David Brin, Sky Horizon (Subterranean Press, 2007)
David Brin's new Young Adult offering, Sky Horizon, is a tale of first contact with an alien species. Hero Mark Bamford is sixteen and trying yet again to acclimate to a new school, this time in Twenty-Nine Palms, California. He has followed his military father all over the world, but Southern California and TNP High are proving as challenging and alienating as any environment he's braved to date -- only here, the pitfalls tend to be of the social variety.
Mark and his climbing-team buddies, Barry and Alexandra, get dragged into a local scuffle between jocks and nerds. The contention centers around the custody of an alien life form -- dubbed Xeno, short for xenoanthropoid -- found wandering the desert after a forced landing of his spacecraft. Unfortunately for Xeno, first contact with the cliquish teens of TNP High School means a basement dog kennel and fifty dollars a pop to the other kids for a peek at you. Mark, his civic responsibility and good-Samaritanism rising above his instinctive adherence to the unspoken teenage credo of 'secrecy from the adults', initiates a public rescue of Xeno with the aid of the federal government and local leaders, hand-picked by himself to include his teacher Mr. Clements.
Mark's social life withers to social hell. He's labeled a snitch, and feels universally reviled by his fellow students, regardless of clique or social standing. The exceptions are his two climbing-team friends and the beautiful Helene Shockley, Mark's secret crush and a vivid, considerably more feminine counterpart to his friend Alex. He thinks she smiles at him once or twice -- and perhaps that's sympathy he sees in her eyes, though he nurtures the hope it could be a little more than merely that.
I like Brin's balance of the adventure portion of the story -- that of first contact with an alien species; what it means for humankind, for Earth, for Mark and the other teens of Twenty-Nine Palms -- with the softer, more introspective aspects of the implications of growing up. The commingling of the two gets off to a rocky start, the portrayal of teenage thought and behavior seeming muddled in the beginning, the "voice" of the protagonist sometimes stilted and confused, even forced. Once or twice, during scenes of Mr. Clements's class discussions (these perhaps based on real classroom discussions Brin mentions in his Afterword), I was afraid the narrative strayed too far into the realm of the preachy. I'm close enough to my inner teenager to know I don't want to be preached at, even if I agree with most of the sentiments expressed. It tottered along that line, however, never quite crossing it far enough to turn me off completely. I hope Sky Horizon's true audience, the YA crowd, feels the same.
What did not work for me: the illustrations. I'm not against illustrated novels. Some of my favorite bookshelf residents are graphic novels and comic books. I've also noticed recent on-line discussions about illustrations accompanying adult novels, and I think we may be seeing a return to this trend. I have to say, I find such illustrations off-putting more often than not. Often, I just dislike the way main characters are portrayed visually. For example; Mark Bamford is cool. I want him to be cool. I want to identify with him. I also kind of want him to be good-looking (Why not? He's a hero!). In my mind, he's dark and lithe and strong, kind of compact, maybe a little subculture, non-mainstream. So what's this dumpy, thick-necked beach-boy-looking dude doing cluttering up the pages of an otherwise good book? And when alien technology makes an appearance in the story -- Brin does an excellent job of describing the size and shape and effect the machine has on the local landscape -- the illustrations are even more jarring, completely at odds with the written depiction of the scene. This really bothered me, as it has on many a bit of cover art. Ultimately, superfluous illustrations (not graphic novels, which are different, or books with accompanying author sketches and maps and notes -- but novels with non-organic illustrations tacked on almost as an afterthought) detract from a book. Well-integrated illustration is great, and good collaboration can be fantastic (Brin and Hampton have collaborated before on such projects as The Life Eaters). Unfortunately, these particular illustrations serve only to dumb-down the novel. It feels almost patronizing, as though adults thought a teenage audience would need illustrations to support the text. Cool illustrations might have worked -- these just didn't make the cut of "cool" -- they feel like the drawings of an older generation, and not in a hip, retro sort of way. The artwork is good, and Scott Hampton has worked on illustrious and iconic projects like Batman, Sandman, Hellraiser, and Star Trek: these particular renderings just don't add in any meaningful way to Sky Horizon.
I don't want to end this on a sour note; Sky Horizon got only better and better as the story progressed. The momentum in the second half of this short work was solid, and in the end, Brin achieved what he meant to, I think; he made me want more. I would definitely read the next book. I look forward to it, in fact. The narrative seemed to be hitting its stride in the final quarter of the novel, effectively setting up a much wider story arc. This was intended as the first installment of a longer series, and it does a fantastic job of wrapping up one storyline while opening a whole new realm of possible action and adventure. As Mark Bamford says when confronted with the idea of first contact, "Either this is a great big hoax, or else our entire world may be changing. Either way, it kind of gets your attention."
