Genre Character of the Week:Colonel Mack Tavernor

Over the last few days I’ve been reading the 1969 novel The Palace of Eternity by Bob Shaw, a science fiction novel taking place on the planet Mnemosyne (an artist’s colony) and taking place during a war with a strange alien race called the Syccans. Our main character (and our genre character of the week) is Colonel Mack Tavernor.

Tavernor is introduced to the reader as a repair man living in a colony of artists, musicians, and poets. He is 49 years old, and keeps many of the planets indigenous creatures in his home as pets. Throughout the novel we learn of his childhood (he was a lone survivor of a planet-wide Syccan attack at age eight) and his military career, as well as the events leading to his current situation.

The novel has a lot of obvious parallels with later SF books, namely Ender’s Game, and Falling Free (from my point of view), and Tavernor is definitely one of my personal favourite kind of genre characters; the working-Joe just trying to mind his own business and live a quiet life who gets swept up in something huge.

I don’t want to go into too many spoilers of the novel, but trust me, Mack’s journey is a pretty major one, and it had me intrigued, excited and honestly shocked at various points throughout. Although the book may require you to make a trip to your local used-book store, it is definitely worth the trip.

Genre Character of the week: Leo Graf

One kind of character I don’t see enough of in genre fiction is the problem solver. There are a lot of leaders and fighters out there, but not so many guys who are just working to get the job done. I guess the most famous one is Montgomery Scott from Star Trek, as he tended to be the guy focused on getting the ship to go, but there aren’t a lot of others like him out there, especially as main characters; which bring me to this week’s genre character, Leo Graf.

The main character of the novel Falling Free, by Lois McMaster-Bujold, is a welder. He’s been hired to go out to a remote space station and train a bunch of people of the techniques of welding in zero gravity, and upon arrival finds the students are actually a bunch of genetically modified humans called quaddies (they’ve got two sets of arms and no legs), who in addition to being his students are also all under the age of twenty.

Leo gets himself busy training these kids and even though he’s incredibly focused on getting the job done, he can’t help but notice some nasty trends going on – like for starters, these kids are genetic property of a company (considered "post-fetal experimental tissue cultures" for legal reasons) and therefore don’t actually have any rights, which makes them pretty disposable if anything bad were to happen.

Inevitably something does, and then Leo Graf makes a desicion, basically he does what needs to be done and he becomes one of my favourite characters in Science Fiction. If you've never read Falling Free, I strongly recommend it.