Read Science Fiction: The 101 Best Novels 1985-2010 Online
Authors: Damien Broderick,Paul di Filippo
Science Fiction: The 101 Best Novels 1985-2010 (29 page)
52
Jonathan Lethem
(1997)
LIKE NEIL GAIMAN
, Jonathan Lethem and his career have long ago transcended the science fiction genre of their roots, soaring into the literary stratosphere occupied by PEN conferences and assignments from
Rolling Stone
magazine to hang with funk legend James Brown. Perhaps the clearest token of this status occurred when his recent domestic relocation from Brooklyn to the West Coast became fodder for the New York tabloids. While he remains genially avuncular toward the genre, producing introductions, for instance, for the Library of America Philip K. Dick omnibuses, it is undeniable that starting no later than his fifth book,
Motherless Brooklyn
, he was no longer a part of science fiction, despite his continued usage of the tropes of fantastika.
Yet once upon a time, it was possible to view Lethem’s work as wholly integral with the field, where it received regular reviews (not the case today), and surely with
As She Climbed Across the Table
, he played completely and brilliantly within the boundaries of the genre.
Lethem’s first novel,
Gun, with Occasional Music
, was a gonzo dystopia. In the world inhabited by Private Inquisitor Conrad Metcalf, Muzak has infiltrated all audiovisual media, resulting in orchestral newscasts, abstract TV, and newspapers filled with captionless photos. Asking questions is a forbidden act, save to those of the Inquisitor’s Office and to the few independent PI’s like Metcalf. Artificially evolved animals (who function much like the Toons in Roger Rabbit, a tragicomic underclass) and artificially evolved children—”babyheads”—mingle with the repressed normal humans, neurotics who all suffer from this society’s absurdist strictures.
Amnesia Moon
solidified Lethem’s street creds in the sf world. In the near future, things have come apart. Alien invasion, psychotropic warfare, environmental disaster—the cause of our downfall is any, all, or none of these. But the effects are indisputable. The world is now divided into zones of altered reality, subject to the shaping influences of the occasional lucid dreamer, whose flights of fancy become other people’s reality (as in, of course, so much of Philip K. Dick’s work, and Le Guin’s
The Lathe of Heaven
).
Living in a shattered Wyoming community that evokes the ambiance of a dozen classic apocalyptic venues all run through a blender, our protagonist, Chaos, appears to be such a powerful figure, yet one wounded by amnesia and kept in subjugation by fellow dreamer, the Palmer Eldritch-like Kellogg. One day Chaos’s disgust and unease reach the boiling point: he assaults Kellogg and hits the road, determined to discover his past. Along for the ride comes Melinda Self, furry thirteen-year-old foil, a ruefully humorous, tough-minded daughter figure.
His hegira takes Chaos through a handful of twisted communities, eventually depositing him in a relatively functional San Francisco.
As She Climbed Across the Table
, Lethem’s third novel, mixed centered surrealism and loopy groundedness, and is as smoothly exhilarating as Eric Clapton’s guitar licks, and possibly just as classic. And like any pop masterpiece, it goes down so smoothly that you don’t notice the philosophical barbs until you’re being reeled in. With its emphasis on academic-centered hard physics R&D, it could be a Gregory Benford novel (
COSM,
say) in postmodern drag.
Physicist Alice Coombs has made a certain decision of the heart: to fall in love with an artificially created pocket universe named “Lack,” whose only manifestation in our continuum is a picky nothingingness that ingests random objects. Naturally Alice’s newly discarded lover, Philip Engstrand, pompous soft science maven, is dismayed at losing his soulmate. This book—narrated in Philip’s hurt, ironic, hilariously bewildered tones—is the story of how Philip seeks to reclaim Alice from Lack.
Miraculously,
As She Climbed
functions equally well on a multitude of intriguing levels. It’s plain old soap opera, the eternal triangle of girl, boy, and spacetime discontinuity. It’s a retelling of “The Emperor’s New Clothes,” illustrating how people can delude themselves into believing that “nothing is something.” It’s a cheesy “invention rapes inventor” tale, like Dean Koontz’s
Demon Seed
. And it’s a pungent satire of academia, with just the section on Georges De Tooth, “resident deconstructionist,” worth a dozen lesser campus novels.
Moreover, Lethem finds time to riff on several fellow authors: James Tiptree (another Alice), is evident in the heroine’s feelings for Lack: “It’s a basic response to... embrace the alien.”
Crash
-era Ballard can be heard in this project by one of Philip’s grad students: “[He] had applied for funding to study the geographic spray of athletes on a playing field following an injury. He wanted to understand the disbursement of bodies around the epicenter of the wounded player.. .” And Terry Bisson’s story, “The Shadow Knows,” featuring an alien emptiness in a bowl, seems another definite referent.
Lethem’s beautifully balanced, metaphorically rich prose propels this blackly jolly fable to a surprising yet satisfying conclusion. By book’s end, a sense that the author had accomplished his takeoff taxiing and was now fully in flight for more cosmopolitan cities pervades the pages.
