A Future Imperfect

Series Title:

The Subterrene War Trilogy

Title:

Germline

Exogene

Chimera

Author:

TC McCarthy

Publisher:

Orbit, 2011, 2012, 2013

ISBN

978-0316128186

978-0316128155

978-0316128179

The future isn't just the undiscovered country (Hamlet), but also a boot stamping on a human face (Orwell), and nothing (Vonnegut). If you look for things people say about the future you find a lot of optimistic and positive things, but you also find Einstein musing about WW IV fought with sticks and stones.

But science fiction, at least in the beginning, was an essentially optimistic literature. It was all about American exceptionalism and manifest destiny, and the technology that was going to give it to us.

Well, if the past few decades have taught us anything, it's that we're not that special. Once other nations gain access to our technology they quickly catch up, and the might that we once had deluded ourselves was ours alone we now share with dozens of nations, and another hundred are rapidly climbing up to meet us.

It should be an uplifting image. If you are Gene Roddenberry, you see a bright future, with all of us standing shoulder to shoulder to strive together for common goals.

If you're TC McCarthy you see people fighting each other for scraps on a resource depleted planet.

The Subterrene Wars, a series of three books that are not so much linked by plot as by setting, concern, as Bug Resnick realizes, the genetic suicide of mankind. We first learn of the nature of this suicide in Germline, where Oscar Wendell, a drug addled journalist hoping for Pulitzer Prize material, is embedded with a group of American marines who are fighting Russian soldiers for access to Rhenium mines in Kazakhstan.

Most of the weapons we see the soldiers use against each other are just advanced forms of the weapons we have now. The marines, as well as Wendell, wear suits of armor reminiscent of space suits, covered with high tech camouflage skin, and equiped with powerful computers and communications gear. They carry Maxwell carbines which fire streams of flechettes, and the artillery uses shells filled with gel that will burn through anything and fusion generated blobs of superheated plasma. There are orbital kinetic kill weapons and tactical nukes.

Wendell is familiar with all that, and so are we, in the same sense that no one has to explain to us Han's blaster or Luke's light saber.

But then Wendell meets his first unit of genetic troups: several dozen girls, identical to each other, whose bodies have been genetically engineered to be faster, stronger, and tougher than the best "nonbred," the name the genetics use for humans. They grow to physical maturity, in much less than their apparent age of sixteen, are trained to war by teaching machines wired directly into their brains, and undergo a horrendous and violent training program after they emerge from their tanks. When the training is over a few weeks later they are shipped to wherever the fighting is, and two years after they leave the tanks their bodies are programmed to self destruct.

At that point they are allowed to request discharge, which is, for the genetics, a euphemism for execution.

No one likes the genetics. The soldiers resent them. The brass don't trust them. And civilians have what can only be described as a racist attitude for them. Wendell, drug addled, horrified by the violence of war, doesn't see genetics that way. Where the soldiers around him look at them in disgust, Wendell falls in love with them.

It is in my opinion a master stroke by McCarthy, because my sympathy was with the genetics from the moment they appeared on the scene. Wendell is not a likable character. He's not brave. He's not very smart. His one virtue is that he survives, so we see the story of the first book through his eyes. He reacts to the war with the emotions of a civilian, and, more importantly, a civilian with our moral skills still intact.

So by the end of Germline we're ready for Exogene.

Now that we have met the genetic soldiers and have recognized that they are as human as we are, McCarthy tells the story of Catherine, a genetic who, long before reaching her discharge age, decides she doesn't want to die. Together with a sister genetic Catherine escapes from the fighting. There are a number of flashback scenes where we learn Catherine is not just any genetic, and then Catherine realizes that there is a reason why the human military is hunting them. She is special.

Genetic soldiers are programmed with a religious faith that is supposed to make them fearless of death, but Catherine has started to doubt the truth of that faith. As she flees the pursuing American assassins, into the arms of Russian genetic forces, male eunuchs who live in a work camp in a remote part of Siberia, Catherine rebuilds her faith. Together with Margaret, another captured genetic, she escapes the work camp, and eventually makes her way to Thailand. We know already, from the earlier book, that Thailand welcomes escaping genetics.

If there was any doubt that Wendell recognized the essential humanity of genetic soldiers, we now know that their humanity is a fact. Catherine struggles with the same doubts we all have about our purpose in life. Hobbled as she is with no ordinary life experience to speak of, she finds her place in the scheme of things as she sees them, the same as we all do. The difference is that, for her, the scheme of things is about killing. Yes, she resents that humans made her that way, but she accepts her place, knowing she has no other place.

