Science Fiction: The 101 Best Novels 1985-2010 (22 page)

Durham tests his ideas by building a hidden virtual world that, in effect, generates itself even after the computers it is running on stop processing its program. This, he argues, is possible, despite its apparently absurdity, if a continuous consciousness can be implemented, via coordinate transforms, as a gappy sequence of states scattered randomly like dust through time and space. If that sounds crazy, it’s worth noting that the physicists Fred Hoyle, Julian Barbour and Max Tegmark independently proposed that the entire universe operates rather like this.

As part of the lure needed to extract millions in development funds from rich dead Copies already uploaded into cyberspace, Durham hires a brilliant young woman, Maria Deluca, who has managed to tweak artificial life cellular automata into evolving without instantly going extinct. The upshot is the creation of a simplified world, with its own physics and history: a blend of Second Life and Tetris or Sudoku. In principle, this Autoverse world is capable of supporting life and, when run for billions of simulated years, evolving new intelligence. Maria is dubious, especially when the authorities tell her it’s all a scam and ask her to spy on Durham. But he is offering a lot of money for her to map out such a new world (as he is paying a great deal to cyber-architect Malcolm Carter to design a virtual reality city suitable for mega-rich Copies), and Maria’s mother is dying but cannot afford the scan needed for her to join the Copies in a VR afterlife.

Egan develops these threads, and more, in impressive, thought-out detail, every page dense with ideas, swift cut and thrust, unexpected implications. When finally the uploaded humans in Durham’s Permutation City venture into the vastly evolved world sprung from Maria’s coding, communicating their role as creators of that world to its insect-like inhabitants, they confront a comeuppance at once terrifying, inevitable, and brilliantly… Eganesque.

39

Michael Moorcock

Like many of the volumes in Moorcock’s canon,
Blood
follows a certain pattern. The reader is initially plunged into a universe analogous on some level to ours, which seems whole and self-sufficient. Gradually, figures and forces from a higher plane begin to intrude, revealing the real scale of affairs, which tend to culminate in a fruitful apocalypse.

The small world Moorcock focuses on here is a unique and vibrant creation. On a timeline where Africa is predominant and whites are a degenerate and despised minority, the South of America is a black-ruled mélange of planters, riverboaters, gamblers, and white slaves. Compounding this strangeness is a different set of physics, one which taps floating spots of “color” for power. Unfortunately arrogant mankind, by drilling too deep for more and more color, has created the Biloxi Fault, a flaw in spacetime that has dangerously warped the fabric of this world.

Supreme in this society are the professional gamblers, or
jugadors
(the prose here is a beguiling mix of English, Arabic, Spanish, and French, a kind of Cosmic Cajun). Two of the most famous are Jack Karaquazian (note the family resonance with Jerry Cornelius) and Sam Oakenhurst. Bound by their chivalry and codes of honor, they travel from the Terminal Cafe on the edge of the Fault up and down the Mississippi, brawling, loving, and playing their Borgesian games, “games of such complexity and subtle creativity, using the most exquisitely delicate electronics (or more recently pseudo-electronics) to create realities whose responsibilities and mathematics sometimes terrified even the most experienced of gamblers.”

This training unwittingly hones Jack and Sam for moving on up to the Second Ether, where the
Zeitjuego
between the forces of Chaos and the stifling Singularity is waged, (Amusingly, the “Second Ether” figures in their own world as a kind of pulp serial that happens to be true!) Soon, they are recruited by the exotic Rose von Bek and embark on an attempt to re-fashion the multiverse to incorporate love and justice, while Jack also continues his Orphic search for his lost love, the female
jugador
Colinda Dovero.

Moorcock succeeds admirably in creating a romping tall-tale atmosphere for the early parts of his book. At times he captures the kind of off-kilter description and dialogue beloved by R. A. Lafferty. At other times, the work is reminiscent of Ishmael Reed in his
Yellow Back Radio Broke-Down
, with a tinge of William Burroughs. The mix is potent, heady and ultimately unlike anything else.

