Science Fiction: The 101 Best Novels 1985-2010 (23 page)

Mother of Storms
throttles back on this tendency, but does manage several brutal sex scenes. One leaves horny college kid Jesse the worse for wear, when he has his way with cyborged XV star Synthi Venture: “Finally he is limp, sore, hurting, and her rough hand trying to bring him up again is unbearable… blood welling to the surface in a couple of places.” XV, introduced in 2006, is full-immersion shared experience, and Synthi (real name Mary Ann Waterhouse, who wants nothing more than to escape her ubiquitous celebrity) is a jacked-in porn journalist who travels to news hotspots and has brutal sex with Rock and Quaz. It’s a satiric projection of today’s extreme cable TV played more for world-weary revulsion than arousal, against a backdrop of hundreds of millions of deaths in a colossal runaway planetary storm of diabolical proportions.

It’s 2028. The Flash did serious damage to the US in 2016 (it seems to have been a big electromagnetic pulse attack, with a nuclear strike thrown in). The Alaskan Free State separated peacefully in 2018, but is now being eyed by the Siberian Commonwealth, which keeps illicit trajectory weapons on the Arctic seabed. The newly powerful UN chooses to take the threat out with a preemptive strike from near-space, hitting them with a barrage of antimatter missiles. An unfortunate side-effect is the disruption of vast pockets of methane clathrates under the ice, released into the ocean, bubbling up into the atmosphere 173 billion metric tons of methane, a powerful greenhouse gas. “That’s just about nineteen times what’s in the atmosphere in 2028,” an omniscient narrator informs us, “or thirty-seven times what’s in the atmosphere in 1992.”

In the fashion of blockbusters, Barnes shifts the action every few pages between a large cast spread far and wide: Jesse Callare and his hopeless crush on Naomi, a hot college activist who blends a sort of Fox News version of feminism and left radical environmentalism; Synthi, with her preposterously augmented breasts, buttocks and internal abdominal sheathing; Diogenes, Jesse’s highly placed meteorologist brother, who believably imparts a lot of the background information while his young wife and child fret; US Republican President Grandma, Brittany Lynn Hardshaw and her criminal sidekick Harris Diem; print journalist Berlina Jameson, an Afropean expelled from Europe in 2022 during a resurgent racist ethnic cleansing of all but whites; wealthy GateTech boss John Klieg who buys up or patents key technical advances before anyone sees their implications; the obsessed, vengeful father of a raped girl slaughtered to make an illegal XV; and most importantly, ex-spouses Carla and Louie Tynan. Carla is another meteorologist, cruising the world in her submersible while veteran astronaut Louie, one of the few humans to stand on Mars, is the sole crew of an abandoned space station, both of them jacked-in to a worlds-girdling cyber system about to accelerate headlong into a Vingean Singularity (see Entry 30)…

As with techno-thrillers of the Tom Clancy kind, a vast amount of information is thrown at the inundated reader:

“…extra heat is extra energy, and one place atmospheric heat goes is into hurricanes, especially when you consider the interaction with surface water. Bigger hurricanes, more hurricanes, hurricanes where there’ve never been hurricanes…”

And

The replicating code that carried messages to reprogram nodes could be duplicated and modified, intelligence added, and the whole turned into a datarodent (so called because it listened and ratted on whoever it could).

As climate crisis intensifies at dizzying speed, mega-hurricane Clem vents a gusting outflow jet that spins the storm west to east, picking up power and water vapor from the Atlantic, devastating Europe as well as America. As more than a billion people die, Louie mobilizes replicators on the abandoned Moon base, and with his machine-amplified intelligence repurposes his orbital home into an interplanetary vehicle that plunges into the outer solar system to collect and hurl back into Earth’s atmosphere frozen gases to soothe and disarm the terrifying world storm. In the aftermath, Carla and Louie, uploaded into a grid as large as the solar system, running a million times faster than human consciousness, speak to the chastened world through Mary Ann’s implants, a transcendent narrative of the history and destiny of humankind that folds together greed, kindness, exploratory hunger, the pleasures of familiarity and domesticity:

There is no lens that doesn’t distort, no two lenses that can be true at once, and yet some distort less than others; and yet, again, however much the story and the picture might bend, seen through all of them, the story will finish in all of them.

As it does, in a kind of triumph that reaches beyond the pain and disgust and dread into a future promise “when every voice can be heard—indeed, every voice that speaks must be heard, forever.”

