Science Fiction: The 101 Best Novels 1985-2010

by Damien Broderick

  The titular “Life During Wartime” was a Talking Heads’ song of rebellion in an imagined 1980s’ epoch of urban terror. Messages are sent only in uncertain hope that they’ll reach their destination and get a reply, identity is masked, preparations for attack by the nameless narrator are readied, even day and night are reversed—and there’s every chance that nobody will ever make it home. That’s Mingolla’s bleak prospect, too. Let us hope we might yet escape it ourselves.

  [1] Shepard did not consciously intend this pun, stating that he drew the name Mingolla from a newspaper. But the story he published immediately after “R & R” was titled “Mengele,” and the unconscious is tricky.

  12

  George Turner

  The Sea and Summer (1987)

  THE TWO most important Australian science fiction novelists to date are Greg Egan, for his brilliant ingenuity and scientific depth (Entry 38), and the late George Turner (1916-1997), for what one critic called his “moral seriousness” and his determination to avoid classic sf clichés.

  A quality of gravitas attends almost all Turner’s writing, beginning with his award-winning non-sf novels of the 1950s and ’60s. (He shared the 1962 Miles Franklin award for The Cupboard Under the Stairs and the Commonwealth Literary Fund award for The Lame Dog Man.) He entered the science fiction world with a series of ferociously contentious and hard-bitten critical reviews of much loved work such as Alfred Bester’s The Demolished Man, and finally decided to try his own hand at the genre.

  His first sf novel, Beloved Son, was applauded by critics, and earned him a Ditmar award, but his best is probably Drowning Towers (the US retitling of the original The Sea and Summer), a Greenhouse mid-catastrophe study of human nature under extreme pressure, climatic and social. It won the Arthur C. Clarke award, and was regional winner in the international Commonwealth Writers’ Prize. (Another significant novel is Genetic Soldier [1994], which drew upon Turner’s own military experience during the Second World War.)

  A thousand years after the melting of Antarctica’s ice, Lenna, a scholar, and Andra, a playwright of the Autumn People, explore the drowned high-rise towers built to accommodate the swarming Swill, living on State charity, of mid-21st century Melbourne, Australia. Each of these monstrous, crowded tenement ghettos housed some 70,000 uneducated, stinking, workless victims of a collapsing society, eight to a bedroom. Most of the book proves to be a novel written by Lenna, reconstructing a key moment in the failure of this makeshift bureaucratic solution to overpopulation and global climate change. Each chapter is told by one or other of the players in this drama, although their voices share Turner’s irritable, tin-eared truculence. (Ventriloquism was not one of his gifts; the biographer of J. G. Ballard, John Baxter, complained that “if there is an awkward way to express a simple thought, Turner will find it.” But George Turner had different game in his sights.)

  The tragical history of our coming century is observed by the Autumn People as a new ice age closes in on a less populated, more modest world better prepared for disastrous change and its amelioration. Their editorial chorus serves Turner’s purpose as a propagandist, but the meat of the book is the tale of the Conway family: mother Alison, her paramour Billy Kovacs—Boss of one teeming tower block, thug, and police toady—and her clever, thwarted children Teddy and Francis, dragging themselves upward again through dystopia. The Conways stand midway between high and low; they are Fringe, formerly Middle Sweet (the well-off with jobs), and now live in a wretched small house near Kovacs’ monstrous ghetto.

  “In 2041,” Francis notes in his diary—presumably Lenna’s reconstruction, not a remnant document—“the population of the planet passed the ten billion mark.” (This is still considered plausible by UN demographers, if on the high end.) Francis was six, Teddy nine, meat rationed, the wheat belt crushed against the southern coast, gasoline unobtainable on the open market, the top third of Australia taken by desperate Asian invaders, nine-tenths of Melbourne’s 10 million crammed into a tenth of its area. These barrios for the Swill are arrayed in “ten close-packed groups of monoliths snuffling blunt snouts at the sky.”

