Science Fiction: The 101 Best Novels 1985-2010 (16 page)
Read Science Fiction: The 101 Best Novels 1985-2010 Online
Authors: Damien Broderick,Paul di Filippo
There was a feeling in this book that Calder had indeed exhausted these particular obsessions of his in this particular manner. Where he ventured from here proved that his talent could open just about any rococo door he chose.
27
Steven Gould
(1992)
SF AUTHOR
Rudy Rucker (Entry 91), who does a lot of critical thinking about the nature of the genre, has given us a very useful specialized literary term with the introduction of “power chord” to our vocabulary. By this musical analogy, Rucker is referring to the massive, Wagnerian tropes that are at the center of our field, signature concepts so freighted with accreted meaning—starflight, aliens, time travel—that merely to strum them is to invoke something majestic and powerful. But of course, the writer gets no subsequent free ride for merely plunking out such heavy-metal notes, but must ably follow up the initial strumming with a maestro’s flair.
Teleportation is one such leitmotif, whether achieved mechanically or organically. As a special ability inherent in the mutant human body, the trope is especially impactful, conferring on the possessor great power and great responsibility, to use the famous Stan Lee linkage, and appealing to mythic daydreams of most readers. The history of the genre is rich with stimulating instances (although, curiously enough, not as many stories as are devoted to telepathy and other mental quirks), most notably Alfred Bester’s
The Stars My Destination
, a masterpiece which has probably deterred more over-awed writers than it has encouraged.
But Steven Gould proved ready for the challenge of beating Bester at his own game, and in his debut novel no less. Although Gould limited himself to depicting a lone teleporter, and not a whole society of them, he nevertheless codified this wild talent in such a masterful, concrete, vivid, exciting fashion as to lay down the gold standard for any future writers looking to harp upon this particular power chord.
Gould’s achievement represents the brilliant intertwining of two strands of story: the strictly personal, mimetic, “human-interest” plot, and the rigorously speculative yet fabulist development of the quasi-magical power of “jumping.” This fusion harkens to the ideal definition of a work of science fiction, where naturalistic fidelity and speculative ideation go hand in hand. In reality, neither strand can be separated from the other, without destroying the book, but it helps the discussion to consider them separately in this somewhat artificial distinction.
First, the human dynamic. First-person narrator Davy Rice is seventeen years old at the start of the book, and his voice is pitch-perfect (although occasionally a little of the inter-teen dialogue is creaky). Davy exhibits the quintessential adolescent mix of bravado and fear, overconfidence and trepidation, optimism and nihilism, insight and blindness, knowledge and ignorance that would be predicated, given his unusual upbringing. Knocked down yet eager to battle on, to survive and flourish, he follows a unique course of action that is utterly believable given his deftly sketched personality and history. Likewise, Davy’s father and mother emerge as fully rounded human beings, not mere game pieces. Millie, Davy’s girlfriend, stands forth as similarly multi-dimensional, especially in her reactions to learning Davy’s secret. Gould’s anatomization of how society works shows deep, mature understanding as well. Given all this, if one could, impossibly, remove the “jumping” from the book, a coherent and well-done novel would remain.
But to add in the teleportation is to raise the story to its science-fictional acme. Subject to clinically defined abuse from his father, Davy learns under this stress that he can teleport. He reacts with caution and disbelief at first. (Taken into account by Davy is the meta-knowledge about such things derived from real literary works such as Stephen King’s
Firestarter
, and, yes, the Bester book, a factor often neglected in sf and fantasy novels.) But once he determines the reality of his situation, he proceeds in a manner, not without mistakes, that fulfills both the daydreams and nightmares of the reader. Without once succumbing to easy and indulgent “Mary Sue” self-identification, Gould nonetheless inhabits Davy’s voyage of discovery intimately, making the miraculous process so real and logical, consorting so well with a physics paradigm, that the reader is convinced that such a wild talent could only be investigated and exploited in the very fashion Gould outlines.
Gould’s prose—Davy’s voice—is sharp and complex and flavorful, without being mannered or idiosyncratic or dense. The narrative has that legendary Heinlein verisimilitude and affability so often imitated but seldom duplicated. The quick cuts between physical locales that are the very hallmark of teleportation are handled brilliantly, so that the reader feels simultaneously whipsawed yet grounded.
When the book moves into thriller territory—Davy conceives revenge upon the Islamic terrorists who killed his mother, and thus runs afoul of the USA’s National Security Agency as well—some of the quotidian domesticity of the novel is lost. But the thriller mechanics—a little prescient of the
X-Men
movie franchise—are ably manipulated, and Davy’s actions up the ante in a way that had to happen, unless Gould had improbably chosen to detour into some kind of minimalist
Dying Inside
cul-de-sac.
The sequel,
Reflex
, very competently and entertainingly extends Davy’s and Millie’s story, which, alas, is not the case with the reboot volume,
Jumper: Griffin’s Story
, composed as a movie tie-in. But the initial thrills of Davy’s wild talent epiphany, and the blossoming out of his powers, are fully delivered in the first superior volume, a landmark of its kind.
