Subject: Mirabile, by Janet Kagan [REPOST]

From: [email-masked] (Wayne Throop)
Date: 31 Jul 92 22:11:51 GMT

[I have reposted this because of a news problem at the moderator's
site.  Apologies if you have seen it previously. -- Moderator]

Mirabile, by Janet Kagan

What attracted me to this book was the evident sense of fun and
wordplay in the titles of the collected stories.  "The Loch Moose
Monster", "The Return of the Kangaroo Rex", "The Flowering Inferno",
and so on.  This sense of wry amusement with the world continues
throughout the stories, so my expectations weren't crushed.

Mirabile is a planet, colonized by an interstellar expedition from
Earth, and now isolated (presumably by distance, but something may have
happened to Earth also... this is not clearly developed).  But to save
space on the ship, the animals shipped with the colonists have had the
genetic information of other species "piggybacked" onto their own.
Thus, when environmental conditions are right, a flower might produce
peculiar seeds that hatch into a polinating insect, or a cow might give
birth to a deer, or whatever.

This setting is used to tell a series of stories, some about the
results of the intended piggybacking process going awry and producing
interesting blends of earth species, some about interactions with the
local pre-existing ecology.

Each story involves some puzzle or some mystery (small or large) to
figure out.  One problem I had was that most all the mysteries were too
easy to figure out.  With perhaps the exception of the tinkering done
to protect bats from a local predator, which I didn't see coming, I was
way ahead of the author on most of the stories, which detracted from
their fun for me.

On the other hand, these stories have some of the flavor of the 1950's
Heinlein juveniles, with some of the points people find bad about that
vintage of Heinlein strained out.

So, the technical gimick seemed weak, the stories seemed a bit
oversimple, but they have a nice sense of fun and a good exposure to
problem solving behavior (so to speak), and a good eye for detail.  On
the whole, I had a good time reading.

%A   Janet Kagan
%T   Mirabile
%I   Tor Books
%C   New York
%D   1991
%G   ISBN 0-812-50993-5
%P   278 pages

--
Wayne Throop  ...!mcnc!dg-rtp!sheol!throopw