  Evidently the grim lessons of the 20th century, when inner city slum communities were razed and replaced by appalling, dysfunctional high-rise Projects, have been forgotten or ignored. The sea is inexorably rising. And a Final Solution of some kind looks inevitable: either the extraneous living must be culled (although at least not butchered; there is no horrified cry here that “Soylent Green is people!”), or their fertility snipped. Kovacs suspects that a plot is underway at the highest levels of authority—genocide of the Swill via mass sterilization—and he is prepared to take any vicious steps necessary to unmask it.

  Teddy enters Police Intelligence, while genius lightning-calculator Francis weasels his cunning way into various criminal enterprises. A coalition of Teddy, his revered Police Intelligence chief, and father-figure Kovacs, creates from select Swill the “New Men”: “people who do what they can instead of sitting on their arses waiting for time to roll over them.” Unlike A. E. van Vogt’s Slans, and other supermen of classic sf, these New Men can do little to hold back the literal and figurative tides.

  Sly Francis is the most entertaining and pleasingly picaresque character in this very Australian version of Dickensian social critique. He is not euphemistic in his hatred of the Swill: “I used to be afraid of their violence but that can be avoided; now I just detest their dirt, their whining voices and their lack of interest in anything but enduring through the night to the following day.” But The Sea and Summer is no mere finger-wagging. The intertwined stories tear along, “little human glimpses,” as Lenna puts it, that “do help, if only in confirming our confidence in steadfast courage.”

  Aside from its merits as a vivid and disturbing study of character under duress, for us in the early decades of the 21st century this novel has a singular and prophetic salience (for all the nits one might pick). Turner characterized our time as plagued, for the authorities, by

  the nuclear threat and the world population pressure and the world starvation problem and the terrorist outbreaks and the strikes and the corruption in high places shaking hands with crime in low places, and the endless business of simply trying to stay in power—all to be attended to urgently.

  Sound familiar?

  13

  C. J. Cherryh

  Cyteen (1988)

  IN BUDDHIST practice, the dharma is transmitted through teachings from one master to another, establishing an endless chain of wisdom. Something very similar happens in literature, but especially in science fiction. Editors anoint authors, authors have protégés or collaborators. Fans become professionals, pros remain connected to fandom. Sometimes authors are also editors, and/or critics. Perhaps the field is actually more like the Buddhist Net of Indra, the symbol for “a universe where infinitely repeated mutual relations exist between all members of the universe,” to quote that science fictional nexus of mutual crowd-sourced knowledge, Wikipedia.

  Surely C. J. Cherryh must feel part of such a transmission, a living legacy, since she was one of the final, late-period discoveries of that seminal figure, the fabled fan, writer and editor Donald A. Wollheim, who bought and published her first two books in 1976, helping Carolyn Janice Cherry (he added the “h” to her surname for its somewhat alien, non-feminine resonance) to win a John W. Campbell Award for Best New Writer the following year.

  Since then, with her patented blend of exotic planetary romances—romances often in the sense of both grand adventures and passionate affairs of the heart—Cherryh has climbed to great heights, with over sixty books published. Half of those pertain to one continuity, the Alliance-Union universe, of which Cyteen is a tiny, but satisfying and award-winning slice. The whole sequence is a full-bore, centuries-spanning future history, akin in feel and tone to Poul Anderson’s Technic series, but perhaps not quite as well-known—yet!

  Despite appearing at the apogee of the cyberpunk movement, the book’s title does not refer
to a cybernetic adolescent, but rather to the name of a long-settled colony world that rivals ancient Earth in power and status. Cyteen has ascended to its influential position thanks to the business enterprise—really, political player and think tank as well—known as Reseune, which exclusively controls the cloning and “tape education” processes that are capable of turning out lab-grown disenfranchised workers (“azi”) and privileged citizens alike, to meet any needs (including warfare, long before George Lucas’s “Clone Wars”). And controlling Reseune is Ariane Emory, ancient megalomaniacal spider, user, abuser and manipulator at the heart of the web. A genius “Special,” Emory is a combination of Howard Hughes, Rupert Murdoch and Edward Teller.

