But what of intelligent life?
That is the crux of the drama. The discovery of intelligent life deeper within Jupiter’s atmosphere would threaten the validity of Scripture, or so the New Morality would have you believe. Fortunately Bova doesn’t go on a rampage against religion, but he seems certainly critical of religious fanaticism. The argument is made that life on other worlds, even intelligent life, reflects more the complex beauty of God’s creation as opposed to its utter denial. Archer, however, doesn’t have Bova’s distance; and must come to terms with both Scripture and Science.
Much of the scientific quest involves discovering the nature of the mysterious beings floating deep below Jupiter’s cloud cover, the Leviathans. With the manned probe treated as a submarine, the Leviathans as Jovian whales, and the crippled but driven Director Wo as an Ahab, the adventure takes on a Moby Dick feel, but with a better ending.
As an added bonus in Jupiter, life below the clouds is as richly described and handled as anything done by Hal Clement at his best. To add further dimension, Bova shifts the narrative to other points of view, so it’s not just Archer’s eyes we see through, but other eyes as well. By doing this, Bova allows the reader a range of perspectives that rounds out the sense of immediacy bought about during the trip under the clouds.
This is pure Bova. His writing style remains smooth and seamless throughout the entire novel with no words wasted on throw-away scenes. Bova doesn’t simply write, he crafts.
If there is any real criticism of Jupiter, it’s that Bova’s characters couldn’t keep a secret if their lives depended on it. Throughout the first two-thirds of the novel, the real story of Director Wo’s mission dribbles out through various characters sharing secrets with Archer along with the added statement, “I really shouldn’t be telling you this. Security, you know.” It’s an obvious plot device meant to reveal the motivations of other characters. His past novels do a better job of revealing information crucial to the plot. Still, even with the information provided by the secondary characters, Bova keeps enough hidden to guarantee some surprising revelations.
Overall, Jupiter reads wonderfully. It’s hard science fiction with a good extrapolation of the nature of interplanetary exploration and a continuation of his theme that the advance of science and exploration requires the willingness to take great risks. The novel also examines the dialectic between science and religion, showing how they both develop in the light of the other’s fire. In this day of advancing genetic studies and the probing of the universe, Bova’s latest book is timely and relevant. Science and religion can co-exist. Perhaps they have to.
“There is never a duel with the truth. The truth always wins and we are not afraid of it. The truth is no coward. The truth does not need the law. The truth does not need the force of government. The truth does not need Mr. Bryan. The truth is imperishable, eternal and immortal and needs no human agency to support it.”—Dudley Field Malone on the fifth day of the Scopes Monkey Trial
Postscript: Ben Bova has arranged for three more “Grand Tour” novels to come out from Tor Books. Further information can be had at his official Web site.
John Teehan is a member of the Critters Workshop and founded RI_Fantastic, an online group for genre writers in southern New England. He makes a living as a typesetter/graphic designer, but claims the naked soul of a writer. Right now, at this very moment, he’s hard at work writing. Quiet, please. (Though you probably won’t disturb him if you visit his Web site.)
Blood, Death, and Dismemberment
By Susan Marie Groppi
8/6/01
When I began working as a fiction editor at Strange Horizons, it seemed perfectly natural to me that our fiction guidelines stated that we weren’t interested in horror stories. After all, I don’t read horror, I don’t like horror, and I don’t have a huge amount of interest in getting involved with it. (While I can’t speak officially for my co-editors, they seem to feel generally the same way.) It seemed fairly straightforward.
The question’s gotten a little more complicated.
For one thing, it’s not true that Strange Horizons as a magazine is uninterested in horror. We’ll publish horror-themed poetry, reviews of horror books and movies, and interviews of horror authors. The fiction department sticks out a little, then, with the explicit exclusion of horror stories. Authors ask, from time to time, why we didn’t want horror stories. That’s a fairly easy one to answer—because we don’t like horror. More recently, authors have been asking what we mean by “horror,” though, and that’s a little harder to answer.
It didn’t seem like a difficult question, the first time I was asked. “You know, horror. Blood, death, dismemberment.” I tossed it off as if it were the obvious answer, while the author looked puzzled.
“Oh,” she said. “That’s not what I mean by horror.”
But what else would she mean? I started asking around. What does it mean to you that a story is a horror story, I asked my friends. A lot of them agreed with me—blood, death, and dismemberment. Serial killers. Drooling fanged dogs. Giant zombie fetuses. Rotting flesh. Pus, slime, or goo. Blood-spattered knives, or blood-spattered clothes, or blood-spattered children, or really blood-spattered anything. Entrails. Psychotic stalkers hiding behind the sofa. People or creatures “from beyond the grave.” Bloodcurdling screams. Bashed-in skulls, insect-infested wounds, disfigured dwarves with evil-sounding laughs. Torture victims tied to chairs while begging for their lives. Severed heads, hands, or penises. Mean ghosts with vengeful urges. Oversized cockroaches, or even normal cockroaches if they’re coming out of someone’s mouth. Maybe normal cockroaches in any circumstances.
You know. Horror. Those of us who don’t like it have a very clear idea of what it is.
The thing is, those of you who do like horror also have a clear idea of what it is, and it’s a different idea. I ran my “blood, death, and dismemberment” idea past an author friend of mine who sometimes writes horror stories, and he laughed at me. “Yeah,” he said, “some horror. But that’s the lazy way to do it.” To do what? To scare people, of course. That’s the other way to look at horror. It’s not about the blood-spattered flying knives and the goo-covered zombie fetuses, it’s about the terror.
Horror stories, this line of thought goes, are stories meant to evoke fear. It’s an interesting idea, that horror is a theme rather than a formula. It also makes perfect sense—defining horror by the “talking severed head” stories is as unfair as defining fantasy by the “winged fairies and friendly unicorns” stories, or defining science fiction by the “square-jawed spaceman” stories. Horror is a vast and complex field, and one that I’ve been unfairly caricaturing all this time. You’d think I’d have caught on sooner—some of the stories we’ve published at Strange Horizons are considered by their authors to be horror stories, and one or two have even been recommended for horror-specific writing awards.
Done well, a good horror story can do what any other good story can do—it can make you reshape the way you see the world around you. It can make you see figures in the shadows, or expect strange faces in the mirror. It can make you jump at every rustling leaf noise or stare suspiciously at incoming clouds. More than that, it can make you like it.
Here’s the thing, though. I still don’t like horror. I’m pretty much not interested in stories that are designed to put terror in my heart, and I’m absolutely not interested in stories designed to shock or disgust me with the gory imagery I’ve traditionally associated with horror stories. I’ve done a lot of re-evaluating my definition of horror lately, but I don’t think we’re going to be seeking it out here at Strange Horizons. The fiction staff, we’re pretty easygoing about genre definitions. We don’t want to see horror stories in the same way that we don’t want to see really tech-oriented hard-SF stories; if we do get one that really grabs us, we’ll take it. We’ve certainly printed stories that appear to violate our own guidelines. Our no-horror policy doesn’t reflect a blanket dismissal of the genre, just a warning to authors that fear-based stories are going to be a really difficult sell in this particular market.
Extremely gory stories are pretty close to an impossible sell in this particular market, by the way. I may have learned an Important Life Lesson about the dangers of narrow genre definitions, but that doesn’t make me any happier about blood, death, and dismemberment.