So who are these assassins who chase down escaping genetics? Meet "Bug" Resnick. He lives to kill. He has a family in the States, but he spends as little time there as possible. When his wife tells him she is bearing another man's child, it doesn't bother him. He lives for his missions.

And the missions are always killing genetics.

Bug is sent to find out what the Koreans are up to. In a round about fashion he ends up in Thailand to hunt Margaret, who leads genetic forces there. Then he's told that Margaret is not to die, because America needs her to help defend Thailand against the Chinese.

Where cybernetic soldiers were hinted at in Exogene, in Chimera we meet them face to face - except a machine doesn't need a face. It needs cameras and other sensors and weapons for close up fighting. If genetics are clearly human, Bug realizes the creature China is building are too different for him. He can fight side by side with genetics, even if he hates them, but he recognizes genetic suicide when he sees it.

It is a conflicted finale to the series. Bug wants humanity to inherit the future, but he will fight with the barely human against those he believes are not human at all. We know by then that the Chinese cyber soldiers have human emotions. They suffer pain and fear, even if we experience their suffering only insulated by the armor that the cyber soldiers wear. They are, like the genetics, slaves for war, created by humans who want to beat the slaves for war other humans have created.

I finished the series, and I thought McCarthy is a god of war stories. He doesn't make this horror seem heroic or exciting or adventurous. It's merely something people try to survive. McCarthy seems to believe it, from the way he made me believe it. In the three books there are no heroes that I cheered on, but there are human beings that I hoped would survive.

I'm frankly surprised that I hadn't heard of these books before - apparently people did talk about them. For what it's worth, these are well written and interesting stories. You'll put them down only because you will need to sleep every 48 hours or so...

Three Books for October

Title:

The Cusanus Game

Author:

Wolfgang Jeschke

Publisher:

Tor, 2013

Original (German):

Droemer Verlag, 2005

ISBN

9780765319081

Yes, I'm a German, and here I'm reading an English translation of a book that was originally published in German.

The process of reading is for me a mixture of language and story, and it's entirely possible for me to enjoy the story thoroughly while the language leaves me cold, or vice versa. So let's start with the important part: Ross Benjamin, the translator, does a very fine job. The book doesn't read as if it was originally written in English. Benjamin chooses words and turns of phrase that give the book not so much a German accent, but rather the promise of a good beer.

Jeschke's story takes place in a fairly near future, a fairly mundane world, with the usual technological advances that we expect, given smart phones and 3D TVs and meta materials. In this future a horrific nuclear accident has scattered deadly fallout across large parts of central Europe. Refugees choke the surrounding areas with their needs. At the same time terrorists and nationalists of various persuasions are battling each other at the margins of a shrinking Europe.

Into this depressing picture walks Domenica Ligrina, a mostly unremarkable young woman who is studying botany at a university in Rome. The city is under assault by terrorists from the South, and the pope has already retreated to Salzburg. Domenica and her student friends seem to drift through their lives, pretending that nothing particular is happening to their world. Domenica is near graduation, when she receives a mysterious job offer from people connected to the Catholic Church for a project they are calling the "Pontifical Institute for the Rebirth of God's Creation." Since nothing much else is available to a newly graduated botanist in these uncertain times, Domenica barely hesitates, in spite of not really knowing anything about the job.

Jeschke's skill in telling a story shows in how he lays out what is going on using an impressionist's palette of scenes, recollections, and flashbacks. Some of those scenes repeat, and as the story progresses we learn that the mysterious business of the Institute involves time travel. Evidently the things that have happened in the past may happen in any number of ways. Some of the ways are impossible to change, which is why the nuclear accident doesn't just disappear. Other things, like the torture and execution of time travelers in 15th Century Europe, exist in overlays of probabilities. Jeschke's story becomes a filigree of these scenes, and the only thing we know for certain is that Domenica is going to be no ordinary time traveler.

I thoroughly enjoyed the story. The titular game, which apparently involves rolling marbles along tracks at just the right speed, in a fashion reflects the mindfulness Jeschke employed in advancing story's plot. My biggest annoyance is that Jeschke, writing in German, will never become as well known in the USA as he deserves.

