[REVIEW] Donald Moffitt

[rfmcdonald]

By and large, I was introduced to science fiction through Charlottetown's second-hand book stores. The American author Donald Moffitt was one of my first discoveries, via a creased paperback copy of his 1977 novel The Jupiter Theft. What caught my attention, I think, as I was skimming the first few pages, was the parenthetical mention of the United States' annexation of Canada in the aftermath of a violent terrorist campaign by Canadian-associated New England separatists. What kept my attention was the vast scale of Moffitt's seemingly hard sci-fi narrative, describing the struggles of a band of intrepid humans to escape from a million-year-old alien civilization that travelled through space drawing its fuel from captured gas giants. The characterization wasn't the most realistic, I knew even then, and the plot was somewhat clichéd--how do we keep the military from screwing things up? how can we quickly spread across the galaxy--but I enjoyed it.

A couple of years later, in the same bookstore, I came across Moffitt's The Genesis Quest and that book's sequel, Second Genesis. In The Genesis Quest, Moffitt seems to have been the first science-fiction author of note to come up with an interesting idea: What if human DNA, and human culture, was transmitted across tens of millions of light-years, to be reassembled by a curious non-human civilization? The Genesis Quest was a better novel than The Jupiter Theft, creating believable non-humans in the benevolent Juxt and plausible--only somewhat clichéd--grounds for conflict. Second Genesis reverted somewhat to type, although Moffitt certainly didn't lack for scale. (All I'll say, to avoid spoilers, is that I hope there weren't any native biota in the Delta Pavonis planetary system.)

My opinion of Moffitt as a basically competent science fiction author only began to change when I came across his novels Crescent in the Sky and A Gathering of Stars. Set in a vaguely alternate-historical setting,as the Islam in Sci-Fi site notes, these books do carry on in Moffitt's tradition of grand hard-sci vistas. The only problems with these books is the fact that the Islamic world-civilization they describe bears more similar to Disney's Aladdin than, say, the infinitely superior novels of George Alec Effinger, or, in fact, any plausible modern Islamic society. Were I a Muslim, I'd certainly be offended; as a non-Muslim, I'm unsurprised that he doesn't know what he's talking about.

Moffitt could get away with weak characterization and clichéd plotting with his overpopulated late 21st century United States in The Jupiter Theft, or the patchily-informed Juxt-raised recreated human culture of The Genesis Quest and Second Genesis, since these three novels described cultures not very removed from his (my) own. He just can't get inside other cultures, or other people. Worse, as james_nicoll pointed out in his caustic review of The Jupiter Theft, Moffitt's hard sci-fi isn't very hard at all. It seems, for instance, that one cannot maintain powered relativistic orbits around gas giants without introducing new laws of physics.

What do I think of Moffitt now? I still want to like him, if only for his Genesis novels and the scope ofThe Jupiter Theft's reworking of Sol's planetary system (61 Cygni's, too). Is that enough? I've known for some time that it's easier for me to like science-fiction authors than literary authors, mainly because I've looser standards for the former. Given my past concern about the future of science fiction, I wonder if that's a responsible attitude for me to take. Can I still like Moffitt and care for good writing?

(This is where I open the floor to the audience. People?)