Science Fiction: The 101 Best Novels 1985-2010

by Damien Broderick

  What makes this novel more than a one-sided pamphlet by a pacifist is its nuance, its attention to the detail of real life in the midst of its phantasmagorical, almost Lewis Carrollian trading of accusation and defense. Escaping, fleeing across ice on a giant prehistoric vulture, he meets his beloved daughter:

  “Honey, there’s something I want to ask.”

  “What?’

  “Do you know what’s happened to you?”

  “Yes, I know.”

  “What’s happened to you?”

  “I don’t want to tell you.”

  “Please tell me.”

  “You know what’s happened.”

  “Tell me.”

  “I died.”

  This is not a light-hearted or thrilling entertainment of a novel. But it is a necessary one, still.

  6

  Kurt Vonnegut, Jr.

  Galápagos (1985)

  SENTIMENTAL, cynical, clear-eyed, spiritual, godless, often very funny, Kurt Vonnegut (1922-2007) was more than a cult favorite in the 1960s and ’70s but has fallen from popular favor. His early novel The Sirens of Titan was unabashed paperback sf, but of a kind rarely seen until then, and Cat’s Cradle was almost as explicitly science fictional. Many of his subsequent novels contain an uncanny quality, verging on sf without ever quite going there. Galápagos tells the cautionary and scathing tale of humanity’s future evolution into mindlessness, narrated by a ghost still lingering a million years hence. That ghost, as it happens, is Leon Trotsky Trout, son of the prolific Kilgore Trout whose terrible sf is quoted through most of Vonnegut’s fiction after his appearance in Breakfast of Champions (1973). It’s obvious that Trout is a fond if mocking mask for sf master Theodore Sturgeon, but really he is, of course, Vonnegut himself. As, too, is Leon, who recalls humankind’s ruined world, brought down (he asserts) by the excesses of our huge, intelligent, obsessive and endlessly tricked and tricky three-pound brain.

  Perhaps the oddest aspect of this bittersweet fable, told by an apparent anti-intellectual misanthrope hanging onto hope by the skin of his teeth, is how startlingly accurate his near-future predictions were. Global financial collapse is due to “a sudden revision of human opinions as to the value of money and stocks and bonds and mortgages and so on, bits of paper,” wealth “wholly imaginary… weightless and impalpable,” just as it nearly did a quarter century later.

  A Japanese genius invents the Mandarax, a handheld device in “high-impact black plastic, twelve centimeters high, eight wide, and two thick,” with a screen the size of a playing card, that can translate a thousand languages, diagnose illnesses, bring up any kind of information or literary quote. At a time when “portable” or luggable computers were known as boat anchors and linked by phone lines, Vonnegut had foreseen Google and the iPhone (which, to draw on the kind of absurdist detail he peppers his pages with, is 11.6 by 6.2 by 1.2 cm). All of this information is useless after the Fall, Trout claims, and dubs the Mandarax “the Apple of Knowledge.” A nod to Genesis, but a startling and amusing intimation of the Apple iPhone…

  The Galápagos islands, described with distaste in 1832 by Charles Darwin as a “broken field of black basaltic lava, thrown into the most rugged waves, and crossed by great fissures, is everywhere covered by stunted, sun-burnt brushwood, which shows little signs of life,” become the home of the last traditional humans, one man and nine women. From this remnant, marooned on Santa Rosalia, home of the vampire finch, springs the non-sapient Homo sapiens of the next million years. Eventually our descendants are aquatic fish-eaters with a head sleek and narrow, jaws adapted to snatching their marine prey, skull too cramped for intelligent thought. To Trout, this is a satisfactory consummation; the fittest have survived, even if their initial “fitness” was sheer dumb accident in a world smashed by human ingenuity and an infertility virus (perhaps inspired by AIDS) spread through the machineries of world-girdling technology. The Galápagos are spared precisely by their isolation. The new humans are inbred, furred because of a mutation engendered in a Japanese child by her mother’s exposure to the Hiroshima bombing, but at least spared the heritable Huntington’s chorea (ironically, a mind-destroying illness) that their ship’s Captain fears he carries. It is a future of “utter hopelessness.”

