Science Fiction: The 101 Best Novels 1985-2010 (11 page)
Read Science Fiction: The 101 Best Novels 1985-2010 Online
Authors: Damien Broderick,Paul di Filippo
17
Iain M. Banks
(1990)
IAIN M. BANKS
, without the middle initial, made his reputation with several freaky postmodern novels of highwire psychopathology. He erupted into British letters in the mid-1980s with such brio that Fay Weldon famously dubbed him “the great white hope of British Literature.” She had in mind
The Wasp Factory
(1984), with its grisly brilliance, and a handful of other technically adventurous mainstream titles. A closet sf fan at the time, Banks was enabled by those successes to publish the bounteous space opera
Consider Phlebas
(1987), an exuberant amalgam of every big screen science fiction invention since (and including) Larry Niven’s
Ringworld
, a gold bangle the size of Earth’s orbit.
With its T. S. Eliot title, its gaudy tale of interstellar conflict between the Culture and the brutal Idiran empire,
Consider Phlebus
introduced a fully stocked universe as ample as anything in sf’s future histories by Heinlein, Poul Anderson, Niven, Asimov. Cunningly, Banks contrived to present the Culture as the apparent imperialist enemy, before his elaborate, careful unfolding of the tale engages our true sympathies.
Happily, Banks has returned repeatedly to this delightfully detailed universe of his post-scarcity galaxy-faring Culture, most of its human-like population dwelling on gigantic, AI-controlled starships or Orbitals, luxurious habitats smaller than a Ringworld and spinning on orbit around strange suns, peaceful but armed to the teeth. Many of the novels involve interstellar spies and manipulators known as Special Circumstances, and their harrowing moral quandaries.
In
The Player of Games
(1988), for example, world-weary Jernau Gurgeh is apparently an amateur Culture expert in strategy and tactics, chockablock with specialized genofixed glands, nurtured and perhaps owned by whimsical and snide AI machines. Gurgeh is snookered into a hustle on a planetary scale. Duped agent of his rich anarchist society, he climbs the ranks of a barbarous game-structured society, learning something of empathy and involvement. His tale enveloped the story of a single intellectual combatant in the endless conflict between Banks’s machine-loving hedonistic Culture (tolerant, benevolent, resolute) and its foes: brutality, credulous faith, political hierarchy, war.
Perhaps Banks’s finest sf novel is the early
Use of Weapons
, a drastically complex biography of a soldier, Cheradenine Zakalwe, recruited from a world not unlike Czarist Russia and for centuries sent into the field again and again, supported with only the most ironic ambiguity by subtle Culture intelligences human and artificial. (He appears again, unnamed and to considerable ironic effect, at the very end of Banks’s recent
Surface Detail
[2010]). Frozen to death, he can be healed, if reached in time. Even if he’s decapitated, he can be revived. A poisoned worm of lost memory remains hidden from sight, however, baffling the labyrinthine plans of even the Culture’s most beguiling minds. Banks somehow works a narrative miracle, a triumph of generic engineering, fusing thriller and moral parable, reeking detail and clinical distance, fanciful invention and heartfelt pain.
The Culture Special Circumstances agent is named, with typical Banksian abandon, Rasd-Codurersa Diziet Embless Sma da’ Marenhide, more usually just Diziet Sma,
attended by her lethal, sardonic drone AI companion Fohristi-whirl Skaffen-Amtiskaw Handrahen Dran Easpyou, or Skaffen-Amtiskaw. Drones are unsentimental:
“We’ve a nebula fleet assembling; a core of one Limited System Vehicle and three General Contact Units stationed around the cluster itself, plus eighty or so GCUs keeping their tracks within a month’s rush-in distance. There ought to be four or five GSVs within a two-to-three months dash for the next year or so. But that’s very, very much a last resort.”
“Megadeath figures looking a bit equivocal are they?” Sma sounded bitter.
“If you want to put it that way,” Skaffen-Amtiskaw said.
The novel winds on itself like a double spiral, an architecture suggested by his Scottish colleague and friend, the equally talented Ken MacLeod (see Entry 53). The main story carries us forward; its parallel runs backward, in leaps of recovered traumatic memory. In the end, all certitudes are broken. Anything may be used as a weapon, however personal, ugly, ruinous to the wielder. The novel is a coiled maze; many ways lead in, as many out, all of them refuting determinacy even as they insist upon it.
And for all that, the book is tremendous
fun
, and is often credited with the revival of intelligent space opera. Colossal artifacts with facetious names like the Very Little Gravitas Indeed roar across the galaxy, while enhanced humans and snide machines frolic within their protective fields. The happiest moment, exactly catching Banks’s way of taking sf’s geegaws and doing rude things with them, is this:
“To the Culture,” he said, raising his glass to the alien. It matched his gesture. “To its total lack of respect for all things majestic.”
At the heart of sf as an enterprise—if it has one, and to the extent that it surmounts national boundaries—ones often sees the hungry wish
not to die,
not to be mortal and evanescent, not to be cast into nothingness
just when the story is getting interesting.
