ARTS
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Page 5
'he Michigan Doily
Saturday, October 31, 1981
Page 5
'Oath' plot too pat for pleasure
By Stephen Miller
CIENCE FICTION will neverbe
S considered great literature. It just
doesn't possess enough relevance to
real life. Fortunately for those who
make their living by writing SF,
however, people don't want to drown
themselves constantly in reality and
great literature. A good book, a clever
extrapolation, and a handful, of
belgievable charaacters are quite suf-
ficient.
SF fills the need for escape, and
challenges readers to flex their
imaginations in the process. Certainly
past works of Larry Niven and Jerry
Pournelle call for a bit of imagination
flexing; if not great literature, they are
at least high level science fiction. But
their latest collaboration, Oath of
Fealty, is no more than a minor story
based on some clever ideas and a few
occasionally well-drawn characters..
The novel deals with the problems of
a "hive community," Todos Santos, a
1,000-foot-tall building in Los Angeles.
It is a new kind of city-an ar-
cology-designed to be as self-sufficient
as possible.
Todos Santos has thousands of apar-
tments, hundreds of stores, recreation
facilities, medical facilities, a power
supply, and virtually everything else
necessary in a modern city. The
residents-they call themselves Sain-
ts-trade extensively with the outside
world, but as time goes on they have
fewer and fewer reasons for actually
leaving their "Nest."
As might be expected, confliict
originates from various outside forces.
An "eco-freak" group is bent on
blowing the place up, and at times the
Todos Santos security force is forced to
waste a bomb-laden terrorist.
The Los Angeles city government,
resents the Saints, because they are
exempt from taxes and other forms of
control. A lot of money flows in to Todos
Santos, whether from visiting shoppers
or residents who work in Los Angeles,
but little seems to flow out.
The action picks up when three young
people break into the building, skillfully
eluding the sophisticated security
devices. Carrying a suspicious-looking
box labeled "dynamite," they enter a
part of the building still under construc-
tion using-conveniently
enough-homemade equipment to
scramble the monitoring computer.
As they sneak around with their box,
the chief security officer is aware of
trouble in the area, but he is unable to
get a fix on it. He has to act fast; hun-
dreds of millions of dollars worth of
equipment is at stake and maybe hun-
dreds of lives. Unwilling to stage a
SWAT-type maneuver that would
probably end with a lot of dead people,
he orders the tunnel flooded with poison
gas.
Now, the plot convolutions get tossed
in thick and fast. When the guards
recover the bodies, they realize it was
all a mistake. The "terrorists" were a
couple of kids; their dynamite was only
a box of sand; it was all an elaborate
prank. One of the trio managed to stay
alive, and he tells the Todos Santos to
brass that the other two were a city-
councilor's son and his girlfriend. This
really stirs up trouble. The war with
Los Angeles has begun.
Is it believable? Well, yes and
no-mostly no. The detailing is usually
very convincing, if sometimes obvious
and heavy-handed. For example, one of
the main characters is a TV documen-
tary journalist. All he ever seems to do
is observe details. Ostensibly this is his
job, but it comes off as a rather clumsy
method of fleshing out the story.
In the same way, such ready-made"
conflict as killing a city councilor's son
is far too pat. Too many ready-made
scenes eventually destroy the illusion of
plausibility that any good book must
maintain.
That illusion doesn't have a chance in
Oath of Fealty, and the characters soon
cease to be interesting. The stings
begin to tie together neatly 10 chapters
before the book ends, as the Todos San-
tos people make mince meat out of their
enemies in LA. They can do no wrong;
even the most hare-brained, illogical
schemes work without a hitch.
Overall, the novel is a failure; but its
worst flaws are not the parts clumsily
constructed by the authors. The fatal
flaw is that Niven and Pournelle have
created an' enormously complicated
setting in Todos Santos itself, and they
use its resources for toys. They tell a
simplistc story, and throw in a lot of
details to cover it up. The effect is akin
- n eo' '
Tissp~ae
c~ontributd bylte p 0 tshe
to using an Apollo rocketship to zip
down to the neighborhood Kroger's..