The middle volume in this series,
Fabulous Harbours
, disarmingly and unexpectedly consists of a short-story collection. Moorcock chose to link an assemblage of disparate stories with new bridges. But
Harbours
keeps faith with
Blood
by opening with an appearance by that earlier volume’s colorful lovers, Jack Karaquazian and Colinda Dovero. But it turns out that the pair has traded both their original universe and the charms of the Second Ether (where the
Zeitjuego
, or Game of Time, is played) for residence, however temporary, in yet a third universe.

This timeline is inhabited and to some extent shaped mainly by the von Beks, that delicious, dilatory, decadent, deceitful clan whom Moorcock often chronicles. One tentacle of the family is ensconced in London’s mythic Sporting House Square, where a gathering ostensibly spins the tales that form this book.

These stories (many of which evoke the ambiance of
The Boys’ Own Paper
as if written by J. K. Huysmans) range across time and space, from a pirate-infested America to a Thatcherite England. Through many of them strides a red-eyed albino with a soul-sucking sword, whether called Elric (“The Black Blade’s Summoning”) or Ulrich (“The Affair of the Seven Virgins”; “Crimson Eyes”) or Al Rik’h (“No Ordinary Christian”). Karaquazian and Dovero gradually fade from view (although their ally/antagonist, Captain Quelch, remains in various disguises), and the reader finds himself repaid for their absence by the doings of the comical, alluringly abominable von Beks.

At the literal and figurative center of the book is “Lunching With the Antichrist.” This tale explicates and embodies the core of Moorcock’s esthetic. Portraying a fragile, isolated period when many factors conspire to permit a utopian moment to exist, this subtle, elegiac tale achieves the impossible: it causes the reader to feel nostalgia for a time and place that never actually was.

In his introduction, Moorcock opined: “I believe our visions reveal our motives and identities. I also believe that one day our visions of a perfect society will be subtle enough to work. Here, for the time being, is a vision of an imperfect world that is somewhat better than our own...” Playing anarchic demiurge, Moorcock simultaneously entertains and remolds our shared life nearer to his heart’s desire, reinforcing the trilogy’s themes.

The War Amongst the Angels
provides, in pluperfect Moorcock fashion, an inconclusive conclusion perfectly consistent with the author’s open-ended philosophy of existence, where everything is “permanently conscious, permanently changing, permanently dying.” This final book charts the intersection of these two axes of story more fully, and at the coordinates zero, zero, the Multiverse is remade.

The War Amongst the Angels
opens as a rather old-fashioned memoir penned by one Rose von Bek (born Margaret Rose Moorcock, niece to an author named Michael!). As in “Lunching with the Antichrist,” an aching nostalgia permeates Rose’s tale of her life. Her twentieth-century world—where continent-spanning tramway lines and zeppelins abound, and where WWII transpired rather differently—is on the verge of coarsening, and quite a few of the deservedly elitist von Beks find it all rather discouraging. Of course, many of the family may seek refuge and adventure by walking the moonbeam roads into the Second Ether, that realm of warring angels where mortals blossom into their frightening avatars.

Interleaved with Rose’s narration are chapters told from the viewpoint of Jack Karaquazian, who has found his lost lover Colinda Dovero, but now stands poised to lose her if he is to rescue the Multiverse from the clutches of Law and the Original Insect.

Like a movie by Luis Buñuel,
War
is exceedingly slippery and shifty. Characters come and go, mutating their forms and personalities, across an unstable landscape. Yet within these parameters, Moorcock manages to tell some old-fashioned tales of heroism and adventure (albeit with a parodic edge) and describe scenes of urban and rural beauty as if he were Fielding writing
Tom
Jones
. Like Philip José Farmer, Moorcock agglomerates various historical and fictional mythic figures—Wild Bill Cody, Tom Mix, Sexton Blake, Dick Turpin—into his yeasty mix of characters, blurring the borderline between those composed of “mere” words and those fashioned of flesh and blood.

If the Beatles’ film
Yellow Submarine
had been scripted by Fellini (the Italian director lends his name to a holy chalice in this novel), the result might have been
The War Amongst the Angels
. And ultimately, the experience of reading the entire
Second Ether
trilogy is akin to living through the explosion of a warhead. Fragments shoot off in all directions, smoke and noise abound, and one’s sense of wholeness is shattered. And yet in the eye of the explosion lives a curious peace.

40

John Barnes