53
Ken MacLeod
(1998)
[Fall Revolution]
BY A STRANGE
irony, this astringently cynical novel is best known for one phrase, a sarcastic put-down of the Vingean Singularity: “The Rapture for the nerds.” The irony is that the story is exactly about what happens to humankind after a real Singularity accelerates and transforms technogeeks into a state inconceivable to the (apparent) losers who are Left Behind.
These Outwarder “fast folk” upload themselves into immensely powerful computer substrates on Jupiter, dismantle its moon Ganymede, turning it into an exotic-matter wormhole that stretches to a very distant star. Their human slaves use that traversable spacetime link to escape to a world they name New Mars, ten millennia in the future, where they set up a libertarian anarcho-capitalist utopia.
What ensues is a clash not just of civilizations but of utopias, as the Union—those deathless humans who inhabit the inner solar system after the Fall Revolution of 2045 and savage viral attacks from Jupiter on their electronic infrastructure—reject capitalism and embrace a kind of Darwinian communism. It is a drastic imaginary sandbox few American writers would consider playing in, and indeed Ken MacLeod, like his colleague Iain M. Banks (see Entry 17), is a Scot. It’s no coincidence that two other non-Scottish masters of transhuman sf, Charles Stross (Entry 81) and Hannu Rajaniemi (Entry 101), also live in Scotland, a territory known for its fierce independence and resentment of authority.
The Cassini Division is the equivalent, in MacLeod’s Fall Revolution history, of Special Circumstances, the spy commando operatives of Banks’s post-scarcity Culture utopia. MacLeod’s viewpoint agent is beautiful, youthful but old. Ellen May Ngwethu (a surname that means
freedom
) is convinced that the long-quiescent fast folk are preparing a new assault on the despised mere humans. The Command Committee remain doubtful, and consider her suggested solution to be nothing better than genocide. But Ngwethu holds firm to the ideology developed by Korean and Japanese labor-camp prisoners, the True Knowledge, cobbled together from the few pre-20th century books available to them: Stirner, Nietzsche, Marx and Engels, Joseph Dietzgen (“The moral duty of an individual never exceeds his interests. The only thing which exceeds those interests is the
material power
of the generality over the individual”), Darwin and Herbert Spencer. Their doctrine is uncompromising, “the first socialist philosophy based on totally pessimistic and cynical conclusions about human nature:
Life is a process of breaking down and using other matter, and if need be, other life.… There is nothing but matter, forces, space and time, which together make power. Nothing matters, except what matters to you. Might makes right, and power makes freedom. You are free to do whatever is in your power, and if you want to survive and thrive you had better do whatever is in your interests….
All that you really value, and the goodness and truth and beauty of life, have their roots in this apparently barren soil.
This is the true knowledge.
We had founded our idealism on the most nihilistic implications of science, our socialism on crass self-interest, our peace on our capacity for mutual destruction, and our liberty on determinism. We had replaced morality with convention, bravery with safety, frugality with plenty, philosophy with science, stoicism with anesthetics and piety with immortality.
And the outcome of this extreme teaching, where the word “banker” is the ultimate obscenity? Why, a culture “sustainable materially and psychologically, a climax community of the human species, the natural environment of a conscious animal…. We called it the Heliocene Epoch. It seemed like a moment in the sun, but there was no reason, in principle, why it couldn’t outlast the sun, and spread to all the suns of the sky.”
The Outwarders in their Jupiter Brain, though, breaking free at last from their virtual reality trap or mass psychosis, seem ready to turn all the matter and energy in the solar system into more data-crunchers. To them, ordinary augmented humans are “counter-evolutionaries.” On distant New Mars, meanwhile, ten thousand years in the future but linked by the wormhole to their era of origin, capitalism has created an alternative utopia with AIs and uploads (rejected as mere machines by the Union), copied minds. The dead can be revived from smart-matter storage, a marvel of the free market.
Some of the characters reappear from MacLeod’s 1996 Prometheus award winner,
The Stone Canal
. Each of the four Fall Revolution volumes can be read independently. The first,
The Star Fraction
(1995)—a nominee for Arthur Clarke award, also winning the libertarian Prometheus award despite its Trotskyist coloration—is less accomplished than the splendid sequels.
The Sky Road
(1999) skews this history interestingly.
Ellen Ngwethu’s quest, in
The Cassini Division,
is for the vanished genius Isambard Kingdom Malley, whose flawed theory of everything was still close enough to the truth that the wormhole project and a working starship drive were based on it. Malley lives among dropouts from the Union: he’s a non-co, a contemptible non-cooperator in the new communist order. She finds him, and in the Division’s spacecraft
Terrible Beauty
they take the wormhole route to New Mars to arrange cometary kinetic attacks on the posthumans of Jupiter ten thousand years in the past. MacLeod’s blend of upscale tour-of-utopias (all the chapters are named after classic works of this kind: Looking Backward, News from Nowhere, A Modern Utopia, In the Days of the Comet, etc), ideological spats (New Martian capitalists use gene-engineered upgrades, the communists stick to machines, including nano-difference engines), and traditional thrill-a-minute calamity storytelling makes this one of the best novels about the Singularity: a veritable rapture for nerds!
