Subject: Review: "Camelot 30K" by Robert L Forward

From: [email-masked] (p-m agapow)
Date: Tue, 3 Sep 1996 14:18:10 GMT

"Camelot 30K" by Robert L Forward
		A Postview, copyright 1996 p-m agapow

On the outer fringes of the solar system, where temperatures hover just
above absolute zero, intelligent life has been discovered on a remote
planetoid.  A small team of humans been sent to investigate grapples with
the mystery of how this minute and primitive race, the kerack, could exist
in the radiation soaked, freezing environment.

Robert Forward has a very distinctive MO. If you were to read any two of his
books you'd recognise them as being the product of the same author.
Regrettably this isn't an entirely good thing.  One of Forward's trademarks
is the depiction of detailed and intriguing alien races, side by side with
flat and implausible humans.  And in this way "Camelot 30K" is a bit of a
departure for him.  In this book, the aliens are also implausible.

There looms an obvious plot development which will have most right-minded
readers white-knuckled with terror.  (Big clue: the humans explore the alien
city of "Camalor" with the help of the wizard "Merlene" and encounter the
warrior "Mordet".  Now think of the title of the book.  Scary, huh?)
Fortunately this analogy isn't fully developed, but underneath it all is the
fact that the alien society is a thin analog of the human middle ages.
(There are professional male warriors on chargers tended to by pages,
serving the Queen and princesses.  There are wars with neighbouring
city-states.  There are males as farmers, females as homemakers and
artisans.)  In addition the aliens language is littered with self-references
in the third person, a base 5 number system, "be"s and "o'"s.  For example:

   "Merlene be the fi'fifth female child of Patene ...  Patene be 
   hoping that her five times five child would be special - and 
   she be!  How proud Patene be when Merlene be made the Wizard 
   o'Camalor!"

300 pages of this pseudo-Latinate is bad enough, but consider that human-
alien speech is achieved through realtime computer translation, which
works transparently except for being unable to substitute "of" for "o',"
base 10 for base 5, and conjugate the verb "to be."

As said above, Forward's human characterisation has never been good and this
fact is highlighted by the failure of the aliens.  Our human crew is drawn
from all different nations, so they periodically drop in a few words of
their mother tongue and reminisce about home to remind you of this.  This
device is even less effective than when used by the allegedly french Picard
on "ST:TNG."  The dialogue is painfully geeky:

   "This must be the beast of burden Merlene described earlier - 
   the hueller," said Selke.  "Built like a caterpillar, but with 
   four sets of legs, two on top and two on the bottom." "That 
   baby is big - even by Earth caterpillar standards!" Rob said, 
   impressed.  "Must be a whole eight centimeters high.  Tall as 
   a kerack - and some twenty-four centimeters long."

It's like being trapped at party full of drunk physics undergraduates, only
less emancipating.

There is a fairly cool form of space travel used, but that occurs largely in
the prologue.  A disappointing effort for Forward - maybe he can write out
the humans entirely next time?  [*/misfire] and public service announcements
on the Sid and Nancy scale.

%A Robert L. Forward
%B Camelot 30K
%I Questar
%C New York, USA
%D 1988
%G ISBN 0-445-20531-8
%P 454pp
%O paperback, Aus$10.95

paul-michael agapow ([email-masked]), La Trobe Uni, Infocalypse
[archived at http://www.cs.latrobe.edu.au/~agapow/Postviews/]