Read Science Fiction: The 101 Best Novels 1985-2010 Online
Authors: Damien Broderick,Paul di Filippo
Science Fiction: The 101 Best Novels 1985-2010 (10 page)
So here, by the same method, is Ringess’s escape from the Solid State Entity:
I was trembling with anticipation as I built up a new proof array. Yes, the simple Lavi could be embedded! I proved it could be embedded. I wiped sweat from my forehead, and I made a probability mapping. Instantly the million branches of the tree narrowed to one. So, it was a finite tree after all. I was saved!
Much sf claims to be focused on ideas, while really hewing to pulp action. Zindell’s book is truly about ideas, notably that great human conundrum revolving around whether free will exists or not.
As for the legacy of
Neverness
, like Attanasio’s
Radix
it remains a secret stream in the genre. But it seems unlikely, for instance, that Neal Stephenson could have been unaware of this book when he conjured up his science monks in
Anathem
. And possibly M. John Harrison nodded in Zindell’s direction with his baroque space opera
Light
(Entry 68).
Zindell would follow up this magnificent and self-sufficient book with a trilogy dubbed
A Requiem for Homo Sapiens
. These books certainly did not dilute his accomplishment with
Neverness
, but simply by virtue of coming later, they could not carry all the freight of unprecedented wonder and astonishment borne so capably by
Neverness
.
15
Rosemary Kirstein
(1989)
WE FIRST ENCOUNTER
the protagonist of this four-part opus, a woman named Rowan, and her quest across a seemingly magical world in the pages of
The Steerswoman
. A sequel followed fairly swiftly in the form of
The Outskirter’s Secret
. (Both of these books were bundled in an omnibus titled
The Steerswoman’s Road
.) Then came a long interval of silence on Kirstein’s part until the release of
The Lost Steersman
, followed at a relatively rapid clip by the fourth book,
The Language of Power
. The series does not terminate here, however, but Kirstein seems to have bogged down slightly, revealing lately that what she thought would constitute Book 5 instead morphed into Book 6, leaving the immediate follow-up volume unbegun. Nonetheless, her unfinished accomplishment here is still significant. As author and critic Jo Walton says, “ If you like science, and if you like watching someone work out mysteries, and if you like detailed weird alien worlds and human cultures, if really good prose appeals, and if you can stand reading a series written by someone brilliant who writes excruciatingly slowly but has no inconsistencies whatsoever between volumes written decades apart, you’re really in luck.”
Rowan is a member of a knowledge-seeking and information-disseminating guild whose itinerant members bind together an ostensibly pre-technological world. The Inner Lands where the steerswomen travel constitute a safe and civilized realm dotted with cities and trade routes, while the Outskirts where they never venture are harsher lands populated by odd beasts and nomadic tribesmen with strict codes of behavior. A final factor in the cultural equation is the presence of a handful of wizards, who remain generally aloof from daily affairs, while retaining immense powers that allow them to dictate policy when they so desire. For many generations this stable scenario has allowed mankind to flourish. But now things have gone awry.
The first sign of a breakdown in the system is an odd piece of jewelry that comes into Rowan’s hands. In the first book of the series, she determines that the jewelry was connected to the demise of one of the Guidestars, stable points of light in the night sky that serve to guide travelers. In the second book, Rowan and her new best friend Bel, a woman warrior from the Outskirts, reach the source of the “jewels” and discover a crashed Guidestar. The fact that this ostensibly “natural” object was actually manufactured opens the possibility that Rowan’s world is not all it seems. In fact, a master wizard named Slado seems to be at the heart of a vast conspiracy. In the third volume, on the hunt for Slado, Rowan encounters a new sentient race.
In the fourth installment, where much is revealed, Rowan and Bel are back in the Inner Lands in a seaside town named Donner. There, they begin to piece together the local events of forty years ago, when the Guidestar fell and Slado first rose to power. Questioning the townsfolk—answering a steerswoman’s questions is compulsory, under pain of a lifetime ban from sharing in the guild’s knowledge base—Rowan learns of a struggle for control between apprentice Slado and his master Kieran. Apparently Slado killed Kieran, assumed his powers, and began his ascent to world dominance. But where is Slado today, and what does he intend?
The arrival of an old friend, Willam, promises to help provide some answers. Several books prior, Willam was a teen with magical propensities whom Rowan managed to apprentice to a friendly wizard named Corvus. Now an adult, Willam has left Corvus behind to function as a free agent. Rowan enlists his help to plunder the secrets of the current wizard of Donner, a pompous fellow named Jannick. But Jannick’s lore is concealed in a house that has killed all previous intruders. Can Rowan, Willam and Bel penetrate Jannick’s defenses and emerge with clues to Slado’s plotting? Maybe, with aid of Jannick’s own dragons...
Rosemary Kirstein walks the tightrope between fantasy and science fiction in this series with precision and grace, producing a hybrid adventure that recalls both purely fantastical works such as Le Guin’s
Earthsea
series and purely science-fictional titles like Miller’s
A Canticle for Leibowitz
.
Right from the outset, Kirstein has been clever and scrupulous about planting clues which hint that not all is as it seems in her future. Although the books read on the surface as pure fantasy, they carefully leave themselves open to interpretation as post-apocalyptic sf. By the fourth volume, this secret is out in the open, and even the non-wizardly characters
themselves start to get the picture. New mysteries left unsolved by the book’s end, involving astronomical photographs, further deepen the sf nature of the tale.
