Guardian

Rating:
Summary: unique speculative fiction
Review: She was only a child when the civil war started but her parents were wise enough to send her up North to relatives when it looked like the south would lose. She stayed at a boarding school until she went to Wellestey College where she met and later married Edward Tolliver, a rich and powerful man. The marriage wasn't a happy one but when Rosa saw her husband sodomize their son Daniel, she knew it was time to leave.

Rosa and Daniel traveled to Dodge City where they had many happy years together until a Pinkerton agent hired by Edward arrived on the scene to take Daniel back to his father. Daniel conked the agent over the head, allowing them to escape and they decide to see if they could get rich in Alaska. While Daniel is in the field panning for gold, a drunken miner kills him and Rosa decides to kill herself until a spirit guide named Raven takes her around the universe. When Rosa returns, her actions change the course of history and save millions of lives.

Award winning author Joe Haldeman has written a very simple story about a woman's fight to survive and triumph. What is not so simple is the way the protagonist has to learn those lessons but what would defeat another person doesn't even phase Rose. She takes what she learns and applies it to her everyday life and in doing so makes the world a better place.

Harriet Klausner

Rating:
Summary: Classic Haldeman
Review: This guy is why I keep reading science fiction (though this is more fiction than science). It's good to know there are a few sci-fi writers left who can write (publishers are letting too much drivel through). This might be one for my top ten list. I may give it a while to settle in, but right now I think it's on my "keep forever give copies to friends list".

Rating:
Summary: Interestingly-offbeat sort-of-SF novel
Review: This interestingly-offbeat sort-of-SF novel starts off as a late 19th century memoir, 'as written by' the protag-lady circa 1952. Rosa Coleman moves to Kansas to escape an abusive husband, then moves on to Alaska when the brute find out she's in Dodge City -- a town Haldeman picked, no doubt, with malice aforethought [note 1]. The 'memoir' is well-researched and pretty good, but has no special sfnal frisson until Rosa is led on a galactic fantasy-tour by an Alien Guardian disguised as a Tlingit Raven shaman... [note 2]

It wouldn't be fair to reveal how Raven got involved, so let's just say that many-worlds is the law in this universe, with interesting consequences. Haldeman's writing is as good as ever (a relief after Forever Peace), and the galactic-tourist scenes with Raven and Rosa are as thrilling and strange as the encounters with the weird continuity-guardian in The Hemingway Hoax [note 3] -- high praise indeed.

The spirit-guardian out-of-body trip leader was a pretty common conceit in 19th century proto-sf, and Haldeman specifically identifies a Flammarion novel [note 4] as a parallel work to his. A somewhat similar book, that ordinary readers may have actually read, is Lindsay's Voyage to Arcturus. Personally, I would have preferred more galaxy-touring and less history in Guardian, but I wasn't disappointed with the book at hand. And, at 231 pages, no great time-committment is required. Recommended.

I glanced through the online reviews for Guardian. About a third wanted more history and less SF. Another third wanted more SF, and the rest were happy with Haldeman's chosen mix. Um, Publisher's Review panned it as "odd and unsatisfying". So YMMV.
____________
Note 1). -- town of a thousand bad cliches. Yup, she got the hell out of Dodge...
Haldeman used to live nearby, in Oklahoma (and grew up in Alaska).

Note 2). Raven has roughly the same position in Northwest Coast mythology as Coyote does in the American Southwest, or Loki in Nordic myths.

Note 3). They also make more sense than those HH scenes.

Note 4). You won't be surprised to hear that John Clute has a copy of the Flammarion in his personal library. Ah, it's Lumen, newly-translated by one B. Stableford...

Rating:
Summary: Good story
Review: This is a good historical novel: well researched and very believable. It has just a touch of Haldeman's traditional science-fiction themes. It seems he is exploring new ground and it works quite well.