Read Science Fiction: The 101 Best Novels 1985-2010 Online
Authors: Damien Broderick,Paul di Filippo
Science Fiction: The 101 Best Novels 1985-2010 (26 page)
46
Mary Doria Russell
(1996/1998)
MARY DORIA RUSSELL,
a Ph.D. in biological anthropology, formerly Christian, then atheist, now convert to Judaism, was already a married mother in her midforties when
The Sparrow
appeared—unusual for a newcomer to the sf mode. It immediately won several distinguished awards, including the 1997 Tiptree prize for best sf novel exploring gender issues (in this case, largely the problems of elected celibacy and the muted varieties of conventional sexual identity).
In 2039, the
Stella Maris,
a modified asteroid paid for by the Society of Jesus, arrives at Rakhat, a planet of Alpha Centauri, in pursuit of the ravishing music SETI astronomers detect from the Centauri suns. Father Sandoz, S.J., and his friends begin their first mission in wonder and hope. Once their clumsy work is done, the broadcast music has been silenced, and Sandoz is broken.
There is a case of conscience at the core of
The Sparrow
and its sequel
Children of God
: not just of moral scruple, of sin and forgiveness, or good and evil, but of mortal consciousness itself—awareness of self, and perhaps of deity, of transfiguring spirit or its absence, of the pain and glory of exquisite sensitivity in a world from which God has, proverbially, absconded.
Two fatally entangled intelligent species are found. Runa and Jana’ata, nicely imagined and deployed, are co-evolved prey and predator, the masterful four percent literally cultivating and eating the babies of the lovable but docile 96 percent. The Rakhat lion people are an exquisite warrior race, like those samurai aristocrat warriors as deft with tea ceremony and flower arrangement as they were with the sword. The sheep—well, a funny lot, the sheep. Children of God reveals that lions not only subsist on the succulent lamb but employ their sheep as civil servants, historians, eyes and ears, the whole mercantile infrastructure.
These are two distinct if entwined species, whose DNA each speaks its singular but complementary message. Ruin is brought upon Rakhat’s ecological balance by the interference of the moralizing humans. The Runa population is held in precarious check by their failure to develop agriculture
(as was ours, until a few thousand years ago). The revolutionary invocation, “We are many. They are few,” is enough to trigger a cascade of resentful Jana’ata rebellion across the planet, disrupting the age-old accommodation of eater and eaten.
Father Sandoz is literally and repeatedly sodomized by these very large and punishingly equipped Jana’ata; his colleagues perish. Russell’s own key is this: “What happens to Emilio Sandoz is a holocaust writ small. He survives, but loses everyone. Now he has to live in its aftermath.” The moral? “Maybe it’s ‘Even if you do the best you can, you still get screwed.’ ” But what if God’s neither in His heaven nor absconded? What if He’s a delusion and a snare, a folly for trapping the vulnerable into cruel absurdities like the voluntary abandonment of sex, children, the simplest comforts of attachment, physical embrace? We find ourselves staring into the face of a Demiurge: in this case, the engagingly smiling face of Mary Doria Russell. Emilio Sandoz and his luckless associates are the snake in an old garden, or rather the culpable gardeners in an old snakepit, and believe they sense the hand of God directing their path.
Broken Sandoz, body ruined by scurvy, mutilation and insupportable grief, bends beneath a crueler doubt than the loss of God. He suspects that deity is not absent but active, smashing us at random or for spite. He has had plentiful proof of divine intervention, coincidences that stretch chance as an explanation. He’s correct; it is the hand of the author at work, skewing the probabilities, setting up the design and kicking it to splinters, in the hope of performing an invocation in the next world up, the world we readers share with her.
Rescuers find Sandoz imprisoned, his hands cut to shreds, dissociated and traumatized, his body unpleasantly damaged by repeated buggerings. These worldly, charmingly profane Jesuits recoil like shocked maiden aunts, assuming without question that he has
voluntarily
chosen a depraved life as a homosexual prostitute. Mary Doria Russell renders Sandoz effectively speechless in his own defense during a pitiless interrogation, but even so the scandalized reaction of his brothers in Christ is difficult to accept. Father General Giuliani’s avows that this cruel grilling “was necessary. If he were an artist, I’d have ordered him to paint it.” As a linguist, specialist in tongues, he must speak his travail—because, despite his apparent apostasy, Emilio Sandoz is “the genuine article,” a true mystic given sight of God. “He is still held fast in the formless stone, but he’s closer to God right now than I have ever been in my life.”
One human adult and one damaged child survive the carnage after Sandoz is returned in mute disgrace to Earth. Runa, challenged by horrific attack, learn that the lamb can best the lion given sufficient numbers and resolve. Jana’ata society is effectively destroyed. It is a mess of biblical proportion. By the time Sandoz the apostate is hauled kicking and screaming from Earth back to hell, torn from his new love and her own child, leaving behind all unknowing a new life, the lions are almost extinct and the sheep are everywhere.
What kind of theodicy is an ex-Jesuit to find in this nightmare? Luckily, two human holy fools guide him, one a slow learner thug who sings opera beautifully, d’Angeli, the other an autistic savant genius who unpacks a Philip Glass–like Music of the Spheres from the comingled genomes of all three species. God has worked, as usual, in mysterious ways, and all’s well that ends well, even if the deep harmony of the choir of angels is brought forth from the tormented evolutionary succession of two whole planetfuls of anguished souls.
