Review of George R.R. Martin's "Tuf Voyaging"

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Baen Books

Tuf Voyaging is a collection of short stories, telling the adventures of Haviland Tuf, who we first meet as a down-on-his-luck interstellar freetrader. He acquires a derelict ship – a warship of old Imperial Earth, the last functioning seedship of the ‘Ecological Engineering Corps.’ With this vast biotechnology, he can save, or destroy, whole worlds.

Yet his needs are few and his ambitions humble. He enjoys traveling to other worlds and solving their problems, even if the inhabitants would sometimes rather he didn’t. Famine, sea-monsters, arena combat, religious fanatics; all present challenges to our quiet hero.

And Tuf is not an ordinary hero. He is a thinker, a negotiator; he never loses his temper. He is loquacious beyond all reasoning. He loses with obvious ill-taste, and is not above using loopholes to his own benefit. At times he seems a prophet, determined to save people from themselves. Though he himself is hard to identify with, the situations he is thrust into are easily grasped.

These stories are all entertaining, though as is usually the case with a collection, some are better than others. Most originally appeared in Analog magazine, though at least one has been lengthened and changed substantially. But since they all are Tuf stories, and appear chronologically, the book feels more like a novel than a collection.

The science holds up well; though the stories were written a number of years ago, nothing seems outdated. Martin did a good job of anticipating the course our technology has taken. One key area is deliberately ignored, however. The seedship holds hundreds of thousands of cell samples from untold numbers of worlds. Tuf can whip out anything from a cat to a tyrannosaur, a virus to an island-sized kraken. Only rarely does he actually perform genetic manipulation – most solutions are already in his data banks. But he can, and occasionally does create lifeforms from scratch.

But there is not a single mention of human genetics. There are cyborgs, and telepathic cats, and minor differences in humans born on various planets, but not once does Martin touch on the tricky subject of human genetic engineering. The stories are structured so that you don’t realize the lack very much, particularly in the last story, which wraps up the fate of forty billion people in seven pages, and gives the reader much to think about. But you feel curiously unfulfilled afterwards.

‑‑ Scott Micheel