New Earth by Ben Bova
Cover art by John Harris
Published by Tor Books
Reviewed by Leigh Kimmel
One of the biggest problems for readers of series is coming into it in the wrong order. Sometimes it's not a terrible problem, and the books can be read in pretty much in any order. However, there are also some series that, while not strictly necessary to be read in order, can be less rewarding if one comes across a later book first.
Because the earlier books of the Grand Tour that I'd read were sufficiently stand-alone that I could pick them up and start reading immediately, when I found Survival on the shelves of a branch of our local public library, I thought nothing of picking it up. However, as I began reading it, I realized that there was a bunch of backstory that I was missing out on. While Mars Life and Farside were both near-future, Survival started with a character captaining a Bussard ramjet spaceship like something in the early part of Larry Niven's Known Space 'verse. I started wondering whether that novel was not part of the Grand Tour, the similarity in cover styling notwithstanding.
After a little research, I discovered that yes, Survival was indeed part of the Grand Tour, but set some time later and part of a sub-series dealing with the consequences of a stellar explosion in the galactic core that sends a deadly wave of charged particles through the galaxy (a concept that also shows up in the later parts of Larry Niven's Known Space 'verse). So I went back and hunted down the three earlier books in the series.
In retrospect, I think I really would've enjoyed New Earth a lot more had I read it first, rather than having already read Survival. They have a lot of the same themes, of contact and communication with alien civilizations, and particularly of trust, and the difficulty of establishing it when one part starts the interaction off being less than honest, even for what they consider the best of all possible reasons. Furthermore, both of them have protagonists that are carrying a heavy load of survivor guilt after the loss of a loved one, something that seems to have become a recurring theme of Mr. Bova's later books, making me wonder if he was dealing with his own burden of survivor guilt.
This novel begins with a brief prologue on an Earth struggling with the ravages of massive climate change, of flooding and famines and hordes of refugees in desperate search of some place to settle and call their own. In it we meet the leaders of the organization that sent a scout ship to Sirius to investigate a mysterious Earthlike planet that by all known theories of stellar and planetary formation should be impossible.
When I first read this, I thought it was the planet that had been discovered in Farside. However, the blurb for that one indicates that their discovery was at a substantially more distant star, which would indicate that this novel does not directly follow upon that one. On the other hand, the blurbs of Farside contained several other substantial errors, so it's possible that a re-reading would reveal that yes, New Earth in this book is the planet they were studying in that one.
In any case, the meat of the story begins with Jordan Kell awakening from cryosleep and having to reorient himself in space and time. Thus we learn that he and his crew are in orbit around the mysterious Earthlike planet that shouldn't be able to exist in the Sirius system. We also learn about the shadow that lays over his life, of a diplomatic mission that went terribly awry, of the death of the woman he loved and his own infection with a dormant version of a bio-engineered virus.
As Jordan and the rest of the crew recover from their awakening and from the process by which their minds are restored from the damage the brain takes in cryosleep, they plan how to make contact with the single known inhabited area on the planet. They are very aware of the possibility that it could be some kind of elaborate trap, so they play it safe and send robotic probes.
However, every one of them are shut down not long after landing. Whoever these people are, they want nothing to do with robotic emissaries. They want to meet with actual humans.
When first contact is finally made, the people of New Earth prove to be gentle, friendly and astonishingly human. They even speak English, and explain their knowledge as having been learned from our broadcasts and Internet. However, they're oddly evasive about their own history, and when they're overheard speaking their own language, it proves to be rapid sequences of tones. When I first read that scene, it made me think of whale song, and made me wonder if these people might be some kind of biological waldos, perhaps for sapient whales living in the oceans.
The longer Jordan and his crew interact with the people of New Earth, the more puzzles they raise. For instance, the "alien" names of the two locals they're interacting with prove to be the names of Hindu gods. Then a thorough physiological examination proves them to both be pure Terrestrial human, right down to the DNA. If it's not just convergent evolution, as they seem to have been trying to lead the mission to believe, what is actually going on? While the protagonists were puzzling it, and becoming steadily more concerned with the difficulty in getting straight answers out of their hosts, I was leaning more and more toward the whale theory.
However, I also noticed more and more parallels with the situation in Survival, which made me wonder whether this one also involved a machine civilization. In both cases, the Terrans grew steadily more frustrated with what they perceived as borderline dishonest interactions, and began pressuring their hosts. In this one, the breaking strain is finally reached when Jordan and his crew decide to carry out a seismological survey, overriding the objections of their hosts, and discover that the seismographic records show the planet acting as if it were hollow, echoing certain very old science fiction tropes going at least back to Edgar Rice Burroughs, and sometimes getting adopted by various occult traditions.
It's at this point that the people of New Earth finally come clean. I think the big reveal would've come as a bigger surprise and had a lot more impact on me if I hadn't already read Survival out of order and knew about machine civilizations and the great mission to save as many species of intelligent beings as possible. However, there was one big logic hole that really bothered me: why would a species of intelligent machines necessarily experience anything comparable to old age? I could understand individuals' software becoming progressively corrupted until they lost the capacity for self-repair, especially in a 'verse in which that kind of AI can't be backed up against loss (like the systems in John C. Wright's Countdown to the Eschaton 'verse). But why would an entire machine civilization grow senescent until only one last member remains, slowly running down?
It really feels like the author has not really thought out the implications of machine intelligence, and is simply giving superficially machine features to something he treats as fundamentally biological. On the other hand, given that Ben Bova started writing and publishing back in the days when computers were still vast machines in special air-conditioned rooms (the "dinosaur pens" of yore) operated by a priesthood of technicians, and media portrayals of AI were typically a monster that was out to destroy humanity Just Because, perhaps we ought to cut him a little slack compared to the new generation of cyberpunks who've grown up with computers in their homes, under the hoods of their cars, and even in their pockets.
On the whole, it's a readable novel, even if it didn't knock me out quite the way Mars Life did when I first read it.
Buy New Earth from Amazon.com
Review posted January 2, 2022.
