In this bi-weekly series reviewing classic science fiction and fantasy books, Alan Brown looks at the front lines and frontiers of the field; books about soldiers and spacers, scientists and engineers, explorers and adventurers. Stories full of what Shakespeare used to refer to as “alarums and excursions”: battles, chases, clashes, and the stuff of excitement.
The novel I’ve picked to review today, Emergence, is one of my favorite books. The protagonist, an unusually gifted young girl, survives a plague that kills most of humanity, and sets out to find other survivors. She overcomes all sorts of challenges, finding friends and great dangers, in a story that will stick with you long after you finish reading. While Emergence was published almost 40 years ago, it has held up remarkably well, and I enjoyed my re-read even more than my first reading of the story.
There were two recent pieces on Tor.com that led me to select Emergence for this review. The first was my own recent review of The Making of the Atomic Bomb by Richard Rhodes, which left me thinking about man-made apocalypses. And the second was the entertaining article, “Competence Porn Is Comforting — Where Can I Find More of It?” by Rachel Ayers. So, when I ran across Emergence on the bookshelf—a book about a super-competent girl in a post-apocalyptic world—I knew it was time to take another look at the novel.
When I was a young teenager reading John Campbell’s Analog in the late 1960s, I was captivated by story after story. Looking back, I think that was more due to my age and the fact everything was new to me, as a younger reader, than it was due to the quality of Campbell’s editorial choices. Then Ben Bova came in as editor and breathed new life into the magazine, and I thought the stories were even better—they featured lots of the action and adventure I enjoy so much. When Stanley Schmidt replaced Ben Bova as editor of Analog in 1978, the feel of the magazine changed. While I still enjoyed most of the stories, they struck me as more thoughtful in tone, and fewer of them stood out from the crowd. But every once in a while, a story came along that brought back the old sense of wonder and excitement, and one of those was the novella “Emergence,” by a writer that was new to me, David R. Palmer.
Emergence, published by Bantam Books in 1984, won the Compton Crook Award for best first novel at Balticon in 1985, and was also a Hugo Award nominee. The book is an expansion of two novellas, “Emergence” and “Seeking,” which appeared in Analog in 1981 and 1983, with both stories receiving Hugo nominations in their respective years.
Palmer’s next novel, Threshold, was published in 1985, and was intended to be the first volume of trilogy. But despite the success of his first book, Palmer then disappeared from the bookshelves, and the second volume of that trilogy did not appear. I suspect the reason was a shift in publishing sometimes called the “death of the midlist,” where changing tax laws made it more difficult for bookstores to keep large catalogs of books on the shelves, and publishers began to focus on bestsellers rather than more modestly successful books. The sequel to Emergence, Tracking, was serialized in Analog in three parts in 2008, but did not find a mainstream publisher.
These changes in the publishing industry, however, eventually led to the rise of small presses, and one of them, Eric Flint’s Ring of Fire Press, put Palmer back in print. They republished Emergence in 2018, and published the sequel Tracking in 2019. They also republished Threshold in 2018, and its sequel, Special Education, in 2019. And finally, they published another unrelated novel, Schrödinger’s Frisbee, in 2021. Thus, after years of neglect, Palmer was finally given some of the attention his fine work deserves.
About the Author
David R. Palmer (born 1941) is an American science fiction author. While he has written other stories, the novel Emergence is his best-known work. In his younger years, he worked at a broad range of jobs, both white and blue collar, in a variety of fields; in later life he worked as a court reporter. He has enjoyed a wide range of pastimes throughout his life, including flying, motorcycling, and sailing, and has driven Formula Vee racing cars.
Wicked Smart
Science fiction writers have long been fascinated by the idea of superior mental powers. These powers include all sorts of as yet unproven powers like telekinesis and telepathy, and in the days when John Campbell was editing Astounding/Analog magazine, you rarely opened an issue without finding at least one story on the subject. As part of this overall focus was an abiding interest in the potential of human intelligence, and especially the implications of superior intelligence. The always-useful online Encyclopedia of Science Fiction has an excellent article on the theme of intelligence that you can find here.
There are certain portrayals of highly intelligent characters that tend to stick in my head, including Matt Damon’s gifted janitor in the movie Good Will Hunting and Richard Dean Anderson’s hyper-competent secret agent and gadgeteer in the TV show MacGyver, which in its original incarnation ran from 1985 to 1992. It can be difficult to depict such characters as commanding extraordinary powers while making them believable at the same time. The MacGruber comedy sketch on Saturday Night Live, which were so popular that they led to a feature film, shows how such portrayals can easily veer into parody and silliness. An author has all the time in the world to research the things a hyperintelligent character might think through in an instant, but it still takes a lot of work to put all that knowledge together and convey it to an audience in a compelling manner. For a reader or viewer, the way the character makes the leap from one conclusion to the next must be believable and logical.
Authors have choices in how to portray a hyperintelligent character. One way is to show the character through the eyes of another, more relatable character, the way Arthur Conan Doyle used Doctor Watson in his Sherlock Holmes tales. Another choice is to dive right into a first-person narrative, showing what the world looks like from that hyperintelligent character’s viewpoint. One literary device, the epistolary tale, once popular but not as widely used today, tells the story in the form of letters or diary entries. It can be a convincing way to put the reader into the mindset of a character. The epistolary style was used in one of the greatest science fiction stories of all time, and one centered on the topic of human intelligence, “Flowers for Algernon” by Daniel Keyes. The story is presented in the form of progress reports from a mentally challenged menial worker, Charles Gordon, who is selected as a human test subject for a type of brain surgery that has increased the IQ of a laboratory rat named Algernon. As Charlie’s intelligence increases, the spelling and grammar of the progress reports improve, providing tangible evidence of the changes in the character. When Algernon eventually shows signs of deterioration, and we see the same thing occurring in Charlie—the quality of prose deteriorates again as the tale moves toward its tragic and poignant conclusion.