  The first third of the book (a fortunate division that lent itself to a since-overturned publisher’s decision to issue the narrative in three separate parts) sets up the whole current scenario, backstory and vast troupe of players. Its climax is the assassination of Ariane Emory by a disaffected confederate. Desperate to regain Emory’s leadership abilities and brains, Reseune’s executives clone her and undertake her upbringing from infancy, in the book’s middle portion. Seeking to replicate her historical nurture, they embark on a program straight out of The Boys from Brazil. This segment ends when Ari II assumes her majority at age fifteen, gets wise to the true nature of her life, and begins to take the reins of Reseune.

  “You know why they made me and how they taught me, and you know what I am. And you know my predecessor had enemies who wanted her dead, and one who killed her. The closer I get to what she was, the more scared people get—because I’m kind of spooky, Amy, and I’m real spooky to a lot of people who weren’t half as afraid of my predecessor.”

  Indeed!

  Cyteen is, in some deep and truly profitable sense, but not exclusively, a rethinking and updating of Huxley’s Brave New World. Casting its spotlight on the genetic tailoring of people to fit into social niches, their artificial education by “tape” means, and the establishment of elites and underclasses, the book echoes and refines Huxley’s dystopia to a certain level of precision. But Cherryh has other themes and tropes in mind. Placing the world of Cyteen in a galactic setting against rival worlds, with all the competition and realpolitik machinations that such a milieu implies, the author exhibits an interest in examining the Darwinian game of “nation” versus nation (Earth versus Cyteen), weighing which political system is best fitted for taking the species to new and productive—if not necessarily safe and fair—places in a hostile universe.

  But perhaps Cherry’s deepest concern is the allied realms of identity/consciousness and family. Although the Reseune tech is less godlike than some other fictional constructs and does not permit full identity transplants between bodily shells, her portrayal of shared clonal identities treats of many of the same existential notions found in the works of such writers as David Brin; Greg Egan; Kazuo Ishiguro (Entry 77); Richard Morgan (Entry 69); Dan Simmons; John Varley. As for family, Cherryh riffs inventively about what it means to have subsets of one’s genes distributed throughout a large population, and the limits and possible permutations of consanguinity and blood loyalty. In a sense, she has carnalized Greg Bear’s notion of virtual “partials.”

  Cherry’s sprawling yet channeled novel (think of a powerful central river with lazy marshes adjacent, a kind of Everglades of a book) combines the sociopolitical reach of Poul Anderson’s aforementioned Technic tales with the Byzantine familial treacheries and alliances of Roger Zelazny’s Amber sequence. It blends the weird hothouse domesticity of Gene Wolfe’s “The Fifth Head of Cerberus” or Le Guin’s “Nine Lives” with the biopunk grotesqueries of Jack Vance’s The Dragon Masters. Such a recipe would have resulted in a farrago in the hands of a lesser writer, but Cherryh justifies every bit of Zen master faith that Donald Wollheim placed in her.

  14

  David Zindell

  Neverness (1988)

  STANDING JUST outside the period of our survey is a mighty crag of a book, A. A. Attanasio’s first novel, Radix. This hegira of maturation, mutation and adventuring across a far-future landscape, where cognitive estrangement and uncanny emotional frissons are the reader’s glorious reward, delivered by the handmaidens of beautifully ornate and darkly rococo language, is a secret talisman to a small group of readers. Surely David Zindell must number himself among the Attanasio cult, for his debut novel Neverness seeks to achieve many of the same goals through similar verbal and cultural warpings. Zindell succeeds magnificently, not merely recapitulating Attanasio’s victories, but also incorporating inspirations from several other and older models of Weird Sf into a unique voice.

  Neverness’s scenario is simple—like that of The Canterbury Tales—but opens out onto endless possible expanses. At least three thousand years into our future, a portion of the galaxy is host to thirty thousand civilized worlds, linked by the bold and privileged pilots of a mathematically inclined Order centered in the glamorously exotic city of Neverness. Our hero and narrator is Mallory Ringess, newly minted as a Pilot and embarked on a quest involving nothing less than the secret of how humanity may ensure its own survival, efflorescence and transcendence. His first adventure takes him among the macrocosmic brain cells (linked cybernetic moons) of the godlike Solid State Entity. Based on information there, he next journeys among the polar tribesmen called the Alaloi. Medical mishaps deposit Ringess on the mystical mystery world of Agathange for two whole years. Returning to Neverness, Ringess finds much change and languishes in confusion for a time. Then comes the Pilot’s War, revolt, death and treachery, and one final questing.

