Read Science Fiction: The 101 Best Novels 1985-2010 Online
Authors: Damien Broderick,Paul di Filippo
Science Fiction: The 101 Best Novels 1985-2010 (25 page)
But also of note in the telling is Stephenson’s exuberant, amalgamated prose. It’s a strong tripod of language. First comes marvelous Dickensian and steampunkish locutions associated with the Vickys. Atop that, delirious infodump language full of neologisms that make reading sf a distinct paraliterary protocol, the kind analyzed by novelist and theorist Samuel R. Delany. Finally, a Pynchonesque hipster demotic prose provides wry observations and laughs. Blended together with head-whipping jumpcuts even within paragraphs, the resulting text is a syncretic delight.
Two other strains of prose play important but smaller parts. The fantasy/fairytale elements of the
Primer
’s stories recall the fusion of fantasy and sf codified in Vernor Vinge’s
True Names
. Some of this leaks out into Hackworth’s life, when he declares that he is embarked on “a quest for the Alchemist.” It’s more Joseph Campbell than John W. Campbell at this point. And the pulp elements involving Dr. X as the quintessential Yellow Peril mad scientist are amusing and well done as well.
At the core of Stephenson’s novel is a smart dissection how culture works and what it’s good for. Consigning moral relativism to the trashcan of history, he comes down firmly on the side of standards and education and visionary goals, a maximum of individual freedom within collective frameworks of mutuality. That all of this is conveyed to Nell—and to us—through an old-fashioned book, however high-tech, perfectly symbolizes the continuity of humanity’s history, from distant past to illimitable futures.
44
William Barton
(1996)
IT TOOK WILLIAM BARTON
two decades—from his first novel,
Hunting on Kunderer
, issued in 1973—until the mid-1990s to reach his peak. But having done so, he shows no sign of dropping off his new high plateau. Barton’s métier—at least in his solo novels; he has a parallel career writing high-tech thrillers with Michael Capobianco—has become the intelligent repurposing of old core sf themes and tropes into a knowingly recursive kind of fiction which, implicitly or explicitly, acknowledges the existence of the genre and its importance to many people, all within the very framework of his new fictions, and yet without seeming derivative and fan-pandering. In fact, Barton’s sense of nostalgia for sf’s Golden Age—the field’s youth and his own personal childhood—is generally melancholy for what’s been lost, rather than blindly jingoistic and immune to current conditions.
The emblem of “Fortress America,” first employed a generation prior by Jack Williamson and others, and that of ancient inherited alien technology, form the main engines in this entry.
Barton realizes that sf contains numerous tropes that resonate powerfully with our deep psychic structures. Perhaps one of the strongest is that of “omnipresence,” the ability to be anywhere or anywhen at will. Whether omnipresence is embodied in a network of matter transmitters or one of more conventional vehicles, this dream of triumphing over the strictures of time and space, of enjoying godlike immanence, fascinates like no other. A quick catalog of writers who have been captivated by this notion would have to include Simak, Sturgeon, Heinlein, Moorcock, Farmer, Stith, Cherryh, Norton, Laumer, Silverberg, Bear, and Pohl. Plainly, there is something deep and strange and alluring in this notion, attracting the attention of some of the field’s best and most ambitious writers. But despite being highly recursive—Barton’s characters acknowledge sf precedents—this novel stands in no literary shadows, but instead blazes forth with its own pure fire of excitement and ideation.
The Transmigration of Souls
opens amid much strangeness, all cleverly interpolated. A century or so in the book’s past, American lunar explorers secretly discovered a buried stargate. After visiting a few planets and reaping much alien technology, they inexplicably retreated to Earth, sealing themselves and their wonders inside the aforementioned Fortress America, leaving the rest of the overpopulated, overburdened globe to fend for itself. (This motif carries a wry and nose-thumbing message about global perceptions of America hegemony. The world retroactively misses America, which is nonetheless hardly blameless for the greedy sequestering of all alien tech.) Now, two competing teams—one Arab, one Chinese, both unwitting of what awaits them—are finally heading back to the Moon, hoping to reactivate the old US base. Pursuing them is an American vessel.
What happens next is simply this: members of all three teams fall into the Gnostic gears of the universe.
It turns out that the stargates are not what they first appeared to be. They are entries to entire alternate timelines, the skeins of the Multiverse. Instead of blithely visiting a familiar Alpha Centauri, say, the hunters and the hunted are falling through layers of ontological reality. Moreover, they must contend with the “Toolbox managers,” the quasi-omnipotent assistants of a departed God, one of whom happens to be a transfigured human sf writer previously lost in the funhouse. (Shades of L. Ron Hubbard and his famous image of God as a writer in a dirty bathrobe!)
Barton populates his book with intriguing, clearly delineated characters, flawed and noble, avaricious and altruistic. This proves essential, as their ultimate destinies are linked to their innermost selves. One of them, Ling Erhshan, happens to be an inveterate reader of sf, providing Barton with a legitimate way to reference dozens of previous sf works in the same vein he’s mining. Yet despite this, because of Barton’s unrelenting grounding of his text in sensory details and deeply lived mature existence, nothing seems arbitrary, his creation is concrete.
Barton’s tough-yet-sensitive-guy style produces an adrenergic, thought-provoking tale that drags the willing reader through it. Like John Barnes (Entry 40), Barton has a sensibility and style that is half cynical, half sentimental, half postmodern, half old-fashioned, half scientific, half fantastic. It’s a potent brew, fit for whatever gods haunt the Multiverse.
