Science Fiction: The 101 Best Novels 1985-2010 (17 page)

This forceful demand for unhindered access to a full complement of writerly tools is no mere crochet on Robinson’s part, but a radical stance that would allow him to craft a big bold story on the widest possible canvas, a work utterly new and contemporary that paradoxically employed some of sf’s oldest, almost Gernsbackian methodologies.

The
Mars
trilogy-plus-one is the late twentieth century’s equivalent of
War and Peace
by Leo Tolstoy, immense (more than 2600 pages), full of solid research deployed to illuminate historical forces and the specialness of a chosen time and place, made vivid by supportive storylines employing a large troupe of actors. In Robinson’s case, of course, his history hasn’t yet happened, so facts had to be supplemented with informed speculation, and he could not utilize actual personages. Nonetheless, his Mars sequence has about it the tactility and complex realism of history, and could almost serve as a blueprint for some NASA return to space (although its emphasis on partnering with the Russians and the Japanese might have to be updated with references to Chinese and Hindu partners). More crucially, these chronicles of the future are what cultural theorist Fredric Jameson, Robinson’s postmodern Marxist mentor, would call
dialectical history
—not a typical sf celebration of raw technology, but a contestatory, painful journey toward a plausible utopia.

Red Mars
opens in the year 2026 and finds its focus with John Boone, the first man to step on that alien world, soon murdered, and his close companions,. the “First Hundred” settlers. Ensconced on a planet hostile to life, coping with harsh conditions and already fracturing into rival parties, they split into those who wish to terraform the planet (the Greens, led by Sax Russell), those who wish to leave it as pristine as possible (the Reds, led by Ann Clayborne), and Areophanists who hope for an entirely new way of Martian life.

A revolution in 2061 undoes many of their programs, bringing down the great skyhook or areosynchronous cable 37,000 kilometers long, 10 meters across, untethered from its asteroid anchor so that it lashes down around the equator of the world:

The cable was now exploding on impact... and sending sheets of molten ejecta into the sky, lava-esque fireworks that arced up into their dawn twilight, and were dim and black by the time they fell back to the surface.... The second time around the speed of the fall would accelerate to 21,000 kilometers an hour, he said, almost six kilometers a second; so that for anyone within sight of it—a dangerous place to be, deadly if you were not up on a prominence and many kilometers away—it would look like a kind of meteor strike, and cross from horizon to horizon in less than a second. Sonic booms to follow.... Clips shot from the night side surface were spectacular; they showed a blazing curved line, cutting down like the edge of a white scythe that was trying to chop the planet in two.

Robinson does not fail to turn an eye toward the unstable situation back on Earth, ruled by corrupt, corporate transnationals, which mostly intend to strip Mars of its resources. But progress proves inevitable.

Green Mars
chronicles the transitional period where the fourth planet is first able to host unprotected plant life. A soletta, a huge delicate cone of mirrors 10,000 kilometers across, hangs between Mars and Sun, focusing extra sunlight for heat and power. Infalling ice asteroids fill the basins with renewed oceans and rivers that support a new biosphere, thickening the atmosphere. Interference from Earth continues, until the home world’s own problems overwhelm the old hegemony. Drastic life extension technologies devised on Mars allow the early settlers to remain youthful for many decades, personally embodying their ideological and political concerns into a rapidly changing future for the once-red planet.

After a second revolution, and in preparation for a third,
Blue Mars
spans a century and more. Mars is raised to solar system ascendency, opening up first the solar system and then the stars for humankind. As with the long historic sagas of James Michener, a familial line of blood and genes unites the eras—but now each generation extends across hundreds of years, creating not just new habitable worlds but a new kind of society deserving (in Robinson’s view) of this opportunity.

A pendant book,
The Martians
, contains a whopping twenty-eight laterally illuminating extensions of the saga, some counterfactual to the trilogy, ranging across a wide spectrum, from a “reprinting” of the Martian Constitution followed by scholarly commentary, to abstracts of scientific papers; poetry; myths; and in the ultimate selection, “Purple Mars,” the depiction of a slice of Robinson’s own life during the composition of the trilogy.

