Customer Reviews

Griffin's Egg

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Gunther Weil is a truckdriver with a bad attitude, hauling fuel
rods to Chatterjee Crater industrial park....

Gunther drove automatically, gauging his distance from
Bootstrap by the amount of trash lining the Mare Vaporum road...

He likes to break new tracks in the "cherry soil, terrain no human
or machine had ever crossed before." His dispatcher isn't pleased,
and not for the first time: "Weil! Where the f*ck are you?"

Ekaterina Izmailova is a demolition jock, hired to "clean up" a
reactor meltdown. With a briefcase nuke. "It was
unf*ckabelievable. The one side of the crater just disappeared..."

Gunther and Ekaterina end up alone together, stuck in an
emergency rad shelter, trapped by a demented drill-punch -- "The
machine followed him, the diamond-tipped punch sliding
nervously in and out of its sheath. its movements as tremulous
and dainty as a newborn colt's." CLANG... CLANG.

After chiseling off the shelter's outer door, the punch wanders off.
G & E, expecting death, celebrate life: "Are you coming yet?" she
murmured... "Tell me when you're about to come..." -- pillow-talk
with an sfnal twist that it would be unfair to reveal.

Griffin's Egg, while very short (75 pages) "has the multiplex attack
of a true novel" (John Clute). I wish it were longer. This is
Swanwick at his hard-SF best, in a setting that's a prequel to
"Trojan Horse" and Vacuum Flowers. Radical neuroengineering
bears its first fruit -- an aerosol schizomimetic war gas. Which gets
it first use inside the lunar habitat. It's a horrifying vision --
Swanwick is disturbingly good at those -- etched in literally
hallucinatory clarity. Breughel and Bosch come to mind, with a
nod to Shakespeare's Ophelia.

The ending feels false and hurried, but this is the only real flaw in
the piece. Folks, literary space opera doesn't get much better than this. Highly recommended.

Review copyright ©2001 Peter D. Tillman

Swanwick combines hard science fiction speculation about the future of the moon with a fastpaced action-adventure story that wouldn't be out of place in Hollywood. This is a short novel, orginally published in Asimov's Science Fiction as a novella, and it well worth reading in one sitting. So what are you waiting for? Pop some popcorn and start reading.

The protagonist is a loner on the Moon who wants nothing more than to be left alone to commune with virgin territory, but circumstances throw him into proximity with others as well as wake him up to responsibility. This is a grand theme in the old SF tradition--in fact, except for the explicit sex and the up-to-date science references (specifically, nanotech), this is something that wouldn't have been out of place in 50s SF. This is a short book, technically a novella, that oftentimes seems rushed. The pacing was kind of a jump-up and wait proposition, very irregular feeling. Michael Swanwick has done much better than this in both characters and plot. (This "review" originally appeared in First Impressions Installment One [http://www.owt.com/users/gcox/fi.contents.html].)