Fenton Wood

Hacking Galileo by Fenton Wood is many things: an adventure, a lament for an age now lost, even a manual for subverting obsolete technology.

This book is for the adults who once were the spergy GenX and GenY kids who are the stars of this book. The kids who built radios and telescopes in their garages. The kids who hiked off in the desert and came back days later and their parents didn't even blink. It was a different world, but this book captures what it felt like to live in it.

Hacking Galileo uses the method of good "hard" science fiction, instructing the reader in scientific or engineering principles using an adventure story to keep things from becoming tedious. Despite the fact that I think science fiction isn't a real genre at all, I do have a great fondness for the many authors who successfully hybridize adventure stories with futuristic speculation.

However, Hacking Galileo has another side to it; one that would have horrified the truest of true believers in science who coined the term "science fiction" precisely to exclude the kind of fantastic speculation that you get here. Readers of Fenton's earlier works will not be surprised, but the Terrible Secret of Space would have given the Futurians fits.

The Futurians wanted to make their readers good socialists by throwing away the fantastical, but it kept sneaking in the back, because it makes for good stories. Hacking Galileo is a good story. Fenton Wood blends the hardest of hard sci-fi, with orbital mechanics, antenna engineering, and good old fashioned social engineering with some of the craziest stuff I have seen in print.

That it all hangs together is a testament to Fenton's skill, and a lot of fun besides. Almost as much fun as those boys had saving the world.… (meer)

Wood states, right up front, who influenced this novel beside William Hope Hodgson and his The Night Land: “John C. Wright, Gene Wolfe, Alfred Bester, A.E. van Vogt, Philip K. Dick, Jack Vance, J.G. Ballard, Larry Niven, Frank Herbert, Cordwainer Smith, Arthur C. Clarke, Roger Zelazny, H.G. Wells, Herman Melville, Tom Wolfe, and the SCP Foundation”.

Part of the fun of this novel is spotting all those influences which I think I did except for Herbert and van Vogt and the SCP Foundation whose work I am entirely unfamiliar with.

There are a few similarities in plot between Hodgson’s novel and this one. Both thrust a man into the distant future. Hodgson’s X is psychically projected into the future. The hero here is Reynard Douglas. Like his model, the real-life Junior Johnson, Douglas is a former moonshine runner turned race car driver who ran afoul of the law.

The book is something of an alternate history starting out in roughly 1984 when no less than the President shows up in person with a job offer for Douglas. They want a man to drive a vehicle into the Zone, an mysterious area that appeared years ago in the American Southwest and is expanding. (Wood credits Jon Mollison’s Barbarian Emperor as inspiration for the Zone.)

That vehicle, the ENLAV (Experimental Nuclear Vehicle, Antarctic Model), is a modified version of an actual design, but that one wasn’t nuclear powered and didn’t go in excess of Mach 2. You need that speed because the Zone is inhabited by hostile creatures. The mission is simple. Drive in fast, put a nuke down by the singularity that created the Zone, and race out.

About the first fifth of the book is Douglas training, with a bunch of hotshot military pilots, on using the ENLAV and developing physical stamina. Douglas may be twice the age of the pilots and out of shape, but he’s onery and no one is a better racer. He’s run all kinds of races in all parts of the world.

So, Douglas is given command and gets a pilot as a crew member. But the mission goes wrong and finds himself alone millions of years into the future of the Night Land.

And here we get more similarities with Hodgson’s novel. There are abhumans, though of a different sort than Hodgson’s. The world is dark but not because of Hodgson’s dying sun. Wood brings in modern scientific ideas to give us a more complicated origin story for the Night Land than Hodgson’s did. Our sun has been replaced by the Black Sun, and stars in this universe are sentient creatures capable of evil. There is a Last Redoubt here as in Hodgson’s work. And, following, not exactly, in the footsteps of John C. Wright’s Awake in the Night Land, we hear about the other settlements in the Night Land’s past. As in Hodgson’s work, there is a Watcher.

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Besides Wright and Hodgson, the other primary spirit infusing this novel is that of Roger Zelazny and his mix of science and myth and archetype. Here we get the shades of extinct creatures and the archetype of the First Horse. There is much wandering. Douglas will go much further afield than Hodgson’s X does. And it’s not to save a woman in a dying city, Hodgson’s story. In fact, there is nothing like a normal human woman in this entire novel. What Douglas sets out to do with the help of Tao, a man from not quite as distant a past as Douglas is. Together they set out to resurrect the world. Like Ishmael’s sidekick Queequeg in Moby Dick, Tao is even a harpooner.

I gather Fenton Wood is associated with the New Pulp movement, a movement whose politics I’m more sympathetic with than their aesthetic judgements about science fiction and its history. And one of those judgements is a belief sf and fantasy should be blended more, not something I’m fond though I’m not inexorably opposed to it.

To be sure the story has plenty of action. I liked the account of infiltrating an ancient fortress and the depiction of an autofac city. And I appreciated Wood trying to get so many technical details right.

But, by the time Douglas and Tao take the ENLAV into space, I found my patience wearing thin, merely skimming over those details to get to the end.

I’m afraid, writing this review up about four months after I read the novel, most of the parts of the novel I remember after we enter Night Land are those abhumans, all extrapolations of groups we are cursed with now. And I liked the sting when Douglas gets some idea of what happened to his world shortly after he left it.

