I recently finished George R. R. Martin’s novel “Tuf Voyaging.” This is a fix-up… i.e. a collection of short stories stuck together as a novel. And it’s a good read.
The stories revolve around one Haviland Tuf. From a certain point of view Tuf is a sci-fi cliche: he’s a trader, hauling merchandise from star system to star system on his own personal FTL starship. This could be Han Solo… but he ain’t. Tuf is 2.5 meters tall, chalk white, devoid of any hair and extremely fat. He is *not* a sex machine; indeed, unlike Captains Kirk and Solo, he dislikes physical contact with humans, including women. Numerous personality quirks point to Tuf having something akin to Aspergers Syndrome. And he has cats. What little affection he shows throughout the ten years covered in the book is lavished upon his cats.
As the story starts, he is seriously down on his luck. But soon he comes into possession of a new ship… a “seedship” produced a thousand years earlier by the “Federal Empire.” That was the peak of mankinds technological prowess and power; the seedships were built to fight a war against an alien race, and while humanity won the war, the end result was an interstellar collapse of civilization. The seedships were not just big warships, though… they were biological warfare platforms, capable of cloning viruses, pests or monsters to drop on enemy worlds to attack the populace, crops or ecosystems.
Throughout the book, Tuf uses the capabilities of his ship to fix various problems encountered on different worlds… improved crops for an overpopulated world, monsters to fight in arenas, predators to fight rampaging sea monsters. In other hands, these could be some pretty stock stories. But in Martin’s hands… Tuf is faced with some very difficult challenges, and meets them with very hard-nosed answers. Several reviews I’ve read online say that as the stories go on, they get a bit darker, with Tuf becoming especially brutal at the end. But really, the darkest moment in the whole thing takes place less than halfway through the first story, when one of the most heartbreaking scenes I’ve read in literature suddenly jumps up and forces Tuf to do something shocking. But while it’s horrible, it is clear that his response is the least bad of the options; and with his unemotional approach, he just goes ahead and does it. And this moment tells the reader what they can expect from Tuf in the future: he is eminently ethical, but he will drop a hammer on you if that is in fact the best solution. Several times Tuf nonchalantly breaks characters with his bare hands without a moments hesitation, because that’s what needs to happen.
In the end, characters recognize that Tuf is, more or less, a god, because he not only has the power of a god (he can completely terraform a world at whim, replacing the existing ecosystem with something completely different), he has the will to *use* that power. And as with the gods of old, your best approach is to *not* tick him off.
A few years ago there was a momentary flurry of interest when Martin mentioned the possibility of “Tuf Voyaging” becoming a TV series. I doubt it’ll ever happen. Just *try* to imagine a show headlined by a fat, bald brilliantly sarcastic Vulcan, with no romance or sex scenes; instead of pitched cinematic space battles,conflict is resolved by Tuf reasoning with the antagonists… or by simply threatening them with extinction. And while I’d love to see the show, I dread one scene: if you’ve read the book, you know what I mean when I say “Mushroom.” Holy crap, I can hear the wailing, of shock, sadness and rage, if that scene was shot and aired as written. That said… a warrior woman riding a T-Rex storming down the kilometer-wide hallway down the middle of the “Ark” seems like it’d make a hell of a shot.