Title:

The Knights Dawning

Author:

James Batchelor

Publisher:

Pendant, 2014

ISBN

9780984004430

I won this book in a drawing, which is a great way of getting reading material to pile up on the side of my bed. However, even though this is a historical piece, and I'm not a fan of historical pieces, the story captivated me and drew me in. So here's what it's about:

Crusades.

Well, mostly it's about the people who went on the crusades, and the people who had to fight them off.

The Dawnings are a recently powerful baronial family from England. Several of the family's young sons go off to fight in what I think are the fourth crusades, around the outset of the 13th Century. King John is running things in England, and pope Innocent III is pulling the strings in Rome.

Crusades are a great thing if you win the battles and bring home loot - that's what the first Baron Dawning managed to do. Now his sons, in an attempt to emulate their father, have depleted the wealth their father had accumulated to travel to the Holy Land and bring back more loot.

As the wildest of them gets himself captured, news gets back to the Dawnings, and several of the remaining brothers go to rescue him. What they don't realize is that it's all a plot to capture the power of their family to punish the crusaders. There are politcal intrigues and pitched battles.

Batchelor's account of presumably fictional events are grounded in the real history of the late Middle Ages. I'm no historian, so all I'm qualified to say is that "it could have happened." In any event, it's quite entertaining, and if you enjoy stories about knights and their world, this book is for you.

Title:

Knights of the Cornerstone

Author:

James P. Blaylock

Publisher:

Ace, 2008

ISBN

978-0441016532

On a bend of the Colorado river is a small settlement of the Knights of the Cornerstone whose history goes back to the Knights Templar. Some people have gotten wind of the fact that the settlement is literally sitting on a deposit of almost pure silver, and they have been engaged in a lengthy campaign to gain access to that silver.

Calvin Bryson stumbles into this situation when a distant uncle or cousin of his sends him a package to deliver to another uncle who lives in that settlement. In spite of cryptic warnings Calvin has really no idea what he's getting into, but little by little he does get involved in a confrontation that gathers steam rapidly and culminates in a pitched battle for the possession of the silver mine.

As crypto histories go, this one is fairly mild. In fact, it reads quite a lot like those Christian fantasies that try to entice their young readers with stories of miracles that happen when you're pure of heart. I have no idea if that was Blaylock's intent - given some of his other stories I'm thinking I may have missed a satirical point of some kind. But like all of Blaylock's stories, it reads well, and entertained me from cover to cover.

Not Your Grandpa's History!

Title:

The Forever Engine

Author:

Frank Chadwick

Publisher:

Simon & Schuster, 2014

ISBN

ISBN 1451639406

Time travel stories come in several flavors, mostly hinged around the paradox where someone travels back in time to kill their grandfather. I think the earliest time travel story I read was the version where any tiny change in the past irretrievably changes the course of history. It was a short story by Ray Bradbury called "Sound of Thunder," where someone accidentally kills a butterfly (of course). There's Asimov's novel End of Eternity, where time engineers intentionally change history. Finally there's Connie Willis' Time Travel stories, where historians travel into the past, always fearful of accidentally changing things, and yet it always turns out that the changes they introduce were actually part of history. Willis' most recent stories in that series, Blackout/All Clear, make clear that the universe may in fact be using the time traveling historians to make sure things go as intended.

Frank Chadwick's story The Forever Engine concerns the adventures of Jack Fargo, a former US Marine who fought in Afghanistan, but is now teaching history, trying desperately to forget the past he lived. Jack gets summoned to a small town in England where a wartime buddy of his is working on a secret weapon that apparently is also a time machine. The troubling thing is, the time machine seems to show that, somehow, the past has been changed, and the present as we know it may be on the brink of destruction! But before Jack even has a chance to look into matters, a huge explosion flings him into oblivion, and when he wakes up it's 1888, and ironclad battle ships are floating in the sky above a smog shrouded London.

The story's main characters, Jack Fargo, and Gabrielle Courbiere, the beautiful French spy, are well realized heroic figures. Jack's main motivation is making sure that the future in which his daughter exists is restored to reality. Gabrielle's motivations are far more mysterious. Since she's a spy it's not all that surprising. Still, when all is revealed towards the end of the book she doesn't suddenly pop. It's more a case of getting a new perspective on someone you thought you knew well.

Since this story's history is different from our past there isn't a good way of judging if Chadwick did his research. And since I'm no historian I don't really care all that much. We meet a few people that are known to us in the here and now, and their presence serves as a kind of anchor in a story that would otherwise have us all adrift.

