Karl Schroeder's first book _Ventus_ was very disappointing. It's easy for a book to be bad, but a book is disappointing when it has a lot of promise that just whithers away. Even though _Ventus_ never went where I wanted it to go, it held more than enough potential for me to pick up his next book, _Permanence_. Unfortunately, _Permanence_ is also a disappointment, but for different reasons.
_Permanence_ begins disjointedly. We join the protagonist, Rue Cassels on the spacestation that is her home. It is located near a brown dwarf star that the author postulates populate the galaxy in great numbers. We eventually will learn that the civilizations around brown dwarfs were served by sub-lightspeed ships called Cyclers. With the invention of an FTL drive that only works around bright or "lit" stars, the economy based on these ships fades away. All this is important, but for now Rue is escaping the station and her abusive brother with a ship. On the way to a planet around the dwarf, she lays claim to something. Her brother never plays a signficant role in the novel after this. The action then flashes forward to the planet around the dwarf star where Rue meets her cousin. There is a serious coincidence here necessary to drive the plot that I think could have been eliminated without too much damage. Soon the book jumps again to join a scientist, Dr. Herat, a companion, Michael Bequith, and some military-types who study alien civilizations and their remains. The join up with Rue and her companions, and a story finally begins to form centered around your basic big dumb object. There are a few more jumps in the story, but the latter two-thirds of the book maintain a reasonable narrative coherence.
The best thing I have to say about _Permanence_ is that it kept me reading; I finished it in one sitting. There's a puzzle or two to be solved and finding out the answers was more than enough to keep me going. Unfortunately, there is rather less to this book than meets the eye. The characterization rarely passes beyond bare outlines and banal conflict. As an example, Rue tells herself throughout the novel that not all men are like her brother, but it never seems like all that serious an issue. There are some other attempts at characterization, but they all fail to add depth to any of the characters.
A more serious issue with the novel is that its fundamental premise falls apart on close examination. Schroeder would like _Permanence_ to be about how to keep a civilization together on geologic time scales. He has many ideas that seem plausible at first glance, certainly as one is being swept along with the story, but they lose their appeal when one reflects on them. Among them and as a fairly central point, Schroeder has a number of technologically advanced alien civilizations with whom we can't join in a joint civilization, ostensibly because we're too different as species. In fact, as Schroeder presents it, they have various prejudices that cause them to not want to communicate with us. He does not, however, present any aliens that we are not willing to communicate with. Apparently, humanity is the only species capable of overcoming its own prejudices. Schroeder also talks a lot about adaptation and tool use. These ideas also fail to withstand close scrutiny, I think, but I won't discuss them here.
The climax of the book is loud, but ends up signifying little. The military-types do what you would expect a central casting military-type to do. Many of the large scale conflicts set up in the narrative come somewhat of a head. Rue and her compadres foil the plots, get the prize and save human civilization. Or something like that. It doesn't really matter, but it was pretty fun.
I want to emphasize Schroeder has written a pretty entertaining book. I don't want to trash too badly anything that I read in one sitting. His potential remains evident, and there are a number of interesting but more peripheral ideas that do work. Both this book and _Ventus_ have a tremendously interesting setting, but he needs to do something more. Until Schroeder can blend the setting and action into something more intellectually coherent, his promise continues to go unfulfilled.
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Last updated 3/30/02