Large-scale, isolated communities
lend themselves well to serious science
fiction. But the idea is highly com-
plicated, and if used merely as a cheap
backdrop, it can easily get out of an
author's control. This happened in Oath
of Fealty, leaving the impression that
the book was slapped together in a very
short time.
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Joe Perry
Former Aerosmith guitarist Joe Perry recently released his second
albu, I've Got The Rock 'N' Rolls Again. He and his band, aptly called
The Joe Perry Project, will perform Monday night at the Second Chance
during the album's promotional tour.
The Project consists oftguitarist Perry, Bassist David Hull (formerly with
Dirty Angel), drummer Ronnie Stewart, and singer Ralph Mormon (ex-
Daddy Warbux vocalist). The latest member to join the band is rhythm
guitarist Charlie Farren. Farren co-wrote four of -the songs on the latest
album.
7hel*?flh
Lieutenan6
Woman
She was lost from
the moment she
saw him ...
(Rj
0Records
MERYL STREEP
Killing Joke-'What's THIS
for'4 Malicious Damage-Jem)
More than music, Killing Joke are
about power. Their plans to make you
dance could quite easily be mistaken
*or an attempt to implode your ear-
drums. Subtle, they are not; powerful,
they are.
Killing ° Joke could be
destribed-only half-facetiously-as
"Heavy Metal With a Difference." Like
the metallic icon, Killing Joke's sound
is designed to fill your skull and block
your neural passages. ,
But if nothing else, Killing Joke prove
that you don't have to be stupid to be
loud, as. they tinker quite wantonly
with our preconceptions of musical
~rranement.
wthat their tinkering has come up
with is a sound driven almost ex-
clusively by a simple but explosively
produced drum beat. Somewhere in the
mix, a guitar and bass support the dan-
ce-maniacal beat, but the only real
challenge to the drum kit's status as the
major diety in Killing Joke's pantheon
of sound is the vocals-a pop melody
stripped to the bones in order to stand
firin against the wailing hysteria of the
instrumentation.
But it is that simple hook that makes
all' the difference. While the
dogfighting guitars and surroundsound
beat make damn sure that you can't
igdore What's THIS For while it's
playing, it's that melody that makes
sure'you'll be back for more.
Welcome to music for the new theatre
of cruelty.
Max Roach-
'Chattahooche Red'
Master drummer Max Roach has on-
ce again proven that the essence of jazz
is a direct expression of the self, rather
than the mere flaunting of technical
ability.
Roach speaks to us through his
drums, drawing on his Afro-American
roots. In "The Dream," the words of
Martin Luther King are fused with
Roach's beating drums to form a
powerful communication filled with a
deep sense of hope and struggle.
Roach's version of John Coltrane's
"Giant Steps," first recorded by
Coltrane in 1959, is refreshing in its
sharp staccato attack, while drums
carry portions of the melody. Odean
Pope's sax solo literally flies over the
chords, leaving us to wonder where he's
been long after he's gone.
Drums are absent from Benny
Golson's ballad, "I Remember Clif-
ford." Pope plays a slow emotional sax
solo, accompanied by Calvin Hill's un-
cluttered bass line. And when Cecil
Bridgewater comes in on muted trum-
pet, they blend as smoothly as glass.
The newer pieces are just as moving
as the standards. "Chattahooche Red,"
by Cecil Bridgewater, ,has three
separate movements. The first is slow,
traditional, and melodic, featuring
tympani drums and chimes. The second
is modern and filled with sustained
tones. And the third is a medium-tempo
swinging piece with walking brass.
If you haven't discovered Max
Roach from his nearly 40 years of
recording, Chattahooche Red is as good
an album to start with as any.
-Faith Birchall
,t , IVmIM-IVV, 7:L7
SAT, SUN-1:00, 3:25,
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3rd,
Sharp, funny weekend
reunion of '60:s
activists ten years later
Directed by ,John Soytes.
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WEEKEND
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-Mark Dighton
N,37 MAPLE
76-13041
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