I can't say more about the story without spoiling things. Jack's competences as a former Marine and history professor are both called upon repeatedly, for a series or cracking good adventures with thrills and spills. If you like steampunk I think you'll love this story, but it's a great read just from a general action adventure angle, as well.

Hits and Misses

Title:

Alien Collective

Author:

Gini Koch

Publisher:

Daw, 2014

ISBN

ISBN 0756407583

---

Title:

Introducing Garrett, P.I.

Includes

Sweet Silver Blues (1987)
Bitter Gold Hearts (1988)
Cold Copper Tears (1988)

Author:

Glen Cook

Publisher:

Roc, 2011

ISBN

ISBN 0451463978

---

Title:

The Alloy of War

Author:

Brandon Sanderson

Publisher:

Tor, 2011

ISBN

ISBN 0765368544

So Many Names!

While I was bulling through the Hugo nominees the stack of books next to my bed was growing steadily. I do have a Kindle, but there's something visceral about holding a chunk of dead tree in my hands, of putting those pages up to my face and smelling the faint spice of paper. And then it makes me sneeze and I try to remember if I took my allergy meds.

The topmost book in my stack was Gini Koch's Alien Collective. It's book nine in a series already ten books long. Apparently ditzy former high school cheerleader Kitty Katt-Martini is an ambassador for aliens from Alpha Centauri, who joins in a protest against a candidate for President of the USA, and is spirited away from there by police who have been tipped off that there will be a series of bomb attacks. That's how the book starts, and it pretty much keeps it up for all 500+ pages. If you haven't read the previous eight (I haven't, either), then you'll be doing some catching up, but Koch makes sure you have all the necessary information. In fact, sometimes it seems that there are pages and pages of backstory (from the previous eight books) being dumped on the reader. There is a cast of characters a mile long, and after the first dozen I didn't even try to keep up.

When the action finally picks up things start moving more smoothly, and Koch shows that she can maintain a consistent impersonation of Kitty's ditzy personality without making her too unbelievable. The people who really are unbelievable are the aliens around her, who married her (it's a part romance, part SF adventure story), who made her their ambassador, and the current president of the USA, who treats her with more deference than members of his own cabinet. If you can swallow all of that then Kitty isn't a problem.

Even though Koch's writing has an easy breezy style I found the story a bit of a slog. I wondered if the fact that its target audience more than is usually the case must be women was what was tripping me up, but my wife didn't have a different verdict.

I make an effort to pick books by authors with whom I'm not familiar. Sometimes I find a gem. Sometimes I bite on a rock. This isn't a terrible story, but it wasn't the kind of book I enjoy reading. If you think you might like the series, I recommend starting at the series' beginning, with Touched by an Alien.

And then there was the Dame

Glen Cook's "Garrett, P.I." fantasy series isn't what all the other fantasy detectives are based on, but it's not hard to see how Simon R. Green's "Nightside" series, China Mieville's "Bas-Lag" series, or Jim Butcher's "Dresden" series got some of their heritage from Cook. Garrett (that appears to be all of his name) is a veteran of a long running war between two kingdoms, chronicling his life in the first person. He is now making a living for himself as security consultant for a brewery and negotiating the release of kidnap victims. Cook seems to pay an homage of sorts to Dashiell Hammett and Raymond Chandler, among others, by tossing female characters into the story that are treated with a sort of retro sexism - not something you'd usually expect in a story written even as early as 1987. Garrett also uses words like darko, breed, and halfblood to refer to non-human and half-human characters. He seems to pride himself on not killing people when he can avoid it, even though he associates with others who have no compunction about killing, and often employs them to assist him.

Garrett's first adventure sends him out of town to track down the heir to a fortune of stolen silver. The second story starts as a kidnapping of the son of a powerful wizard, but things quickly get complicated. The last story pits the local crime boss against an ancient religious fraud, and Garrett ends up in the middle. All stories are entertaining and well written, moving along at a good pace. If you're a fan of Mieville or Butcher, Glen Cook will be worth your time.

Steel vs Gold

The magic in Glen Cook's world is the hand-wavey kind. Garrett buys it from wizards and hopes it works when he needs it. More recent fantasy authors who put magic in the hands of their heroes put considerable thought into how that magic is supposed to work, probably influenced by games like Dungeons and Dragons. My next author, Brandon Sanderson, even wrote a blog post describing his methods for including magic in his stories, and of his stories the Mistborn series is probably best known for its magic system, which allows certain people with the right genetics to swallow various kinds of metal to do magic.

