Blue Remembered Earth

Blue Remembered Earth
Alastair Reynolds

There is a track on Kenny Garrett’s 2002 release Happy People that is a mix of three placid Asian folk songs. For almost seven minutes, Garrett plays with an uncharacteristic calm, before finally letting loose a sudden blast of harmonically adventurous butt kicking. “That right there,” said a friend and band mate, “was when he just couldn’t restrain himself any more.” I thought of that about halfway through Blue Remembered Earth. Considering the gothic insanity of the Inhibitor books or the steampunk noir of Terminal World, Blue Remembered Earth is strikingly normal. The characters are regular people, any post-human modifications are understated, nobody is hooked up to a calliope/life support system, no pigs have been uplifted. I was not disappointed by any means, but I was definitely taken aback by the recognizable near future, accustomed as I am to Ultras or Chasm City denizens. Then, suddenly, some of the characters find themselves in an anarchic Martian arena, where machines are set loose in a hyper-Darwinian struggle in hopes that some sort of useful technology will evolve itself midst the mechanized terror. “This is more like it,” thought I, but there is much to cover both before and after this flash of Reynoldsian horror.

I’m diving into this book both with an eye on wrapping up my Books of 2012 list and as a part of the 2013 Science Fiction Experience. Being very serious about my own pomposity, I want to look at Reynolds’ book in terms of what it says about the SF Experience right now; in particular how it fits into some noticeable Hard SF trends and how it answers some recent laments of SF losing its way, becoming irrelevant and/or boring, and failing in its alleged duty to address modern day problems and inspire answers to them. In terms of an actual “book review,” it should come as no surprise to frequent readers that I’m a big fan of Blue Remembered Earth; nobody will be more shocked than I if I ever give Alastair Reynolds a negative review. (Not just because he once retweeted a post, then answered my question of which Steely Dan album he wants to be. There are literary reasons as well.) (And for the record, it was Royal Scam.)

Blue centers itself on the Akinya family, an Africa-based business empire. Grandmother Eunice, whose intrepid genius built said empire, has just died. At the funeral that opens the book, control of the family passes to Hector and Lucas. “The cousins” enlist the introverted elephant researcher Geoffrey to clear up some lingering questions on the Moon. He in turn pulls his bohemian sister Sunday in, after these small questions open up into much larger issues. The balance of the story follows the two as they unravel a mystery left behind by Eunice, while also tracing the family relationships inside the complicated Akinya clan. Along the way, Reynolds takes us on a tour of the Solar System, all while poking around questions of law and surveillance, AI, the environment, how we might spread out away from Earth, and proper uses of machines and biology.

I think it is no coincidence that three of the highest profile Hard SF books of 2012 (this, Existence, and 2312) all confront the same questions of how we will survive the coming years of (inevitable?) turmoil and spread into the Solar System. Each takes different paths to different answers, but all seem to be direct responses to recent conversation inside the field. Between the Mundane SF movement, Neal Stephenson’s call for more optimistic, proactive SF, Paul Kincaid’s lament on SF exhaustion, and other smaller scale conversations, The People seem to want books that pull back from Galactic War and address our fears right now, but not in a gloomy, dystopian way.

Reynolds starts with the now common proposition that our generation will fail completely to address climate change, basing his Earth on the possible consequences. Much like Kim Stanley Robinson, he posits massive change and upheaval, tempered with scientific ingenuity and our inate abilities to make do. We have made our way into space, as far as the Moon and Mars. The Earth has settled into a kind of omnipresent world government that uses constant surveillance to prevent crime and violence. Parts of the Moon and Mars, by contrast, remain free of prying eyes, letting Reynolds create his first dichotomy. Another is provided by the Panspermian movement, which advocates humanity’s duty to spread biological life throughout the universe; they are in ideological conflict with the establish government policies that favor a more mechanized, uploaded approach. Here too Reynolds toys with burning questions in contemporary SF. From the fundamentals of the world building through the details of characterization and plot, Reynolds confidently engages with critiques and issues in the genre.

I’ve taken a general survey of reactions to Blue, most of which can be immediately categorized into those familiar with Reynolds and those giving him a first try. Those of us that have read through most of his novels know that we’re in for a dense, idea-rich book that moves at a stately pace. Readers coming in from lighter stuff may well bounce off of it all. Blue is certainly a challenging book, one that demands thought and patience from the reader. All the more so as Reynolds brings up plenty of questions, but doesn’t necessarily propose answers. Do we think that the benevolent, but somewhat stagnant, Surveilled World is better than a more dangerous alternative? Should we be looking to send our meaty selves to the Oort cloud, or uploaded personalities? What are our duties to ourselves and our families? The plot requires no answers, so we are allowed to decide for ourselves.

By now it is probably clear that I think Blue Remembered Earth is one of the vital books from 2012. It gives as good a summary of SF today as anything I’ve read. Not an easy read, but well worth the effort.

Rating: The author may not like this, but I have to compare him to the German National Team. Methodical, precise, and relentless, somehow these books always end up winners.

The Fractal Prince

The Fractal Prince
Hannu Rajaniemi

I bowled through The Fractal Prince in my last, mad bid to read the best of 2012, getting a brand new library copy of the book just as the year expired. It is yet another stop on the 2012 Hard SF Revival Grand Tour, proving conclusively that Analog readers need not yet weep for the death of SF’s core subgenre. Parenthetically, I thought that my Best of 2012 list would be utterly mainstream and unoriginal. Instead, I find that it is overwhelmingly Hard SF and not at all like others I am reading. I’m not sure why this surprised me. Digression aside, The Fractal Prince presents several challenges to the reviewer, which forces this post further into more appropriate territory for The 2013 Science Fiction Experience. Why? Because Rajaniemi’s novel clearly illustrates the change that has overtaken SF in the last decade or two.

