Fenton Wood

Back in the early days of the internet of the late 90's/2000's you had a number of stories you'd come across that were hacker based that had just enough of the technology but didn't skimp out on the "fiction" to make the story interesting. Some of these book titles have been lost to memory and time but their stories I remember reading. Hacking Galileo was remembering these stories and adding good ol' nerd indie writing to the mix!

This book is not going to be for everyone. Wood has done a lot of homewood and the science and tech of the late 80's of telephony, computers, HAM radio, astrophysics are there. Homoages to early OG hackers like Kevin Mitnick, 2600, and others are scattered throughout. This is like Stranger Things but with nerdier people and less running around with monsters.

On one hand, many of these characters are too smart and too good at what they do, especially in high school to be real. But again, I harken back to the days of reading hacker fanfiction and this is right up there with all the characters I loved to read about. I will say that the main character who is telling the story tends to get lost in the story. He's there, of course, and he helps do things as he has some skill for "not being noticed" but that seems to be it. He might add details but the other characters are doing the heavy lifting in "the team". The book is also "written" by the main character and the indie author gets away with the amateur look to the font and chapters because it makes it out like one of the self-published conspiracy books you'd buy from a guy at a table by the Grassy Knoll in Dallas, Texas. It just adds a lot to the story and the feeling of reading it. The excess of chapters also makes the book read very quickly.

There are parts where you suspend your disbelief when it comes not to just the characters but to the plot. Going to Russia and acceptance to different groups that puts our characters on the right path and is just part of the fun. There are a couple of chapters in there where it switches to this attempt to parallel the story with a fantasy novel a friend was working on and I just hated that shift. But it's a few pages and is done after that. The conclusion was a bit mixed but overall, the renegades of society against the Man, the System, the Fedbois, the world - I really just had a lot of fun with this book. This was nostalgia done right! Final Grade - A… (plus d'informations)

Hacking Galileo by Fenton Wood is many things: an adventure, a lament for an age now lost, even a manual for subverting obsolete technology.

This book is for the adults who once were the spergy GenX and GenY kids who are the stars of this book. The kids who built radios and telescopes in their garages. The kids who hiked off in the desert and came back days later and their parents didn't even blink. It was a different world, but this book captures what it felt like to live in it.

Hacking Galileo uses the method of good "hard" science fiction, instructing the reader in scientific or engineering principles using an adventure story to keep things from becoming tedious. Despite the fact that I think science fiction isn't a real genre at all, I do have a great fondness for the many authors who successfully hybridize adventure stories with futuristic speculation.

However, Hacking Galileo has another side to it; one that would have horrified the truest of true believers in science who coined the term "science fiction" precisely to exclude the kind of fantastic speculation that you get here. Readers of Fenton's earlier works will not be surprised, but the Terrible Secret of Space would have given the Futurians fits.

The Futurians wanted to make their readers good socialists by throwing away the fantastical, but it kept sneaking in the back, because it makes for good stories. Hacking Galileo is a good story. Fenton Wood blends the hardest of hard sci-fi, with orbital mechanics, antenna engineering, and good old fashioned social engineering with some of the craziest stuff I have seen in print.

That it all hangs together is a testament to Fenton's skill, and a lot of fun besides. Almost as much fun as those boys had saving the world.… (plus d'informations)

Wood states, right up front, who influenced this novel beside William Hope Hodgson and his The Night Land: “John C. Wright, Gene Wolfe, Alfred Bester, A.E. van Vogt, Philip K. Dick, Jack Vance, J.G. Ballard, Larry Niven, Frank Herbert, Cordwainer Smith, Arthur C. Clarke, Roger Zelazny, H.G. Wells, Herman Melville, Tom Wolfe, and the SCP Foundation”.

Part of the fun of this novel is spotting all those influences which I think I did except for Herbert and van Vogt and the SCP Foundation whose work I am entirely unfamiliar with.

There are a few similarities in plot between Hodgson’s novel and this one. Both thrust a man into the distant future. Hodgson’s X is psychically projected into the future. The hero here is Reynard Douglas. Like his model, the real-life Junior Johnson, Douglas is a former moonshine runner turned race car driver who ran afoul of the law.

The book is something of an alternate history starting out in roughly 1984 when no less than the President shows up in person with a job offer for Douglas. They want a man to drive a vehicle into the Zone, an mysterious area that appeared years ago in the American Southwest and is expanding. (Wood credits Jon Mollison’s Barbarian Emperor as inspiration for the Zone.)

That vehicle, the ENLAV (Experimental Nuclear Vehicle, Antarctic Model), is a modified version of an actual design, but that one wasn’t nuclear powered and didn’t go in excess of Mach 2. You need that speed because the Zone is inhabited by hostile creatures. The mission is simple. Drive in fast, put a nuke down by the singularity that created the Zone, and race out.