Brandon writes in the acknowledgements of The Alloy of Law that he was planning all along to write two further trilogies to take place in the Mistborn setting. He says that the present book is not part of those two trilogies. It takes place some years after the initial stories finished. Technology has advanced to the stage of electric lights and internal combustion engines, and people with the right genetics to use magic have become more common since no one is killing them off, anymore. Lord Waxillium, Wax to his friends, is able to use two powerful kinds of magic, and has made quite a reputation for himself as an effective lawman. Now that he's back in the big city he finds that he can't simply be an aristocrat and run his businesses in peace when a mysterious gang of robbers starts interfering with his life.

This was a great story, full of derring do and veiled romance and mystery. For me it's so far the favorite of the Mistborn stories, and, while it's not part of one of the promised trilogies, its ending makes a sequel necessary. I'm definitely looking forward to that!

Humming Betrayal

Title:

Ancillary Justice

Author:

Ann Leckie

Publisher:

Orbit, 2013

ISBN

ISBN 031624662X

I don't particular like war stories. Futuristic war stories are no exception. Typically authors who indulge in military scifi focus on weaponry, and they love to write about how fast a missile flies, or how quickly a defense reacts. There is obviously a market for that sort of thing, but it ain't me. So when I realized that Ann Leckie's book Ancillary Justice was about a soldier I was a bit disappointed.

But I judged too soon.

One Esk is a troop of slaves, human bodies that were killed for any number of reasons and harvested to become ancillaries, slave soldiers ridden by the omniscient AI that runs the warship Justice of Toren. Everyone treats ancillaries as if they were mindless, with no will of their own, but maybe everyone is mistaken. As One Esk is forced to be party to two monstrous acts of betrayal it decides to test its freedom to act, and exact its justice for the betrayals. This will be a bit of a challenge, since the target is the empire's omnipotent tyrant.

So, no, it's not military scifi. While Leckie has to mention weapons and armor in the course of the story, they aren't the featured characters that I worried about. Instead Leckie concentrates her attention on the real character: a slave, newly freed, who must discover that she is as human as anyone she meets, and has the freedom to act, and, more importantly, be responsible for her actions. It's a marvelous examination of moral responsibility and what it means to be human.

The story takes place against the background of an empire on the cusp of rebellion. It's the first book of a loose trilogy, and Leckie allows us to glimpse beyond the frame of her story, giving the feeling of a larger story waiting to be told. I particularly enjoyed her description of the starting setting, a small town, recently conquered, and divided against itself by tradition and prejudice. It's the background against which we get to know One Esk, and realize that there may well be more to these slave soldiers than their masters guess.

Ancillary Justice is the third of the 2014 Hugo nominees that I've read. It is Leckie's breakout novel, and it fully deserves its nomination. I strongly recommend it, and I'm looking forward to reading its sequel, Ancillary Sword

Cousins

Title:

Parasite

Author:

Mira Grant

Publisher:

Orbit, 2013

ISBN

ISBN 0316218952

In her first foray into the land of zombies (Newsflesh), Grant proposed a scientific reason for zombies that seemed scarily plausible. She did her homework then, and now she's done even more homework. If you haven't heard of the idea that too few parasites are bad for us, you might read up on Helminthic Theory. Yep, sounds legit.

But seriously, there are people looking into the question if there is such a thing as being too clean. Whether this turns out to be anything other than a crackpot notion I have no idea. While I'm not about to start swilling sewer water, it's also true that bacteria compete with each other, even in places like our mouth and our gut, and if not enough of the good or at least harmless bacteria are around, then nasties will take over and wreak havoc.

In Mira Grant's book Parasite (book one of the Parasitology series), Doctors Banks, Cale, and Jablonsky have developed a genemod variety of tapeworm, the Intestinal Guardian (TM), which, if ingested by a human being, will keep the host healthy, supplying drug dosage if needed, and suppressing excessive immune responses like dog or cat allergies. The story's main character, Sally Mitchell, also has one of these tapeworms when she gets into an accident. She's in a coma from brain damage, and her family is about to disconnect her, when she sits up in bed.

As far as anyone knows, the tapeworm will not resurrect you from the dead.

The action catches up with Sally six years later. She has by now relearned to speak. Reading is still very difficult, but from all appearance things are looking up. She even has a boyfriend who cares for her. And then people start getting the sleeping sickness (a lovely euphemism for turning into zombies), and SymboGen, the makers of the tapeworm, seem to be hiding something.