  Ringess recounts his own exploits in a rich language full of neologisms and repurposed words, which some have likened to the methodology of Gene Wolfe. And just as Wolfe was influenced by Jack Vance, so too does Zindell employ some of the stratagems of that anthropologically savvy Grand Master, showing us how social customs and taboos and convoluted etiquette can shape and constrain societies. Ringess’s forays, solo and with his comrades, obviously harken to the great Arthurian cycle of tales (hence “Mallory,” as in Thomas). The “Elder Eddas” secret which they all quest after is thus akin to the Holy Grail. Moreover, the bardic, mythic, roistering elan vital on display brings up comparisons with E. R. Eddison’s great Zimiamvia trilogy, which, though it soon became indistinguishable from fantasy after its first few pages, commenced as science fiction set on Mercury. Sometimes Zindell’s voice approaches that of David Lindsay in his eccentric A Voyage to Arcturus. And Stanislaw Lem’s extravagant techno tall tales in The Cyberiad spring to mind as well.

  The trope of damaged or specially endowed starship pilots is a rich one in sf, and Zindell has a lark trying to incorporate as many allusions to the great stories of this heritage as possible. Cordwainer Smith, Samuel Delany, Frank Herbert and Anne McCaffrey are the major past peaks he surmounts. Additionally, Zindell makes a nod toward what was at the time the gold standard of space opera, Larry Niven’s Known Space future history, with mention of a “ringworld” and employment of the trope of a wavefront of exploding stars that threatens civilization, the Puppeteer’s bane, here called “the Vild.”

  Zindell’s story is notable for its unabashed cerebral pleasures, which do not cancel out its vividly physical blood and thunder moments:

  My ship did not fall out into the center of the moons. Instead, I segued into a jungle-like decision tree... Each individual ideoplast was lovely and unique. The representation of the fixed-point theorem, for instance, was like a coiled ruby necklace. As I built my proof, the coil joined with feathery, diamond fibres of the first Lavi mapping lemma.

  These star pilots, are taking their ships through windows in hyperspace by proving mathematical theorems! How strange! And yet—don’t today’s pilots do something like that already? Mapping a course, by hand or by computer, is the application of mathematics to the shape of the world. These futuristic pilots happen to be doing it (somehow) directly! Feeling these sentences work on you, getting the point, is an audacious and shiver
y pleasure for those who know that the trick to decoding such sentences is not by way of the conventional dictionary and encyclopedia. Recognizing the fixed-point theorem, which in mathematics governs the transformation of one set of points into an isomorphic set, helps one appreciate a sense of recursion in what is being described/constructed—but it is not crucial.

  So here, by the same method, is Ringess’s escape from the Solid State Entity:

  I was trembling with anticipation as I built up a new proof array. Yes, the simple Lavi could be embedded! I proved it could be embedded. I wiped sweat from my forehead, and I made a probability mapping. Instantly the million branches of the tree narrowed to one. So, it was a finite tree after all. I was saved!

  Much sf claims to be focused on ideas, while really hewing to pulp action. Zindell’s book is truly about ideas, notably that great human conundrum revolving around whether free will exists or not.

  As for the legacy of Neverness, like Attanasio’s Radix it remains a secret stream in the genre. But it seems unlikely, for instance, that Neal Stephenson could have been unaware of this book when he conjured up his science monks in Anathem. And possibly M. John Harrison nodded in Zindell’s direction with his baroque space opera Light (Entry 68).

  Zindell would follow up this magnificent and self-sufficient book with a trilogy dubbed A Requiem for Homo Sapiens. These books certainly did not dilute his accomplishment with Neverness, but simply by virtue of coming later, they could not carry all the freight of unprecedented wonder and astonishment borne so capably by Neverness.