Read Science Fiction: The 101 Best Novels 1985-2010 Online
Authors: Damien Broderick,Paul di Filippo
Science Fiction: The 101 Best Novels 1985-2010 (31 page)
Vast
opens some 200 years after this departure. The semi-living ship
Null Boundary
, shadowed by Chenzeme pursuers, carries Lot and his comrades toward an unknown fate. Adding tension, the humans (including the ship’s captain, an ancient digitized personality called Nikko) are at odds about their best options and leery of Lot’s powers. When the Chenzeme ship catches up to
Null Boundary
, a strange mating between the two crafts opens up new avenues for possibly subverting the whole Chenzeme fleet. Whether Lot will achieve his personal goals remains in doubt up till the final pages.
Nagata is highly inventive in her language, conjuring up such terms as “philosopher cells” and “sensory tears” to brilliantly match her closely reasoned speculations. Although the density of her conceptualization never reaches Eganesque levels, she provides more than enough wonders—including an entire vacuum ecosystem—to entrance the reader.
At one point, Lot, nearly drowning inside a
Null Boundary
environment gone chaotic, experiences “a sense of wonder edged in faint, warm fear.” That’s the impact Nagata’s work offers to readers, too.
56
John Varley
(1998)
A TERRIFYINGLY
vivid life-and-death pursuit inward from the outer solar system, an hilarious and cluey Hollywood-in-Space and Off-Off-Broadway tell-all, a scam caper, a poignant psychobiography,
The Golden Globe
is the most fun you can have (as John Varley says of writing his sf) with your clothes on. Although there’s no obligation
not
to read it naked, as dedicated nudist Robert A. Heinlein, one of Varley’s acknowledged prototypes, might have done. After all, in this highly enjoyable romp, eight year old thespian Kenneth Catherine “Sparky” Valentine and his Gang perform for millions of viewers in vests but without pants, bare as Donald and Daisy Duck. They decide not to have sex on the show until sidekick Polly is 11 and has her “blood day,” just as her mother did.
And their show rates better than a competing kiddy program,
What the Fuck?,
which is failing because “the declining numbers of educational programming across the board in the past three years reflected a growing anti-intellectualism or merely a stagnation of fresh new ideas in the presentation of loftier kid-vid.” On his 100
th
birthday, in 2250, highly cyborged and ageless, switching from male to female form at the rather painful drop of a hat, Kenneth is denounced by another player as a “polymorphous, talentless, scenery-chewing, ass-kissing sorry excuse for a has-been actor!”
Little wonder that a recent interview with Varley for a conservative website issued this warning:
Read at your own risk
.
[1]
Sparky’s dad is abusive, charismatic John Barrymore Valentine, famous as a stage actor in this era of vids and (according to
Howdy Doody
“The Trade Mag of Kid-vid”) for
what the police call the “long con.” That’s what he did time for, anyway, though I’ve been told his skills at the Pigeon Drop and the Spanish Lottery are considerable as well. He exhibits no shame about this, doesn’t mind discussing it with the press. It’s all part of some extremely wonky political worldview I will not bore you with.
This worldview might be consistent with libertarian Heinleinism, a formidable star-craving crank cult in Luna two centuries after the Invaders took over Earth and incidentally killed billions, exiling the remnant of humankind to the Eight Worlds, most of them moons.
Versions of that elaborate solar system have comprised Varley’s chief playground since the late 1970s, most buoyantly and complexly displayed in
Steel Beach
(1993), this quasi-sequel, and the promised finale,
Irontown Blues
.
Down on his luck in the cometary zone beyond Pluto—not to mention that little business with the governor’s daughter—centenarian Sparky gets his chance to play Lear. But only if he (and his Bichon Frise dog Toby) can reach the Golden Globe theater, King City, Luna farside. Even flying in a pirated spacecraft via a slingshot past the photosphere of the Sun, it seems a schedule impossible for a man without funds. And there’s a Mafia enforcer team after him from the former Plutonian hard-case prison moon Charon, demonic commandos of ruthless pursuit. This relentless chase, an all-stops-out blend of Hitchcock, Peckinpah, and Itchy & Scratchy, has Sparky braining (with a sousaphone and a violin case), dismembering, and setting fire to his vengeful hunter, who keeps coming back for more like one of the Furies:
With one hand almost off, one arm stuck to his side by the tanglenet, the other arm held by the ring of brass tubing, six inches shorter and fifty pounds lighter than me... even with all that about the only edge I had on him was the weight.... I wrestled him to the bed, all the time soaking up a punishing series of kicks to the shin and a jackhammering of his knees to my crotch…. His kicking lost some accuracy, but never let up. I hurled him face-first into the makeup mirror, pulled him away, and then did it again now that it was broken and jagged…. I searched for his eyes with my thumbs and felt something squish, but that gave him a chance to shrug the tuba up over his free shoulder and he began flailing at me. He used the arm as a club, getting in one ringing blow that almost broke my collarbone, then another to my side, before bringing his forearm down like a swung baseball bat on the edge of the makeup table. Face powder blossomed into the air, and both bones in his forearm snapped like dry spaghetti. I thought I heard him grunt a little from that, but it never slowed him. He kept swinging the arm, which now bent in three places, the mangled and blackened remains of his fist like a grisly mace at the end of a bloody rope.
These recurrent set-pieces are genuinely thrilling, and macabrely funny. Varley is shameless. In earlier and better days, to which many flashbacks return us, young Sparky had an accountant, “a handsome Latin-lover type who… looked like a lawyer, and who was proud of his Indian and Arab heritage, …named Yasser Dhatsma-Bhebey.” Only in a novel as drenched in stage and movie lore as this one could a lawyer be named, unblushingly, Yes sah! Dat’s ma baby. Is that Yasser’s gag, or Varley’s? It doesn’t matter; this is madcap noir.