First, the book and its challenges. The largest is basic comprehension. Between string theory, quantum physics, and Rajaniemi’s oft cryptic narrative style, I did not understand large patches of the book. This is generally not a problem, since I don’t really need to know what a “qdot” is, the ins and outs of space battles, or why exactly something works the way it does, but I confess to scratching my head a bit at the end, double checking myself to make sure I knew what had just happened. A certain type of reader is going to go bonkers at this. As a reviewer, the swirling question marks make it difficult to pen a coherent and knowledgeable response, since I spend as much time going over basic plot points in my head for comprehension as I usually do with analysis.

That said, the story sweeps along, pushing all willing readers before it with a certain inexorability. Rajaniemi has utmost confidence in himself, to tell a story beguiling enough that the reader will forget any confusion, and in his audience, to have brains enough to keep up. Uncompromising it may be, but The Fractal Prince shows the utmost respect for the reader. Rajaniemi of course has no control of the bewildered audience, its patience, or its interest, but his self-confidence is well placed. The book is an elegantly crafted mystery of stunning prose and imagination, one that threatens the stone walls of genre and the glass ceilings of science fiction convention. Yes, he’s telling a caper, but he tells it with style, with math, and, in this case, with The Arabian Nights tangled up in quantum physics. The influence of a merry band of Scottish authors is clear, but Rajaniemi weaves those same threads of mayhem visible in Banks or Stross in a way all his own.

Stepping back for a broader look, one thing stands out more than the craft and intelligence: The Fractal Prince shows possibly the clearest demarcation yet between traditional science fiction and the contemporary scene. Rajaniemi hasn’t upended the genre with this book, but a reader looking back can see just how far science fiction has moved in the last decade or two. The sensation is rather like hiking with one’s head down for a couple of hours, then looking up and realizing that the tree line is some ways back and the scenery is completely different. He is standing on the shoulders of giants to accomplish this of course, giants of the New Wave, the cyberpunk movement, the Singularity crew, and others, but the book comes very close to burning the bridge leading back to traditional SF.

What makes this science fiction experience so different? More than anything, this is a book of the Information Age. I have written before how science has expanded, adding the entirety of the IT field. “Scientists” now include programmers, network admins, project managers, and the like. Readers that once were engineers and physicists are now also computer gamers and app creators. Hard SF can still be about gargantuan engineering projects in deep space, but more often it is about information. Further, Vernor Vinge and his Singularity posse have made post-scarcity a real concept to be wrestled with. When everybody has stuff and things, what matters are intangibles: art, ideas, secrets. There are still stories about pragmatic, Anglo-Saxon engineers solving problems, but they read like relics. Cyberpunk led the way, but its doubtful that William Gibson and crew had any idea that network security would form the basis of whole sagas, that no book written past the mid 1990s could be taken seriously without some extrapolation of the internet.

All of this is clearly visible in the story. We rejoin Jean, our erstwhile protagonist, in the heart of a giant, outer space construct; but it is not a space station or battle fortress, it is a building-sized router. Jean is on a quest, so to speak, and while he isn’t hacking in the traditional sense of the word, he is searching for information, for bits of code. In The Quantum Thief, Jean was stealing time, another intangible that retains value in a post-scarcity world. Rajaniemi is slowly outlining the contours of the major conflict in his universe, a conflict immediately recognizable to readers of post-Vinge SF. The Sobornosts, when not fighting each other, are in a slow burning war with zoku over, in a word, death. Not to the death, but about death. The Sobornosts want to digitize everything, while the zoku prefer to retain some attachment to the wet, squishy parts of us. Everything is utterly post-human of course, but this is a debate we see in Stross, Schroeder, and others. Beneath the jaunty caper, the lyrical prose, and the string theory, we are watching the debates of the information age play themselves out, debates that were well-nigh unimaginable during the Golden Age.

By now I suppose it is painfully obvious that I am not going to corral this into a simple plot summary and recommendation. A reduction into an arbitrary number of stars isn’t going to help anyone anyway, since individual mileage will vary here more than most novels. I would never in a thousand years give this to someone who asked me, “So what’s this science fiction thing you talk about? Where should I start?” I wouldn’t give it to the Baen Books crowd either. The people who are going to love this book are people steeped in science fiction, willing to make the effort to understand something complicated and challenging, and hunting for new paths for the genre to take. The rewards are there for those who go looking.

Rating: Roy Hodgson! Let’s do a little switcheroo here. “Woy” went to Scandinavia from England and gained renown for changing how they play football. He won numerous club titles in Sweden and pushed Finland to their highest world ranking ever. Is there similar glory in Rajaniemi’s future?

Ashes of Candesce

Ashes of Candesce
Karl Schroeder

DownBeat, the leading jazz publication, divides its annual Critics Poll into two: the Best (whatever) and the Rising Star (whatever). The latter used to be called Talent Deserving Wider Recognition (TDWR), which I prefer as a name, even if it doesn’t roll off the tongue. This split allows the critics to vote someone venerable like Sonny Rollins or Dave Brubeck as the best, even though they are ancient, have lost a step or two, and are no longer on the cutting edge; while simultaneously recognizing the younger faces who are really driving the music forward today. I wish the Hugos would do the same, because in a year when SF titans are dropping major works, someone like Karl Schoeder is going to be shut out. Not that I want to take anything away from a masterwork like 2312, but I’d love to see some of the lesser known writers get more attention with a TDWR award.

