★★★☆☆ "What if...", or "If this goes on..."

Ogres

Adrian Tchaikovsky

Theodore Sturgeon used to say that there are two types of science fiction stories, "What if...", and "If this goes on...". The question you ask yourself on beginning Ogres is "Which of the two is this?" Now, of course when someone says, "There are two types of X..." your mind (or mine, at least) immediately goes to "Are these two things mutually exclusive and exhaustive? Could there be mixtures? Could there be Xs that are neither of the two?" Those were the questions that posed themselves when I began reading Ogres.

Let me begin by saying that Adrian Tchaikovsky gets a lot right in this novella. Tchaikovsky is one of the best of writers writing hard science fiction these days. Most science fiction is just fantasy+technobabble. Science Fiction authors just make up whatever they want to drive their plots, then fill in with scientific-sounding nonsense where, in a fantasy story, the magical incantations would go. You have to respect the old-school author who doesn't take the easy way out, but makes the effort to tell a scientifically plausible story. Tchaikovsky does that. (I had a few quibbles with the science of Ogres, but they were so minor compared to the nonsense of most science fiction as not to be worth detailing.)

What's more, it's a good story. It's one of those stories where it becomes obvious early on that there are two ways this could end (win or lose), and the author's job is to surprise you with a third ending. Ogres sort of does that, but not quite. Still, the ending is good enough.

There is one big problem with Ogres, though. It fails to surprise. This is mainly because of a technical choice Tchaikovsky made. He foreshadows far too heavily. Every major plot twist is clearly telegraphed in advance. I never once thought, "WHOA! didn't see that coming..." No, it was "It's gonna be X...", and it always turned out to be X.

Briefly, the two big plot questions were the ones I hinted at (1) Is it "What if..." or "If this goes on..." and (2) What twist are we going to use to avoid the two obvious endings? (1) The story is designed to look like a "What if..." when you start -- the first major twist is that it's actually mostly "If this goes on..." (2) The third way ending twist is Torquell's betrayal by Minith. It is too obvious that Minith is Torquell's Svengali for this to be a surprise. If you've been asking yourself from page 1 whose voice the story is written in, Minith is the obvious answer.

So, Ogres is a good story, spoiled.

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