About the first fifth of the book is Douglas training, with a bunch of hotshot military pilots, on using the ENLAV and developing physical stamina. Douglas may be twice the age of the pilots and out of shape, but he’s onery and no one is a better racer. He’s run all kinds of races in all parts of the world.

So, Douglas is given command and gets a pilot as a crew member. But the mission goes wrong and finds himself alone millions of years into the future of the Night Land.

And here we get more similarities with Hodgson’s novel. There are abhumans, though of a different sort than Hodgson’s. The world is dark but not because of Hodgson’s dying sun. Wood brings in modern scientific ideas to give us a more complicated origin story for the Night Land than Hodgson’s did. Our sun has been replaced by the Black Sun, and stars in this universe are sentient creatures capable of evil. There is a Last Redoubt here as in Hodgson’s work. And, following, not exactly, in the footsteps of John C. Wright’s Awake in the Night Land, we hear about the other settlements in the Night Land’s past. As in Hodgson’s work, there is a Watcher.

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Besides Wright and Hodgson, the other primary spirit infusing this novel is that of Roger Zelazny and his mix of science and myth and archetype. Here we get the shades of extinct creatures and the archetype of the First Horse. There is much wandering. Douglas will go much further afield than Hodgson’s X does. And it’s not to save a woman in a dying city, Hodgson’s story. In fact, there is nothing like a normal human woman in this entire novel. What Douglas sets out to do with the help of Tao, a man from not quite as distant a past as Douglas is. Together they set out to resurrect the world. Like Ishmael’s sidekick Queequeg in Moby Dick, Tao is even a harpooner.

I gather Fenton Wood is associated with the New Pulp movement, a movement whose politics I’m more sympathetic with than their aesthetic judgements about science fiction and its history. And one of those judgements is a belief sf and fantasy should be blended more, not something I’m fond though I’m not inexorably opposed to it.

To be sure the story has plenty of action. I liked the account of infiltrating an ancient fortress and the depiction of an autofac city. And I appreciated Wood trying to get so many technical details right.

But, by the time Douglas and Tao take the ENLAV into space, I found my patience wearing thin, merely skimming over those details to get to the end.

I’m afraid, writing this review up about four months after I read the novel, most of the parts of the novel I remember after we enter Night Land are those abhumans, all extrapolations of groups we are cursed with now. And I liked the sting when Douglas gets some idea of what happened to his world shortly after he left it.

Still, I’m grateful for someone again taking up Hodgson’s world and showing, along with the other modern treatments of it, that it still has interest and dramatic potential more than a 100 years after Hodgson bestowed it upon us. Hopefully, others will follow Wood’s work.… (plus d'informations)

The Earth a Machine to Speak by Fenton Wood is a satisfying conclusion to Philo’s adventures. That is no mean feat. The series has an ending, and that ending left me feeling that Philo had been done justice in fictional form.

I think it is fair to say that Philo’s story recapitulates the Hero’s Journey. Unfortunately, the popularity of this mode of storytelling does not match the skill with which it is deployed. Hardly anyone knows what to do with a character who has completed it. These days, about the best thing you can hope for is a swift death.

Which is almost right. The natural end of the narrative structure of a human life really is death.

I have fought the good fight, I have finished the race, I have kept the faith. –2 Tim 4:7

Call no man happy until he is dead. –Solon

The hard part comes because there is usually a long interval inbetween the end of the Hero’s Journey, and when he actually dies. This is also hard because our culture worships youth and reviles domesticity.

But the whole point of completing the Hero’s Journey is that it means you can leave your youth behind, and join the adult world. Once there, the pace of activity lessens, although impact may increase. In order to tell a story in this mode, you have to change what you do. And this is exactly what Wood does, slowing the pace of the book immensely, and allowing Philo the full scope of his life. One of the real advantages of a book compared to a medium like film is that it is relatively easy to shift scale and mode, and then allude to a period of happy domesticity without destroying the narrative entirely.

In a movie, a scene like this is hard to do except as an after-credits scene, but in The Earth a Machine to Speak, this thing happens three-quarters of the way through, and it fits perfectly.

We still have all the trademarks of the Yankee Republic series. The engineering marvels like the Mesta 50,000 ton press, the ancestral gods of wine and grain and the forge, hidden in plain sight, and Philo’s fundamental nature of being as wise as a serpent and guileless as a dove.

I heartily recommend the Yankee Republic series as a juvenile novel, a grand adventure, and a beautiful imagining of a world that never was, but perhaps should have been.… (plus d'informations)