Candesce is the fifth and (for now) final book of Schroeder’s Virga cycle. Virga is one of the most impressive Hard SF series of the last decade, though I imagine the author didn’t expect it to go in the direction that it did. The first book introduces Virga, a giant, atmosphere-filled balloon with a technology-damping fusion sun called Candesce in the middle. Other, smaller, artificial suns dot the inside of Virga, each with its compliment of cities, farms, and factories. Virga itself is weightless, so the cities are spun up for gravity. This paired with a sun that prevents any transistor or digital technology creates an evocative landscape of wooden city wheels, rotating patches of forest and farm, bubbles of water for lakes, and people moving at all angles via airship, ropeway, air cycle, or personal wing and fin sets. The series started out as adventure yarns in the style of classic nautical tales, with the first three books forming a trilogy of sorts. (The stories are more or less sequential, but each book follows a different character.) The fourth book takes off in a whole new direction, with mostly new characters and places, while Candesce brings everything together.

It also brings the philosophy, which is both where the fun begins and where Candesce fulfills its promise. Intentional or not, Schroeder jumps head first into one of SF’s biggest debates with this book. The Virga series could have stayed with zero-g swashbuckling, wooden ships, iron men, and what not, but for whatever reason, Schroeder decided that he wants more. I have no idea if the last books were conceived as such, but they form an extended counter to the ideas espoused by Greg Egan, Charlie Stross, and others who suggest that humanity’s future lies in some variety of uploaded, software state. Schroeder is unconvinced by this, and has said so in interviews, arguing that our consciousness is too tied up with our wetware to allow simple digitization.

This debate plays out viscerally in Candesce, as the analog Virgans resist incursions from the digitized Artificial Nature, who want to extinguish whatever it is in Candesce that shuts down high technology and upload everyone. Virga is packed full of fractious city-states, so factions and agendas abound. Likewise, numerous groups living outside of Virga ensure that this is not a straightforward, two-sided battle. Further muddying the waters is the simple fact that the Virgans are not idiots. They realize what technology can bring and aren’t sold on their Industrial Revolution era lives. It isn’t clear until near the end just which groups will end up allied with each, or indeed which side is “right.” Most impressive to me is Schroeder’s overall stance. Virga would be easy to idealize, to protect with a paternal attitude of saving the innocents from the evils of The Future. Schroeder is no such romantic however; he is fully on board making lives better through science. In one of the most vivid scenes in the book, a character is stunned by the intensity and happiness of the short, biological lives, only to witness just how messy and tragic those lives can be.

While the meta-dialog shines brightest for me, the book is hardly a philosophy text. Virga is an amazing creation and a world I would love to visit. I doubt it would be a good live action movie, but I would love to see someone like Miyazaki animate Rush or Spyre. And while the pace starts off much slower than the other books, everything blows up for the last hundred pages of frenetic action. Schroeder has lost none of his kinetic prose; this may be his most balanced book for brains and explosions.

The characters are also engaging and likable, though my own favorite is relegated a bit to the background. To be fair, the pirate engineer and renegade sun-lighter Hayden Griffin probably sounds more interesting than he actually is, so I have to trust that the author keeps him in the background for a reason. The newer characters are also interesting, especially those coming from outside Virga, but in the end it is Venera Fanning who rules over the entirety of the series. Nobody else can even approach her mad, regal bearing. I don’t envy Venera’s husband, but she deserves immortality.

Candesce was released early in 2012, so it may be natural that it is less talked about now, especially considering the blockbusters that came out over the summer. Schroeder has a lot on his plate besides writing; I wonder if the book would be more well-known if he spent some of that time blogging, tweeting, going to cons, and generally engaging more with fandom. On the other hand, consulting for the Canadian military has to pay much better, so in his place, I would likely do the same. My only regret is that Candesce will be on my Best of 2012 list, while I fear it will be left off many others, not because my tastes are weird (though they probably are), but because people were blinded by higher profile releases and missed this one. (Maybe I’m totally off base and Candesce is a really big deal. I feel like I’m going to say all of this and then have fifty people tell me that Schroeder is everywhere and what internet have I been looking at anyway?)

Because of that, I want the Hugos to award Ashes of Candesce this year’s Talent Deserving Wider Recognition for novels. More people need to be reading about Virga, talking about Schroeder’s ideas, and possibly building a zero-g theme park so I too can flit about the city wheels.

Rating: Hoffenheim. Quietly putting together quality seasons, but out of the spotlight because, well, they’re Hoffenheim.

Bowl of Heaven

Bowl of Heaven
Greg Benford and Larry Niven

For a certain kind of SF fan, news of a Benford – Niven collaboration is a bladder loosening event. I kept control of myself when I first heard about it, but just barely. Larry Niven was my first favorite SF author and while I am occasionally hard on Greg Benford’s books, his best are very good. My life got even more fabulous when I found out that their book would be an update on the Big Mysterious Object trope that I dearly love. “Let’s take Ringworld,” they must have said, “make so it isn’t broken, so the creators are still in control of things, and, just for the hilarity of it all, send it cruising out in the stars, like a Dyson Sphere sized Winnebago.” This was in many ways the SF event of the year for me.

The collaboration is doubly intriguing because their writing styles are so different. Niven’s stories tend toward fast moving, brightly optimistic tales, with that kind of “science will make it all ok” attitude characteristic of an earlier age. Benford, in contrast, adopts a darker tone, not necessarily pessimistic, but almost seeming resigned to our final irrelevance, what with the impending heat death of the universe and all. Something I read or heard leads me to believe that Benford did most of the writing, with Niven taking the role of Idea Man. I think Benford himself explained this in a Google roundtable, saying that much of the book worked itself out on walks the two would take together, though I would have to track down said roundtable to confirm this. The book itself bears this out, with zany big ideas reminiscent of Known Space, but restrained prose.

