Science Fiction: The 101 Best Novels 1985-2010 (37 page)

The best entry point is
The Cassandra Complex,
which uncannily resembles
Prime Suspect
, the dark, gritty, layered British television police investigation drama made famous by actor Helen Mirren and orginated by screen writer Lynda la Plante, although Stableford had planned the book before the first of that series was broadcast
.
It is easy, though, to visualize forensic specialist Inspector Lisa Friedman, PhD, as an aging Mirren, pressed at age 61 toward retirement by an arrogant younger woman Chief Inspector, and beset by nitwits.

Woken and attacked in her code-locked bedroom by unidentifiable assailants convinced that she is hiding something crucial, denounced by the word TRAITOR daubed on her door, Lisa swiftly learns that her former teacher and lover Morgan Miller is missing. What’s more, his decades-long breeding project with half a million mice has been incinerated. Miller, it proves, has lately made tentative contact with both the Ahasuerus Foundation and their rivals, the Algenists, proponents of a Nietzschean dream of posthuman enhancement.

Is either organization convinced that 40 years of breeding experiments have found a cure for death? Lisa can’t believe Miller would have hidden such an epochal discovery from her. But everything is more tangled than even she can imagine. Unfolding the plots and counterplots provides the action of the plot. What makes the book, and the series, truly interesting and rewarding is the amount of serious thinking about our future that Stableford has embedded in his novels.

68

M. John Harrison

Out in the flat gray void beyond, a huge actinic flare erupted. In an attempt to protect its client hardware, the
White Cat
’s massive array shut down for a nanosecond and a half. By this time, the ordnance had already cooked off at the higher wavelengths. X-rays briefly raised the temperature in local space to 25,000 degrees Kelvin, while the other particles blinded every kind of sensor, and temporary sub-spaces boiled away from the weapons-grade singularity as fractal dimensions. Shockwaves sang through the dynaflow medium like the voices of angels, the way the first music resonated through the viscous substrate of the early universe before proton and electron recombined.

In the epoch of the blog, we now have access to Harrison’s own mordant, rich commentary on his intentions in creating this lapidary work of art. It is not especially surprising that a working draft title was
Empty Space
. What fills the novel to flooding is the paradoxical fullness and emptiness of space: the foamed, invisible dazzle of quantum virtual particles rushing in and out of reality, sustaining our apparent solidity. At the core of the narrative is the Kefahuchi Tract, fecund waste land boundary of the black hole seething in its infinitely dense vacancy at the heart of the galaxy. On its shores, its Beach, are the derelict traces of extinct species drawn to its transfinite, transgressive promise: whole abandoned star-plying planets, great enigmatic machines.

Everywhere in this cosmic absence and emptiness is always
more,
and then, as Harrison insists, always
more after that.

In a parallel tale, his present-day serial killer mathemagician, the obsessed and terror-haunted Michael Kearney, plunged dizzyingly as a child into the fractal endlessness of the sea’s edge, an aperture of insight that finally gives humanity faster than light travel. Ed Chianese, the novel’s third chief player, is client and then tormenter and cuckolder of a mock human New Man named, absurdly, Tig Vesicle. “Chinese Ed” retreats from the intoxicating confusion and fertility of his and Seria’s 25th century interstellar world (pursued by the standover Cray Sisters, a British joke on the once notorious brutal Kray Brothers) into a VR cartoon of
noir
mean streets. Ed the twink, as usual in such picaresques, is being educated; like some zany in a Philip K. Dick Ace Double, he is being programmed as a medium, a precog, a shaman of the Tract.

But in the cauldron of this simmering bouillabaisse of broken people, other fishies mingle, flesh peeling from their hearts, perhaps curing their egregious and haunted lovers. Kearney’s waif wife Anna, in her abiding sexual solicitude, her regaining of her self, is not a character one would find in Stepford Sci-Fi. Nor is the great-limbed Annie, Ed’s simple-minded rickshaw girl saint. It would be easy to read this casting of characters as mean-spirited, even misogynist; that would miss the point utterly, as the Tiptree judges understood. But so, too, would be the temptation to see
Light
as just a recuperation for the 21st century of, say, Alfred Bester’s
The Stars My Destination,
for all that Kearney cries out like synesthetic Gully Foyle, in the moment of his apotheosis:

“Too bright,” he said…. The light roared in on him unconfined: he felt it on his skin, he heard it as a sound…. The vacuum around him smelled of lemons. It looked like roses.

As the Shrander, an awful horse-skull entity in a maroon wool winter coat that haunts Kearney’s blighted trajectory to heaven, explains: “Everywhere you look it unpacks to infinity. What you look for, you find.” It’s like that with Harrison’s marvelous, difficult, rewarding novel, indeed his entire
oeuvre
, which constitutes a reproach to the McSci-Fi racks and a healing proof that the form of science fiction is not exhausted after all. More, and then always more after that.

(And indeed, in a more literal sense, Harrison provided more in 2006, returning to this universe in
Nova Swing
, for which he won the Arthur C. Clarke and Philip K. Dick awards.)

69

Richard Morgan

Almost instantly, Kovacs is plunged into the elaborate and deadly politics of both the local scene and the whole Earth milieu. A large cast of suspects, allies, enemies and innocent bystanders complicates matters. There’s Kristen Ortega, local cop, who just so happens to be the lover of the body Kovacs is wearing, that of a fellow cop uploaded out of his flesh to the penal Stack for various crimes. There are professional assassins Trepp and Kadmin, who are stalking Kovacs. There’s the AI that runs the hotel Kovacs is staying at, the Hendrix, who becomes Kovacs’s partner. There are organlegging doctors; hackers known as Dips who take byte-sized pieces of personality backups in transit; and an assortment of whores, drug-dealers and other unsavory types. Most importantly of all, there’s merciless crime lord Reileen Kawahara, with whom Kovacs has tangled before. When Kovacs begins to step on her toes, the violence amps upward.

Morgan has the essentials of noir fiction nailed down tight. The wisecracks in the face of death, the elaborate similes and metaphors (“less noise than a Catholic orgasm”), the institutional corruption, the way alliances get made despite principles rather than because of principles. The plot is more tangled than six Chandler novels put together, yet Morgan manages to unknot it all at the end. Kovacs is as nasty a hero as any outside of a James Crumley novel, yet we root wholeheartedly for him. And the speculative content is impeccable: a sharp central concept (reminiscent in many ways of the core notion in David Brin’s
Kiln People
), lots of deadly hardware, and plenty of socio-political ramifications.

One possible gripe is with the unlikelihood that five centuries have passed since our day. Morgan picks this distant era because he needs to set up a degenerate elite of ancient powerbrokers. (Bancroft and Kawahara are both three centuries old.) But would such things as the UN, tobacco cigarettes and LED readouts survive unaltered over such a span? What institutions and customs remain to us from Shakespeare’s time? It’s much more likely that the passage of five centuries would result in a future with many fewer familiarities. But once you get over this initial implausibility, the action of the book is freed to zigzag madly from one explosive action scene to another, all of them elaborately constructed and recomplicated. Morgan’s unflagging attention to meticulous detail confirms the old saw about genius being an infinite capacity for taking pains.

Morgan shows us that, given a wealth of talent and ambition, no writer need be afraid to tackle any mode of fiction deemed played-out. All those who suspected that the landmark fusion of noir and sf William Gibson pioneered had been done to death will find their rebuttal here.