The Rif War

One of the lesser known 20th century wars gets an Alternate History

Review: Sky People

A Polish Zero?

The Poles develop a fast, maneuverable fighter comparable to the Japanese Zero in the late 1930s.  

Point Of Divergence is an amateur press magazine and also a forum for discussing AH and AH-related ideas.  Here is my comment section.

Review:The Sky People (Book By Steve Stirling, Review By Dale R. Cozort)

I'm going to try really hard to keep the sour grapes out of this review, but I suspect that a little might slip through.  This book is close enough to one I've been writing for several years called Mars Looks Different that I suspect that if I ever get Mars finished and out it will be considered derivative, though I started Mars almost five years ago.  Oh well.  That's not Steve Stirling's fault.  No one owns an idea, and this one was fairly obvious. 

The Sky People takes a very different approach than I do in 'Mars'.  The idea is that some sort of ExtraTerrestrials have been monkeying with Venus and presumably Mars since at least the Jurassic.  As a result, both Venus and presumably Mars are inhabited by earth-type life, including dinosaurs, Neanderthals, and true humans.  Venus humans are mostly bronze age or more primitive technologically.  Earth humans have tenuous toe-holds on the planet, with both the Soviet block and the US having small logistically constrained bases.

As the continued existence of the Soviet bloc illustrates, Earth history has diverged a bit due to the finding of other inhabitable worlds.  The changes in Earth history are not the focus of the story, and are revealed mostly in brief excerpts from various history books or other media from that time-line.  The Earth of The Sky People is a much more peaceful place than our time-line, with the two major power blocks imposing a solution to the Arab-Israeli conflict early on, and avoiding a major conflict over Vietnam.  China is still part of the Soviet block, but the balance of power within that block is shifting away from the Soviets and toward China.  The Europeans lagged behind the two major power blocks in terms of Venus exploration and bases, but they, and especially the French, want into the game as an independent power block.

The action in the story takes place on Venus.  This version of Venus is a very nice place for an adventure story, with all of the classic elements.  It's like a more scientifically plausible version of one of the Edgar Rice Burroughs settings.  It has dinosaurs, flying reptiles, sabertooths, and lion-sized pseudo-dogs,   As a sort-of alternate history it has the obligatory dirigible--solar powered no less.  The solar-powered dirigible actually makes sense in this situation.  The two human bases on Venus have to worry about every ounce of weight that comes from Earth, and other than the solar cells most of the material for the dirigible can be made on Venus.

So, how do I like The Sky People?  I have mixed emotions.  Keep in mind the potential for sour grapes on my part.  WIth that in mind, I like the setting.  Stirling did a pretty good job of world-building for this story.  He has all of the elements of a very nice playground for a whole series of adventure stories here.  He could take things a lot of different ways with this.  The mysterious ETs that seeded Venus could take a more direct hand.  The presence of Earth bases and Earth technology could ignite festering conflicts between Venus human factions and between humans and Neanderthals.  The East bloc/West block/European tensions could turn hot back on Earth and strand the Earth humans on Venus. 

So what's to not like?   Nothing specific really.  There is a lot of action.  There are unique concepts and scenes that are fun to visualize.  At the same time I felt a little disappointed when I finished the novel.  The plot and most of the characters seemed somehow too small for the setting. 

That's probably inevitable to some extent.  Stirling is reviving a type of story that I read as a teenager, and he's completing not against John Carter of Mars but against my nostalgic memories of John Carter of Mars.  It's also apparent that this is the first story in what is likely to be at least a trilogy, and some of the plot components touched on in this story have a lot of potential down the road, as I mentioned earlier.  At the same time, the plot and characters seemed almost like an after-thought to me, especially in the last half to the third of the book.  The message seemed to be "Here is this extremely cool setting, and here is a set of generic characters and a generic plot to show off the setting."   That's always a danger with a setting like this.

