REVIEW: Soothsayer by Mike Resnick
Wayne Throop
Both are space opera, not of the "Lensman" or "Skylark" kind, but of
the "substitute a laser for a sixgun" kind.
The setting is the far future. A far future somewhat like that
in Resnick's _The_Dark_Lady_, but with a "frontierland" twist. In
fact, the expansion inward along the spiral arm of the galaxy is
called the "inner frontier", and outward towards the rim the "outer
frontier" in this book. The inner frontier is the wild wild west,
the west of mythic outlaw figures. From Resnick's prologue:
It was a time of Giants. [...]
There was Backbreaker Ben Ami, who wrestled aliens for money and killed
men for pleasure. There was the Marquis of Queensbury, who fought by no
rules at all, and the White Knight, albino killer of fifty men, and
Sally the Blade, and the Forever Kid, who reached the age of nineteen
and just stopped growing for the next two centuries, and Catastrophe
Baker, who made whole planets shake beneath his feet, and the exotic
Pearl of Maracaibo, and the Scarlet Queen, whose sins were condemned by
every race in the galaxy, and Father Christmas, and the One-Armed
Bandit with his deadly prosthetic arm, and the Earth Mother, and Lizard
Malloy, and the deceptively mild-mannered Cemetary Smith.
Giants all.
Yet there was one giant who was destined to tower over all of the
others, to juggle the lives of men and worlds as if they were so many
toys, to rewrite the history of the Inner Frontier, and the Outer
Frontier, and the Spiral Arm, and even the all-powerful Democracy
itself.
This giant is the title character, the Soothsayer. (As an aside, I've
always been a sucker for the list-of-neat-stuff style Resnick uses in
the above excerpt, whether used by Ellison in "Repent Harlequin"... or
by Moran in the Continuing Time books.)
Now in this case, as with the Galaxy Rangers, prepare to check your
brain in at the door. Don't fret your head about why people with
such a high technology would be running around having shootouts,
and macho pseudo-cowboy bluster, and all that. Just sit back and
enjoy. And it *is* very enjoyable.
And yet....... while you have to numb your brain down about some of the
sociological background details, you end up soaking in some pretty heavy
philosophy. The Soothsayer can tell the future (or at least, see the
many possible futures, and know definitely the consequences of actions
taken). Shades of Foster's _The_Morphodite_ and sequels. In fact, shades
of many different works; old themes handled well.
This incarnation of these ideas has one (if one is at all like me)
thinking about things like the Newcomb Paradox, and other deep(ish)
stuff. And it is handled in such a gritty, down-to-earth way that some
of the background messages sneak up on you. The "who can control a
child with such superpowers", and many others.
When I first read the ending, I was surprised, and thought that the
groundwork for it had not been laid by the preceeding story. But after
a little thought, I don't know... Was it a "cautionary tale" ending, or
a "lady and the tiger" thing, or is he just setting up a sequel?
You better decide for yourself.
%A Mike Resnick
%C New York
%D November 1991
%G ISBN 0-441-77285-4
%I Ace
%P 279
%T Soothsayer