I suspect that most people who pick up this book do so knowing exactly what is coming. With an all-star collaboration like this, there is no reason to expect that either author will suddenly strike out in a new direction. Sure enough, this is unapologetic Hard SF. It’s fairly safe to say that fans of the subgenre will love Bowl, while those who demand lyricism, depth, and grand insight will roll their eyes. My own stance should be clear to long time readers, but for any new faces, I will confess to treasuring whiz-bang engineering and plausible, inventive aliens over all else. This is, after all, why I read the genre. Anyway, not everyone is into this kind of thing I guess, but fans of stupendous and mysterious Stuff in Space should begin reading immediately.

Details about The Bowl are pretty easy to come by, but a quick summary follows just in case. Take a Ringworld, attach half of a Dyson Sphere, then dedicate most of the sphere part to a propulsion mechanism that turns the solar wind into a jet engine shooting out the base of the bowl. Put some aliens in charge of the thing and point it towards a yet unknown destination. Unlike most Big Mysterious Objects, this one is neither abandoned nor mysterious, not at least to the aliens in charge. The humans that stumble on it have no idea of course, but The Bowl contains a functioning civilization, not just a bunch of relics and ruins. Further, the aliens are the quality one would expect from Benford and Niven, with a well developed culture that is both comprehensible to us, but utterly different. No people in rubber masks here.

I must reserve judgment about plot, characters, themes, and other prosaic stuff, because Bowl is only half of the story. Part Two will come out in 2013, so for now we are left without any sort of conclusion. Most of the first 400 pages of this epic are concerned with finding The Bowl, landing on it, then having some adventures and capers. Everything points to major developments later on, but for now we have to make do with survival, some chases, and a whole lot of Big Science. I will say that a couple of things surprised me a bit. I didn’t expect as much Boy Scout wilderness survival. I also didn’t expect paragraphs about “leadership” and “team building” to randomly pop up. Earlier Benford spent a lot of time lashing out at management types, and I have never seen Niven pull out business-speak. Neither of these are bad things necessarily, just not what I expected.

The rest goes pretty much according to plan. I am not yet convinced that the characters will learn crucial life lessons or “grow.” Everyone is a rational, pragmatic science type, which is nice for anyone sick of people having emotions in SF. The Bowl, and a couple of aliens to a lesser extent, thoroughly overshadow the mere humans wandering around in it. James S.A. Corey gets credit for writing throwback SF in The Expanse, but Bowl is ten pounds of throwback in a five pound bag. It doesn’t get any more old school than Benford and Niven.

This ultimately is what will make or break the book. Nothing in this review will change an educated SF reader’s mind; the only way I could influence anyone is if the book were a flaming pile of crap and I said so publicly. (It’s not, so I won’t.) Beyond that, Hard SF people know what they want, and they probably want Benford and Niven writing a Big Mysterious Object story together. Other kinds of readers will skip it and read Honor Harrington, or urban fantasy, or whatever it is they prefer. I know what camp I am in, so nobody will ever convince me that half a Dyson Sphere crewed by giant, sentient birds and hurtling through the void is anything but pure awesomeness.

Rating: Zidane and Ronaldo teaming up. What could possibly go wrong?

Existence

Existence
David Brin

The first review I read of Existence didn’t rate it very highly. This is odd, because most of the reviews I’ve seen since have been beside themselves with joy; and unfortunate, because this opinion dampened my enthusiasm for one of this year’s biggest new books. (I won’t say who, because I like him personally, even if I think he was wrong this time.) There were no real world ramifications however, since the line for a library copy wasn’t responsive to my feelings and it took quite awhile for my turn to roll around anyway.

Three things stand out immediately. I remember reading a blog post by or interview with Brin some time ago, saying that he would never again write a back-breakingly thick tome like Glory Season. He may want to rethink that pledge, because Existence is quite the doorstop. The second, related, reaction is that Brin hasn’t published a novel in many years. The ideas must have been bottled up for quite some time in his head, because they come out in a barely contained torrent. In many ways, this is a culmination of his thinking and agitating for the past decade or so; compressing this much into a single novel seems to require the massive word count. Finally, the timing and setting of the novel are going to spark inevitable comparisons with Kim Stanley Robinson’s 2312, though they are very different books. More on all of these later, after some background and technical summaries.

Existence takes place over several unspecified years around 2050. The Earth is more or less what any scientifically literate person can expect, in terms of climate change, technological advancement, population, and whatnot. Rising ocean levels and global warming have inflicted the expected havoc and people are facing resource depletion, though science has advanced just enough to hold Armageddon at bay. Just barely. Politically, Brin’s society requires more of a leap, though not nearly as large a leap as some of us might hope. He envisions a global stratification based more on class than on race or gender, where we have taken several steps forward with intolerance problems, but perhaps a few steps back on economic equality. The world is loosely controlled by the very richest of the rich, where families measure their wealth by the numbers coming after the decimal point of the 99^th percentile. (Lest one think Brin supports a full-born Illuminati style conspiracy, at least one of the characters wonders aloud if the people supposedly running the show have nearly as much power as they think they do.) The book is written in a multi-perspective third person, with interludes excerpted from “books,” “news reports,” and other miscellanea. Again, this reminds the reader of 2312.