Still, I’m grateful for someone again taking up Hodgson’s world and showing, along with the other modern treatments of it, that it still has interest and dramatic potential more than a 100 years after Hodgson bestowed it upon us. Hopefully, others will follow Wood’s work.… (meer)

The Earth a Machine to Speak by Fenton Wood is a satisfying conclusion to Philo’s adventures. That is no mean feat. The series has an ending, and that ending left me feeling that Philo had been done justice in fictional form.

I think it is fair to say that Philo’s story recapitulates the Hero’s Journey. Unfortunately, the popularity of this mode of storytelling does not match the skill with which it is deployed. Hardly anyone knows what to do with a character who has completed it. These days, about the best thing you can hope for is a swift death.

Which is almost right. The natural end of the narrative structure of a human life really is death.

I have fought the good fight, I have finished the race, I have kept the faith. –2 Tim 4:7

Call no man happy until he is dead. –Solon

The hard part comes because there is usually a long interval inbetween the end of the Hero’s Journey, and when he actually dies. This is also hard because our culture worships youth and reviles domesticity.

But the whole point of completing the Hero’s Journey is that it means you can leave your youth behind, and join the adult world. Once there, the pace of activity lessens, although impact may increase. In order to tell a story in this mode, you have to change what you do. And this is exactly what Wood does, slowing the pace of the book immensely, and allowing Philo the full scope of his life. One of the real advantages of a book compared to a medium like film is that it is relatively easy to shift scale and mode, and then allude to a period of happy domesticity without destroying the narrative entirely.

In a movie, a scene like this is hard to do except as an after-credits scene, but in The Earth a Machine to Speak, this thing happens three-quarters of the way through, and it fits perfectly.

We still have all the trademarks of the Yankee Republic series. The engineering marvels like the Mesta 50,000 ton press, the ancestral gods of wine and grain and the forge, hidden in plain sight, and Philo’s fundamental nature of being as wise as a serpent and guileless as a dove.

I heartily recommend the Yankee Republic series as a juvenile novel, a grand adventure, and a beautiful imagining of a world that never was, but perhaps should have been.… (meer)

The City of Illusions: Yankee Republic Book 4 by Fenton Wood is Philo’s most fantastical adventure yet, as he traverses the Tower of the Bear, travels through time, and survives the challenges of the Obsidian Tower.

As we are now four books into a five book series, nothing will truly make sense without reference to what has gone before. Philo’s journey across the American continent is itself prefigured in the first book, when he and his friends biked fifty miles to get radio parts. I struggle a bit with how much to share and how much to reserve, as there are mythic depths to be plumbed, but also the pure joy of experiencing it for yourself.

As Philo nears the goal of his quest, the challenges become commensurately greater. He must be tested, and found worthy, for that which he seeks can provide great power, and with great power comes great responsibility. Many who have come this way before him have failed.

So, rather than go into the details of the quest, and how Philo attempts to overcome the challenges set before him, let us turn to the great conversation of fantastic adventures. I maintain that adventure fiction, that genre which seeks to instill the emotion of wonder in its readers, is best when it is seen as low art. As such, its primary purpose is to entertain. However, once that primary purpose has been fulfilled, authors can then usefully turn to developing their favorite speculation about new lands, new peoples, and new possibilities.

One of my favorite bits of The City of Illusions is when Philo meets the Lost Cosmonaut, whom we first heard rumors of in Pirates of the Electromagnetic Waves. In Philo’s world, the Russians have the most advanced space program, sending men on far flung missions throughout the solar system. The radio operators of the Republic carefully preserve recordings of when they claim they heard the last desperate message of cosmonaut, lost without hope of return, who passed beyond the heliopause and started to hear the music of the spheres, inexpressibly beautiful and strange to human ears.

But because this is the Yankee Republic series, no one is every truly without hope. That man did not perish alone in the dark vastness of space, but instead passed beyond merely human experience and was granted a vision of glory. Clarke and Kubrick and Sagan tried to express this same idea, the grandeur and glory of the universe, yet in my view all of the foregoing failed, as their materialistic premises limited their imaginations. Unlike Frank Poole, the Lost Cosmonaut has seen the Face of God, and now he is truly happy.

There are so many possible links in this volume to well-known fantastic fiction that is difficult to do them all justice. The way in which the Lost Cosmonaut describes the music of the spheres reminds me of Fredrik Pohl’s The World at the End of Time. The genesis of the Lost City in the Valley of the Angels is much like the afterword of Niven and Pournelle’s Burning City, when Canfield and Doheny dug an oil well with pickaxe and shovel, driven as if men possessed.

The fate of the Valley of Angels is also like another Niven and Pournelle collaboration, Lucifer’s Hammer. I felt like this was the Jerry Pournelle memorial volume. Even the point at which Philo crosses the Colorado River on a monumental bridge, and he has a vision of what might have been if the people of the Republic had conquered this land flashed before his eyes. Jerry was involved in so many things during his life that increased the scope of the scientific knowledge and ambit of power of the Republic in our world, that I couldn’t but help think of him.

Philo’s world is not the world that Jerry tried to create here, but nonetheless I feel like there is a family resemblance, much like the faces back home in Porterville. Philo’s world has a beauty and peace to it that pulls you in, a magnetic attraction that exceeds mere utility. It is not our world, but in a strange way it is somehow more real for not quite existing. Come along for the journey, and see what I have seen.

Up next, the thrilling conclusion of the Yankee Republic!… (meer)