On Books
by Peter Heck
OLYMPOS
by Dan Simmons
Eos, $25.95 (hc)
ISBN: 0-380-97894-6
Over the years, Dan Simmons has put himself on the map with science-fictional reframings of earlier literary classics, as in his “Hyperion cantos,” loosely based on Keats's poetry. His previous novel, Ilium (which Olympos continues), began with a reconstruction of the Trojan War, generously spicing the Homeric epics with more modern elements ranging from Shakespeare's “Tempest” to H.G. Wells's Time Machine, with various Victorian poets and a broad sampling of earlier SF thrown in.
But in a characteristic twist, Ilium ended with a detour from the original plot, engineered by the revived twentieth-century American scholar Hockenberry, who came to the Homeric era to provide an objective chronicle of the fall of Troy. Now, in this second volume, the Greek and Trojan heroes have allied against the Olympian gods, with moravecs (advanced space-going robots) aiding the humans. And Helen of Troy has taken Hockenberry as her latest lover.
Meanwhile, in a different reality, a lovely but decadent human civilization is under attack from its feral former servants, the robot-like voy-nix. A third plot strand updates the conflict between the sorcerer Prospero, Caliban, and Caliban's monstrous god Setebos. Simmons brings each of these subplots to a boil, spinning off sub-sub-plots involving Achilles’ love for an Amazon queen he has defeated in battle, Odysseus’ voyage to the alternate Earth with Hockenberry and the moravecs, the arrival of Setebos and his minions in what was once Paris, and several more.
Simmons gets great fun out of having his characters quote freely from Homer, Shakespeare, Shelley, Browning, Proust, and a host of other sources that liberal arts majors can test their memories by spotting. Simmons often gives his borrowings an ironic twist—as when Odysseus quotes from Tennyson's “Ulysses,” or when Prospero objects to playing himself in a production of “The Tempest,” not wanting to memorize so many lines. Homeric heroes alternate between tough-guy street talk and high epic diction. Several of the moravec scientists turn out to be Star Trek fans, familiar with minute details of the show. This playfulness extends throughout the novel, tempering the tone of doom-and-gloom common in Simmons's earlier work (not that it's absent here).
Olympos stands reasonably well alone, although it takes on more resonance read as a sequel to Ilium. But even by itself, it works as a solid adventure story, with the plot mysteries explained in SF terms (not without some hand-waving, but that's all in the spirit of fun, too). But Simmons also gives the reader a world-sweeping subject, strong action, an eye for vivid settings, and believably grey characters. Run through his literary blender and spiked with a surprising sense of humor, the result is one of his most enjoyable pieces to date.
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ACCELERANDO
by Charles Stross
Ace, $24.95 (hc)
ISBN: 0-441-01284-1
Stross, described by Cory Doctorow as “the mad antipope of the Singularity,” has assembled his innovative “Lobsters” stories, which appeared in this magazine from 2000 to 2004, into a fixup novel. Even if you read them all individually, the impact of the entire set makes for an exhilarating read.
The story begins in the second decade of this century, just on the verge of the Singularity (here, the emergence of artificial intelligences so superior to humankind that extrapolation of history into the future is effectively impossible). The central figure of the first three stories is Manfred Macx, an electronic entrepreneur who has figured out how to survive by making other people rich. His strategy consists of reinventing economics on the fly to exploit the potential of amplified human intelligence. His major struggle is staying one step ahead of his ex-wife, Pam-ela, an accountant who pursues him around the world with a huge bill for back taxes.
A brief reunion results in the birth of a daughter, Amber, who in the middle third of the story uploads a version of herself into a software program to go on an expedition to a nearby star, where alien intelligence has been detected. The aliens turn out to be small-time (but highly advanced) con artists, preying on naïve beings who fall for their crooked economic schemes. But her real discovery is the inevitable result of the Singularity, the emergence of computronium, microscopic artificial intelligences who surround their star and convert all extraneous mass into further copies of themselves. By now, most human beings have become effectively post-human, with computer implants and augmentations. Even splitting into several divergent computer personalities is commonplace. But computronium is a step beyond, causing the reduction of all matter to components of a vast artificial intelligence network.