David R. Palmer also uses the first-person epistolary style to good effect in Emergence. The young protagonist uses a distinctive Pitman shorthand style in her diary. She complains about the flabby nature of English, and the style she chooses is idiosyncratic, with most sentences starting with a verb, and the prose stripped of articles. The diary often has a stream-of-consciousness feel to it, and sometimes teases the reader by doling out information important to the story in a non-linear manner. It is quite effective in making it clear that this is not an ordinary person about whom we are reading. One limitation of the epistolary style, however, is the way it can sap the sense of jeopardy from the narrative. After all, if the character is sitting down to write, they must have survived whatever it is they are writing about. Palmer gets around this limitation in two ways. The first is to insert diary entries from other characters at points in the narrative. The other way is a bit more science fictional—something I will leave for readers to discover for themselves.
Emergence
The book begins on a tangent, with our narrator discussing the library she has available to her, and how she has decided to keep a diary. She introduces herself as Candidia Maria Smith, age 11, from Wisconsin, unusually precocious, and orphaned by a car accident at age 10 months. She was adopted by the Foster family (a little pun there I just noticed), and when Mrs. Foster died, Doctor Foster was her sole, doting parent. She describes how she grew up reading everything she could get her hands on, hungry for knowledge. Soo Kim McDivott, an elderly Chinese-American man she calls Teacher, moves in next door and becomes a mentor, not only guiding Candy’s education, but becoming her karate instructor. She also mentions her “adoptive, retarded twin brother” Terry, who it turns out is actually a hyacinth Macaw, her constant companion from birth.
And then Candy gets to the topic she has been avoiding. World tensions have been increasing, and her father is called to Washington. Before he leaves, he takes her to the bomb shelter beneath the house, and reviews emergency procedures. He departs, and thus she happens to be in the shelter with Terry when the world ends, and seals herself off. Someone has seeded an engineered virus across the world, which is activated by the radiation from nuclear detonations. Her father probably died quickly, killed by a nuclear weapon detonated over the capitol. But for some reason, Candy is still alive.
After three months, when all radio transmissions have dwindled to nothing, and after many diary entries that dance around the elephant in the room, Candy emerges into the world again, and the experience hits her hard. All the familiar places remain relatively untouched, but skeletons and partially decomposed bodies are everywhere. She decides that, in order to survive long-term, she will have to find a farm, and sets out to build a new life for herself. What follows are long passages that describe how she goes about doing that. I found these sections fascinating, although admittedly others might find them tedious.
Buy the Book
The Jinn Bot of Shantiport
Following her preparations, Candy finally works up the courage to visit Teacher’s home, planning to give him a decent burial. Instead, she finds him gone. He has left a letter for her, explaining that she survived because she is a member of a new species of human, Homo Post Hominem, which emerged, at first unnoticed, from survivors of the Spanish Flu epidemic of 1918. He explains that there are more like her, immune to most illnesses, scattered around the country. Those who were brought up in an environment that encouraged their intelligence, the AA group, should be friendly. But there is another group, the ABs, brought up in unhealthy environments, who could be antisocial and even dangerous. One person in particular, a Peter Bell, is recommended by Teacher as someone Candy should seek out. So she sets aside her farming plans and she and Terry prepare for a journey into the wider world, bringing the first section of the book to a close.
The second section of the book finds Candy frustrated as she travels around the country, finding that the AAs from Teacher’s list are missing, having left their homes without providing any indication of where they have gone. When she finally finds someone, in Baltimore, it is by accident. And indeed, an accident takes place, as they nearly collide at an intersection, neither expecting any traffic on the cross street. The boy in the crashed sports car is threatened by fire, and Candy uses her advanced karate training to draw on hysterical strength, rescuing the boy. She performs emergency surgery on the spot to save him, only to then be overcome herself. She awakens in his home to find him a gracious host, a boy only a few years older than her, who will not reveal his name, and wants to be called Adam. I was worried he was hiding his name because he might be on the AB list of dangerous people, but it turns out he is simply embarrassed by one of those long and pompous names old-money families impose on their offspring. Adam proposes a sexual relationship, but Candy does not feel ready, and while he fusses a bit, he respects her wishes. The two of them decide to continue the search for others together, and have all sorts of adventures as they head for the West Coast. Adam’s presence is welcome, as without someone besides Terry to interact with, the narrative had been at risk of bogging down.
I will not discuss the rest of the book in detail, as much of the fun comes from the surprises that Candy, Adam, and Terry encounter. There are other survivors, and at one point, Candy even has the opportunity to find out who tried to destroy humanity and why. And another threat emerges that might be able to destroy what is left of humanity. Some of Candy’s adventures and abilities stretch credulity, and at the end the narrative takes an unexpected turn into outer space, but for the most part, the book feels surprisingly grounded and realistic. The distinctive voice of Candy’s diary entries and the level of care and detail Palmer puts into the story keep you engaged in the narrative from the first page to the last. Anyone who is a fan of science fiction will enjoy this book.
Final Thoughts
Emergence is one of the best first novels I ever encountered. It is engaging, entertaining, and thought provoking. Candy is a fascinating character, and the depiction of her superhuman abilities is plausible and convincing. And now I’d like to hear from you: If you’ve read Emergence, I would be interested in your thoughts on the book. And the floor is also open for discussion of any other post-apocalyptic survival stories you have enjoyed, or stories of humans with superhuman intelligence or abilities.
Alan Brown has been a science fiction fan for over five decades, especially fiction that deals with science, military matters, exploration and adventure.