I kind of started suspecting what was going on almost from the beginning - this is a story by Mira Grant, after all. Still, rather than making everything predictable, Grant kept me on the edge of my seat for all five hundred pages. Sally is a recovering amnesiac, and her recovery may strike people who know a little bit about, for example, retraining TBI patients or stroke victims, as if Sally is doing far too well. The mystery ingredient is obviously the tapeworm, but we don't know quite what role it is playing until about halfway into the story (when it's still a mystery to Sally and her friends).

Yes, from that point on you'll probably know what is really going on, and you'll be wondering how Sally and her boyfriend Nathan haven't caught on yet. Well, there are perfectly good reasons, of course. Meanwhile the mere fact that you know will not at all detract from the story.

Grant's story takes place in a near future California. We're not told what all has happened, but a fair amount obviously has. Maybe some of that backstory will be featured in the sequels, but it doesn't really matter. It's a believable version of the future. You will feel right at home, I'm sure.

This is the second of the Hugo nominees I've read. It is definitely a worthy nominee, and I highly recommend it.

Homo Economicus

Title:

Neptune's Brood

Author:

Charles Stross

Publisher:

Ace, 2013

ISBN

ISBN 0425256774

Classical economics mostly consists of theories concerning the price of goods, the value of money, and what governments should or shouldn't do about them. More recently critiques of economic theory like to point out that people, individually, or even in the aggregate, do not follow simple mathematical formulas. We don't have the processing capacity for all of the relevant information, even if it were available, and we evidently do not act on that information even when we do have it.

So what would the world be like if we were truly economical beings?

Charles Stross spins a great tale in Neptune's Brood. It's thousands of years in the future. The human race - the biological species that is us - has become extinct three separate times, but our offspring, metahumans (not the ones from DC Comics), carry our legacy forward.

Metahumans have some of the characteristics of humans, but they are homo economicus, entirely subordinate to economic laws, down to their very cells. Their desires are driven by the laws of debt and liquidity. That doesn't make them totally inhuman, but it means that Krina Alizond 114, a fraud specialist looking for the lost proceeds of the biggest fraud ever committed, has interesting and surprising motivations as she attempts to solve the mystery of her sister's disappearance while dodging an assassin and various parties who have gotten wind of the missing treasure.

Stross tells a story of people who appear to be quite a lot like us, until Krina stumbles across a couple having sex, or when she considers the prospect of food, or the alteration of her body plan. Homo economicus is quite obviously not human. The resulting story is remarkable for that reason. Stross isn't writing about humans like us, but we still want to sympathize with Krina and we're cheering her quest. Meanwhile, as the story progresses it becomes increasingly clear that Krina is like no one we've ever known.

Most of the story takes place in a single planetary system orbiting a star mostly like our Sun. Stross's description of the environment is inventive and fun. We get a taste of interplanetary travel as well as interstellar travel (which happens mostly by lightspeed laser transmissions), and what life might be like on the surface of a watery superearth.

The characters populating the story, though evidently not human like us, are still human enough that we can sympathize with them and understand them, even the communistic squid and the piratical bats. Like Alice in Wonderland we discover people we've never imagined.

This book was a page turner, in spite of its abstruse messages about economics. It's also been nominated for the Hugo, and it's one of the best Hugo nominated books I've read. Highly recommended.

The Long Story

Title:

The Long Earth

Author:

Terry Pratchett and Stephen Baxter

Publisher:

Harper, 2013

ISBN

ISBN 0062068687

---

Title:

The Long War

Author:

Pratchett and Baxter

Publisher:

Harper, 2014

ISBN

ISBN 0062068695

If you've ever heard of the "many worlds theory," the idea that any event that could have turned out more than one way creates a split in the universe so that the event turns out each of the possible ways, then you know the basis of a subgenre of science fiction folks call alternate history. You could just see alternate histories as fantasies with no particular basis in reality, but the many worlds theory, which came from quantum theory, is the basis for these stories.

Even some time travel stories tackle it: you go back in time, accidentally make a consequential change, and the future you return to is different. What happened to the future you came from? It's probably still there. You just can't reach it anymore, unless you travel even further back in time to prevent the first change.

One fairly rare take on the many worlds is the ability to travel laterally between them. Instead of flying to the stars to find a new planet, you travel from our planet to a probabilistic neighbor. It's got everything Earth has, except people. No pollution, no overcrowding, all that good stuff. So far a few stories have been written considering this idea, but most if not all of them are short story treatments. I know of none that explored the subject as thoroughly as Pratchett and Baxter do in The Long Earth and The Long War.

