Science Fiction: The 101 Best Novels 1985-2010 (35 page)

Nothing much in the novel is as it seems. Certain mystical or dreamlike episodes might be delusions fostered by grief, thwarted pain and ambition and love, and perhaps concealed machineries. It is possible that Nasir himself did not know ahead of time where the narrative would come to rest, his several alternative superposed trajectories careening together to create a kind of mutually constructing and self-deconstructing curve drawn sparkling inside the Cloud Chamber of Unknowing. He comes close to making it work successfully because he is ready to put his character through comic pain:

...he had reasoned that out there somewhere must be a girl beautiful and young and educated that would love him, blonde with silken skin who unclothed was all catlike languor and fire…. They sat in a quaint cafe and talked about Emily Brontë and Shakespeare, Doyne Farmer and God, complexity and love and the structure of the universe, their eyes locked together, until he could feel the earth turning about him, the blood rushing in his veins, time bringing the sun to light the flowers in the window boxes, the rain to water them....

But where to go? A singles bar? The idea both repelled and tantalized him. He holding a drink and sliding through air-conditioned dimness toward a half-seen hairdo in the smoke, which would probably conceal a drunk dental hygienist or secretary who, smelling his fear and uncertainty, would sneer at him in her stupid vocabulary and bad grammar. He didn’t know where any singles bars were, and anyway even if he managed to pick someone up he would have nowhere to take her but his smelly, disheveled apartment.

The fatuous but heartbreakingly elegiac, the callously cruel but self-laceratingly candid—none of this is remotely new to the mainstream, but it remains rare in an sf novel. What you might not find in most “literary” novels is Nasir’s easy confidence with the rhetoric of scientists in full flight, notably in a concerted scene with a Francis Crick-like genetics Nobelist, Dr. Raymond Hall:

“Do you think scientists are immune from the lure, the seduction of higher meaning?...Science began as a religious exercise: it was believed that the study of nature would reveal the hand of the Creator and hints as to His divine plan. It was never suspected that no sign of a God would ever be found at all, that deep, rigorous study of nature over hundreds of years using incredibly sophisticated techniques would turn up not one iota of evidence—not one, anywhere—that God exists.... This isn’t some whim or premature conclusion or philosophical sleight of hand. It is the result of five hundred years of concentrated study by thousands of the best minds of every generation... all of which has been gone over again and again by people of all backgrounds and biases, but most of whom, the vast majority of whom would much rather have concluded that there was a higher meaning. If there had been one there to find, we would have found it, we would have fallen on our knees before it, we to whom meaning, pattern is everything.”

What counts here is Nasir’s scrupulous annotation of a worldview rarely seen in the mainstream, yet often just assumed as background in sf. When the epiphanies tumble down, as they inevitably do (most blatantly, in the exact middle of the book), their sweetness is only slightly cloying, since we know in our bones that awful reverses lurk deep within such narratives of redemption and illumination. The question is, which redemption will be unmasked as villainous error: the probing scientific meliorism with its inevitable thalidomide-like risks, or the Zennish post-illusioned elevation of the ordinary? Nasir’s answers are thought-provoking. One might have expected this fine novel to be a strong runner for the Philip K. Dick award (as was Nasir’s earlier novel,
Tower of Dreams
in 1999), or the Campbell Memorial award. It was not even a nominee.

64

Alastair Reynolds

Into this landscape, Reynolds inserts one professional soldier-assassin, Ana Khouri; one merciless starship commander, Ilia Volyova (also female, the de facto trendy gender nowadays for tough spacers); and one rogue scion of a famous family, Dan Sylveste, whose Shrouder-altered mind seems to hold secrets inaccessible even to himself.

Reynolds uses a three-track narrative to acquaint us with these main characters and a slew of supporting actors.

In the first segment, we watch Sylveste at work on the planet Resurgam, conducting an archaeological dig. Unsuspected by him, his skills and knowledge are desired by someone else. That person is Volyova, who is battling a plague onboard her ship, the
Nostalgia for Infinity.
Meanwhile, Khouri is resident in the vast urban space known as Chasm City. She is tasked with infiltrating the
Nostalgia for Infinity
as it seeks Sylveste, and then eventually killing the man.

The narrative tracks fuse to two, as Khouri is insinuated aboard Volyova’s ship, and then to one, as the
Nostalgia
picks up Sylveste as well. The denouement on an artificial planet circling a neutron star certainly rewards the careful buildup, which has been peppered already with sub-climaxes galore.

