Spinneret, by Timothy Zahn
A while back I mentioned I was reading some vintage science fiction published in 1985, and that book was SPINNERET, by Timothy Zahn.
In SPINNERET, some Canadian scientists invented hyperdrive around 2012, and so humanity has sent its first hyperspace-capable ships to explore the nearby star systems in hopes of finding planets to colonize. However, the explorers quickly discover that all the nearby habitable planets are already colonized by space-faring races. After some negotiation, the United Nations is offered the lease to a habitable planet called Astra, a planet all the other space-faring races rejected because of the utter lack of metals in the planet’s crust – even crops will not grow there without massive piles of fertilizer. But with no other choice, an American military colony under the command of one Colonel Meredith is established on Astra.
However, the colonists soon accidentally discover why there is no metal on Astra – there’s an alien machine buried beneath one of the mountains, a machine that absorbs any available metal on the planet’s surface and converts it to a strange metal that is superconducting, incredibly strong, very flexible, and practically impervious to all forms of physical and radiation damage. The colonists nickname the device the Spinneret, and quickly realize that a lot of people, both back on Earth and among alien races, want to get their hands on the machine.
Mayhem ensues.
It was a fascinating book for two reasons. First, I enjoyed the exploration of human colonization on another planet – complete with labor unrest, since it turns out many of the Hispanic agricultural workers brought to Astra were deceived into coming to the planet. (History, repeat, again.) Additionally, the tension of finding a powerful alien device energized the novel. It was like throwing a pizza into a room full of hungry college students, and watching them eye each other and wonder who was going to take a grab at the pizza first.
Second, this book is what I call “vintage” SF, by which I mean SF written long enough ago that we are now living in the time period the book portrayed. So it’s interesting to see what a writer in 1985 thought the future around 2013 would look like. In SPINNERET, the Soviet Union is still around and kicking, which makes since, since no one thought the Soviet Union was going to collapse right up until Boris Yeltsin got up on that tank. There are a large number of illegal Hispanic immigrants in the US, not because of decades of steady migration, but because in 2011 the Mexican government collapsed in civil war and created a refugee crisis in the US. In 2013, humanity has figured out interstellar flight…but not, apparently, the Internet or email, and a major subplot involves someone smuggling paper letters (actual, physical letters, written on paper) back to Earth. People have cell phones, but they’re strapped to the wrists like watches. (Maybe this anticipated the smartwatch.) No one has tablet computers or laptop computers, and the only computers are apparently big mainframes.
I like vintage SF, since it’s a bit like reading a parallel universe. But it’s more authentic than reading a book where someone explicitly tried to create an alternate history to our own, since this is what a writer suspected the future would actually be like.
Anyway, SPINNERET was an enjoyable book, both in its own right and as a parallel-universe look at what 2013 might have been like.
-JM