  Vonnegut being the kind of Mark Twain writer he was, all of this hopelessness is screamingly funny.

  In a typographical stunt that blends foreboding with a cheeky grin, all those fated to die before next sunset are given an asterisk before their name. *Andrew MacIntosh is a sociopath billionaire with a blind daughter, Selena, who survives. Her seeing-eye bitch is Kazakh, who, “thanks to surgery and training, had virtually no personality”—like the posthumans of the far future, who manage it by natural selection. (Curiously, Kazak without an h is the alert canine companion to Winston Niles Rumfoord in Sirens of Titan, whose fate is to become detached in time and space. This probably signifies the sort of meaningless coincidence that for Vonnegut comprises most of the events of life and indeed the universe.) *Zenji Hiroguchi is the inventor of the Mandarax, and his death strands his pregnant wife Hisako, skilled in ikebana or flower arrangement, in a hellish landscape devoid of flowers.

  Adolf von Kleist avoids Huntington’s (unlike his brother *Siegfried). He is captain of the Bahía de Darwin, out of Ecuador, deserted by its crew. This vessel is chosen for “the Nature Cruise of the Century,” a strenuously promoted event that attracts celebrities such as Jacky Onassis and Rudolph Nureyev, although both are spared the rigors of Santa Rosalia as the human world goes bankrupt and sterile. This ship of fools comprises rogues, victims and other hapless souls: fiftyish Mary Hepburn in surplus combat fatigues, widowed school teacher; *James Wait, a younger swindler who makes Mary his eighteenth wife; Jesús Ortiz, an Inca waiter who idolizes the wealthy and hopes to join their number until a brutal encounter with financier *MacIntosh sets him straight; others. Leon Trout, political refugee to Sweden from the Vietnam War after partaking in a My Lai-type massacre, is not aboard, being dead, but we learn his tale as well, and that of six little Kanka-bono cannibal girls.

  The whole shambling novel, typically for Vonnegut, is a jumble of flash stories and blackouts, salted with sardonic jokes and agony, yet somehow manages to achieve what Martin Amis claimed for it, that “it makes the reader sweat with pleasure, but also with suspense.” This is so even though we know that “Thanks to certain modifications in the design of human beings, I see no reason why the earthling part of the clockwork can’t go on ticking for ever the way it is ticking now.” Brainless, that is, with no Beethoven, no Shakespeare, no high school movie showing annually the erotic mating dance of the Galápagos’ blue-footed boobies, copulation deleted.

  7

  Pat Murphy

  The Falling Woman (1986)

  ARE COMMUNICATIVE, rational ghosts still a fantastical, supernatural conceit, rather than some as-yet unplumbed facet of the quantum-strange universe, if they convey accurate information about their pre-posthumous lives; undertake no actions that violate natural laws; and appear at times and places that bear a logical relationship to their old identities, visiting us, perhaps, out of physicist David Bohm’s implicate order?

  Such is the categorical conundrum posed to the literary taxonomist by Pat Murphy’s The Falling Woman, a novel full of ghosts. We think such a story can be parsed as sf. Murphy’s second novel is undeniably science fiction, due not only to the general reasonable affect of the ghosts therein, but also to the science-heavy apparatus and storyline that contain them, like Prospero’s warding spells

  Science fiction has made many accommodations with spirits in the past. Timeslip tales such as Jack Finney’s Time and Again are really all about a live human easing back into the realm of the departed, achieving time travel (an essential motif of sf) without the machinery. Sometimes, alien cultures have ready access to their dead, as in Brian Aldiss’s Helliconia trilogy. And finally, the whole iffy area of paranormal powers has long been accorded a central place in science fictio
n, from at least John W. Campbell’s time (Asimov’s Mule, anyone?). Thus we get the wild talent of psychometry—invoking the historical information trail of an object via touch—which comes awfully close to seeing ghosts

  In any case, the protagonist of The Falling Woman, Elizabeth Butler, is indubitably a scientist—an archaeologist—who sees ghosts, as does, intermittently, her daughter (thus suggesting a genetic basis for the ability). So exactingly and empathetically is the mother’s professional field depicted that we accept the ghosts as merely one more tool in her toolkit, a handy technic that her less-gifted peers simply lack.