Of the two novels,
Children of God
is more satisfactory than its better received forerunner, whose cast are now mostly dead, leaving Russell without their dazzlingly intelligent winsomeness. If sf’s vocation is to be “a symbolic meditation on history itself”—as critic Fredric Jameson insists—Russell comes closer here to that large-scale canvas. Drawn in to her complex antiphonies, the richly imagined and described lives of these twinned aliens and their human tempters, one is able to ignore the inconsistencies and absurdities. Redeemed Sandoz is left at the end, as he must be, holding doubt in his tattered hands.
47
Bruce Sterling
(1996)
IT’S THE END
of the 21st century. Aquinas, a postcanine with an implanted voicebox, hosts a TV show, and solicits protagonist Maya as a guest:
“Frankly, I hate old movies. I don’t even much like my own ancient medium of television. But I’m enormously interested in the processes of celebrity.”
“I’ve never had such a sophisticated conversation with a dog,” said Maya. “I can’t appear on your show, Aquinas. I hope you understand that. But I do like talking to you. In person, you’re so much smaller than you look on television. And you’re really interesting. I don’t know if you’re a dog or an artificial intelligence or whatever, but you’re definitely some kind of genuine entity. You’re
deep.
Aren’t you? I think you should get out of pop culture. Maybe write a book.”
“I can’t read,” the dog said.
It’s a poignant moment, and an index of how startling yet fragile ordinary life might be in a future that’s on the verge of the authentically posthuman. Aquinas is an early step on the path to the truly posthuman astonishments of Sterling’s first tour de force, 1985’s Schismatrix, and its associated stories about the bioengineering Shapers and cyborged or uploaded Mechanists, our solar system descendants in 2200 and later centuries. That sequence was Sterling’s most remarkable plunge into a techno-future that sprang from the same assessment of change as, say, Vernor Vinge’s (Entry 30). But Holy Fire is more engaging, more human, even as its characters go beyond what have always been the limitations of their species.
That scene with Aquinas from near the end of
Holy Fire
is nicely bookended at the start by glimpses of Plato, an earlier version of Canis Superior:
The dog wore a checkered knit sweater, tailored canine trousers, and a knitted black skullcap.
The dog’s front paws were vaguely prehensile, like a raccoon’s hands…. A dim anxiety puckered the hairy canine wrinkles around the dog’s eyes. It was odd how much more expressive a dog’s face became once it learned to talk.
Plato’s very old owner, Martin, is dying, and wants Mia, who loved Martin seventy years ago, to adopt the creature. She declines, but it’s a wedge into her carefully protected, safe life. As a representative of the ruling polity tells her, “The world is extremely strange now…. People like you are brittle… There’s no such thing as a genuine normality for a ninety-four-year-old posthuman being…. You’re just very guarded, and very possessive of an old-fashioned emotional privacy that no one really needs nowadays.”
Californian Mia is persuaded, finally, and undergoes an extremely traumatic and complicated rejuvenation, the kind that can only be earned by devoted service to the polity.
Neo-Telomeric Dissipative Cellular Detoxification… was a very radical treatment that was very little tried and very expensive. Mia knew a great deal about NTDCD, because she was a professional medical economist. She qualified for it because she had been very careful. She chose to take it because it promised her the world, and she was in a mood to gamble.
Mia put 90 percent of her entire financial worth into a thirty-year hock to support research development and maintenance in NTDCD.
The detail of her renewal is plausible and coolly rendered:
Intercellular repair required a radical loosening of the intracellular bonds so as to facilitate medical access through the cell surfaces…. The skinless body would partially melt into the permeating substance of the support gel. The fluidized body would puff up to two and a half times its original volume.
At this point, flexible plastic tubing could worm its way into the corpus. The skinless, bloated and neotenically fetalized patient, riddled with piercings, would resemble an ivory Chinese doll depicting acupuncture sites.
At the end of this heroic transformation, fully as drastic as Plato’s or Aquinas’s, she is a hormone-bursting young woman of 20 with a mind neither old nor really new. She changes her lifestyle and name, becomes Maya. And the novel accelerates into its
fin de siècle
not-quite-Singularity future, roaming through a new Europe, a world recovered from the dreadful plagues of the 2030s and ’40s. But at last Maya knows that she is anchored, or perhaps mired, in her own 21st century becoming. “I’ll never live to see the world beyond the singularity,” she tells a young scientist/artist. “It’s not that I don’t want to. But I just wasn’t born in time.” “Are there worse things than dead, Maya?” she’s asked, and answers. “Oh, my heavens, yes.”
And one of those things, it turns out, is what dead Martin had been doing to his dog, Plato. The luckless creature shares his modified doggy mind with an emulation or extension that roams Martin’s cyberspace memory palace, tormented by the conflict between his illuminated postcanine mind and his animal instincts. It is a fearsome allegory of how we could go wrong, running recklessly toward an augmented future that will never entirely remake us into cyber-angels bathed in holy fire—at least, not until the utterly altered future of a Schismatrix.