What Kirstein is doing is portraying how humanity’s innate desire to unriddle the phenomenological universe will persist through all sorts of dark-ages setbacks. Rowan’s adherence to the tenets of her guild make her a kind of proto-scientist, and thus a perfect exemplar of the science fictional mindset. Additionally, the books take on some of the qualities of a mystery novel, as Rowan and crew try to reconstruct old crimes and puzzle out active conspiracies. Sf and the mystery genre have always been intimately linked, and Kirstein makes the most of their resonance.
But of course none of this would matter if the characters and their adventures were not compelling, and Kirstein satisfies in these areas as well. Rowan ages realistically during the course of her adventures (the books span six years of her life), and by the fourth volume she’s scarred and limping from her exploits. Bel is an excellent foil and contrast to Rowan, and Willam comes across as his own man as well. Kirstein’s compassion for even minor characters is evident on every page, and her prose is measured and alluring without being overworked.
Further entries in this already monumental series, much awaited, can only add to its unique luster.
16
Sheri S. Tepper
(1989)
IF THOMAS HARDY
had ever written an sf novel, he might have produced something very much like Sheri Tepper’s
Grass
. A thick, claustrophobic, landed-gentry melodrama full of strained politesse, thwarted sexuality, immemorial traditions, fatedness, dark passions, religious obsession, foreboding, doom, cultural misunderstandings, and hypocrisy. It’s a book about bizarre aliens in which humans are the strangest creatures of all, one over which the judiciously omniscient narrator looms like a god who could be called cruel, were She Herself not so splendidly Other as to defy human conventions. The novel bears affinities to the works of James Tiptree, Gene Wolfe, Norman Spinrad, Laurence Janifer, Jack Vance and M. John Harrison, but possesses an eerie ambiance and otherworldly
weltanschauung
all its own.
Let us consider, in the reverse order Tepper presents them, two planets. Earth, teeming with too many souls, is ruled by Sanctity, a religious government with total control on the homeworld, but lesser sway among the diaspora of colonized worlds. Sanctity is worried about plague. An unstoppable, unnamed disease has begun to spread, killing even the head of the church, the Hierarch. Lady Marjorie Westriding and her husband Rigo Yrarier are summoned by the authorities. They are informed that they are being dispatched as ambassadors to the only colony world that has shown no signs of the plague—a planet that bans scientific researchers. Their undercover mission: to discover a cure, if any. Off they go, with reluctant adolescent children Tony and Stella in tow, and a retinue of assistants and priests.
The world where they have been assigned is called Grass. Completely covered by a lush carpet of non-Terran grasses (invoked by the author with Whitmanesque poetic cadences), except for one rocky hundred-square-mile site that serves as a port town, the world is inhabited by seven haughty, elite families who live on their walled estancias spotted throughout the vast wilderness. Peons support them with their separate village lives. To help order and ameliorate the extremely long Grassian calendar year with its harsh protracted winter, the elite lead lives of mannered ritual, full of taboos and compulsions, disdaining anything
fragras
, or foreign.
Chief among these ceremonial pursuits is the Hunt, involving three native animals. First, the prey, the foxen, savage predators, each big as a dozen tigers. Then come the Hounds, canine-like creatures large as Earth horses. And finally, the horse analogues, or Hippae, scaled and horned and razor-crested mounts like good-sized dragon-dinos, whose human riders suffer an appalling mortality rate, sometimes even vanishing entirely during the chaotic Hunts. The Hounds and Hippae are not domesticated or kept by the humans, but merely appear at Hunt times, as if in symbiosis and obeying some kind of planetary cycle.
Added to this outré mélange are the Green Brothers, a Jesuitical sect of monks whose main task is an archaeological dig at the ruined city of the long-extinct Arbai, enigmatic humanoids whose ruins dot the galaxy. The Green Brothers also breed hybrid grasses and sport a cult of sky-worshipping tower climbers within their ranks. And why is it, exactly, that the Brothers can roam the prairie and never be attacked by the supposedly vicious foxen?
Once on Grass, Marjorie and her family find themselves the center of disdain, sabotage and entrapment. Rumors abound that the Moldies—humans who wish actually to spread the plague and engineer a cleansing apocalypse—might be present. With an outsider’s perspective, Marjorie begins to see that the Hippae might be the true rulers of Grass. But will the sentient monsters enjoy having their secrets revealed? And will they threaten her family first of all?
Tepper deftly spins a half-dozen plates simultaneously. She speculates on ET theologies in the manner of James Blish or Mary Doria Russell. She delves into ornate ecologies and life cycles in the manner of Philip José Farmer. She looks at inbreeding and clannish pride, recalling Avram Davidson (“The House the Blakeneys Built”) and David Bunch (
Moderan
). Romance, or lack thereof, fills the human dimensions. Marjorie and Rigo suffer a dead marriage, and infidelity looms with a Grassian native, Sylvan bon Damfels, who allures Marjorie and she him. Issues of colonialism and privilege, machismo and sexism come by turns to the fore.
Additionally,
Grass
merits one more distinction. It is generally acknowledged that Samuel Delany’s
Flight from Nevèrÿon
was the first work of fantastika to deal with AIDS, the relevant portion of Delany’s book appearing as early as 1984. But five years after that, Tepper’s treatment of the incurable disease rampant within the Sanctity—the shame it confers, the secrecy involved, the class barriers in play—marks a second respectable foray by the genre into dealing, at least on metaphorical terms, with the late twentieth century’s dominant epidemic.
Tepper continued exploring this complex cosmos in the notional Arbai Trilogy, whose formidable second and third entries were
Raising the Stones
and
Sideshow
. But these tangential cousins cannot duplicate or enhance the exotic, mind-blowing estrangements of Grass. The book glows like some rare Terence Malick film, aloof and mysterious, knowing yet quizzical.