Some time in the near future the world changes. A scientist posts plans on the internet for building a stepping box, a simple device, apparently powered by a potato, which allows the wearer to step from this world into an alternate world. The worlds stretch out in two directions, for infinity, it seems, and at first appear to be completely devoid of any intelligent life, though in other respects life flourishes on most of them.

The stories' main character, Joshua Valienté, accompanied by a computerized simulation of a Tibetan mechanic named Lobsang sets out to explore the Long Earth, and perhaps discover its purpose. The fairly mundane task of exploration is leavened by a continuous conflict between Joshua and Lobsang arising from Joshua's distrust of this machine that appears to have an indecent amount of power over the lives of people. The story finishes with a perhaps predictable event that has nothing to do with the main plot, but that's actually OK since it leads to the sequel.

The sequel takes place a couple of decades later. Human prejudices against trolls, gorilla-like intelligent beings who live in the Long Earth, naturally stepping between worlds, are resulting in the withdrawal of the trolls from most places in the Long Earth. Sensing a threatening war between humans and non-humans, Joshua and his computerized friend set out again to see if they can broker a treaty. This story also has enough unfinished business at the end that it's obvious there's going to be a sequel - The Long Mars.

Which I haven't read. Yet.

Anyway, stylistically both books show the hallmarks of a collaboration. Both Baxter and Pratchett are stylistically competent, as is this book. The prose doesn't evoke either author's distinctive style, though both authors toss in occasional sly references to their own works - just not anything that disrupts the flow of the narrative itself. The result is a consistent and even flow of narrative that is easy on the mental ear.

There is a large number of characters who make their appearances as the plot advances. Each get a fair amount of time for development, and in the end, paradoxically almost, the one character that remains a cypher is Lobsang, who plays the role of cat's paw in both books. Instead of developing as a central character, the AI acts as a foil against which many of the other characters measure themselves. Since the books are not actually about computerized intelligences, that's as it should be.

Pratchett and Baxter include many different worlds in the story. I enjoyed the descriptions of the varied animals and environments found on the Long Earth, even the idea of Jokers, places that are unusually different from the surrounding Earths, was a great idea. While the story starts with the appearance that humanity is alone on the Long Earth, there are hints early on that we've got company. The second book even presents a scientific rational for this state of affairs. And of course stepping itself has a number of limitations, which are addressed in a variety of ways.

The books are not the usual thing to expect from either author. It might be a good idea to approach the books while pretending you had read nothing by either author before. The books deserve to be seen in their own light.

Overall I strongly recommend the stories.

Diamonds in the Sky

Title:

2312

Author:

Kim Stanley Robinson

Publisher:

Orbit, 2012

ISBN

ISBN 0316098124

Three hundred years ago, in 1713, the schooner was the height of technology. If you had talked to people back then, even scientists like Descartes or Newton, they would have been unlikely to predict our world today: computers, cell phones, satellites, orbiting laboratories, molecular cancer treatments, laser surgery - that's just a very partial list of technological features of the early 21st century of which even knowledgeable people three hundred years ago would have had no inkling.

It's not any different now. Science fiction is seen by many as a genre of predictive fiction, and yet only rarely do writers manage to predict the future. Heinlein thought that by 2000 we'd be living on the Moon. Fifty years seemed like plenty of time to him to go from Braun's experimental rockets to lunar settlements. And if he completely misjudged the shape of the future, he's in excellent company.

If Robinson worried about getting the future wrong, he's given himself plenty of room. But it's a lovely future he's painting. 2312 has people living all over the solar system, with access to practically unlimited energy, from solar power stations in close orbit around the Sun to exotic technologies like fusion and antimatter. We travel in hollow asteroids filled with miniature ecologies on cometary orbits between the planets, and life extension is available so that we may live to be almost 200 years old, or older, depending on the subspecies of humanity we belong to.

But as Robinson lets us peer more closely at this paradisaical future, the worm in the apple becomes apparent. People are still people, and we still manage to act out on our less lovely emotions. So it happens that the story's heroine, Swan, and her companion Wahram barely survive a deadly attack on Terminator, Swan's home city on Mercury. As Swan, Wahram, and the diminutive Inspector Genette are on the trail of the attackers, more of the worm is revealed. This is especially evident on Earth, where banditry seems to be common and where political and tribal rivalries make life on the solar system's single most hospital planet more precarious than in some tiny terrarium whizzing about the Sun.