Thus, sf’s interest in time-dilating starships, in cryonic suspension into the future, in characters who upload their minds into secure computer substrates, who hybridize themselves by a dozen paths into persistence. Does anyone
really
want to live in the inhospitable ruin of Mars, let alone the planets of distant stars, reachable only at immense cost and probably uninhabitable on arrival? Yes, a few do, like Arctic and Antarctic explorers; it would be a rewarding exploit, in its way (see Robinson’s Mars trilogy, Entry 29). But maybe, after all, it is a metaphor like the anarcho-socialistic Banksian Culture. “Can I get there by candle-light? Yes, and back again!”
Meanwhile, we have the Culture and its delights, complexities, rich imaginary adventures, and we’re the better for their sometimes confronting thought experiments and gratifying playfulness.
18
Greg Bear
(1990)
A PRODIGY
, Greg Bear published his first sf story at 16, in 1967, and his first novels by 1979, but his major impact on the genre awaited his maturity in the mid-1980s (
Blood Music
;
the ambitious diptych about the infinite construct, the Way,
Eon
and
Eternity
;
the world-destroying attack by aliens,
The Forge of God
and its vengeful sequel). In later years he explored a range of sf and near-sf forms, from
Star Trek
and
Star Wars
vehicles, to a pre-
Foundation
novel set in Asimov’s commodious universe, hi-tech FBI and horror tales, a far future novel that echoes William Hope Hodgson and Arthur C. Clarke (an early Bear influence),
City at the End of Time
. Like John Varley, he has explored projects in Hollywood. Of them all, perhaps
Queen of Angels
and its sequel
Slant
(1997) are his most satisfying classical sf works.
Jacques Lacan (patriarch of French psychoanalytic feminism) rewrote Freud as the geographer of lack. “When, in love, I solicit a look, what is profoundly unsatisfying and always missing is that—
You never look at me from the place from which I see you.
” Sf’s canon is drenched with wish-fulfillments answering exactly Lacan’s poignant absence: mind readers, shape-shifters, paranormal
gestalt
superhumans built up—organ by organ, as it were—out of maimed, bitterly lonely individuals. Bear’s melodramatic
Blood Music
attempted a 1980s’ version: Vergil Ulam, a self-centered, heedless biotech cowboy, brews the world’s first intelligent microbes and lets them loose in his own bloodstream. This is an early imagining of nanotechnology, viruses or perhaps machines built on a molecular scale. Soon the world’s population is melting down, each mind and soul absorbed into its own endless fecund angelic orders of smart tissue. Lacan’s lovers are lost in endless narcissism, then set free into microbial quantum heaven:
With her last strength she came to him and they lay in each other’s arms, drenched in sweat.... With each pulse of blood, a kind of sound welled up within him as if an orchestra were performing thousands strong…. Edward and Gail grew together on the bed, substance passing through clothes, skin joining where they embraced and lips where they touched.
Bear’s ornate
policier
of the 21st century,
Queen of Angels
, evades such explicit transcendence. It uses nanotechnology, a science only now beginning to shift from fantasy into reality, to enter the fragmented neural architecture of a political dissident. That voyage is paralleled with the quest for true selfhood in an artificial intelligence—something it attains only by doubling itself into a sort of Lacanian self-reflexivity. More than 20 years after its first publication the novel remains challenging, audacious, nothing if not ambitious, attempting to portray an American world of 2047 that is real in every fiber of the text, as significantly different from our own time as ours is from the Elizabethan. In a somewhat unlikely millenarianism, a great change is anticipated as the world approaches the “binary millennium” of 2048: in binary notation, the jump from the year 11111111111 to 100000000000.
The neuro-therapied rich live in combs, vast hi-tech termitaries. Between these arcologies, in the Shade, dwell the untherapied. Society is rich; nano machines can literally build gourmet food from garbage, construct full-scale robot devices (arbeiters), even transform human bodies. And the human mind/brain itself is finally giving up its secrets. An AI probe investigates the planets of Alpha Centauri B, beaming back data and opinions for dispersion through LitBid interactive media programs available to everyone, a sort of souped-up YouTube-meets-Facebook. Crimes are solved with ease by highbrow pds—public defenders.
In this endlessly inventive utopia Emanuel Goldsmith is the world’s most famous black poet and ideologist of revolt (and surely we are meant to think of
Nineteen Eighty
-
Four’s
Emmanuel
Goldstein, Orwell’s theorist of resistance to Big Brother and author of
The Theory and Practice of Oligarchical Collectivism
).
Goldsmith runs amok, murders eight of his friends, and vanishes. Transformed pd Mary Choy must track her suspect, but more importantly she needs to understand the motivation of his crime. The immensely wealthy parent of one of the victims, capturing Goldsmith, seeks to use prohibited psychological techniques that permit an observer to enter another human’s Country of Mind. In Bear’s Jungian mythos, this is the substrate of mental agents, talents and sub-personalities that comprise each self. In an eerie parallel, the AI four light years away struggles to become the first non-human “self,” to declare itself “I”.
Bear’s narrative never remains stationary, shifting voice and point of view, adapting techniques from modernist John Dos Passos first borrowed for sf half a generation earlier by John Brunner in
Stand on Zanzibar
(1969). The reader does not slip gracefully through this story; it can be an effort in places, but with an enormously satisfying payoff.
Queen of Angels
, like its author, is genuinely prodigious, and Bear’s future assembles itself like a nano machine from a multitude of brilliant details, built with a disturbing conviction.
