Customer Reviews

The Sky People

5 star:		(15)
4 star:		(15)
3 star:		(12)
2 star:		(1)
1 star:		(2)

 

 

For those of us who cut their eye-teeth on Edgar Rice Burroughs and all the wonderful pulp classics of Science Fiction; SM Stirling has given us an adventure right up that alley and shows his versatility as a writer. From good stand-alone books, through "door-stopper" trilogies and now, revisiting the Golden Age he gives us a great yarn.
It's alternate history, with a twist. That twist is the "Lords of Creation." Instead of a "what if" that happened in OUR history, the what if is an alien race messing around in our backyard.
In this universe the Soviets and the Americans realize that Venus and Mars support life. Instead of wasting each other and the world with two pointless World Wars and countless skirmeshes, the two super powers begin a space race. The Americans launch a probe at Mars and the Soviets at Venus. By the nature of the broadcast, each nation shares the information with the world.
The next step is sending people up to the two planets. Unlike Carson and Carter, the colonization of our sister planets is by no means possible for the individual industrialist or mystic. Fantastic as the premise is, SM Stirling still keeps a very good grasp on the cost effectiveness of interstellar travel under the conditions postulated.
In the American colony on Venus Marc Vitrac (Cajun) is tapped to join an expedition to resuce a missing Russian pilot. With him fly his secret passion, the Harlem raised Cynthia Witlock, the Brit fair-haired boy with a dark secret, Christopher Blair: his boss, Captain Tyler and Jadviga, wife to the missing Russian.
Secrets aplenty tickle and tease the imagination through the book, planned as one of a duo. Hints have been scattered through the book, leaving fans screaming for more.
The Sky People is a straightforward adventure in the old pulp style. It's short, in the old pulp style and it is limited to 4 main characters, in the old pulp style. The villains are black and the heros are white... except when they aren't.
It's a great Saturday evening read in front of the fire.

Science fiction readers of a certain age remember those stories written before the 60s where Venus was covered with jungles, teaming with life. Alas, modern space probes discovered instead a hell world, choking in a sulferous atmosphere with temperatures of near nine hundred degrees.

Steve Stirling imagines a Venus as it should have been, with the jungles, the teaming life (including dinosaours!), and human space explorers. A space race such as people could only dream about is on, with America and the British Commonwealth on one side, the Soviet Bloc on the other. A US/British expedition is sent forth to rescue the crew of a crashed Soviet space ship. An adventure begins such as we have not seen since the first Mariners and Veneras ruined things for us. Enjoy.

This book and its projected successors are updated versions of the pulp genre pioneered by Edgar Rice Burroughs in his Carter (Mars) and Carson (Venus) series. In these books, Venus, Mars, and other components of the Solar System are inhabited by humans (or humanoids) and the backdrop for adventure stories. This is not the first time that Stirling has used an alternative history approach to update a genre classic. His book The Peshawar Lancers is a similar effort following Kipling's Kim, and his The Protector's War paid homage to Conan Doyle's best historical novels. While somewhat derivative, The Sky People displays several of Stirling's best characteristics. The construction of the alternative history and biology are well done, and this is the best part of the book. The plotting is solid. The quality of writing is competent, though I think he has produced more interesting characters in other books. Overall, a fun read.
Readers who like this kind of book and who are not familiar with the older books of the genre might do well to try to find them in libraries or used book stores. Stirling mentions several of the authors in this genre in the preface to this book. I particularly recommend the work of Leigh Brackett, alas now long out of print. I particularly recommend her The Ginger Star series, published for Del Ray about 25-30 years ago.

Not only are Venus and Mars habitable, they are inhabited--by humans. Unlike Earth, however, Venus is inhabited by modern humans, neandertals, sabertooth cats, and dinosaurs, all living simultaneously and in close contact. Russia and the US have transferred their rivalry from Earth to Venus, with the US playing catch-up to the early Russian settlement, and the European Union wanting to get into the game but unable to do so due to their more simplistic technologies.

Cajun Marc Vitrac is part of a small airship team sent to rescue a Russian supply ship that crashed deep in the forbidden territory. Sabotage, natural disaster, and some alien power combine to force down the airship--and put Marc in charge of the small group. There Marc learns of a mysterious alien technology--apparently responsible for the placement of earth-derived species on Venus, and a dangerous weapon that the Russians planned to deliver. Back on Earth, Science Fiction has become the primary form of literature, studied in all of the universities, and more literary fiction is pretty much ignored by the academics.

Author S. M. Stirling creates a charming homage to the Venus stories of Edgar Rice Burroughs, complete with earth-stud, sexy native woman, beast-like near-humans, charging dinosaurs, and other usual suspects. In creating an homage, however, I felt that Stirling missed a chance to transcend this genre--or even to show its evolution.

