Science Fiction : WOLF AND IRON <i> by Gordon R. Dickson (Tom Doherty Associates/Tor: $18.95; 468 pp.) </i>

Most science-fiction novels seem to begin with the end of the world. It is, perhaps, no wonder. The dilemmas we must face, as citizens of the planet in 1990, are simply too complex to write good stories about. The easiest way to cope (in fiction) is to wipe the slate clean.

For the writer who wishes to entertain us with the future, almost anything will do--a plague of mutant AIDS viruses, or war, or famine, or the sudden death of the oceans, or perhaps a simple collapse. Then, once the decks have been cleared, the story can begin.

Gordon R. Dickson--a veteran writer from the 1950s, when the future was more easily grasped--takes the simplest option in “Wolf and Iron.” To begin his novel, he chooses collapse.

In America, the late 20th Century has, quite suddenly, ceased to be sustainable. The cities have collapsed. Government has imploded. Gangs loot the countryside. Jeebee Walter escapes the shambles of his university town to trek westward through dangerous country in the direction of his older brother’s ranch in Montana.

En route, he liberates a wolf from captivity; slowly and delicately, the two establish a working rapport. He comes across a traveling caravan, and learns from its sagacious master some further lessons in coping with the new world; and he falls in love with the old man’s resilient daughter. They part. He reaches Montana.

Injuries force him to set up camp short of his brother’s territory. After the ambush of her caravan, the girl (in the only pulpy moment of the book) manages to reach him. They have a child. The wolf continues, more and more intimately, to behave like a wolf. Jeebee and the girl decide to stay where they are. The book ends.

It all sounds very much too simple, a Robinsonade that makes Crusoe’s experiences seem positively worldly, but “Wolf and Iron,” a tale sustained on a raft of emotion, shines in its clarity like a jewel. Perhaps it is because Dickson wears his heart so openly on his sleeve.

It is obvious he loves the cleansed and emptied America of Jeebee’s trek; he loves Jeebee himself, his sinewy alertness of mind, his singular attentiveness to the new world and how to make things work in it; and he loves the entirely realistic wolf whose behavior he has so meticulously envisioned. “Wolf and Iron” is what one might call a fascinated book.

After the labored pulpit-pounding of Dickson’s Childe Cycle, it returns us to the real thing.

THE QUIET POOLS by Michael P. Kube-McDowell (Ace Books: $17.95; 371 pp.)

“The Quiet Pools,” Michael P. Kube-McDowell’s first novel, is of genuinely strong interest, but its underlying premise is devastating to the self-esteem of the human race.

It is the 21st Century. Against fervent opposition, a private corporation is building spaceships to carry select populations to the stars. Christopher McCutcheon, who works for The Diaspora Project but who does not himself wish to embark, slowly analyzes his bruised self, his failed marriage group, his enigmatic father, and through a slightly over-complicated plot discovers something of the truth behind things. Some humans (he learns) have a genetic quirk that compels them into space, and those who remain behind are bound to the planet by what they lack.

There is a glad tale-telling energy about the book--just as there was about James Tiptree Jr.’s best stories--that carries one on, as though to joy; but just as in Tiptree’s “A Momentary Taste of Being,” the message of “The Quiet Pools” is ultimately determinist and bleak. We are walking spermatozoa, Kube-McDowell suggests; and, as we depart this world, it is likely we will leave our nest in ruins.

THE DIVIDE by Robert Charles Wilson (Foundation/Doubleday: $19.95, cloth; $8.95, paper)

Take a break with “The Divide,” a neat and simple dual-personality drama by Robert Charles Wilson that looks as though it is going to address some heavy issues, but ends in a fit of glamorizing plot.

A man whose intelligence has been artificially enhanced creates a secondary personality to cope with mundane matters. When he finds his own abilities beginning to decay, he must attempt to come to terms with the sharer he has created.

It is a familiar SF tale, which is no reason not to retell it, and Wilson is deft and nifty and quick off the mark. But his problem is just that: He stays nifty. In the process, he sloughs off any anguish inherent in the drama he has begun to develop, and for a climax tricks his tale up in tiresome twists like a fatally unambitious magician looking for a fast curtain.

Those final moments are too contorted and too dumb to expose in their entirety--but guess who gets his brains sorted out by a blow to the head? Right.

WALKER OF WORLDS by Tom De Haven (Foundation/Doubleday: $19.95, cloth; $8.95, paper)

In “Walker of Worlds,” the first book of a projected sequence, “Chronicles of the King’s Tramp,” Tom De Haven almost fox-trots us into his grip for good by the time we’re halfway through. By the end of the book, after we have managed to walk with the large cast into a world deeper than ours, it is as though we had gone through the pain barrier in a dance marathon.

Most magic-realist science-fantasy novels--like John Crowley’s “Little, Big” and Mark Helprin’s “A Winter’s Tale,” both of which are invoked in the blurb--show a reverent quiet at the point where our world meets its maker, and characters may pass into their true selves. It is exactly at this point in “Walker of Worlds” that all hell breaks loose.

Jack the Walker, and the eccentric human cast he has garnered, travel inwards to the world of King Sad Agel, and stumble into an immense affray with thousands of bats and mages and Epicenes and cronies. It is like a fantasy role-playing game: Every turn of the page is a turn of the plot.

Before the chaos subsides briefly--as a breather before Volume Two--we lose that sense of bated breath so central to Crowley and Helprin, the sense that our own world, which bears the stamp of the real world within, may allow us to partake of some great secret. So far--though brilliantly at points--De Haven offers nothing but gossip.

CASTLEVIEW by Gene Wolfe (Tom Doherty Associates/Tor: $18.95; 279 pp)

“Castleview,” the latest novel from the great Gene Wolfe, introduces at least 50 named characters, and some of them are shape-changers. As in almost any Wolfe novel, some single key will unlock the flickering mosaic of story, though it will not tell the meaning of what is to be found inside.

In this book , the key seems to be that there are too many characters to fit into the roles available for them. The main story takes 24 hours. Will E. Shields and family arrive in Castleview to live and work, but the town, long haunted by visions of a moving castle, now suffers a series of supernatural visitors from the world of King Arthur. They are looking for new avatars. It is like a recruiting drive, or a game of musical chairs.

That great stage-manager of impostors--Puss in Boots--makes an appearance. Farce ascends to a grave music. An Arthur is selected. A sacrifice is made. Like all of Wolfe’s work, “Castleview” is a game and an act of reverence--a fine dream of superb gallantry.