With his blend of realpolitik, scrupulous scientific accuracy, visionary future history and microcosmic affairs of the mind and heart, Robinson’s books obviously owe a debt to Robert Heinlein’s novels of pioneering in space, such as
Farmer in the Sky
and especially
The Moon is a Harsh Mistress
, until now the gold standard of space colonization and rebellion stories. But Stan Robinson’s own well-known outdoorsman activities provide the empathy and sensibilities that allow him to depict the geology, geography, topography and nitty-gritty tactility of life on the planet. He achieves a unparalleled blend of minute short-term focus and Stapledonian long-view perspectives.

Robinson’s achievement here would inform his own subsequent near-future
Science in the Capital
series about imminent global climate change, but no real heirs have yet stepped forward to emulate his patented mix of sober engineer’s blueprints and pioneer’s utopian zeal.

30

Vernor Vinge

Having seen this daunting prospect as an almost inevitable end of the road for humankind, or for any intelligent species, Vinge found that he’d painted himself into a narrative corner with no obvious escape. If every civilization either obliterates itself or passes into an incomprehensible condition of Singularity, hidden behind a veil we can’t pierce with our limited minds, how can a science fiction writer continue with her craft, his bold extrapolations? Vinge’s solution was another startling move on the story-telling game board. Suppose the universe is
partitioned
, as portrayed in his 1993 Hugo and
SF Chronicle
award-winning novel
A Fire Upon the Deep
. We see no faster than light (FTL) space craft, no visiting or colonizing aliens, experience no technology equal to magic, precisely
because
of where we live, here two-thirds of the way out from the core of the Milky Way. Actually, Vinge postulates, the universe is divided into Zones: the Unthinking Depths near the heart of the galaxy where mind is almost impossible, the Slow Zone where we live, the Low, Mid and Top Beyond near the rim, and the empty gulfs of intergalactic space, or Transcend, where post-Singularity beings dwell, equal to gods but segregated from us by the cramping laws of local physics.

Of course, today’s physicists have no more reason to postulate such a segmented cosmos than those in Wells’s time had for his gravity insulator “Cavorite”—something that crops up, amusingly, in
A Deepness in the Sky
(1999)
,
the prequel that won the 2000 Hugo, the Prometheus, and the Campbell Memorial awards. It doesn’t matter. Science fiction, as we noted in the Introduction, need not mirror what happens to be known at the time of writing, or even when a story is read. What’s needed is the mimicry of authenticity, an attempt to suggest ways in which future or ancient or alien knowledge might impinge on today’s verities and shake them up, using rules of reason and logic to explore their impact. Vinge is a scientist, but he is also a great storyteller; the Zones of Thought is a delicious gadget allowing him to take us into a kind of history of the future that nobody had ever imagined. And to escape, in one bound, the trap he’d set for all sf writers in postulating an inevitable Singularity lurking in the shoals of tomorrow. But this does not limit his tale. Even walled out by the sluggishness of the inner galactic Zones, Powers are terrible in the true sense, and, when they go bad, are Blights, vast, all but unstoppable, utterly menacing.

Vinge seldom writes directly of this war between ancient gods, because conflict at such scale loses sympathy. His people are two children,
Johanna Olsndot, 14, and her brother Jefri, only 7, survivors of a catastrophic Blight event unleashed in High Lab by their careless information-archeologist parents from Straum, a Beyond world abutting the Transcend. Inward lie Sjandra Kei, Harmonious Repose, and the Tines World. Fleeing in coldsleep from the feral symbiotic amalgam now dubbed the Straumli Blight, the children are rescued on Tines World by barbarians, the boy taken by the tyrannical Steel, the girl by Steel’s rival, Queen Woodcarver.

Tines are pack creatures somewhat resembling fierce dogs, each pack comprising a single consciousness mediated by ultrasonic bursts. If a single animal perishes, another may join the pack, altering the group consciousness. This lovely notion is fresh and fascinating (and was first introduced by Vinge in a novella, “The Blabber,” in 1988, which perhaps should be read before
A Fire Upon the Deep
). A rescue mission to save the kids and a treasure they possess, key to blocking and repelling the worlds-eating Blight, is undertaken by humans Ravna Bergsndot and resurrected Pham Nuwen (who appears as well in the prequel, 20,000 years earlier), and a pair of Skroderiders, Greenstalk and Blueshell, limbless aliens mounted on gaily decorated six-wheeled carts for mobility.