Science Fiction: The 101 Best Novels 1985-2010 (51 page)

Cobbling together an alternate, privacy-friendly internet out of simple video-game consoles, Marcus—masquerading as the mysterious and anonymous M1k3y—foments small but cumulatively stinging acts of culture-jamming, becoming a glamorous icon of rage against the machine. He is aided by his pals, including newcomer Ange Carvelli, who becomes his first love. Dodging the authorities, Marcus gets a nerve-racking crash course in the dangers, thrills and responsibilities of dissent, before the whole situation ramps up to a climactic battle of small and righteous versus big and mean-spirited.

Doctorow’s major literary accomplishment, from which all else flows, is certainly his faithful and naturalistic inhabiting of the consciousness of Marcus. In every respect, Doctorow’s portrayal of the lad is utterly believable, from his scared reactions at his initial confinement to his puppy love affair to his fiery resentment at the abuses of authority. This verisimilitude echoes the proverbial Golden Age of Sf (and the Golden Age of an sf author’s intoxication with the form) being thirteen. This is a novel where satirist P. J. O’Rourke’s formulation of “Age and guile beating youth and innocence every time” is given the hearty and convincing boot. Which is not to say that Marcus has a cakewalk to victory. Doctorow is careful to insert realistic setbacks and roadblocks and partial victories into his tale, just as he fairly offers the arguments of the authorities.

Doctorow is of course in love with technology and romanticizes it no end. His paean to computer programming at the close of Chapter 7 is practically a love song, and some of his—or Marcus’s—infodumps approach MEGO conditions. Coding up boring Cobol routines for the insurance industry, say, can instill doubts about the wonderfulness of all programming. But then again, the core ethos of sf revolves around technology, and Marcus’s ingenious hacking makes for some clever reading.

Doctorow’s goals with this novel are twofold: first, of course, to entertain with scintillating speculations and an exciting adventure; second, to propagandize on behalf of freedom, political accountability, communal action and taking control of one’s life. The book reflects this bipartite mandate neatly, in its alternation between action and theorizing, with each half of the equation balancing and justifying the other.

In the end, Doctorow totally fulfills his dream of updating Orwell for the iPod generation.

95

Ekaterina Sedia

Mattie’s meticulous lab work to perfect “the alchemy of stone” recipes that will halt the petrification of the gargoyles show Sedia’s keen and clear understanding of the basic tenets and practices of science, and her desire to put such knowledge at the heart of her fiction. Her novel’s title proves well-chosen when we recall that our own historical alchemists were not primarily supernatural occultists, but sedulous experimenters intent on producing duplicable results and transmissible formulas.

But enfolding this science-fictional nugget at the heart of the book lies the overarching depiction of Mattie, and the burden of meaning engendered by her sheer being. What we have here is the latest extension of the grand old theme of “robot becoming human.” Like Lester del Rey’s Helen O’Loy, Mattie is a robot who learns to love, despite abuse at the hands of her creator and her second-class status in the city’s hierarchy. “She came from Loharri’s laboratory, born of metal and coils and spare parts and boredom; this is where she would find herself in the end, likely enough.” And Sedia’s conceit of a physical key to Mattie’s heartsprings expertly illustrates one of the things sf does so well: concretization of metaphor.

Along with its echoes of Miéville, Sedia’s sweetly melancholy novel—continuously captivating, even though less densely tricked out with backstory and verisimilitudinous details—carries with it a delicious flavor of a tributary stream to sf: European puppet fairy tales, from E. T. A. Hoffmann to Carlo Collodi. In the end, though, its major guiding star might be a writer who does not figure often enough into New Weird hagiography, despite a strong and continuing track record: Tanith Lee. Lee’s particular blend of dark fantasy, romance, weird science and obsessive quests seems to have found a worthy protégé in Sedia.

Finally, as an extra-literary codicil, we should mention that Sedia’s career happens to illustrate another important development that occurred during the period of our survey: the rebirth of the small or independent sf presses. Once, on the nearer borders of the Golden Age, before large publishing houses became interested in science fiction, the core publishers of distinction were all small, fan-based operations such as Arkham House, Gnome and Shasta. Today, as big firms chop their backlists, avoid anything but potential bestsellers, and become leery of transgressive subject matter, indie firms such as Night Shade Books and Tachyon Press, aided by POD and digital technologies, carry the banner of innovative sf high. Nearly Sedia’s entire output has reached readers thanks only to Sean Wallace’s bold Prime Books.

96

Paolo Bacigalupi

And rough indeed is Bacigalupi’s vision for the planet.

The Expansion—our current era—is over, killed by the exhaustion of cheap energy sources. Now humanity lives in the Contraction. Untenable skyscrapers are left to rot. Genetically engineered megodonts turn millwheels that store animal energy in spring batteries. And agronomists struggle with every tool in their biopunk kits to provide enough calories for the globe’s suffering population.

It’s this last domain that occupies centerstage in
The Windup Girl
. Anderson Lake is a
farang
spy resident in Thailand as a factory owner, really seeking to exploit the country’s hidden and acknowledged biological resources. But he has the misfortune to fall for Emiko, the Windup Girl. A slave and member of the underclass of artificial humans, Emiko wants nothing more than her freedom. But she harbors secret potentials that will alter all the personal and social equations on which Lake only imagines he has a firm grasp, leading, at least in Thailand, to something of a Ballardian entropic interlude in the world’s recalibration.

Bacigalupi’s evocation of his future Thailand is dense and sensorily rich. The sweat and stink and perfumes, the heat and humidity, the colors and sounds accrete into a palpable texture. The technological accommodations and cultural shifts of the Contraction are complexly arrayed. (Citizens of this future find that the rare, clunky, coal-fired automobile moves appallingly fast.) This is world-building, not bereft of monitory impulses either, of the finest caliber.

But it’s the dynamic and unpredictable interactions among the cast that are the most entrancing aspect. In his corrupt, mercenary way, Anderson Lake is a soulful artist of the world’s flora. His resonance with outsider Emiko is telling. Emiko’s status is a fresh riff on the perennial “underpeople” trope, best exemplified by Cordwainer Smith’s
Instrumentality
mythos and Richard Calder’s
Dead Girls
sequence (Entry 26), which also revels in a Southeast Asian milieu. Captain Jaidee represents the best of officialdom. But a venal villain almost steals the show: Hock Seng, Lake’s toadying factory manager, who out-Heeps Uriah.

The whole mix evokes the louche tropical ambiance of a Graham Greene or Somerset Maugham tale, and calls for a director of Howard Hawks’s stature to render
The Windup Girl
as another
To Have and Have Not
. Bogart as Lake, Bacall as Emiko and Brennan as Hock Seng? When CGI avatars are perfected, why not?

In a recent review of the anthology
Welcome to the Greenhouse
(an apt alternative title for
The Windup Girl)
, Bacigalupi opined that science fiction

seems to affirm that children will still be children and that even in a devastated future, thrilling antics await. We want that affirmation. We are desperate and grateful for it. And our storytelling methods respond to that basic human hunger. Fiction, by its nature, is optimistic. Even the most apocalyptic of… scenarios… contain people. Fiction is an artificial construct in itself, in that it presumes that there is a story to tell, with its protagonists and antagonists and arc of discovery, or learning, or change. My biggest fear is… that fiction itself is extinct. That in the future there will simply be no tale to tell.