Science Fiction: The 101 Best Novels 1985-2010

by Damien Broderick

  15

  Rosemary Kirstein

  The Steerswoman (1989)

  WE FIRST ENCOUNTER the protagonist of this four-part opus, a woman named Rowan, and her quest across a seemingly magical world in the pages of The Steerswoman. A sequel followed fairly swiftly in the form of The Outskirter’s Secret. (Both of these books were bundled in an omnibus titled The Steerswoman’s Road.) Then came a long interval of silence on Kirstein’s part until the release of The Lost Steersman, followed at a relatively rapid clip by the fourth book, The Language of Power. The series does not terminate here, however, but Kirstein seems to have bogged down slightly, revealing lately that what she thought would constitute Book 5 instead morphed into Book 6, leaving the immediate follow-up volume unbegun. Nonetheless, her unfinished accomplishment here is still significant. As author and critic Jo Walton says, “ If you like science, and if you like watching someone work out mysteries, and if you like detailed weird alien worlds and human cultures, if really good prose appeals, and if you can stand reading a series written by someone brilliant who writes excruciatingly slowly but has no inconsistencies whatsoever between volumes written decades apart, you’re really in luck.”

  Rowan is a member of a knowledge-seeking and information-disseminating guild whose itinerant members bind together an ostensibly pre-technological world. The Inner Lands where the steerswomen travel constitute a safe and civilized realm dotted with cities and trade routes, while the Outskirts where they never venture are harsher lands populated by odd beasts and nomadic tribesmen with strict codes of behavior. A final factor in the cultural equation is the presence of a handful of wizards, who remain generally aloof from daily affairs, while retaining immense powers that allow them to dictate policy when they so desire. For many generations this stable scenario has allowed mankind to flourish. But now things have gone awry.

  The first sign of a breakdown in the system is an odd piece of jewelry that comes into Rowan’s hands. In the first book of the series, she determines that the jewelry was connected to the demise of one of the Guidestars, stable points of light in the night sky that serve to guide travelers. In the second book, Rowan and her new best friend Bel, a woman warrior from the Outskirts, reach the source of the “jewels” and discover a crashed Guidestar. The fact that this ostensibly “natural” object was actually manufactured opens the possibility that Rowan’s world is not all it seems. In fact, a master wizard named Slado seems to be at the heart of a vast conspiracy. In the third volume, on the hunt for Slado, Rowan encounters a new sentient race.

  In the fourth installment, where much is revealed, Rowan and Bel are back in the Inner Lands in a seaside town named Donner. There, they begin to piece together the local events of forty years ago, when the Guidestar fell and Slado first rose to power. Questioning the townsfolk—answering a steerswoman’s questions is compulsory, under pain of a lifetime ban from sharing in the guild’s knowledge base—Rowan learns of a struggle for control between apprentice Slado and his master Kieran. Apparently Slado killed Kieran, assumed his powers, and began his ascent to world dominance. But where is Slado today, and what does he intend?

  The arrival of an old friend, Willam, promises to help provide some answers. Several books prior, Willam was a teen with magical propensities whom Rowan managed to apprentice to a friendly wizard named Corvus. Now an adult, Willam has left Corvus behind to function as a free agent. Rowan enlists his help to plunder the secrets of the current wizard of Donner, a pompous fellow named Jannick. But Jannick’s lore is concealed in a house that has killed all previous intruders. Can Rowan, Willam and Bel penetrate Jannick’s defenses and emerge with clues to Slado’s plotting? Maybe, with aid of Jannick’s own dragons...

  Rosemary Kirstein walks the tightrope between fantasy and science fiction in this series with precision and grace, producing a hybrid adventure that recalls both purely fantastical works such as Le Guin’s Earthsea series and purely science-fictional titles like Miller’s A Canticle for Leibowitz.

  Right from the outset, Kirstein has been clever and scrupulous about planting clues which hint that not all is as it seems in her future. Although the books read on the surface as pure fantasy, they carefully leave themselves open to interpretation as post-apocalyptic sf. By the fourth volume, this secret is out in the open, and even the non-wizardly characters themselves start to get the picture. New mysteries left unsolved by the book’s end, involving astronomical photographs, further deepen the sf nature of the tale.

