Griffin's Egg

____________________________________________ Gunther Weil is a truckdriver with a bad attitude, hauling fuel rods to Chatterjee Crater industrial park.... Gunther drove automatically, gauging his distance from Bootstrap by the amount of trash lining the Mare Vaporum road... He likes to break new tracks in the "cherry soil, terrain no human or machine had ever crossed before." His dispatcher isn't pleased, and not for the first time: "Weil! Where the f*ck are you?" Ekaterina Izmailova is a demolition jock, hired to "clean up" a reactor meltdown. With a briefcase nuke. "It was unf*ckabelievable. The one side of the crater just disappeared..." Gunther and Ekaterina end up alone together, stuck in an emergency rad shelter, trapped by a demented drill-punch -- "The machine followed him, the diamond-tipped punch sliding nervously in and out of its sheath. its movements as tremulous and dainty as a newborn colt's." CLANG... CLANG. After chiseling off the shelter's outer door, the punch wanders off. G & E, expecting death, celebrate life: "Are you coming yet?" she murmured... "Tell me when you're about to come..." -- pillow-talk with an sfnal twist that it would be unfair to reveal. Griffin's Egg, while very short (75 pages) "has the multiplex attack of a true novel" (John Clute). I wish it were longer. This is Swanwick at his hard-SF best, in a setting that's a prequel to "Trojan Horse" and Vacuum Flowers. Radical neuroengineering bears its first fruit -- an aerosol schizomimetic war gas. Which gets it first use inside the lunar habitat. It's a horrifying vision -- Swanwick is disturbingly good at those -- etched in literally hallucinatory clarity. Breughel and Bosch come to mind, with a nod to Shakespeare's Ophelia. The ending feels false and hurried, but this is the only real flaw in the piece. Folks, literary space opera doesn't get much better than this. Highly recommended. Review copyright ©2001 Peter D. Tillman

Swanwick combines hard science fiction speculation about the future of the moon with a fastpaced action-adventure story that wouldn't be out of place in Hollywood. This is a short novel, orginally published in Asimov's Science Fiction as a novella, and it well worth reading in one sitting. So what are you waiting for? Pop some popcorn and start reading.