Read Science Fiction: The 101 Best Novels 1985-2010 Online
Authors: Damien Broderick,Paul di Filippo
Science Fiction: The 101 Best Novels 1985-2010 (14 page)
The “intuitive communication” of the Aleutians, mistaken for telepathy, is a sharing of microscopic airborne packets of information gradually suffusing the world, augmented by grooming and gobbling “vermin”—the wanderers that summarize each alien’s current state of mind and history. These unisexed people give birth to offspring that reincarnate one of some three million genotypes that have persisted forever, but with constant updates that provide a sort of Lamarckian evolution. This bold postulate is milked for all it’s worth in a formidable display of science fictional creativity. Luckily, Jones is a masterful writer; as Kathleen Bartholomew notes, “Her prose is etched in silvered glass, with acid: it is hard and bright and sharp, and it smokes.” Here is an example, where Johnny is traumatically raped by Clavel, his alien poet stalker:
The naked chicken-skin baboon crouched over him. It took his hand and buried it to the wrist in a fold that opened along its groin. The chasm inside squirmed with life. Part of its wall swelled, burgeoning outward.... Something slid out of the fold: an everted bag of raw flesh, narrowing to a hooked end.
Science fiction as challenge—as exploration of otherness—has never been more confronting.
23
Paul McAuley
(1991)
[Four Hundred Billion Stars Trilogy]
THERE MUST
have been something special added to the water consumed at science fiction conventions circa 1980, a laggardly, relatively unexciting time in the field. Or perhaps, as in John Wyndham’s
The Midwich Cuckoos
, a generation earlier some visiting aliens tampered with a batch of human embryos. Or could a fallen meteor possibly have kickstarted an evolutionary leap among those who came in contact with it, as Philip Jose Farmer postulated for his
Wold Newton
stories? In any case, these fanciful explanations might not be strictly necessary to account for the burst of Hard Sf writers that came to fresh prominence around this time. We might just call it the zeitgeist, and let it go at that. Something similar would happen a generation later, with such figures as Alastair Reynolds and Peter Hamilton, indicating a mysterious cyclic and emergent process fruitfully and forever at work at the heart of the genre.
First to arise in this earlier renaissance wave was Charles Sheffield. He was quickly joined by John Stith, Roger MacBride Allen, Paul Cook, Colin Greenland and Paul McAuley. Their work took off from ancestors such as Larry Niven and Poul Anderson, bringing fresh possibilities to the subgenre of technologically rigorous yet mind-blowing sf.
In the current landscape, Sheffield is gone, deceased too young, and Cook, Allen, Greenland and Stith have either fallen silent or departed the high-profile mainstream of publishing. But happily, Paul McAuley remains at the top of his game, an acknowledged master. His first novel and its two sequels, especially the third book for which this entry is named, betokened his burgeoning talent to all who were paying attention at the time.
Four Hundred Billion Stars
possesses a Stapledonian title somewhat at odds with its Michael Bishop innards. In a galactic scenario where mankind, despite 600 years of interstellar activity, remains precariously enthroned at best, Dorthy Yoshida, astronomer and telepath, is sent to a benighted, artificially jiggered planet, P’thrsn, where a small group of fellow human researchers is intent on unriddling the ancient enigmas concealed by the seemingly savage sophonts. In a manner somewhat reminiscent of—yet decidedly less trippy than—Robert Silverberg’s
Downward to the Earth
, she makes immersive mental contact with the natives and notches up a victory toward the survivability of our species.
Of the Fall
was a minor, lateral extension of this future history. Set earlier in the galactic backstory, on the colony world Elysium, the book conflated elements of Heinlein’s
The Moon is a Harsh Mistress
and any of Poul Anderson’s Polesotechnic novels, such as
War of the Wing Men
. Hidden beneath excess plottage at its core, a perennial sf sentiment: “Knowledge is an abstraction won from the whirling chaos of the universe, neither constant nor concrete.”
Bouncing back from Elysium’s tedium—without wasting these backstory tidbits—and rejoining the sharply delineated and appealing Dorthy Yoshida in a new culminative adventure proved the winning stroke to signal McAuley’s expansion of his prowess.
Eternal Light
begins with an astrophysical action passage surely meant to recall the famous start of Doc Smith’s
Triplanetary
. Smith: “Two thousand million or so years ago two galaxies were colliding; or, rather, were passing through each other. A couple of hundreds of millions of years either way do not matter, since at least that much time was required for the interpassage.” McAuley: “It began when the shock wave of a nearby supernova tore apart the red supergiant sun of the Alea home system, forcing ten thousand family nations to abandon their world and search for new homes among the packed stars of the Galaxy’s core.” And although McAuley’s updating of the Smithian paradigm is notably short on ravening particle rays and giant vacuum tubes, it nonetheless hews to the spirit of wide-eyed space opera, albeit tinged with more ethical nuance and sophistication, thus setting a template in the field for future works.
