Subject: Margaret Ball: No Earthly Sunne

From: [email-masked] (Dani Zweig)
Date: Thu, 17 Nov 1994 03:31:03 GMT

Neither cover of Margaret Ball's "No Earthly Sunne" makes any pretense
that the book is anything but a romance with a thin patina of science
fiction or fantasy.  Besides, I've read her earlier sf novels, so I can't
claim to have expected anything else.

This time it didn't work, though.  For one thing, the patina wasn't just
thin; it was actively painful.  Consider this gem of dialogue:

		"Oh, yes, I remember; you got a programming job,
	didn't you?  Poor you.  How boring."

		"Not at all," Ellen said briskly.  "KNEE happens to be
	*the* major artificial intelligence project of this decade.  When
	completed, it will provide a platform for easy development of
	truly self-understanding, self-teaching expert systems drawing
	on a complete common-sense world-knowledge base.  In the last year
	alone, my team has been specifying the base set of specialized
	deduction processes for the Newtonian time-space model, with
	specific integrity verification system-based facilities for each
	one.  Then, to make things easier for the general user, we wrote
	KNEEJERK, a language translator that accepts additional rules in
	the predicate calculus form that everybody knows, then translates
	them from the generic epistimological state to the internal form
	required by the inferencing engine."

Fortunately, not much is done with the computer side of the story --
except that towards the end the heroine uses her expert system to convince
the Elves that they've completely misunderstood the nature of time and
space.  The core of the story is that four hundred years ago, a musical
performance led to a couple's separation, when he was taken by Elves and
she pined away.  Now she's been reborn, and for some possibly-sinister
reason, the Elves are working hard to get her to repeat the musical
performance and be reunited with her lover.  The story itself shifts back
and forth between the basic romance -- Eleanor and Kit falling in love in
Elizabethan England -- and the fantasy romance -- Ellen being maneuvered
into drawing Kit back, and then dealing with the consequences.

It doesn't work very well.  The love story is formulaic, the characters
are uninteresting, the resolution is improbable.  Oh, well.

%A Ball, Margaret
%T No Earthly Sunne
%I Baen Books
%C New York
%D December 1994
%G ISBN 0-671-87633-3
%P 343pp
%O $5.99

-----
Dani Zweig
[email-masked] 

   "You have the reputation of being one of the nicest guys in the field.
    We both know you're a hyena on its hind legs.  How have you fooled
    everyone?"  "By keeping my mouth shut when I read garbage" -- Gene Wolfe