So there's plenty going on. But Robinson doesn't stop there. In Swan and Wahram he serves up two of the best realized characters in fiction. Swan is a complex woman, mercurial in the proverbial sense. She is believable as a woman with two lifetimes worth of experience, and her self discovery in the course of this story is nevertheless fascinating. Wahram, as saturnine as Swan is mercurial, makes the perfect contrast in their pas-de-deux, as he looks for routine in life, rather than disruptions. It is hard to imagine an unlikelier couple, and Robinson brings it off without a hitch. I think if 2312 turns out to be as different from the world of this story as the year 2000 was from Heinlein's imaginings, this book will still be worth reading then if only for this well done love story.

To be sure, the story has a couple of features that I didn't fully understand. There are a number of interludes, one or two between each chapter, with headings like "Lists" or "Excerpts." The first is lists of words, things, or ideas, without any narrative connection, though usually tied to some aspect of the foregoing chapter. I thought of them as a bit like illustrations between chapters. The excerpts are written as quoted passages, starting in the middle of a sentence, and ending in the middle of another, each passage providing some information, and the entire section serving as an info dump for 2312. I didn't think these parts were necessary, since science fiction for a long time now has traded in a set of familiar tropes, and this story is no different.

Then there were three interludes with the heading "Quantum Walk," which were more closely connected to the story, but I didn't realize the connection until well towards the end of the book. I had to go back and re-read those three sections. They made an interesting sidelight to the story for various reasons. I have not figured out if I can say the same thing about the "Lists" or the "Excerpts." Suffice it to say that they weren't intrusive, so I didn't see them as detracting from the overall story. I did notice the similarity between these interludes and Brin's interludes in Existence, and wondered if there was a new style developing. (Probably not, though.)

2312 was the third of the 2013 Hugo nominees that I read. I liked it a lot.

Shouting into Silent Space

Title:

Existence

Author:

David Brin

Publisher:

Tor Books, 2012

ISBN

ISBN 0765303612

A little over 60 years ago, so the story goes, Enrico Fermi pointed out a problem with our thinking about the universe. Our Sun, he said, is actually quite young. There are billions of stars in our galaxy that are much older. Around our Sun it seems life evolved rather quickly. We don't know of any reason why Earth should be special in that regard. There should be millions of planets in our galaxy that offer similar advantages.

If we accept those premises, then there's a painfully obvious question we should be asking ourselves: where is everybody?!

Since then many scientists have offered up theories to explain the Great Silence. Not least among them is David Brin. After holding forth on the topic thirty years ago, Existence is a fictional treatment of his thinking on the matter.

The story takes place a few decades in our future, when orbital worker Gerald Livingstone retrieves an artifact that turns out to have come from a non-human civilization. As the story develops, the alien civilization that sent us the artifact turns out to pose an unforeseen danger to humanity, and various actors on Brin's stage struggle to save humanity's future.

In spite of a large number of interruptions where Brin in the persona of "Pandora's Oracle" muses on the reasons why a technological civilization might not survive to colonize the galaxy (one of the obvious explanations for the Great Silence), the story is well paced. There is a large cast of well developed characters, though some of the more important ones seem to sneak up from the sidelines, like Peng Xiang Bin's wife and child. It is clear by the end of the book that, while writing an entertaining story was certainly one of Brin's goals, it's those interruptions that were the greater purpose.

Brin is one of those SF authors mother used to warn you about. His SF is political. Until Existence the stories weren't obviously political, but it seems that this time Brin had a number of messages he wanted to get off his chest, and he crammed them into the book. He's done that before, for example with Earth, and with Kiln People, both books which clearly repeated points Brin had made at various occasions. But Existence is different, in that rather than telling a story that includes a larger point, this book explains a larger point and makes it palatable by wrapping it in a story.

Brin's politics aren't easily categorized. He blogs as a contrarian, which is apt if you agree with him that every currently fashionable political view in general use in the States and around the world ignores various inconvenient facts about human nature. If you have strong views on political topics, you will knock heads with Brin, no matter what your views are. That makes Existence a little difficult to swallow for many readers. Not only is the story not your typical genre fiction, but there are political ideas in there that Brin defends quite forcefully.

I did enjoy the book. But I know this book isn't going to be everyone's cup of tea.