Brin is an activist writer, something that is clear to anyone who follows his online persona. This implies a political agenda, which Brin has, but politics is only a part of his grander philosophy. Things are partially summed up by the political axis he creates, assessing resistance to technological progress and the tendency towards oligarchy as the respective x and y. He has little use for the current US Left-Richt dichotomy, arguing instead that the true fulcrums of policy are the older, deeper rivalries of the Enlightenment – Romanticism and Feudalism – Egalitarianism. (He names this partially after the Satsuma clan, the major source of leadership in Meiji Japan, because this axis frames their policies accurately.) Brin readers will notice the relationship to his oft-discussed definitions of science fiction and fantasy. I don’t fully share Brin’s opinion of our innate longings for feudalism, though I agree that this is a far better way to view public policy than the current US split.

Existence is more than just political navel-gazing. Brin’s activism extends to the genre itself; he uses this book as part of a broader call to action to the SF community. Several authors, among them Kim Stanley Robinson and Neal Stephenson, have called for SF to regain its status as a hopeful, encouraging genre, with books that once again inspire a generation of scientists to go out and fix problems. I don’t know if any other genre spends so much time talking about itself and bemoaning its own demise, but in this case I support the introspection. I appreciate the aims of literary SF and Mundane SF, enjoy a lot of the darker stuff out there, and am fully sympathetic to those who respond to the last decade or so with pessimism. Like Brin I remain a futurist though, convinced that we can overcome (or at least survive) the impending challenges if we create a framework that lets science attack our problems. Books that promote the futurist agenda, like Existence and 2312, are an important part, maybe my favorite part, of science fiction.

Back to the story. Brin is firmly in the Hard SF camp, and Existence is overflowing with ideas. He careens through information technology, environmental science, rocketry, transportation, energy, and astronomy, while dealing with geopolitics, economics, journalism, crowd sourcing, and a host of other topics. Brin is clearly keeping up with current technology, rather than relying on the tropes that carried SF in the 80s, when he first came on the scene with the other Three B’s. (Benford, Brin and Bear.) This is clear with his depiction of the internet and augmented reality, but also in the environmentalism, space travel limitation, and machine consciousness. All of these new ideas labor in service of that most classic of SF themes, First Contact, building a bridge between the current generation of new writers and the Golden Age. The Fermi Paradox is also tied integrally to the narrative, with the answers Brin proposes to both hoary tropes wildly inventive. This particular future is far cry from the bright colors and optimism of the Uplift series, but Brin retains his flair for storytelling. It is this storytelling where Existence really breaks from 2312, despite thematic similarity: Robinson is a painter, creating a series of scenic vistas, while Brin is a Hard SF yarn spinner.

My only real complaint with the book is its balance from start to finish. Existence to me felt more like a book and a half, with the first volume concluding neatly, but the second not quite fleshed out enough to stand on its own. It’s not enough to detract from the book’s impact, though I would have preferred to hear more of the later story. Aside from that, this is Brin at the height of his considerable powers. He will never be a lyricist or poet, but this is Hard SF taken to its logical conclusion.

In a year of heavyweight contenders, Existence has to stand near the top of the 2012 SF pile. It is ambitious, outspoken, stimulating, and entertaining. My review is barely scratching the surface of what’s on offer. There is a character that some think is Bring inserting himself, but canny readers will call The Redemption of Michael Crichton. There are zeppelins. There is a nod to Startide Rising. There are a thousand and one ways humanity could extinguish itself, and possible answers to most of them. Brin largely delivers with his years in the making call to action that is equal parts entertaining, visionary, and inspiring. I don’t know if it will win the Hugo, but it will be on the ballot if I have any say in the matter.

Rating: The Houston Dynamo for two reasons. First, at time of writing, the Dynamo are in the finals for the MSL Championship. Second, everything is bigger in Texas.

2312

2312
Kim Stanley Robinson

2312 is quite a ways down my reviewing queue, but somehow it has forced its way to the top. I think this means that my subconscious isn’t done with the book yet, since it still clamors for attention a week after I finished reading. 2312 is a complex, demanding novel that rewards the attentive reader with ideas and images that linger long after the last page is read and the book returned to the shelf. At the same time, it is strikingly contemporary; Robinson is taking questions that fill the newspapers today and builds his future history on the answers he finds.

Robinson is not, by his own admission, a writer of nimble or action-packed stories. Much like the magisterial Mars trilogy, 2312 moves at a stately pace, unafraid to pause for reflection, to peek under stones, or to take in the view from a scenic point. There is action, danger, tension, and drama, but they come gradually and over a period of several years of story time. This is the anti-24, an antidote of sanity in a frantic ADHD world. 2312 is more compact than the Mars books, with fewer infodumps and navel-gazing. Brief interludes of historical text, lists, stream of consciousness writing, and other errata serve the same function as a detailed infodump, in fewer words and with a greater conservation of storytelling momentum. Still, the phrase “taut narrative” does not apply.

I must confess parenthetically that, as a frequent shill for greater economy of prose, I feel a bit like the dreaded flip-flopping politician when I praise a Robinson book. In my defense, there are clear differences between bloat, self-indulgence, and quality writing that happens to be dense or slow. There are a lot of words in a Robinson novel, but he means every one of them and it behooves the reader to pay attention.

The story centers primarily around two characters: Swan and Wahram, with a couple of peripheral folks occasionally adding perspective. Swan is an artiste from Mercury who is drawn unwillingly into Solar System politics. Wahram is a diplomat from the Saturnian League who engages with Swan, sometimes in concert, other times in counterpoint. The musical reference is not just metaphorical, as the two actually create music together in a way that reflects their actions through the book. Indeed, music fills a very specific background role throughout 2312, as Beethoven, Brahms, Glass, and others provide the soundtrack. (Again not totally related, but Robinson convinced me to give Phillip Glass another try. Unfortunately, even with the goodwill engendered by the book, I just can’t get into the Glass style of minimalism.)