  What Kirstein is doing is portraying how humanity’s innate desire to unriddle the phenomenological universe will persist through all sorts of dark-ages setbacks. Rowan’s adherence to the tenets of her guild make her a kind of proto-scientist, and thus a perfect exemplar of the science fictional mindset. Additionally, the books take on some of the qualities of a mystery novel, as Rowan and crew try to reconstruct old crimes and puzzle out active conspiracies. Sf and the mystery genre have always been intimately linked, and Kirstein makes the most of their resonance.

  But of course none of this would matter if the characters and their adventures were not compelling, and Kirstein satisfies in these areas as well. Rowan ages realistically during the course of her adventures (the books span six years of her life), and by the fourth volume she’s scarred and limping from her exploits. Bel is an excellent foil and contrast to Rowan, and Willam comes across as his own man as well. Kirstein’s compassion for even minor characters is evident on every page, and her prose is measured and alluring without being overworked.

  Further entries in this already monumental series, much awaited, can only add to its unique luster.

  16

  Sheri S. Tepper

  Grass (1989)

  IF THOMAS HARDY had ever written an sf novel, he might have produced something very much like Sheri Tepper’s Grass. A thick, claustrophobic, landed-gentry melodrama full of strained politesse, thwarted sexuality, immemorial traditions, fatedness, dark passions, religious obsession, foreboding, doom, cultural misunderstandings, and hypocrisy. It’s a book about bizarre aliens in which humans are the strangest creatures of all, one over which the judiciously omniscient narrator looms like a god who could be called cruel, were She Herself not so splendidly Other as to defy human conventions. The novel bears affinities to the works of James Tiptree, Gene Wolfe, Norman Spinrad, Laurence Janifer, Jack Vance and M. John Harrison, but possesses an eerie ambiance and otherworldly weltanschauung all its own.

  Let us consider, in the reverse order Tepper presents them, two planets. Earth, teeming with too many souls, is ruled by Sanctity, a religious government with total control on the homeworld, but lesser sway among the diaspora of colonized worlds. Sanctity is worried about plague. An unstoppable, unnamed disease has begun to spread, killing even the head of the church, the Hierarch. Lady Marjorie Westriding and her husband Rigo Yrarier are summoned by the authorities. They are informed that they are being dispatched as ambassadors to the only colony world that has shown no signs of the plague—a planet that bans scientific researchers. Their undercover mission: to discover a cure, if any. Off they go, with reluctant adolescent children Tony and Stella in tow, and a retinue of assistants and priests.

  The world where they have been assigned is called Grass. Completely covered by a lush carpet of non-Terran grasses (invoked by the author with Whitmanesque poetic cadences), except for one rocky hundred-square-mile site that serves as a port town, the world is inhabited by seven haughty, elite families who live on their walled estancias spotted throughout the vast wilderness. Peons support them with their separate village lives. To help order and ameliorate the extremely long Grassian calendar year with its harsh protracted winter, the elite lead lives of mannered ritual, full of taboos and compulsions, disdaining anything fragras, or foreign.

  Chief among these ceremonial pursuits is the Hunt, involving three native animals. First, the prey, the foxen, savage predators, each big as a dozen tigers. Then come the Hounds, canine-like creatures large as Earth horses. And
finally, the horse analogues, or Hippae, scaled and horned and razor-crested mounts like good-sized dragon-dinos, whose human riders suffer an appalling mortality rate, sometimes even vanishing entirely during the chaotic Hunts. The Hounds and Hippae are not domesticated or kept by the humans, but merely appear at Hunt times, as if in symbiosis and obeying some kind of planetary cycle.

  Added to this outré mélange are the Green Brothers, a Jesuitical sect of monks whose main task is an archaeological dig at the ruined city of the long-extinct Arbai, enigmatic humanoids whose ruins dot the galaxy. The Green Brothers also breed hybrid grasses and sport a cult of sky-worshipping tower climbers within their ranks. And why is it, exactly, that the Brothers can roam the prairie and never be attacked by the supposedly vicious foxen?

  Once on Grass, Marjorie and her family find themselves the center of disdain, sabotage and entrapment. Rumors abound that the Moldies—humans who wish actually to spread the plague and engineer a cleansing apocalypse—might be present. With an outsider’s perspective, Marjorie begins to see that the Hippae might be the true rulers of Grass. But will the sentient monsters enjoy having their secrets revealed? And will they threaten her family first of all?