Yoshida, still reeling from the half-understood revelations received on P’thrsn about the Alea, mankind’s enemy, is kidnapped by Duke Talbeck Barlstilkin, one of the Golden, or near-immortal human elite. They embark on a mission with many others of various persuasions on a big ship to a rogue star and accompanying planet hurtling toward Earth at a sizable fraction of lightspeed. There, Barlstilkin suspects more information on the Alea will be found, with Dorthy’s help. Travelling separately in a small ship is Suzy Falcon, ex-fighter pilot eager to wreak revenge on the aliens, and her companion, an artist named Robot. When all these factions are plunged through a wormhole to the very center of the Galaxy, where the ancient enemy of the Alea lurk, they must undergo a mental and physical odyssey of enlightenment.
McAuley’s foray into what we might think of nowadays as patented Gregory Benford territory (Entry 41) also benefits from its flavors of Frank Herbert’s Dune sequence, homages to Samuel Delany’s seminal Nova, and even a few sprinkles of Zelazny’s cavalier, black-souled immortals in the portrait of Barlstilkin. The dense sensory tangibility of the various venues (although surprisingly limited for most space operas) contribute to the impact of the book, as do the portraits of Suzy and Dorthy as pawns (specifically, female pawns) who manage to achieve high degrees of freedom and self-actuation. A touching and surprising emotional coda rounds out the book’s virtues.
The majestic long-term, wonder-inspiring perspectives of the book, squeezed down into the realtime adventures of the cast, are summarized by Professor Gunasekra when he says, “If more people understood the time scale on which the processes of the macrouniverse operate, we should not be a species blown up with hubris.”
Science fiction as a guide to an easygoing confident humility and sense of one’s true embedded place in the scheme of creation. That’s McAuley’s vision in a nutshell.
24
Michael Swanwick
(1991)
“
THE BUREAUCRAT
fell from the sky.”
Miranda, where he lands, is a world on the edge of cataclysm as precession swings its poles. The ice melts, drowning most of its land ecology under the centenary Jubilee Tides, threatening the colonist humans. Evolution has pre-adapted most of the world’s creatures to this cyclical calamity, so that birds and animals can morph into marine form. Perhaps the fabled native indigenes, the haunts, do so as well. As the geological crisis nears, troops from the orbitals gather the locals in readiness for evacuation. Crowd violence is poised on a hair trigger. Precious artifacts are removed, and what can’t be saved is smashed or burned. The mood is one of carnival, an extended
Día de los Muertos
, a frenzied Day of the Dead. Hunting for an item of forbidden technology in this forcibly and resentfully primitive culture, the bureaucrat harrows a kind of hell in a landscape of convulsive transformation.
Throughout the book, this nondescript bureaucrat, a representative of the orbital Division of Technology Transfer, remains nameless, but by no means juiceless and anonymous. Attended by his nano-maker briefcase-cum-AI, he takes on shifting roles as he crosses the world Miranda in the Prospero system. Is he himself Shakespeare’s magician Prospero, from
The Tempest,
or is that the (perhaps phony) magician Gregorian, whom he seeks? The briefcase might as well be named Ariel; an information system is called Trinculo, a jester from that play. Maybe Gregorian is, rather, Caliban, roaring out his desire to rape the planet Miranda. Or is the bureaucrat a suffering, postmodern and ambiguous Jesus—taught Tantric sex by a superb, tattooed Magdalene, Undine—dragging his crucifix through 14 Stations of the Cross told in the novel’s 14 tidal chapters, to his final transformation? Or perhaps a potential Judas—or indeed Satan banished and fallen from heaven—ready to betray his own kind? Gregorian, meanwhile, was born of a virgin surrogate mother, fathered by a man from the celestial Puzzle Palace… another contorted hint.
Swanwick is himself a magician of words and images, setting traps and betraying our expectations. His first story was the accomplished “Ginungagap,” when he was 30; his second novel
Vacuum Flowers
mixed space opera with cyberpunk, and later he won applause for
The Iron Dragon’s Daughter
and
Jack Faust,
all splendid inventions. Here he brews a hallucinogenic recipe, intensely vivid, baffling, but intoxicating. In
Stations of the Tide
, which won 1992’s Nebula and Locus awards for best novel, nothing holds still for long. People readily move their point of awareness into skeletal surrogate bodies, and can fracture their minds into agents that impersonate them, act on their behalf, are absorbed back and extinguished. When an agent of the blockaded colony mind Earth is met, it is something out of Milton and Swift, an authentically monstrous manifestation in virtual reality:
The encounter space was enormously out of scale, a duplicate of those sheds where airships were built, structures so large that water vapor periodically formed clouds near the top and filled the interior with rain. It was taken up by a single naked giant.
Earth.
She crouched on all fours, more animal than human, huge, brutish, and filled with power.... Her limbs were shackled and chained, crude visualizations of the more subtle restraints and safeguards that kept her forever on the fringes of the system.
This vast, sweat-stinking, musky monster is a figure familiar from psychoanalysis: the archaic Mother, a sort of feral female phallic force, more mythic than misogynistic in Swanwick’s making. And like that clammy image from post-Freudian analysis, complete with vagina dentata, it invites the bureaucrat into its mouth. In the overwhelming presence of an Earth utterly overborne by technology out of control, he asks the agent:
“What do you want from us?”
In that same lifeless tone she replied, “What does any mother want from her daughters? I want to help you. I want to give you advice. I want to reshape you into my own image. I want to lead your lives, eat your flesh, grind your corpses, and gnaw the bones.”