Adding to the lunacy is Elwood P. Dowd, as played by Jimmy Stewart in
Harvey,
who shows up (visible only to Valentine Jr.) in moments of crisis to chide Sparky gently or give him handy advice. The legendary director of
King Lear
, toward whom he is rushing under deadline, is his childhood sidekick Polly, now a centenarian crone whose fundamentalist creed forbids her the benefit of antiaging treatments. And there’s the murder he (or perhaps Elwood Dowd) committed 70 years ago, which also has him on the run. When the hitman shows up in his dressing room halfway through a triumphant opening night, disabling his lethal Pantechnicon luggage and menacing beloved Toby the dog, it’s showdown time. Followed, inevitably, by a court trial—this one adjudicated by a computerized Judge, and interrupted by shocking revelations. What else would you hope for in such a fun gallimaufry? A faster than light starship in which to flee the Charonese? Luckily, there’s one of those, too, owned by the Heinleiners.
As Sparky, that ancient movie buff, says: “Keep watching the sky!”
[1]
http://www.republibot.com/content/interview-john-varley?page=1
57
Simon Ings
(1999)
SCIENCE FICTION
is always breeding up its own successors, the glorious mutants who will overthrow the reigning dinosaurs and inherit the marketplace. Thus it was with cyberpunk, that subgenre just breaking big circa 1985, at the start of our survey. These mirrorshade-wearing rebels came along, cunning mammals, and overthrew the old fogy dinosaurs. But fifteen years onward, a new generation of writers had taken the crude and primitive tools and tropes which the first-generation cyberpunks had established and expanded them immensely. The first-gen writers, born mid-twentieth-century or earlier, improvising their tools as they raced ahead into the mists of futurity, the lineaments of the fabulous beast they stalked as yet unclear, lurking at the waterholes Burroughs and Pynchon had charted, could only look behind now and see baroque mutants surpassing their progenitors in every way!
Simon Ings is a fine example of this phenomenon. His second and third novels were a tight duology comprised of
Hot Head
and
Hotwire
. Ings—a cusp writer born in 1965—furiously limned a transhuman future where giant rogue AIs known as Massives plot a biologically ripe fate for the solar system incorporating jazzed-up humans weird enough to be their own aliens. Ings’s future can be synopsized thus: not long from now, Earth is a patchwork of poverty and wealth, shiny new cities and plaguey ruins, all as a result of a recent war fought with the Massives. No clear victory was won by either side, for the Massives still flourish, on Earth as intelligent networks and in space as mad habitats where exotic lifeforms are bred in tanks and on slabs of pain. Various factions—pro- and anti-Massive, as well as neutrals—pursue their diverse goals, utilizing exotic technics, creating nano- and bio-based miracles.
In language as dense as anything by McAuley (Entry 23) or Egan (Entry 38), Ings proved himself their conceptualizing equal, an outrider on humanity’s singularity-bound forced march into the future. These superb novels were the very model of postmodern, trans-cyberpunk fiction: laser-gazed logicbombs, simultaneously appalling and heartening, monitory and embracing. All the lessons and insights and techniques that the first generation of cyberpunks donned like sometimes ill-fitting garments, Ings fully internalized.
Ings culminated this series with
Headlong
, which, by virtue of a single shared character (the scientist Dr. Nouronihar), serves as a prequel to his duology. Yet in effect and tone, it’s vastly different from the prior two novels. More along the lines of M. John Harrison’s
Signs of Life
or Richard Kadrey’s
Kamikaze L’Amour
,
Headlong
is a love story and a tale of detection set much closer to our present time. (The similarity to Harrison’s work, at least, cannot be coincidental, for Ings has even collaborated with Harrison on a story or two.) Consequently, the milieu of
Headlong
, distorted as it might be with new drugs, new politics, and new technology, feels more homey than that in the duology, and so the bruising events hit even more forcefully.
Like most great Chandler- or Hammettesque noir fiction,
Headlong
is narrated stylishly in the first person. The poetically melancholy Chris Yale was an architect assigned to help colonize the Moon. Given brain implants that confer godlike sensory abilities by his employer, the enigmatic Apolloco, Yale and his wife Joanne, along with the other Lunarians, became something other than mortal. However, economic collapse on Earth dragged them back “downwell,” where they were stripped of their new senses. Now, like the doomed starpilots in Delany’s “Aye, and Gomorrah…” the exiled Lunarians form a caste of crippled freaks, subject to a disease called Epistemic Appetite Imbalance.
Bad as his lot is, Yale is about to experience worse. His ailing wife turns up murdered, and his search for the reasons behind her strange death propel the swiftly moving, indeed headlong plot.
Ings’s book is stuffed with classic noir tropes: treacherous friends, helpful enemies, driven cops, sexual confusion, drugs, riddles, assignations with strangers in seedy dives. But Ings infuses each trope with the requisite sf energy, and the union of genres is seamless. Ings manages also to balance the fate of individuals with the fate of his whole world, giving each its proper weight. Here is Ings via Chris Yale musing on the paradoxical search for truth:
The detective looks for a single cause. The detective hunts through the spreading World, dismissing the irrelevant, the ambiguous, the accidental, and searches instead for one Answer.
The World, on the other hand, has no focus. From a single cause, it extemporizes a complex creation, a live and changing mass, an endless spew of things. The World doesn’t care for answers, only questions.
The detective’s truth and the World’s truth are different. Find one, you lose the other.