Swan and Wahram move through a Solar System teeming with human life, investigating a mystery, tracking down a terrorist, helping an environmentally compromised Earth, and teasing out the possibility of an AI singularity; all things that may or may not be related beneath the surface. Again much like the Mars books, Robinson creates a future history that seems so natural and inevitable that one comes away from the novel convinced that The Future can only be like this. He has explained in interviews that this future history is not the same as the trilogy, but the end result is almost identical. The observant reader will note both the divergences and similarities, but also catch an easter egg or two that scramble the multiverse a bit.

The author also borrows ideas liberally from earlier works, most notably the moving city on Mercury, but in many cases these ideas are used because, to Robinson at least, they are the most practical and likely paths that we will walk. Among these are the economic system he proposes, the likely outcomes of current environmental and political problems, and the ultimate uses of asteroids and other space-based resources. The terraforming in particular has been mapped out in several scientific writings, so he’s not really taking gambles there. I have seen a small number of reviews that call out the anti-capitalist bent to Robinson’s book (no surprise there!), but few of them fully address the shortcomings of our current iteration of economic experimentation or the need a space-based society will have not just for new science, but for new social structures. Any serious reader will come away from 2313 with an appreciation for the depth Robinson brings to his universe, though with it comes the danger that books that merely transpose our current society wholesale into the future will satisfy that much less.

Another word I have seen bandied about in discussions of the book is “Utopia.” I am uncertain why people started labeling the 2312 society as such, but I guess in these dark times, any book that is not clearly a near future with an Earth devastated both politically and environmentally is now Utopian. Of course, Earth in 2312 is exactly that, a gargantuan sink hole propped up only by the efforts of those who have escaped into space; a planet full of poor, hungry, and bitter people that are ravaged by war and corruption. Robinson, like many of us, can see no reasonable alternative to this dark future. In space however, all is not lost. Humanity has mined the asteroids, transforming them into hollowed out terrariums that move between the planets. We have seeded some with lost ecosystems, turned others into massive farms, and yet others into interplanetary cruise ships brimming with decadence. Mars has a breathable atmosphere and a temperature warm enough for shirt sleeves, the moons of the gas giants host their own colonies, and even Venus is slowly capitulating to our engineering might. Politics rages, each power center leverages is economic might for its own purposes, and, while war is not a feasible threat in the book (gravity wells and asteroids make for a whole new level of mutual assured destruction), this is no beatific, system-wide harmony.

What this says to me is not utopia, but a throwback to the optimism of Golden Age SF. Problems abound and people are venal, but we have found a way for science to lead us onward. Swan and Wahram don’t find all the answers, nor do they solve even a fraction of the problems facing humanity, but they society they live in is facing forward. I find it depressing that simply asserting, “Science can improve our lives,” is now a Utopian sentiment and suspect that this is behind some recent murmurings in the community about how SF is exhausting itself, isn’t leading the way forward, or just plain isn’t any fun anymore.

This is all just scratching the surface of what is on display in 2312. I could probably write a (very boring) dissertation just on the music and economics, but the above paragraphs should give a passable summary. Despite what may sound like a heavy slog through social science musings, Robinson delivers some truly stunning set pieces. From Terminator, Mercury’s perpetually moving city-on-rails, to views of Saturn from verandas on its moons; space elevators where the passengers all sing Philip Glass operas during the ride to the glittering skyscrapers and Venetian canals of now-flooded Manhattan, 2312 is full of images that promise to remain long after plot details are forgotten. One scene in particular, which I won’t spoil here, will leave Sierra Club members in stunned amazement, wishing fervently that they could be alive to see it happen. Robinson tempts me sorely to have my head frozen, in the vain hope that I can be revived when his history comes inevitably true.

Summing up a major work like this in a blog post is utterly fruitless, but I have tried to capture the scope and depth of the book. In a year of heavy hitters, 2312 stands out as possibly the most impressive SF novel. I would not be surprised to see Robinson cut a swath through the awards, though there will be stiff competition. Regardless, this is a massively important novel. It tells an interesting story, gives us fascinating and complicated characters, addresses the unavoidable challenges facing us while pointing a hopeful way forward, outlines a comprehensive and plausible future, and still manages that all important sense of wonder. Robinson provides the buzz that we crave from SF and the meat that serious readers demand. 2312 is must-read stuff and is heading straight for the SF canon.

Rating: A Champion’s League final. No true fan will want to miss it.

Noise

Noise
Hal Clement

Noise is the best example I have yet found of the evolution of science fiction. Clement is best known for Mission of Gravity and is justifiably famous for his world building. “World building” in this case is not the namby-pamby soft science, let’s explain the culture and society of neat people variety that one sees in epic fantasy. No, Clement literally builds worlds, starting with stars, orbital mechanics, physics and geology, before moving on to exotic aliens and societies that form on whatever bizarre setting he has concocted. He is at his best when cooking up extreme environments and seeing what happens to the characters he drops there. This is Hard SF at its hardest.

Noise is more of what Clement enjoys the most, though this time there are no aliens, only Polynesians. Everything takes place on Kainui, and all-water world where seafaring types have somewhat inexplicably settled. What makes someone emigrate to a planet with no land, a poisonous atmosphere, and constant storms and tsunami? I have no idea, but these people seem to like it. (The title refers to the constant natural volume of the weather and ocean.) We follow Mike Hoani, an anthropologist and linguist who visits for research purposes and gets more than he bargains for. He accompanies a ship that sets out from the main Kainui city, they see the world, discover some crazy mysteries, face peril, and give Clement a chance to show off his creation.