  Elizabeth Butler and her professorial co-worker Tony Baker are on their annual summer dig at the Mayan site of Dzibilchaltún, riding herd on the usual set of horny and lackadaisical and sincere students. (The camp’s interpersonal dynamics summon up allied notes from such safari scenarios as Hemingway’s “The Short Happy Life of Francis Macomber.”) Elizabeth, long prone to seeing animated shades from the past while not interacting deeply with them, now experiences visions of the last inhabitant of the once-flourishing Mayan settlement, an old woman named Zuhuy-kak. More vitally, Elizabeth discovers she can converse with Zuhuy-kak, and begins to learn information she could not otherwise have access to. But the spirit is bitter and vengeful, and has bad things in store for Elizabeth, generating the book’s considerable suspense, which is compressed into a mere two weeks or so.

  Into this fraught scenario comes Diane, the estranged daughter, fleeing bad times of her own. She wishes to reconnect with her mother, and Elizabeth reluctantly agrees to take her on as an untrained helper. (Diane’s inexperience allows Murphy conveniently and unawkwardly to educate both character and readers in the methodology and goals of a dig.) Murphy splits the narrative between mother and daughter points of view, and the resulting see-sawing insights and battling failures of communication prove fertile.

  The mother-daughter relationship obviously is a central engine of the book, and Murphy explores it passionately and deeply. Likewise, the patriarchal roadblocks Elizabeth has experienced in her career are highlighted in a judicious yet righteously ireful manner. Elizabeth’s damaged psyche receives an airing as well, nowhere more tellingly than in Chapter Thirteen, where she muses on the central dead space inside her heart. “I had sealed off the part of me that knew how to love. It was too close to the part of me that knew how to hate, and that was at the center of the madness. I had sealed them all away, leaving a dead place...” Then Elizabeth all unconsciously segues to a discussion of the cenote—the Mayan sacrificial well that plays such a pivotal role in the tale—never realizing that, metaphorically, just such a cold vacuity full of skeletons and sacrificed virgins lies inside herself. Murphy’s deft symbolical identification of inner and outer topography is complete.

  Murphy’s novel consorts well with the elegantly enigmatic work of Graham Joyce, Jonathan Carroll and Jo Walton, although with an emphasis on science rather than fantasy. Elizabeth Butler is no Indiana Jones. In fact, she belittles her profession. “Archaeologists are really no better than scavengers, sifting through the garbage that people left behind when they died... We’re garbage collectors really.” But the dedication and intellect she bestows on her chosen field, the scrupulousness with which she follows her protocols into the territory of artistry, her unselfish desire to expand humanity’s knowledge base, all belie her protests, and her adventures of the mind—whether with trowel in hand or conversing with the dead—end up outshining anything Harrison Ford has yet brought to the screen.

  8

  Pamela Sargent

  The Shore of Women (1986)

  EDITOR OF THE FIRST, and still important, anthology devoted to science fiction by women, Women of Wonder (1975), and two sequels, novelist and critic Pamela Sargent observed that women sf writers during the ’70s, like the feminist sisterhood, were

  coming to consider themselves a group. This is not to say that they shared the same views, were equally doctrinaire in their feminism, or similar in their writing. But there was a growing sense that science fiction was a form in which the issues raised by feminism could be explored, in which writers could look beyond their own culture and create imaginative new possibilities.

  She added:

  At the core of both feminism and science fiction—at least what ideally should be at the core of both—is a questioning of why things are as they are and how they might be different. Science fiction, with more women writing it, had a chance to become what it had claim to be all along—a literature that embraces new possibilities.[1]

  Alongside the many excellent writers she showcases in her anthologies, Sargent exemplifies this prospectus in her own novels. These range from one of the first novels exploring the consequences of human cloning, Cloned Lives (1976), to a formidable trilogy about terraforming Venus, and other serious, thoughtful, lucid work. In The Shore of Women (1986), Sargent constructs a post-apocalyptic world where today’s smug certainties have been undone by global nuclear war and a consequent “nuclear winter.”