28
Maureen McHugh
(1992)
ONE WONDERS
precisely how Maureen McHugh feels about her accomplished first novel, a hard-hitting, elegant hybrid of mimetic and speculative modes, some twenty years after its publication, given that the broad premise of its somewhat dystopian future (dystopian, that is, from the American perspective) seems closer to fulfillment than ever. Is she proud of her uncanny prophetic vision, or dismayed at her Cassandra-like status? After all, her book’s monitory message stayed under the culture’s radar for two decades. Whatever the author’s extra-literary sentiments, she can continue to be pleased with the fine literary quality of this striking debut.
Fictional forecasts of what was seen as America’s imminent, nasty and assuredly well-deserved doom probably first materialized about twenty-four hours after the founding of the nation. Popular during the late Sixties (see Norman Spinrad’s 1970 story “The Lost Continent”), such deliciously self-flagellating depictions of decline remain in vogue today, as witness the masterful novel
Julian Comstock
by Robert Charles Wilson. McHugh’s book falls midway along the timeline between Spinrad and Wilson, and identifies a threat to the USA little acknowledged at the time of the novel’s composition.
Our main protagonist, China Mountain Zhang (Zhang Zhong Shan), twenty-six-years old at novel’s outset, is a gay man, half Chinese, half Latino, living in New York City in the tail end of the twenty-first century and laboring as a construction worker. Zhang’s decrepit, stunted USA has undergone a “Second Depression” and socialist revolution, the Cleansing Winds period, and is entirely in thrall to the Chinese hegemony. Zhang must hide both his sexuality and mulatto nature to get ahead in conformance with Chinese prejudices. But in the opening section of the novel (all portions embrace vivid first-person narration), all his dissembling comes to naught, as a curious non-sexual affair with his boss’s daughter blows up in his face, and he finds himself unemployed.
We next inhabit the viewpoint of Angel, a female kite rider in the futuristic sport favored by Zhang as spectator, involving aerial competitions with advanced hang-glider-type technology where the riders cybernetically jack into their crafts. Returning to Zhang’s life, we find him desperately taking a job at a research station at Baffin Island near the Arctic Circle, hoping that the “hazardous duty” perks involving an educational stipend will allow him to advance. The next contrasting vignette involves Martine, a middle-aged woman settler on Mars.
Zhang returns, a student at Nanjing University, maturing and suffering at the intersection of illicit love and society’s imperatives. Alexi, Martine’s husband back on Mars, offers our next sidebar, before we encounter Zhang in post-grad mode, sophisticating his native skills. Catching up, four years on, with his old New York City boss’s daughter, San-xiang, provides insights into the problems of the ruling class. Finally, Zhang returns to New York, dallies for a time with old lover Peter, begins teaching, and, at the book’s broad-ended conclusion, finds his future wide-open and beckoning, in contrast to the stymied dead-end vision of his youth. A true journey’s end, but also merely the first step on a longer path.
McHugh’s novel walks a beautiful tightrope between cyberpunk and humanist modes, leaning ultimately more toward the latter side. True, her techno-socio-political speculations and gritty/gleaming world-building are top notch, in the Sterling-Gibson manner. This contrasting portrait of China with the USA’s condition is typical.
In New York [thinks Zhang] I ride a subway system built sometime in the 1900’s, here buses segment and flow off in different directions. There’s a city above the city, a lacework super-structure that supports thousands of four-tower living units and work complexes like the University complex we live in… and there’s food here I’ve never seen or heard of, from Australia and South America and Africa, at outrageous prices. Everyone here seems rich.
But such touches take a back seat to character development, the bildungsroman nature of the tale. The reader’s primary interest always resides in Zhang’s muddled course through life’s minefields, as he acquires more and more tools with which to carve out a life for himself, coming to recognize his flaws, remedying what he can and accepting the rest. It’s a primal journey that provides strong hooks into the reader’s affections and sympathies.
With its multiple viewpoints and slice-of-life concerns, McHugh’s novel harks to an infrequently sampled but distantly admired landmark of an earlier generation, Thomas Disch’s urban and urbane
334
. Echoes of fragments of Samuel Delany’s “We, in Some Strange Power’s Employ, Move on a Rigorous Line” and “Time Considered as a Helix of Semi-Precious Stones” also intrude their presence. Stripped of any surrealism or epistemological weirdness, McHugh also somehow owes a debt to Philip K. Dick and his focus on the “little man.” This is one of those rare sf novels where neither war nor espionage, neither mortality nor crime, neither paradigm shifts nor transcendence serve as plot engines. Instead, in accordance with Ursula K. Le Guin’s famous essay, “Science Fiction and Mrs. Brown,” we inhabit deeply an average soul, and in so doing share what Zhang characterizes as an “inner light” resident in us all.
29
Kim Stanley Robinson
(1992)