If this were The Golden Age, Clement’s efforts would suffice. The story isn’t packed with gripping action, but it has a rigorously shaped world and some engineering challenges; this seems to have been enough for readers of the time. We tend to be a bit more demanding now however, expecting such luxuries as character development and compelling plot arcs. In this sense, Clement proves to be product of his time. Kainui is a fun backdrop and I am impressed with its construction. On the other hand, I remember almost nothing of the characters or what happens to them, despite finishing this book only recently. There is nothing wrong with the book, in the sense of comically bad writing, plot holes, or the like, but neither is there any magic or sparkle to it, nothing that reaches out and grabs me, forcing me to take notice.

In this sense, Noise works best for me as a milepost showing how much SF has changed over the last fifty odd years. I can’t really give it a strong recommendation, except to readers who want their Hard SF uncut. There is no commentary on the human condition, no exploration of philosophy or ethics, and no pushing of any boundaries. It is a solid, competent work, but will disappoint those looking for more.

Rating: Werder Bremen. A comparatively well known team in a comparatively prominent league, but not one of the elite.

The Peace War

The Peace War
Vernor Vinge

The Peace War is next up in my ongoing quest to read The Complete Vernor Vinge in Random Order. In this case, I saw the book at the library and figured that to be as good a reason as any to pick it up. I was a bit surprised however, discovering this book to be more or less absent his two favorite playgrounds: The Zones of Thought universe and The Singularity (capitalized because to Vinge it is a specific thing, not just any singularity). Instead, the novel is a fairly straightforward Overthrow the Evil Government tale. And that, I promise, is the last unnecessary capitalization I will use in this post.

The basis of the story is an invention called the bobble, which covers an area in some sort of impenetrable field. The exact nature of the bobbles is slowly revealed as the story progresses, but the effects are obvious from the start: hostile targets instantaneously enveloped by a perfectly reflective bubble. Vinge follows the discovery of bobbles, the pencil pushers who take over the world with them, and the rogue scientists and engineers that fight against the bobbling world government. There is also frequent use of the best word ever to come from SF: “embobbled.”

The world is interesting, a slightly skewed take on both post-apocalyptic tropes and anti-science regimes. The bobbles are initially deployed in the name of peace, removing anything hostile or belligerent. As is inevitable though, power soon abandons its idealism and shifts its focus to maintaining itself. The world is superficially idyllic, what with the lack of armies, bombs, terrorists, and whatnot, but the anti-science bent of the rulers means that humanity has regressed to confused, low technological base. Some engineering is allowed, but nothing that might result in threatening; bio-tech is anathema. Plagues periodically sweep through population centers and things like tuberculosis are once again deadly terrors.

Indeed, the world building is probably the best part of the book. The plot is fairly predictable (SPOILER  ALERT: The good guys wiin!), though the hows and whats are creative even as the whys follow a standard path to resolution. The characters won’t be winning any prizes, but they do the trick. As might be expected of this sort of Hard SF, scientists and engineers are on a pedestal despite sinister developments at the beginning. That said, it wasn’t really the scientists that performed acts of villainy so much as the middle managers. Fair enough – in these post-Cold War, ethnically sensitive times, the one villain I’m sure we can all agree on is middle management.

The Peace War is not the most essential Vinge. He didn’t phone it in by any measure, but it lacks a bit of the sparkle that one sees in A Fire Upon the Deep or Rainbows End. Still, it’s entertaining and worth the relatively short time it takes to read. Recommended for completists, but newcomers should start with one of his more important novels.

Rating: Thierry Henry playing in MLS. One should never turn down a chance to see a master at work, but this is not his most memorable work.

Fleet of Worlds

Fleet of Worlds
Larry Niven and Edward Lerner

Every once in awhile, I get the urge to revisit Known Space. Larry Niven’s popular future history is the kind of future I want to be reborn in, with its high technology, weird but basically non-threatening aliens, strange worlds, and off-beat humor. I am almost through all of the classic Known Space stories, but I’m a little less excited by some of his newer additions. For whatever reason, Niven seems to have lost a step in the last decade or so. His books aren’t as sharp and there is a sense that he’s coasting a bit on past glories. There’s quite a bit of glory to coast on, but still one hopes for a new milestone, one more shining tale to add to his illustrious library. Perhaps the forthcoming collaboration with Greg Benford? My hopes are up.

Anyway, I approached Fleet of Worlds with some trepidation. The latest Ringworld books have garnered mixed enough reviews that I have stayed away, but his series with Edward Lerner has promise. After all, who can resist a few hundred pages with Pierson’s Puppeteers? The Puppeteers are one of Niven’s finest creations; no matter how bad the book may be, it’s still a deeper look inside the cowardly society of advanced, two-headed herbivores. Fortunately, the book isn’t bad, and it delivers its Puppeteers in spades. (Is anyone really reading this for the humans? I thought not.)

First, a warning for readers. Nobody should start Known Space with Fleet of Worlds. There are plenty of great places to start (N-Space, Ringworld, Protector), but this is definitely not one of them. While it won’t be incomprehensible (I think), most of the enjoyment comes from a working knowledge of Puppeteers and human future history. There are a few easter eggs tucked here and there that Niven aficionados will smile at and the kind of detail and background that only fans will truly appreciate. Likewise, what you see is what you get with Niven. Anyone who doesn’t like him now won’t find reason to change that opinion, while long time fans will come away satisfied.