  Tepper deftly spins a half-dozen plates simultaneously. She speculates on ET theologies in the manner of James Blish or Mary Doria Russell. She delves into ornate ecologies and life cycles in the manner of Philip José Farmer. She looks at inbreeding and clannish pride, recalling Avram Davidson (“The House the Blakeneys Built”) and David Bunch (Moderan). Romance, or lack thereof, fills the human dimensions. Marjorie and Rigo suffer a dead marriage, and infidelity looms with a Grassian native, Sylvan bon Damfels, who allures Marjorie and she him. Issues of colonialism and privilege, machismo and sexism come by turns to the fore.

  Additionally, Grass merits one more distinction. It is generally acknowledged that Samuel Delany’s Flight from Nevèrÿon was the first work of fantastika to deal with AIDS, the relevant portion of Delany’s book appearing as early as 1984. But five years after that, Tepper’s treatment of the incurable disease rampant within the Sanctity—the shame it confers, the secrecy involved, the class barriers in play—marks a second respectable foray by the genre into dealing, at least on metaphorical terms, with the late twentieth century’s dominant epidemic.

  Tepper continued exploring this complex cosmos in the notional Arbai Trilogy, whose formidable second and third entries were Raising the Stones and Sideshow. But these tangential cousins cannot duplicate or enhance the exotic, mind-blowing estrangements of Grass. The book glows like some rare Terence Malick film, aloof and mysterious, knowing yet quizzical.

  17

  Iain M. Banks

  Use of Weapons (1990)

  IAIN M. BANKS, without the middle initial, made his reputation with several freaky postmodern novels of highwire psychopathology. He erupted into British letters in the mid-1980s with such brio that Fay Weldon famously dubbed him “the great white hope of British Literature.” She had in mind The Wasp Factory (1984), with its grisly brilliance, and a handful of other technically adventurous mainstream titles. A closet sf fan at the time, Banks was enabled by those successes to publish the bounteous space opera Consider Phlebas (1987), an exuberant amalgam of every big screen science fiction invention since (and including) Larry Niven’s Ringworld, a gold bangle the size of Earth’s orbit.

  With its T. S. Eliot title, its gaudy tale of interstellar conflict between the Culture and the brutal Idiran empire, Consider Phlebus introduced a fully stocked universe as ample as anything in sf’s future histories by Heinlein, Poul Anderson, Niven, Asimov. Cunningly, Banks contrived to present the Culture as the apparent imperialist enemy, before his elaborate, careful unfolding of the tale engages our true sympathies.

  Happily, Banks has returned repeatedly to this delightfully detailed universe of his post-scarcity galaxy-faring Culture, most of its human-like population dwelling on gigantic, AI-controlled starships or Orbitals, luxurious habitats smaller than a Ringworld and spinning on orbit around strange suns, peaceful but armed to the teeth. Many of the novels involve interstellar spies and manipulators known as Special Circumstances, and their harrowing moral quandaries.

  In The Player of Games (1988), for example, world-weary Jernau Gurgeh is apparently an amateur Culture expert in strategy and tactics, chockablock with specialized genofixed glands, nurtured and perhaps owned by whimsical and snide AI machines. Gurgeh is snookered into a hustle on a planetary scale. Duped agent of his rich anarchist society, he climbs the ranks of a barbarous game-structured society, learning something of empathy and involvement. His tale enveloped the story of a single intellectual combatant in the endless conflict between Banks’s machine-loving hedonistic Culture (tolerant, benevolent, resolute) and its foes: brutality, credulous faith, political hierarchy, war.

  Perhaps Banks’s finest sf novel is the early Use of Weapons, a drastically complex biography of a soldier, Cheradenine Zakalwe, recruited from a world not unlike Czarist Russia and for centuries sent into the field again and again, supported with only the most ironic ambiguity by subtle Culture intelligences human and artificial. (He appears again, unnamed and to considerable ironic effect, at the very end of Banks’s recent Surface Detail [2010]). Frozen to death, he can be healed, if reached in time. Even if he’s decapitated, he can be revived. A poisoned worm of lost memory remains hidden from sight, however, baffling the labyrinthine plans of even the Culture’s most beguiling minds. Banks somehow works a narrative miracle, a triumph of generic engineering, fusing thriller and moral parable, reeking detail and clinical distance, fanciful invention and heartfelt pain.