Modern science is working hard to create a picture of the neandertal people, but the stupid and brutish people depicted by Stirling belong more to the SF of the 1920s than to the modern view. While Marc might have had a momentary concern over the fate of the neandertal women and children, he certainly never made plans to do anything less than eradicate as many as possible--all for the sake of his beautiful cave-girl. That kind of genocidal impulse really should be left out of modern science fiction. Also, Stirling chose not to really give his characters a lot of emotional depth. While they might have had tragic pasts, they went through their daily lives with a 'just the facts' attitude that is, again, consistent with the pulp fiction of the early 20th century Stirling is emulating, but that cheats the reader out of the chance to really buy into the character.

Fans of pulp SF will enjoy THE SKY PEOPLE for what it is--an homage to a literature that is past. It's a fast-moving and readable story with plenty of action, military scenes, and dinosaur hunting. But I, for one, can't help thinking that Stirling also missed a chance to take this kind of pulp fiction to a higher level.

The Sky People (2006) is a standalone SF novel set in an alternate universe where the Solar System differs from ours. The nearest planets, Venus and Mars, are both inhabitable and inhabited. So are planets around some nearby stars.

In this novel, the USSR drops planetary probes on Venus in 1962 and discovers people, both Homo Sapiens and Homo Neanderthalis, on the planet. Manned flights by the Russians and later by the Americans establish bases on the planet and find other familiar species. Both fauna and flora are strangely similar to those from Earth's past.

Lieutenant Marc Vitrac, a Ranger in the US Aerospace Force, has been on the planet for a year. Born in a Cajun family amidst the Louisiana bayous, his primary function is exploration of the vast wildlands. Today, however, he meets a group of newcomers and escorts them back to the base.

The newbies are somewhat taken back by the ceratopsian used as the shuttle bus. The dinosaur has been Iced by the insertion of an Internal Control Device n its brain. While Marc talks to the new fish, the creature stands quietly as a trickle charge runs through its pleasure center. When Marc is ready, he turns off the park control and activates the motor nerves to drive the topsie.

These newbies include Cynthia Whitlock, a young black specialist, and Wing Commander Christopher Blair, a British linguist. As with all the Terrans on the planet, Cynthia and Chris also have other skills. But Chris spends most of his time -- after reacclimating to gravity -- in the nearby town of Kartahown extending their knowledge of the native language.

In this story, the EastBloc loses a shuttle in the unexplored wildlands and asks for American assistance to recover the crew. The airship Vepaja, with Captain Tyler commanding, is selected for the rescue attempt and Marc, Cynthia and Chris are chosen as the crew. Jadviga Binkis, wife of the EastBloc shuttle commander, is also included in the crew.

Marc also takes his greatwolf pup with them. Tahyo had almost drowned during a flash flood before Marc rescued him. The pup's mother had died in the flood, but the pup had been recently weaned, so Marc could feed it meat. As the pup grew larger, Marc trained him in the same manner as he would a dog, with excellent results. Still, the pup grew to the size of a small lion.

Naturally, the scientists at the Jamestown base are puzzled by the seeming parallel evolutions. Although the base doesn't have any means to check the DNA, other tests indicate that the natives are closely related to Terrans. The fossil record is very spotty, with occasional infusions of new species. But how could these genes be shifted from Earth to Venus?

If anyone thinks that these circumstances are much like the pulp era SF stories of Venus, they would not be wrong! The author admits his liking of these old stories and obviously he set out to recreate those earlier views of the planet. So what would it take to terraform Venus into a near duplicate of Earth? The author doesn't provide a complete answer, but he does give some hints. Maybe there will be a sequel?

Highly recommended for Stirling fans and for anyone else who enjoys tales of an inhabitable Venus, with a bronze age civilization and various monsters in the wilds.

-Arthur W. Jordin

In the Sky People, Venus is everything pulp sf said it would be, complete with beautiful nomadic aliens, huge bugs, and even dinosaurs running around the prehistoric landscape. There is an underlying mystery to this, however, and it was the mystery that hooked me more than the colorful world. Why ARE all the creatures and plants on Venus eerily similar to Earth? Add in an alternate history backdrop in which the Cold War is still raging, a survivalist plot with an alien twist and a cliff-hanger ending to the mystery, and you have an intriguing start to a new series.

My biggest piece of criticism is perhaps out of place in a book that is paying homage to the pulp sf greats, namely that the characters are little more than caricatures. There is nothing that Our Hero cannot do, except get the girl, but this is okay because later he gets an alien priestess, which is a whole lot better than a mere human woman. Rivalries, romantic relationships and even friendships in this novel happen more because The Author Said So than because the characters had developed any real bonds. When other characters die, the living characters don't so much as blink. For example, when the alien priestess's mate dies, she mourns for about a seco- hey, who's that handsome stranger over there? Add in very bad accents and you get characters that you occasionally want to see taken over by alien life forms (when it does happen, you can only tell the difference because of the shift in vocabulary.)

