Book #34

Achilles' Choice
by Larry Niven and Steven Barnes

Definitely something lighter, since the ending of that book was pretty depressing, and maybe something faster. Less real, less poetic. Hmm. Maybe Kitty Takes a Holiday? No -- let's go with a little science fiction, since I rarely read that any more. Ah, here we go: Achilles's Choice, by Larry Niven and Steven Barnes. One of the better collaborative teams, though not as good as Niven and Jerry Pournelle; Niven and Pournelle complement each other perfectly, whereas Steven Barnes is actually a good writer all by himself, and thus doesn't mesh as well with Niven. And -- oh, it's illustrated by Boris Vallejo! Well, alright then: let's read about muscly women in skimpy outifts.

And that's much of the book. The premise is fairly interesting: the Olympics of the future has become a testing ground for the best and the brightest; athletes now have to participate in academic and artistic events along with their athletic events. As the world has moved toward a one-world, corporate-run society, the Olympics is less about national pride. But now there's a twist: athletes can opt to undergo a surgical procedure, called the Boost, that increases their nerve output and makes them quicker, stronger, more coordinated, and also able to think faster and heal better. But it kills them within eight or nine years, and so they only get two Olympics to try for the ultimate prize before they become too damaged to compete -- though if they win, they become Linked, one of the elite members of the ruling class, and they are given a means of managing their screwed-up bodies that gives them back their lifespan. So it's all or nothing: win enough gold medals and get chosen to survive, or fail and die. Since most of the athletes choose to Boost, there is no other option -- an unBoosted person simply can't compete with the Boosted ones.

So it fits in well with our modern version of sports, what with steroids and manic over-training to maintain a competitive edge, and I like that. I love the idea that the athletes have to be complete, rather than one-trick monkeys like our modern overpaid mindless amoral hulks. I like the heroine, to some extent, though there are some annoying things about her, too. But the message of the book is too focused on competition as a means of fixing everything. Too capitalistic for my tastes. I mean, the world has become a single peaceful society, and war is a thing of the past; however, the oligarchy in charge of the world has intentionally kept society from becoming a utopia, because they, like so many other futuristic societies I have read or seen in movies, have realized that a perfect world is self-defeating, that elementary chaos theory as well as a simple reading of human nature shows that people, given paradise, will find a way to fuck it up. Okay, I got that; I may even agree, though I think we could find a new concept of what "fuck it up" means that would lead to a utopia that we would see as perfection -- like, they live in peace and harmony but they all dress really badly, or something. But the underlying idea is that the heroine is the savior of this society, that she will be the one who fixes all of the problems and makes it better -- and they had to find her through the Olympics. She had to win an athletic contest, after Boosting, to prove herself worthy. They tried to construe it as evidence that she'd never give up, that she was willing to do anything to be the best, but come on. The character from Pursuit of Happyness is a far better example of that than someone who is willing to kill themselves in order to win a goddamn sports event.

Anyway, it was a one-day read, and the Vallejo pictures were actually quite nice; since this was about hyper-athletic people, his usual depiction of perfect human musculature was appropriate here. It was good enough.