  The Culture Special Circumstances agent is named, with typical Banksian abandon, Rasd-Codurersa Diziet Embless Sma da’ Marenhide, more usually just Diziet Sma, attended by her lethal, sardonic drone AI companion Fohristi-whirl Skaffen-Amtiskaw Handrahen Dran Easpyou, or Skaffen-Amtiskaw. Drones are unsentimental:

  “We’ve a nebula fleet assembling; a core of one Limited System Vehicle and three General Contact Units stationed around the cluster itself, plus eighty or so GCUs keeping their tracks within a month’s rush-in distance. There ought to be four or five GSVs within a two-to-three months dash for the next year or so. But that’s very, very much a last resort.”

  “Megadeath figures looking a bit equivocal are they?” Sma sounded bitter.

  “If you want to put it that way,” Skaffen-Amtiskaw said.

  The novel winds on itself like a double spiral, an architecture suggested by his Scottish colleague and friend, the equally talented Ken MacLeod (see Entry 53). The main story carries us forward; its parallel runs backward, in leaps of recovered traumatic memory. In the end, all certitudes are broken. Anything may be used as a weapon, however personal, ugly, ruinous to the wielder. The novel is a coiled maze; many ways lead in, as many out, all of them refuting determinacy even as they insist upon it.

  And for all that, the book is tremendous fun, and is often credited with the revival of intelligent space opera. Colossal artifacts with facetious names like the Very Little Gravitas Indeed roar across the galaxy, while enhanced humans and snide machines frolic within their protective fields. The happiest moment, exactly catching Banks’s way of taking sf’s geegaws and doing rude things with them, is this:

  “To the Culture,” he said, raising his glass to the alien. It matched his gesture. “To its total lack of respect for all things majestic.”

  At the heart of sf as an enterprise—if it has one, and to the extent that it surmounts national boundaries—ones often sees the hungry wish not to die, not to be mortal and evanescent, not to be cast into nothingness just when the story is getting interesting. Thus, sf’s interest in time-dilating starships, in cryonic suspension into the future, in characters who upload their minds into secure computer substrates, who hybridize themselves by a dozen paths into persistence. Does anyone really want to live in the inhospitable ruin of Mars, let alone the planets of distant stars, reachable only at immense cost and
probably uninhabitable on arrival? Yes, a few do, like Arctic and Antarctic explorers; it would be a rewarding exploit, in its way (see Robinson’s Mars trilogy, Entry 29). But maybe, after all, it is a metaphor like the anarcho-socialistic Banksian Culture. “Can I get there by candle-light? Yes, and back again!”

  Meanwhile, we have the Culture and its delights, complexities, rich imaginary adventures, and we’re the better for their sometimes confronting thought experiments and gratifying playfulness.

  18

  Greg Bear

  Queen of Angels (1990)

  A PRODIGY, Greg Bear published his first sf story at 16, in 1967, and his first novels by 1979, but his major impact on the genre awaited his maturity in the mid-1980s (Blood Music; the ambitious diptych about the infinite construct, the Way, Eon and Eternity; the world-destroying attack by aliens, The Forge of God and its vengeful sequel). In later years he explored a range of sf and near-sf forms, from Star Trek and Star Wars vehicles, to a pre-Foundation novel set in Asimov’s commodious universe, hi-tech FBI and horror tales, a far future novel that echoes William Hope Hodgson and Arthur C. Clarke (an early Bear influence), City at the End of Time. Like John Varley, he has explored projects in Hollywood. Of them all, perhaps Queen of Angels and its sequel Slant (1997) are his most satisfying classical sf works.

  Jacques Lacan (patriarch of French psychoanalytic feminism) rewrote Freud as the geographer of lack. “When, in love, I solicit a look, what is profoundly unsatisfying and always missing is that—You never look at me from the place from which I see you.” Sf’s canon is drenched with wish-fulfillments answering exactly Lacan’s poignant absence: mind readers, shape-shifters, paranormal gestalt superhumans built up—organ by organ, as it were—out of maimed, bitterly lonely individuals. Bear’s melodramatic Blood Music attempted a 1980s’ version: Vergil Ulam, a self-centered, heedless biotech cowboy, brews the world’s first intelligent microbes and lets them loose in his own bloodstream. This is an early imagining of nanotechnology, viruses or perhaps machines built on a molecular scale. Soon the world’s population is melting down, each mind and soul absorbed into its own endless fecund angelic orders of smart tissue. Lacan’s lovers are lost in endless narcissism, then set free into microbial quantum heaven: