Science Fiction: The 101 Best Novels 1985-2010 (36 page)
Read Science Fiction: The 101 Best Novels 1985-2010 Online
Authors: Damien Broderick,Paul di Filippo
66
Karl Schroeder
(2001)
KARL SCHROEDER
holds the distinction of being one of the few writers of sf actually trained in “designing the future,” having recently acquired a Master’s degree in Strategic Foresight and Innovation, that discipline once called “futurism.” But even before passing that academic milestone, he proved speculatively puissant indeed, in the homegrown, un-diploma’d manner of other masters of the genre, offering readers a brilliantly recomplicated future straight out the gate with his debut solo novel
Ventus
, whose Heisenberg-hazy December/January publication date straddled the century’s divide, earning it the lead slot in this volume’s 21st-century selections.
In many ways,
Ventus
is the quintessential novel of “conceptual breakthrough,” a classic mode of sf that can be relied upon to provide many delightful frissons for reader and protagonist alike. A narrative venue, either somewhat mysterious to native dweller and reader alike, or, alternatively, mistakenly deemed fully plumbed and comprehended, is revealed to possess hidden depths, or to exist in undetected relations to a larger sphere. The textbook case is a generation starship carrying nescient and degenerate human cargo. In the instance of the planet Ventus, inhabited by our hero, Jordan Mason, both conditions are true, and the existential explosion causes Jordan—and the novel’s appreciative audience—to experience that mind-widening ontological leap beloved of the sub-genre.
Ventus was terraformed a thousand years in the past by artificially intelligent nanotech entities doing mankind’s bidding. But upon the arrival of the first human settlers, these “Winds” inexplicably went a tad berserk, and began a program of destroying any technological artifacts. The result, after a few centuries of mecha-Luddite pogrom, was to plunge the colonists into ignorance of galactic affairs and into a state of civilization on the level of Earth’s 1700s. Steam power is barely known and tolerated by the Winds, who are thought by Ventusites to be malicious supernatural creatures.
Into this settled society come two interstellar emissaries, operating undercover: Calandria May—much like a Banksian Culture operative (Entry 17)—and Axel Chan, Han Solo-ish rogue. They are on the trail of a construct named Armiger, a semi-detached extension, an avatar, of a rogue AI dubbed “3340.” Although the hostile 3340 has been put down elsewhere, its scattered seeds such as Armiger still threaten our species.
Jordan Mason is their lead to Armiger’s whereabouts, thanks to a nanotech probe from Armiger that he bears in his sensorium. But Calandria does not reckon with the fact that the humans on Ventus have their own dynastic schemes, and that some of them might actually be able to communicate with the powerful, enigmatic Winds. When Calandria’s starship is destroyed and she and Axel are stranded, the fun is just beginning. Especially when Armiger joins forces with dynamic Queen Galas, one of the few natives who understands the Winds for what they truly are.
Schroeder has a stylistic and thematic romp across his blood and thunder adventure, by operating on two levels: those of fantasy/myth and of Hard Sf. While the whole scenario is impeccably buttressed by cutting-edge science, much of the action comes across like fantasy. The untenanted perfect ancient mansions where machine servitors await are straight out of the uncanny fairytales by Grimm or Andersen. Armiger’s corpse-like condition and his stumbling escape through nighted forests reads like the plight of a zombie or Golem. There are duels and castles galore. As Calandria observes, something about Ventus inspires ancient feelings of the supernatural.
Likewise, when Axel tries telling Jordan about the war against 3340, Jordan replies that it sounds like pure legend. This flip-flop illusion—vase or profiles?—is the perfect sf trope of cultural relativity. Schroeder is, to some degree, heir to John Campbell’s worldview and school of storytelling. One can envision this book as being written by a ramped-up, hip, 21st-century H. Beam Piper or Randall Garrett. And indeed, one of Campbell’s late-period discoveries, Vernor Vinge, attempted something similar to this in his
Tatja Grimm’s World
. Schroeder even indulges in a little of the ironic, winking juxtaposition of mythic and scientific that Roger Zelazny employed in
Lord of Light
and elsewhere.
One of Schroeder’s most salient and intriguing riffs concerns the concept of “thalience.” This is the notion of networked intelligence at the fine-grained levels, attainable through a nanotech insemination of computing power. Here’s how Jordan comes to conceive of this revelation, yet another conceptual breakthrough:
Each and every object in the world knew its name; all, that is, save for the humans who lived here, because they had no dusting of mecha within them…. Jordan had found by experimenting that when you changed an object into something else, its mecha noticed and altered its name to suit. That had got him wondering: could you command an object to change its name; and if you changed an object’s name, would the object itself change to match it?
Instantly, the savvy reader will spot the forerunner of both Rudy Rucker’s concept of an intelligent creation in his
Postsingular
(Entry 91), and also a hint of Wil McCarthy’s notion of programmable matter in his non-fiction book
Hacking Matter
, and associated novels (Entry 54). Finally, this is yet another instance of Schroeder messing with an overlay of faux magic, since knowing an object’s “true name” and using it to command (see Vinge’s seminal novella of that title) has long been a wizardly skill.
Schroeder would later issue a satisfying prequel to
Ventus
,
Lady of Mazes
. And his
Virga
sequence is a glorious, masterful exploration of the “steel beach” theme of odd environments. But in
Ventus
, he melded perfectly the novel of fantastical, legend-breeding derring-do with the novel of postsingular humanity, producing a book that could be read and enjoyed on multiple scales, from the atomic to the cosmic.
67
Brian Stableford
(2001)
[Emortality sequence]
AT 17, IN 1965
, Brian Stableford published his first (co-authored) story in
Science Fantasy,
and his first published novel followed at 21. By mid-2011, he had published 201 books in a profusion of formats and genres, unified by his interest in the interactions between science and narratives of the fantastic. After a degree in biology, he gained a PhD in the sociology of sf, and his long writing career has constantly pushed against the boundaries of commercial science fiction and fantasy. As a result, he became marginalized in a market where reliable commodities tend to bring far greater profits to publishers. In a
recent interview
, he was justifiably caustic:
Stories require things to go wrong in order that they can be put right again, thus providing a basic pattern of challenge and climax and a satisfactory sense of closure. Many writers do, of course, find the prospect of progress innately threatening—it’s difficult for anyone over 40 to adopt any attitude to the future except terror or denial—but I’m more concerned with the way that the very nature of fiction favors story-arcs that afford a tacit privilege to the status quo, representing all innovation as evil simply because that’s the easy way to make a story gripping. Morally responsible futuristic fiction—which, of course, excludes all cinema and TV “sci-fi” and most printed sf—needs to find a way of steering around that problem…. Hopefully, there will always be heroic writers willing to work on that frontier, but as a marketing category, sf will continue to go exactly where it’s been headed since the term entered common usage: nowhere.
[1]
One of Stableford’s major achievements was his ambitious Emortality sequence of six novels, published out of order and not a commercial success, the last volume making it into print only due to its championing by a US editor.
[2]
While the first books released were
Inherit the Earth
(1998), set in the 22nd century,
Architects of Emortality
(1999), set in the late 25th century, and
Fountains of Youth
(2000), in the 31st century, the sequence begins chronologically with
The Cassandra Complex
(2001)
,
anchored far more near-term in 2041.
Dark Ararat
(2002) follows an interstellar Ark into the 29th century, and
The Omega Expedition
(2002) extends beyond the year 3000. All six are developed from a large-scale effort at futurism published in 1985 by Stableford and fellow British writer David Langford,
The Third Millennium: A History of the World 2000-3000 A.D
.. They comprise an attempt at a genuinely searching and non-trivial futurist exploration of this millennium in which the quest for extended lifespan will be sought and finally achieved. The goal is
emortality
—a term coined in
The Conquest of Death
(1979) by biology professor Alvin Silverstein. Unlike
immortality,
which seems to promise eternal life through invulnerability or supernatural survival, emortality more reasonably offers protracted healthy youth, while remaining prey to super-diseases, lethal accidents, and ultimately the extinction of the entire universe.
Each of these novels is independent, although several characters reappear, inevitably given the very long lives enjoyed by those preserved by cryonic biostasis or true emortality treatments. But the saga they weave is one immense fabric. Information and references to offstage events and characters are seeded throughout, just as realist novels are replete with unfootnoted references to historical commonplaces. The alert reader slowly accretes knowledge of this future, ranging from the engineered global stockmarket
bouleversement
or Great Panic of 2025, that allowed a few megacorps to take over the world, the rise of “hobbyist terrorism” after ’22 (the book was a hair too early for 9/11), the rise and fall of post-backlash feminist Real Women, the massive dieback and sterilization of humankind in vast plagues, through to the final conquest of death. Names recur: Adam Zimmerman, founder of the Ahasuerus Foundation (named for the fabled, deathless “Wandering Jew”), preserved for a thousand years to witness the outcome of his great plan, Mortimer Gray, historian of death, Madoc Tamlin, Michael Lowenthal.
Deliberately, the novels comprise two trilogies, one of thoughtful classic sf adventure, the second following a kind of comic, playful path into an increasingly strange future where the traditional tropes of fiction simply break down because the old stakes (youth versus aging and death) no longer retain their ancient poignant value. It’s a mark of this comic aspect that important figures in the policier The Architects of Emortality are Charlotte Holmes and her boss Hal Watson, and the beautiful, clever, and insufferable Oscar Wilde, a geneticist who designs flowers (and naturally wears a green carnation).