Returning to the solar system, Amber takes up residence in the atmosphere of Saturn, the inner system already being well on the way to conversion to computronium. There, she encounters a surprise: son Sir-han, the offspring of the version of herself who stayed behind. The father is Sadeq, a Muslim cleric sent by Pamela to undermine Manfred's plans to insure their daughter's freedom. The last three stories reunite the entire family, including Aineko, Manfred's cyborg cat, who turns out to have far more to do with events than the humans have suspected.
The Macxes and their group spend much of the last third of the book working (not necessarily all together) to escape the solar system. Even Pamela, who steadfastly refuses to be modified or uploaded in the manner of the other family members, makes a reappearance. But in the inner system, the Vile Offspring of the now-all-but-obsolete human race are reaching out to convert their worlds—and what's left of humanity—into computronium.
Stross spins this generational saga with great wit and energy, throwing in references to a huge range of literary and cultural material, an even more exhilarating mix in novel form than in the separately published stories. Stross also manages to make economics seem almost as hip as the runaway cybernetic revolution that serves as background to the story. Don't miss this one.
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QUICKSILVER
Volume One of the Baroque Cycle
by Neal Stephenson
Perennial (HarperCollins), $15.95 (tp)
ISBN: 0-06-059308-3
This one's a couple of years old, and only peripherally SF, but so good that it's worth calling to the attention of anyone who—like this reviewer—might have missed it before now.
Stephenson frames the trilogy of which this is the beginning as a sort of prequel to his Cryptonomicon, with ancestors of several of his characters from that book and a similar theme of cryptography and international intrigue. The story is set in the late seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries, precisely the time when modern science was just beginning to make an impact on Europe. And, much like Thomas Pynchon's best work, it combines the author's imaginative constructs so seamlessly with real historical events that a reader may wonder just which parts are real and which invented.
The book begins in Boston, in 1713, where Daniel Waterhouse is busy bringing the fruits of the new natural philosophy to the new world at a college he has founded, evidently a predecessor to M.I.T. (The Harvard of the era is interested primarily in training clergy for the churches of the colony.) Waterhouse, we learn, is considered something of a crank by his fellow Bostonians, but (as Isaac Newton's old college roommate and a key member of the Royal Academy) an authority on the new way of doing science.
The narrative then jumps back to the 1660s, to Daniel's youth in England, and follows his career through the remainder of the Stuart Restoration. Raised a Puritan in one of the most radical sects, Daniel is at a great social disadvantage at a Cambridge now being reclaimed by the dissolute sons of the returning Cavaliers. But he turns out to have a knack for diplomacy, a talent useful to all parties—especially since he is one of the few men able to get along with the cantankerous but obviously brilliant Newton.
Meanwhile, on the continent, several wars are raging. The Turks are besieging Vienna, resisted by a co
alition of mostly German states, while Louis XIV of France carries on a sporadic war against the Netherlands, various small German states, and anyone else he can concoct a reason to fight. The English are in a series of shifting alliances, fighting a series of small wars all over the continent. Against this background, a half-crazed vagabond known as Jack Shaftoe cuts a swath from the siege of Vienna to Amsterdam, in the company of Eliza, whom he rescued from a Turkish harem. Against all odds, both find themselves caught up in high political machinations—Jack as a courier for the French, Eliza as a spy for the English.
In the background, a different kind of conflict is brewing between Newton and his continental counterpart, Leibnitz, over who should be recognized as the inventor of the calculus. Daniel Waterhouse is caught in the middle; he recognizes that Leibnitz's method is superior, but, of course, it's impossible for an Englishman to admit as much in public.