  Hundreds or perhaps thousands of years later, matriarchal and apparently worldwide urban utopias—walled enclaves protected by force fields—maintain a stationary technological civilization, in the midst of a vast wilderness sparsely populated by bands of hunter-gatherer men scratching a stone age living. These mini-clans get along grudgingly with each other in prickly territoriality, united by a “holy speech” used in the many hi-tech shrines scattered by women across the landscape. Here worshipful and (by default, in everyday life) homosexual men drop by to commune in wired dream with the Lady, and Her several virtual aspects, enjoying imaginary coition with very real consequences, as their semen is milked away mechanically and used to inseminate the Mothers of the World safely within their lesbian redoubts. Girl children are retained by the enclaves, boys shoved out at 5 or 6 after mindwashing and placed in the custody of men. If any bands get the itch to join into larger settlements, risking the reinvention of agriculture, the wheel and metal-working, golden flying globes are dispatched from the nearest city to slaughter the brutes and raze their habitats to the ground.

  Inevitably, since this is a novel written for today’s readers, it takes a Romeo and Juliet turn, although one with more fear and loathing and remorseless slaughter than Shakespeare managed after Titus Andronicus. A young woman, accused of complicity in a near-murder done by her mother, is exiled with her into the outer grimness. While her mother dies almost immediately at the hands of male ruffians, Birana survives, sheltered by wise Wanderer. In the guise of a beardless youth, she meets Arvil, a young man of about her own age. Their growing relationship and even intimacy is thwarted by Birana’s bigoted, heterophobic upbringing.

  But this social order is no mere inversion of our own traditionally homophobic rejection and stigmatization of gays and lesbians. In Sargent’s future, men are repeatedly conditioned to worship the ideal feminine, and to crave the orgasmic satisfactions of vaginal sex. So while Birana is revolted by the prospect of physical intimacy with a male, Arvil must fight his own impulses.

  Meanwhile, Birana’s peer and former object of desire, Laissa, has problems with her own mother, who retains an unhealthy affection for her infant son Button, trying to forestall his exile into barbarity. By a curious coincidence, Arvil is Button’s older brother, and Laissa’s twin—and the physical resemblance does not escape Birana, whose initial interest in the young man is a displacement of her infatuation with his sister.

  The early emphasis on Laissa, more or less dropped for the bulk of the book, is explained in the end, when as a historian she shapes much of the first-person testimony of these two star-crossed lovers into the book we’ve read. It perhaps explains a certain muted, almost sepia-toned calmness in the telling of events that do not lack in drama, tension, fear, intoxicated romance, terror, death, birth, and courageous perseverance. This avoidance of a melodramatic tenor in a narrative where it might seem an endless temptation is one of the features that draws the reader into a sympathetic l
anguor, the kind of mood more often elicited by long Victorian novels than by survivalist thrillers, or even the chilling bleakness of Cormac McCarthy’s The Road (Entry 84). It is a little reminiscent of the long dying falls of George R. Stewart’s superb Earth Abides (1949), but Sargent tells a more confronting tale than history’s collapse into pastoral loss of memory.

  The women’s enclaves resemble more closely the sequestered, changeless city Diaspar, in Arthur C. Clarke’s The City and the Stars (1956). The youth who leaves Diaspar for the forbidden outdoors is Alvin, almost an anagram of Arvil, so perhaps The Shore of Women, with its hints of a rapprochement between the sexes and these mutually alien ways of life, is a kind of inversion of Clarke’s famous fable. The voice of that book, too, moved against the fall of night to a vivid stance opposing restriction and fearful stasis. In the end, this is the reality the women of Sargent’s enclave must accept, however resentfully: “We are being given a chance to reach out to our other selves. What we do will show what we are and determine what we shall become.”