Science Fiction: The 101 Best Novels 1985-2010 (54 page)

The MacGuffin is a “secret brand,” a line of clothing known as Gabriel Hounds. Bigend wants to lay his hands on the creator of this anti-product, and sets Hollis and Milgrim to ferreting out the origin of the clothing. But they unfortunately intersect with a semi-deranged ex-military type named Michael Preston Gracie, as well as his mean sidekick Foley, and a simple investigation turns deadly. Add in Hollis’s dirty-tricks boyfriend Garreth, her two ex-bandmates, and a Federal agent named Winnie Tung Whitaker, among others, and Gibson has a recipe for a complicated and farcical thriller.

Mention of the thriller mode raises the issue of Gibson’s altered taste in narrative templates. His earlier books were famous for their noir influences. But this latest trilogy firmly adopts the armature of the simon-pure caper/thriller/espionage novel: a bit of John LeCarre, some Elmore Leonard, some Carl Hiassen. (Gibson’s mordant, droll humor is an aspect of his writing frequently overlooked.) A
Mission Impossible
-style climax here would have seemed totally out of place in his earlier works. And in fact, one suspects that the formula employed in these three books even offers a sly nod to
Charlie’s Angels
: mysterious Mr. Big(end) sends his wily women on various secret and dangerous assignments.

But of course, if with one eye completely closed and the other half-shut, a reader could view
Zero History
as Gibson’s
Charlie’s Angels
script, with eyes fully open the same reader would see Gibson’s evergreen deep tropes and themes utterly intact. His Pynchonesque preoccupation with paranoia and with subterranean movements and factions remains on display, as does his Ballardian fascination with the surfaces of the material world. Just as Ballard posed the existential and koan-like question, “Does the angle between two walls have a happy ending?” so too does Gibson’s intense and minute particularity, concerning such things as Hollis’s luxe hotel room, induce a kind of slippery, almost Phildickian apprehension in the reader, a sense that quotidian reality is a loose warp and weft we continually re-weave to keep from falling through to our doom.

One notable aspect, however, about the new-model William Gibson different from the younger version is a kind of cooling down of affect and tone. This might derive simply from the author’s aging, or represent a deliberately dispassionate strategy in dealing with the confusing postmodern world. The white-hot impatience and drive of his earlier protagonists is missing nowadays. Sex, for instance, is hinted at and spoken of, but never indulged, either on- or off-screen. Moments of high drama are few and far between, and when they do occur—such as the collision of cars carrying Milgrim and Foley—they are rendered in subdued fashion. It’s all very “The Dude Abides.” The working-hard-just-to-maintain stance, always an undercurrent in Gibson’s fiction, has now expanded to be the default option for navigating the world.

In a
Wired
essay titled “My Obsession,” Gibson declares, “We have become a nation, a world, of pickers.” Scavengers, in other words, for the beautiful and odd and valuable and fascinating. Given that this same obsession is precisely what drives Bigend, the ultimate engine of all three books, we might call this latest cycle of Gibson’s novels the “Picker “ series. We all are searching for gems in the manure, says this X-ray-eyed observer.

101

Hannu Rajaniemi

—
The Escape of Arsène
Lupin

Leblanc’s Lupin was the French equivalent of Conan Doyle’s Sherlock Holmes, but with a twist: like le Flambeur, he was a master thief. A
flambeur
is a flamer, a big-time gambler. So this is not Jean’s true name (and neither was Lupin’s), but marks his occupation. For most English-language sf readers, though, this simple key, and many others scattered through the novel like Easter eggs, will be unavailable without repeated trips to Google.

Jean Le Flambeur, trapped in a deadly iterated Prisoner’s Dilemma game meant to teach him the value of cooperation, is sprung in a daring raid by Mieli who wants her female lover Sydän back and needs the thief’s help. Of course that is just one of the motivational threads in this monstrously complex tale. Escaped to Mars and a gigantic walking city, the Oubliette, Lupin is pursued by 20 year old genius detective Isidore Beautrelt, who is entangled with a cryptic and powerful woman, Raymonde. These names and motivations are taken directly from Leblanc’s
Arsène
Lupin Vs. Sherlock Holmes: The Hollow Needle,
where the task of the brilliant boy detective Isidore is to find his way through a maze of tricky clues and false leads. And indeed a Maze plays a key role in
The Quantum Thief
, as does memory and forgetting, hiding and disclosure, false names and faces. It is a confection that keeps you on your toes even as it melt on your tongue, like the chocolates that are one of the Oubliette’s specialties.