Stevenson winds all these (and several more) plot strands through a densely woven historical background, some as preposterous as anything invented for an alien SF society—which of course the Baroque period is, in several important ways. Often the most bizarre details are straight out of history, heightened in the manner of the famous pizza delivery scene that opens Snow Crash. Stephenson gives a list of characters to help the reader sort out the historical from the fictional, and this particular edition includes brief appendices on the origin of the Baroque Cycle and other details of likely interest.
A big, sprawling read, and with all three volumes now available, readers can plunge in without having to wait for the continuation. For anyone who's enjoyed Stephenson's work in the past, I heartily recommend the Baroque Cycle.
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THE WHITE WOLF'S SON:
The Albino Underground
by Michael Moorcock
Warner, $24.95 (hc)
ISBN: O-446-57702-2
Moorcock continues his saga of the multiverse, in which a mutating cast of archetypal heroes carries on an eternal struggle between Chaos and Law. The central figure here, as in much of his best work, is Elric of Melnibone—an albino warrior whose extended family includes Oonagh von Bek, the main narrator of this installment.
As the book opens, Oonagh is a young girl living in Yorkshire. One day, when Oonagh's parents are away, strangers begin to appear in the neighborhood. One pair strike her immediately as suspicious, claiming an undue familiarity with her family and attempting to lure her away from the home. Others appear to be old family friends, military types who have come to protect her against the suspicious pair; these she welcomes, and ends up taking out to dinner. But the next day, a sudden earthquake drops Oonagh into deep caves that lie under the family home, and her adventures begin.
A talking fox in eighteenth century finery, Lord Reynard, takes her to a nearby city where he rules the Thieves’ Quarter. There she meets a blind albino boy, perhaps Elric's son, and a young woman who appears to be Oonagh's grandmother—temporal relationships are fluid in the multiverse. Reynard, a student of the Enlightenment philosophers, is exploring ways to return her home, perhaps by magic. Then Oonagh's pursuers attack, and in a magical duel the city is flooded.
Oonagh and her friends (including the old family friends who have now reappeared) flee across the fantastic landscapes of several alternate Europes, winding up in a world in which Britain plays the role of Nazi Germany, spreading its evil dominion across the continent.
We quickly learn that henchmen of the evil king of England are searching for Oonagh and the albino boy, whose blood holds the key to the fate of the entire multiverse—and it is soon clear that they are the same enemies who have pursued her from her Yorkshire home.
Elric also searches for her, while her allies and enemies go through shifting configurations of friend and foe. Oonagh and the albino are captured, taken to England, and the evil-doers’ plot seems on the brink of fruition—but of course, the game isn't to be ended that quickly or easily.
Moorcock plays his customary games with shifting realities, larger-than-life characters, and a plot assembled from disparate mythical themes mutated through an ironic sensibility. Here, the bright young protagonist makes the novel fresh enough to keep all but the most jaded reader from realizing just how many times Moorcock has told this story in some slightly altered guise. Needless to say, the journey is enjoyable despite its familiarity.
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MAGIC STREET
by Orson Scott Card
Del Rey, $24.95 (hc)
ISBN: 0-3454-41689-9
Card's latest is a contemporary fantasy, with a young protagonist who comes of age over the course of the story. So far, familiar enough. But Card steps out of comfortable territory by setting the story in Baldwin Hills, a black suburb of Los Angeles, with an all-black cast.
The opening scenes set the stage for the main action. A college professor picks up a ragged hitchhiker, who seems to have a power to impose his will on those around him. Prof. Williams takes the hitchhiker home to Baldwin Hills, to discover his wife is about to give birth—despite not previously being pregnant. The hitchhiker takes away the baby boy and leaves it in a nearby park, where it is found by two young boys sneaking off to smoke dope. One of them, Cecil (Ceese) Tucker, and takes it home, giving the child the name Mack Street.
Ceese, his mother, and the next-door neighbor, bring up Mack, whose strange birth is apparently forgotten by everyone who witnessed it. But Mack is ... different. For one thing, he appears at first to have no independent will, merely doing as he is told by the authority figures around him. He also has the ability to see inside people's dreams—especially wishing dreams, which begin to come true, harming the dreamer by fulfilling the wish in a perversely literal way. At the same time, Mack has a dream of his own, one in which he is trying to escape some disaster that he cannot see. His greatest fear is that his own dream will come true.