41

Gregory Benford

The first two books—
In the Ocean of Night
and
Across the Sea of Suns—
may be regarded as a diptych or even a single novel broken in two. The first book opens in the now-bypassed “yesterday’s tomorrow” of 1999, and finds astronaut Nigel Walmsley making the first contact with an alien intelligence within our solar system. In
Across the Sea of Suns,
Walmsley and crew are embarked, some sixty years later, on humanity’s first interstellar voyage. Reaching another planetary system, they find themselves stranded there at book’s end—but with hopeful portents.

Readers expecting an immediate continuation of Walmsley’s career when
Great Sky River
appeared must have suffered a short, sharp shock. But trust in Benford’s schemes would ultimately prove to be rewarded. Instead of a resolution to Walmsley’s quandary, the action takes place tens of thousands of years into his future, after humanity’s glorious ascent and painful fall, against hordes of mechanical rivals.

On the planet Snowglade, the small tribe known as the Bishop Family live a harried life as prey to intelligent machines—“techno nomads.” (Think a combination of William Tenn’s
Of Men and Monsters
and Thomas M. Disch’s
The Genocides
.) Mutated into new clades along Stapledonian lines, these weakly posthuman humans employ a scavenger’s bricolage technology and rely on the advice of embedded software ancestors. Led by headman Killeen, the Bishops find a starship and escape their deadly world.

In
Tides of Light
, they arrive at their intended refuge planet only to find it being gutted by a huge cosmic string under intelligent direction. Picking up Quath, a new ally from the myripodia aliens, they push inward toward the seething Galactic Center. Arriving in
Furious Gulf
, they find a hidey-hole with other humans, the “esty,” “a space-time kernel” embedded in the warped cosmic substrate around a massive black hole. The artificial esty is a whole universe of wonders in itself. And there, impossibly, Killeen’s son and heir Toby meets up with—Nigel Walmsley.

Sailing Bright Eternity
at first unfolds Nigel’s backstory to a listening Toby, hooking up past to future with the literal and metaphorical wormhole connections that the ancient man, preserved by various Einsteinian time contractions and paradoxes, has experienced. He recounts the discovery of the Old Ones, immaterial intelligences like gods, subsisting in enormous filaments of information floating in space. He discloses the ultimate aim of the mechanicals: to engineer their essences into the soup of particles at the Omega Point at the end of all time. After learning all this, Toby embarks on his own odyssey across the Labyrinth of the esty—with deliberate shades of Huck Finn’s river quest. Curiously enough, this quest comes to resembles Moorcock’s warped New Orleans passages in his
Second Ether
volumes (Entry39).

Through the efforts of all the players, acting in fashions that mix predestination with free will, the mechs will eventually be subdued into a more beneficial role, and the Syntony will blossom: a new paradigm for intelligence to inhabit. As Benford signs off his Timeline, caps sic: “END OF PREAMBLE. LATER EVENTS CANNOT BE THUS REPRESENTED.” We have passed into post-verbal Singularity territory.

Benford’s chapters in this final volume are like nuggets of dwarf star matter: small but full of gravity, as if together they can assemble a pointillistic portrait of something too big to depict with conventional strokes of the narrative brush.

Nigel thought of them as The Phylum Beyond Knowing. They spoke to him as he sat there… Only the voice. One rolling articulation, threaded with chords. But without words.

Information is order. By the Second Law of Thermodynamics, order is a form of invested energy…. Information is order is food.

While memes swim in the warm bath of cultures—both Natural or mechanical/electronic—others could operate as pure predators. These use the energy equivalent of information. They can swallow data banks, or whole mentalities—not to harvest their memes, but to suck from them their energy stores. When a lion eats a lamb, it is not using the lamb’s genetic information, except in the crudest sense. Predators do not propagate memes; they feed upon them.

So there arose in mental systems the datavores.

His language when dealing with cosmological issues acquires a bardic heft worthy of Poul Anderson. His metaphysical musings foreshadow the kind of quasi-religious speculative physics that scientist Frank Tipler would later engage in.

In the
Xeelee
sequence, begun some 15 years after Benford’s, Stephen Baxter (Entry 25) achieved a future history of the same magnitude and nature as Benford’s, one perhaps even more complexly baroque. But no one has surpassed this ground-breaking achievement in mapping the unmappable depths of space, time, and consciousness.