45
Raphael Carter
(1996)
LET’S BEGIN
with an admission: the future in this fine first novel is arguably implausible, because in the mid-’90s Carter insisted on grisly 1980s’ cyberpunk devices contrived to make our skins crawl: chips as big as your thumb socketed into the shaved scalp:
The chip was long and white, with many metal legs… holes drilled in my head, capped with black adapters... the Net-rune in my cheek, a scar of garish luminescence slashing down from eye to jaw in swoops and angles… the bumps and bulges in the left side of my skull where implants nestled to the connectible tissue, like baby spiders hidden in the tangle of their egg sac.
When you’re Maya Tatyanichna Andreyeva (of News One hearth, a Camera), chasing down a disappeared genocide by the human swarm-mind Unanimous Army in Kazakhstan, that is the kind of cyberware your skull bristles with. Except that by the 24th century or even this one, it surely will not be, despite disruptions in the rising curve of technology due to Carter’s nasty Guardians and the horrific worse-than-the-disease meme war solution of the Unanimous Army.
It will take nanotechnology and advanced AI-mediated bioengineering to get from here to there, and that will yield a condition closer to Greg Bear’s
Blood Music
or Rudy Rucker’s orphids (powerful smart microbes infesting your flesh; see Entry 91) than to clunky old jack-in William Gibson pre-personal computer cyberpunk. In this case, righteous extrapolation looks more like magic than most sf has ever surmised. And indeed, Maya
is
also infested by a “nano population” that requires refreshing now and then from a flask. So the implied technology is seriously inconsistent.
And yet this flaw does not for a moment damage Carter’s deliciously written novel. It is almost plausible that this authentic sf novel might be read simply as a study of a woman journalist of the future, even if the Russia in question is a pretty strange locale in the Fusion of Historical Nations policed by the amusingly named Emily Postcops (
very
polite and deadly if you breach their etiquette). Maya is a lesbian, which her otherwise wildly diverse world regards as a vile crime—as ours did for centuries, and still does in plenty of places. (Raphael Carter’s web site declares a passionate interest in androgyny as the way of the future, or perhaps just as an option that ought to have its ample space, and a certain tension in the novel’s substrate plainly derives from the author’s own embattled endurance of bigotry.)
We are quickly drawn into the teasing but slightly sinister flirting between Maya, a telepresence Netcast journalist, and her new “screener,” Keishi Mirabara, a young Japanese Black émigré, to judge from her VR image. This mysterious person stands between Maya’s unfiltered consciousness and the vast feedback ocean of her co-experiencing audience. Has Keishi known Maya previously, in a decade-long blind-spot enforced in her memory by a patrolling chip? “You’re a Postcop,” Maya speculates fearfully. “Or are you a Weaver?” The Weavers are virus-scouring denizens of grayspace. Little wonder Maya is paranoid and mind-scrambled.
And what is her relationship to Pavel Voskresenye, a cyborged revolutionary, former victim of the Mengele-like author of the hidden atrocity she investigates? How may the wrath of the deadly Weavers be avoided? And what is happening with the snooty Africans, apparently the only people to have gone through the Singularity with success? Theirs is a hyper hi-tech culture ruled, or perhaps epitomized, by the Unknown King, His Majesty-in-Chains, and Only-A-Man, and Its-Ethereal Highness, the calculator-king. And what is it, exactly, that is very like a whale? In Maya’s future, you can pose these questions in the new languages Sapir or KRIOL, if you would prefer. “Sapir… changes human thought to fit computers, not the other way round.”
Carter’s brio and inventive spin on all the cyber tropes apparently exhausted in the 1980s and early 1990s is fun, speedy, if never quite as wrenchingly moving as the writer clearly wishes it to be. Or maybe that is just an index of overdose on those very cyberpunk tropes. Yet a mainstream reader, hunting for a novel on women journalists in Russia, would be baffled by
The Fortunate Fall
. It takes shrewd sf insiders to relish work this complex and detailed, which is itself a hazard for the author because such readers are already immunized against the shock of the new. But the artificial life speculations are exactly right in their quicksilver detail: species and genera and entire phyla of viruses and grander alife creatures that prey on each other in grayspace, the realm of virtual reality. Long before
The Matrix,
Carter envisaged the creatures of that realm:
Some long, lithe creature, like an eel, was swimming for its life with an immense shark behind it…. At the last instant, the eel ducked into Swazi and was silvered. The shark… fretted and fumed, like a cartoon lawman stopped by a painted border…
The bubbles circled the shifting and circling Weaver. At length one of her tendrils flicked idly, like a hand absently grasping a teacup, and a bubble disappeared…
[T]he lump of neurodes was thickly cabled to a vast dark bulk that loomed above us… like a storm cloud that takes up the whole sky. The eye shrank from it.
Maya is confronted by entities with designs on humanity:
“They are trying to hack the archetypes—to change what makes us human. You might say they’re trying to revoke original sin.” […]
“We are a machine built by God to write poetry to glorify his creatures. But we’re a bad machine, built on an off day.”
Puzzles, mysteries, false memories, transformations pile atop each other. Finally, Maya faces a redemptive possibility: “Maya, they can only take away so much. They can’t change who you are, not completely.” It is a hope common to many of the powerful dystopias discussed in this book, and we can only trust that it will remain true.