The crisis comes as Mack reaches his teens. For the first time, he notices a house that shouldn't be there, tucked away in a spot he can only see out of the corner of his eye. He carefully makes his way to the door, and finds it inhabited by a ragged man that the reader instantly recognizes as the same hitchhiker who had such a strange role in Mack's birth.
And out the back door, Mack finds a magical forest, filled with strange creatures—including a panther that guards what the hitchhiker tells him are imprisoned spirits. He quickly learns that time spent in this magical world doesn't pass in the normal world, but that any mark he makes will make some impact on the Los Angeles he inhabits—usually incomprehensibly except to him.
Around this time another strange person appears in the neighborhood, a beautiful woman who rides a motorcycle. She had appeared to several other characters around the time of Mack's birth, but at first he has no knowledge of this. Eventually Mack learns the truth about both her and the hitchhiker; they are both residents of the fairy realm, locked in a struggle with the king of that land for control of the world. And Mack himself is a major weapon in that struggle, conceived as a means of giving the king a way of entering into the dreams of humans and eventually into the real world.
Card combines the modern milieu and the old English folklore tradition smoothly and convincingly. His choice of setting isn't without its risks, and I'm sure there will be readers who think he's missed the target with his presentation of this particular segment of society. But it's good to see him stretching into new territory, and especially good to see him making it work so smoothly. Urban fantasy fans take note.
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THE STONEHENGE GATE
by Jack Williamson
Tor, $24.95 (hc)
ISBN 0-765-3089705
Jack Williamson has gathered just about all the honors and recognition anybody could ask for in the SF/fantasy field. So it's very much a bonus that, at the age of ninety-seven, he continues to write, especially since he is still turning out top-
level work. (One segment of his previous book, Terraforming Earth, won both Hugo and Nebula awards as best novella, and the novel as a whole won the 2002 John W. Campbell award.)
The Stonehenge Gate is, in one sense, a book that Williamson could have published in the 1950s—possibly even earlier—although modern attitudes on politics, gender, and race clearly mark it as coming from a more recent era. Next to the work of Stross, Stephenson, or Simmons, the book may seem old-fashioned. But Williamson is as good a storyteller as any of them, and it's easy to see why he's still appearing on awards ballots.
The narrator of the novel is Will Stone, an English professor at the New Mexico university where Will-iamson himself is Professor Emeritus. Stone and three fellow professors get together regularly to play poker, and to talk about whatever strikes them as interesting. The story begins when one of them, Derek Ironcraft, a physicist and astronomer, reports finding a Stonehenge-like rock formation in ground-piercing radar images of the deep Sahara desert. The group, which includes two anthropologists, decides to pool its resources to investigate the structure.
They arrive at the structure, but almost as soon as they begin to study it, an insect-like creature emerges from one of the gates. It seizes Lupe Vargas, one of the anthropologists, and carries her through the gate before the others can react. That act forces the other three to enter the gate in hopes of rescuing their friend. They emerge at first into a waterless, oxygen-poor world that Ram, the other anthropologist, compares to the hell his grandmother described coming through before her life in Africa, where he was born. Using oxygen gear, they push through it into another dry world, but one where they can survive—and where a road stretches out before them.
Thus begins Will's odyssey through several alien worlds in search of his captured friend. Eventually Will and Ram arrive in a world where an equatorial continent of black humans has been colonized by a polar continent of whites. Ram, who has a luminous birthmark similar to symbols marked on the gates, is recognized by the natives as an avatar of their god, Anak; his arrival serves as the spark for a rebellion against the colonial overlords. At first the overlords appear to be in control, but a plague to which the blacks are immune turns the tables. Will and Ram move on, eventually uncovering the beginnings of an answer to some of the enigmas they have seen along the way.
Asimov's SF, February 2006 Page 21