My mixed emotions could also be a matter of personal taste.  I didn't particularly like or identify with the main character for some reason, especially in the second half of the book.  Your mileage may differ on that, and if it does you'll find the second half of the book much more enjoyable.

So how is the alternate history background in terms of events back on earth?  Well, it has a touch of 'if only' in my opinion.  The tensions and suspicions of the Cold War were very real to the participants, and developing the kind of technology it would take to get to Venus on a semi-regular basis would have military applications, as both sides would quickly discover.  In particular, accurate guidance systems and routine access to space would make the inevitable nuclear standoff less and less stable as time went on.  At the same time, I could see some of the tensions and rivalry being channeled into a space race with a more obviously worthwhile goal.

Does the Venus ecology Stirling puts together work?  To be honest I hate to look too closely at that, because this kind of setup begs for a wide variety of big fierce anmals.  It would be kind of lame if someone seeded Venus with an intriguing selection of Earth animals and most of the really interesting ones died out.  At the same time, I suspect that's probably what would actually happen.  The setup here is that the mysterious ETs have been periodically seeding Venus with animals from Earth since the Jurassic.  Even if the ETs didn't seed Venus with an ecologically complete package of plants and animals in the first place, the animals that they did put on Venus would develop into a reasonably complete ecology in a few million years.  Okay, now they bring over a new set of Earth animals and try to seed them.  A few of the new species may find niches that none of the first wave have occupied.  Most will have to compete with an incumbent species from the first seeding.  On earth at least, introduced species tend to either fail to get a foothold or succeed spectacularly, disrupting the existing ecology.

Earth has seen a number of such confrontations when continents were isolated for a while and then reconnected.  Generally animals from the larger of the two continents win the bulk of these ecological battles, but a few species from the smaller continent either hang on or expand to the larger one.   The larger continent's advantage is more pronounced for larger animals, and especially for predators.  Different sets of big predators just don't mix well.  For example, when North and South America reconnected, most of the movement was from the larger continent (North America) to the smaller one.  South America lost all of its large mammal and non-flying bird predators.  It lost most of its large plant eaters, though the big ground sloths survived and even spread north before they died out at the end of the last ice age.  Smaller South American animals like rodents and opossums did better in terms of surviving in South America, though only a few of them spread north.

So, what would all of that mean in terms of repeated seeding of Venus with Earth animals?  Well, if two sets of animals are going to coexist each one of them is going to have to find a niche where they have a competitive advantage.  I could see very large dinosaur predators coexisting with smaller mammal predators, with the fact that they are (at least in their Venus versions) cold-blooded letting them grow to sizes that no mammal predator could reach, and tackle prey that no mammal could grow big enough to tackle.  I can't see large mammal predators and the smaller warm-blooded dinosaur predators co-existing in the same area and in the same time-slot though.  The niches are too similar, and one of the two body plans is going to be superior.

I could see the smaller dinosaur predators dominating the open-country fast predator niches while mammal predators dominated woodlands and niches for slower and more nocturnal predators.  That's apparently the pattern that developed between large ground-living predatory birds and marsupial carnivores in South America.  The predatory birds took over the fast-runner niches, while the larger, faster marsupial carnivores gradually disappeared.   In the case of South America though, the two types of predators developed alongside one another over a period of millions of years.  On Venus the introduced sets of mammal predators would be entering an ecology that wasn't adapted to them and that they weren't adapted to.

It would be tough to actually come up with the ecology described in The Sky People.  On the other hand, I suppose that ETs powerful enough to terraform Venus could come up with some way of shaping two sets of predators so that one didn't kill the other off before they found some way to divide up available niches.

So, should you run out and buy The Sky People?  I did, and in spite of my mixed emotions I'm not sorry I did.  This is a good setting, and not a bad book overall.    

Posted on Feb 3, 2012.

More Stuff For POD Members Only

What you see here is a truncated on-line version of a larger zine that I contribute to POD, the alternate history APA.  POD members get to look forward to more fun stuff.