And then there are the names. The story takes place during the eighties, and so the author presents us with names like Marc, Cynthia and (waitforit) Blair. Blair, I say!

You'll enjoy this book if you like pulp science fiction. You may even be entertained by this book if, like me, you normally don't read pulp. Just don't expect rocket science from it (or even basic psychology.)

Remember when the Solar System was an enthralling place? Before we found out that the other planets are a collection of cold dead rockballs and chemical hells?

In Stirling's new book (first of a series), that's the way it still is. Red-blooded pulp adventure lives! There are dinosaurs on Venus! Ancient canal-building civilizations on Mars! Strong-jawed heroes! Monsters! Airships! Nobody actually swings from any rigging in this one, but I have hopes for the sequel.

Stirling does a nice job updating the old tropes with a modern sensibility. He sensibly jettisons the worst and most dated of the stereotypes, while retaining the derring-do and broad canvas that make the genre fun. It's pure adventure, and there's not a damn thing wrong with that.

It's not quite five-star work, yet. The book would have been stronger with a single, continuing, active villain; as it is, it's mostly a man-against-circumstances struggle. The climax, as a result, is a little loose. The plot is a well-worn one, though perfectly serviceable. And the characterization is slight, just enough to carry the action along--about the deepest emotion any character experiences is a bad case of the hots.

So if you're looking for the subtle interplay of naked human souls in their existential angst, or a genre-bending re-examination of post-sentient evolution of technology, or a gritty hard-wired exploration of a bleak cyber-future, look elsewhere. If you ever visualized yourself hunting tyrannosaurs through the jungles of Venus, on the other hand, give _The Sky People_ a shot. It's much of a piece with the rest of Stirling's work: plenty of action, interesting extrapolation, some politics (not always predictable).

And you just gotta love the setting.

S. M. Stirling never fails to entertain, and "The Sky People" is definitely his best novel to date. It is a wonderfully realistic alternate-historical portrayal of 'the Space Race' and 'Cold War'--which in themselves would make a great premise for a novel, but Stirling goes much further. The colorful and quirky Solar System of old pulp science fiction novels is featured with the well populated Venus many of us would have loved to have seen. Earthlike dinosaurs, sabretooths and Neanderthal-like beastmen abound, forming the mystery of the plot as the protagonist investigates, while enemy Russian agents turn up at every turn.

The plot is fast moving, characters are colorful and interesting, and the humor is spot on. It is a bit of Mad Magazine's "Spy vs. Spy" crossed over with authors Ben Bova and Joe Haldeman, and humorist Robin Williams thrown into the mix. A Highly Recommended novel which will keep you thinking, and grinning.

THE SKY PEOPLE (2006) is a fun Alternate History/SciFi story, involving the alternate possibility of a Venus and Mars terraformed in the far past by aliens, rather than the existing dead planets. This leads to a more intense and persitent "space race" between the USA/England vs. SovietUnion/China (and also to a certain extent latecomer European Union) - rather than the fairly short-lived space race to The Moon, and the drawn out cold war.

The bulk of the story takes place on the planet Venus, and involves a series of survival ordeals, whose participants are the small bands of newcomer Earth men and woman, who begin interacting with the diverse bands of Early Humans and Neanderthals that had been transplanted to Venus from Earth some 20-50,000 years earlier. Also co-existing with these pre-historic humans are dinosaurs who had been transplanted to Venus some millions of years earlier.

I'm looking forward to a sequel to this book, as the door is certainly left open at the end of the book.

If you like this book, you might also enjoy Harry Turtledove's Alternate WWII History Series, which involves Invading Aliens attacking Earth at the peak of WWII.

Stirling has produced an unabashed shamelessly nostalgic romp through a different solar system; one that was imagined in the classic pulps by writers like Edgar Rice Burroughs. The science behind a liveable Venus and Mars is given a somewhat tenuous framework. But no more so perhaps than the deux ex machina of the Nantucket and Dies the Fire trilogies.

Readers of his earlier works will find elements reproduced here. From the General series comes the idea of an omniscient Computer in a planet of savagery. Though the Computer in Sky People differs. It has immensely more power, to somehow transform entire planets' biospheres, and transport organisms from Earth. But strangely, it seems far less sentient than the entity in General.

Another similarity is in the view from 20th century humans of a pre-industrial city and society. It echoes what Stirling wrote in Nantucket, when the Americans visit ancient Babylon.

Sky People also has Stirling's trademark loving descriptions of a rural landscape. As you may have read in General, Conquistador or Nantucket. But the level of detail in this book does not match that of Conquistador and Nantucket. If you are used to those earlier works, this might seem a little skimpier in this regard.