Rajaniemi carefully chooses terms from Finnish (the intelligent, saucy spacecraft
Perhonen
is a butterfly, the
alinen
is the substrate of a vast cyberspace, Mother Ilmatar is a goddess from the national Finnish epic, the
Kalevala
), Russian (the enslaved minds or
gogols
are a pun on Nikolai Vasilievich Gogol’s novel
Dead Souls,
while the Sobornost collective mind ruling the inner solar system is a borrowing from Russian precommunist mysticism), plus scads of French. But the teasing search provides its own pleasures, as does the deluge of neologisms and borrowings that decorate the surface of
The Quantum Thief
.

Young Isidore is called in early to investigate the baffling murder of “
Marc
Deveraux.
Third
Noble
incarnation.
Chocolatier.
Married.
One
daughter….
As always in the beginning of a mystery, he feels like a child unwrapping a present. There is something that makes sense here, hiding beneath chocolate and death.” Deveraux’s mind has been stolen and hidden in plain view, and in solving the crime Isidore manages to get his face in the papers, something he really didn’t want in this society based on a technology of gevulots (Hebrew for “borders” or guarantees of privacy and containment). The city is a masque of people in masks, blurry or invisible unless they allow access.

All of this politesse is handled by the exomemory system, which of necessity must be utterly sacrosanct—but, Isidore deduces, has apparently been breached and tampered with. He hopes to join the company of the
tzaddikim
(Hebrew for the righteous elite who represent justice), and has been taken under the wing of a tzaddik, the Gentleman, whose metallic mask hides more than a face. Meanwhile, le Flambeur is drawn into his most audacious, risky heist and saved by the quite literal wings of Mieli, whose augmented body and brain serve the immensely powerful posthuman pellegrini. (Joséphine Pellegrini, as it happens, is a foe and lover of Arsène Lupin. Marcel, Gilbertine and Bathilde are from Proust’s In Search of Lost Time. None of this name-dropping can be accidental, nor anything as simple as whimsical borrowing from the canon of European crime and literary fiction. Watching how all this masking and unmasking works out will be part of the pleasure of the unfolding trilogy.)

The book seethes with action, vivid and inventive decoration, peril and audacious escape:

Mieli shatters the pseudoglass with her wings. The shards billow across the room in slow motion like snow. The metacortex floods her with information. The thief is
here
, the tzaddik
there
, a fleshy human core surrounded by a cloud of combat utility fog…. Then her wings’ waste-heat radiators are blocked too, and she has to drop back to slowtime.

The tzaddik’s foglet-enhanced blow is like colliding with an Oortian comet. It takes her through a glass shelving unit and the wall behind it. The plaster and ceramics feels like wet sand when she passes through it. Her armor screams and a quickstone-enhanced rib actually snaps. Her metacortex muffles the pain; she gets up in a cloud of debris. She is in the bathroom. A monster angel stares at her in the bathroom mirror.

The story can’t be explained, it has to be lived through. We pick up clues as we go, trying out hypotheses, seeing them fail, trying again, just as the thief must weave his way toward an uncertain goal and recovery of his blocked memories, and the detective strives to make sense of events that seem entirely unconnected. In a universe of posthuman demigods, where the solar system was changed catastrophically by the Spike—“Jupiter is gone, eaten by a singularity, gravitational or technological or both, no one knows”—and life is followed by service as a cyborged Quiet, until rebirth is earned, where Time is the very currency, we read as if our future depended on it.

Which is, indeed, how science fiction felt, sometimes, during the boundary years 1985-2010, between the brief lurid explosion of cyberpunk and the deferred future everyone anticipated for the magical year 2000 and after. To repeat the insightful words that close David Pringle’s volume:

…all the best science fiction… deals with reality, not fantasy, and if some of the technological gimmickry... may seem far-fetched, it also serves, as would a set of distorting mirrors, to reflect ourselves and what is around us.

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