Reynolds proffers many gifts to his readers, among which are primarily speculative fertility and descriptive clarity. Here for example is his vivid explanation behind the explosion of an ancient weapon:

Spacetime had been punctured, penetrated at the quantum level, releasing a minuscule glint of Planck energy. Minuscule, that is, compared with the normally seething energies in the spacetime foam. But beyond normal confinement that negligible release had been like a nuke going off next door. Spacetime had instantly healed itself, knitting back together before any real damage was done, leaving only a few surplus monopoles, low-mass quantum black holes and other anomalous/exotic particles as evidence that anything untoward had happened.

Employing such no-nonsense yet evocative prose, Reynolds still manages to produce some real poetry. And his choice to eschew FTL travel or FTL communications lends a deeper majesty to his slow empires.

Reynolds, born in 1966, represents a generational shift in the writing of space opera. Raised on
Star Wars
, Reynolds and his cohort take the bones of the mature subgenre for granted, relying automatically on the painfully accumulated encrusted tropes of their forebears as mere scaffolding onto which they can graft twenty-first-century speculative concepts, postmodern sensibilities and multicultural characters, and some paradoxically retro blood and thunder. Their sense of wonder derives not from the mere skeletal notion of empires stretching across light-years and the tech that supports them, but from the flesh of daily living that enfolds the milieu.

Reynolds’s unerring ability to please a new generation of readers—and attract veteran fans as well—his reliability in crafting lived-in and challenging galactic adventures would be rewarded in 2009, when he inked a contract garnering him one million UK pounds for his next ten books. Doc Smith, pioneer of the form, was undoubtedly smiling down incredulously from his heavenly coign of vantage.

65

Adam Roberts

Because what arrives unheralded and disruptively must always be compared with what has gone before, despite any injustices to all parties involved, consider some of the sensations of reading Roberts’s first novel, all unawares.

It’s like reading Crowley’s “In Blue” as rewritten by Barry Malzberg. It’s like reading Ursula Le Guin’s
The Dispossessed
as rewritten by Norman Spinrad, or her
The Left Hand of Darkness
reworked by Ken McLeod (Entry 53). Or Robinson’s
Red Mars
(Entry 29) altered by Mark Geston. Or Eric Frank Russell’s
Wasp
redone by Stanislaw Lem. Yes, that strange and enjoyable.

A sublight colonization party—twelve ships tethered to a tame comet—is headed toward a distant world that seems from past probes to be capable of supporting life. One ship, the
Senaar
, is crewed and captained by adherents of a rigidly hierarchical political system. Another ship, the
Als
, contains anarchists. Our narrators, in alternating sections, are Barlei, a general, and Petja, a typical libertarian type. The conflicts that arise between these men and their followers en route, before they enter hibernation for three decades of travel, are merely a sampling of the trouble that will follow on Salt, their new world. Struggling with the inhospitable environment, the colonists nonetheless are fairly well off and secure enough to have time for mischief. Misunderstandings between the settlements named after the founding ships soon blossom into internecine war.

Roberts portrays both his dominating landscape—a world of chlorine-tainted seas and harsh radiation, yet weirdly beautiful—and his people astonishingly well. Lots of the uneasy laughter in this tragicomic book stems from the disjunction between viewpoints. Seeing the same events through the radically different minds of Barlei and Petja, the reader is astonished that any two humans could be so incongruent. Or perhaps the moral we are meant to take away is that any agreement at all between any two humans is the real miracle.

But the core event that limns the full extent of these clashing worldviews is the arrival of a Sennarian diplomat, Rhoda Titus, in Als. Petja’s take on her mission, and her reaction to his indifference, segues from hilariously comic to shatteringly tragic, once battle intervenes. And it’s a surprise, yet somehow right, that Rhoda gets the final words in the book.

Roberts’s real genius is in making neither Barlei nor Petja the absolute villain. Both are obtuse at time, both perceptive. Each honors his own values, and simply cannot fathom an alternate paradigm. Perhaps Barlei is a bit more self-serving and deceitful, but Petja’s frigid honesty and lack of connection serves him and his community just as ill as Barlei’s glory-seeking sternness. And neither man “wins” in the end.

Salt
stands today as a marker laid down in a gamble by a neophyte author: can a career be made under present marketplace circumstances without pandering to fans, repeating oneself, or dumbing down sf’s essential mode of estrangement? No wise reader should be willing to bet against the seasoned veteran Roberts has become, in light of his superlative record.