There are two concurrent plot lines in Fleet of Worlds that will presumably run throughout the series. The first concerns internal Puppeteer politics, opens a large picture window into Puppeteer society, and shows us Nessus before his days harassing Louis Wu. The second follows a hardy band of humans from a heretofore unknown colony that the Puppeteers have indentured for food production. The latter is far less interesting than the former, but I imagine it will have serious repercussions as the books progress. Since this book basically sets the table for 300 pages, I can only assume that the banquet is yet to come. The plot isn’t bad or boring, but it is clearly a bit of groundwork laying in preparation for something much bigger, or at least that is the assumption I have to make based on what I read.

Beyond this, there isn’t much profound analysis waiting to happen. Fleet of Worlds is a fun but non-essential addition to Known Space, written with fans in mind. Later volumes may change my perspective, but so far it is a pleasing diversion. There is a hint of possible greatness to it all, so we will have to see what Niven and Lerner conjure up next.

Rating: A mid-season, mid-table match. Likely to contain some elements of excitement and long-term importance, but probably not something the casual fan will be gripped by.

Usurper of the Sun

Usurper of the Sun
Nojiri Housuke

I am slowly working my way through the Haikasoru catalog, as quickly as the library here adds titles. Their most recent acquisition is Nojiri Housuke’s Usurper of the Sun, an expansion of three earlier short stories. The original short story won a Seiun Award in 2000, the book won a second Seiun in 2002. It is one of the first novels that Haikasoru published, and more to my taste than some of their other titles. Why? Because Usurper is the first full-on Hard SF I have read from Japan. No anime, no otaku, no giant robots, no tentacles, just a bunch of scientists and a big mysterious object. It’s probably not the only Hard SF out from Haikasoru, but it’s the only one I’ve found so far.

Nojiri mixes and matches his science throughout. His BMO is a thin ring that blooms out of Mercury, blocking an increasing amount of Earthbound sunlight on its eventual way to becoming a Dyson sphere. Earth is plunged into a catastrophic freeze as scientists worldwide struggle to figure out why the ring is there, who put it on Mercury on the first place, what it is supposed to do, and how humanity is to survive the seeming assault from the stars. The book touches on astronomy (of course), the nature of AI and consciousness, nanotech, first contact and alien communications, climatology, and a bit of the softer sciences as we watch Earth dismantle itself in panic. I have to confess that some of the discussion of introverted and extroverted consciousness sailed above my head, but I caught just enough for the conclusion to make sense. This is Hard SF, so the science is the focus as much as, or more than, the characters, but that’s kind of a subgenre given at this point.

Usurper differs a bit from other Japanese SF I have read in the general exclusion of Japan. The main character, Aki Shiraishi, is Japanese, but she spends most of her time in California, in Texas, or in space. Her interactions are also primarily with Westerners, so thematically there is very little to differentiate Usurper from any other science fiction. This is not a critique of course, just an observation. In the real world, any large scale space effort would be based in the United States as a matter of economic course, so it is entirely natural that Nojiri’s book would also spend most of its time dealing with the US, the EU, and the UN. There are however two points that stand out, though whether they are intentional or just a product of cultural background noise is not a question I am prepared to answer.

There are two responses to the aliens trying to, er, usurp the sun. Many see it as a preemptive attack on humanity, or at the very least blithely ignorant genocide, and agitate to fight back. Others frame it as a big misunderstanding and push for a peaceful first contact. Even if this is a misunderstanding in the same way that, say, the Great Leap Forward was a multi-million fatality economic misunderstanding, it is obvious that the aliens are so technologically superior that “war” would probably be more like “swatting gnats.” “Not so!” argue the militants. “We could probably get a good lick or two in. Besides, we might as well go down fighting.” The pacifists are not convinced by any of this reasoning and take their own steps towards talking with the aliens. Considering the nationality of the writer, I will give readers exactly one guess as to which countries take each position. Give up? Here’s a hint: George W. Bush had just taken over the White House when Usurper was published. (To be fair, this was pre-9/11, so the Invade Iraq drumbeat had yet to begin. Still, we Americans had been seen as warmongers for many, many years before toppling Saddam.)

The second point could be entirely of my own imagining. Midst the discussion of consciousness, there is a lot about minds focused entirely inward, uncommunicative because they either don’t notice or don’t care about anything outside. I don’t think it spoils anything too much to say that the aliens blocking out the sun’s light are doing so because they feel this way about Earth and its inhabitants (or don’t feel, as the case may be). I wonder if Nojiri isn’t offering subtle commentary about Japan, a nation often accused of being uninterested in the outside world and overly focused on itself. I could be making this up, especially in light of recent domestic media hysteria about Japan’s insularity. Still, this is hardly a new topic and I think there are certainly comparisons that can be made. Japan isn’t actively harming anyone else right now (that I know of), but how much more good could the Japanese be doing if they turned outward a little more and engaged the rest of the world? This was the message that lingered for me after I turned the last page; I probably owe it to myself to dig into some Japanese reviews of the book to see if anyone else thought so. Perhaps this is a project for later.

Beyond these messages, Usurper is pretty typical Hard SF. Lots of science, lots of talking about science, a mix of respect for and distrust of the military, awkward romance, and partially developed characters, usually engaged in science. The reader’s reaction to this book will depend almost entirely on preconceived notions of Hard SF; non-fans will probably want to skip it. Anime fans may come away disappointed unless their minds are open to a little more science than giant robots provide. Those who prefer Clarke, Benford, or Niven will likely enjoy Nojiri’s book more than other, squishier Haikasoru titles. I’m a huge fan of both first contact and big mysterious objects, so I hope that more of this sort makes it into English. I’ll be the first to read and review it when it does.

Rating: The Kashima Antlers. Clinical and efficient, they are Japan’s most successful club team.