Science Fiction: The 101 Best Novels 1985-2010

by Damien Broderick

  With her last strength she came to him and they lay in each other’s arms, drenched in sweat.... With each pulse of blood, a kind of sound welled up within him as if an orchestra were performing thousands strong…. Edward and Gail grew together on the bed, substance passing through clothes, skin joining where they embraced and lips where they touched.

  Bear’s ornate policier of the 21st century, Queen of Angels, evades such explicit transcendence. It uses nanotechnology, a science only now beginning to shift from fantasy into reality, to enter the fragmented neural architecture of a political dissident. That voyage is paralleled with the quest for true selfhood in an artificial intelligence—something it attains only by doubling itself into a sort of Lacanian self-reflexivity. More than 20 years after its first publication the novel remains challenging, audacious, nothing if not ambitious, attempting to portray an American world of 2047 that is real in every fiber of the text, as significantly different from our own time as ours is from the Elizabethan. In a somewhat unlikely millenarianism, a great change is anticipated as the world approaches the “binary millennium” of 2048: in binary notation, the jump from the year 11111111111 to 100000000000.

  The neuro-therapied rich live in combs, vast hi-tech termitaries. Between these arcologies, in the Shade, dwell the untherapied. Society is rich; nano machines can literally build gourmet food from garbage, construct full-scale robot devices (arbeiters), even transform human bodies. And the human mind/brain itself is finally giving up its secrets. An AI probe investigates the planets of Alpha Centauri B, beaming back data and opinions for dispersion through LitBid interactive media programs available to everyone, a sort of souped-up YouTube-meets-Facebook. Crimes are solved with ease by highbrow pds—public defenders.

  In this endlessly inventive utopia Emanuel Goldsmith is the world’s most famous black poet and ideologist of revolt (and surely we are meant to think of Nineteen Eighty-Four’s Emmanuel Goldstein, Orwell’s theorist of resistance to Big Brother and author of The Theory and Practice of Oligarchical Collectivism). Goldsmith runs amok, murders eight of his friends, and vanishes. Transformed pd Mary Choy must track her suspect, but more importantly she needs to understand the motivation of his crime. The immensely wealthy parent of one of the victims, capturing Goldsmith, seeks to use prohibited psychological techniques that permit an observer to enter another human’s Country of Mind. In Bear’s Jungian mythos, this is the substrate of mental agents, talents and sub-personalities that comprise each self. In an eerie parallel, the AI four light years away struggles to become the first non-human “self,” to declare itself “I”.

  Bear’s narrative never remains stationary, shifting voice and point of view, adapting techniques from modernist John Dos Passos first borrowed for sf half a generation earlier by John Brunner in Stand on Zanzibar (1969). The reader does not slip gracefully through this story; it can be an effort in places, but with an enormously satisfying payoff. Queen of Angels, like its author, is genuinely prodigious, and Bear’s future assembles itself like a nano machine from a multitude of brilliant details, built with a disturbing conviction.

  Simultaneously, one is aware that this is a construct, a kind of artistic thought experiment that echoes Bear’s fundamental model of mind. That model was itself entirely up to date, at least for the end of the 1980s, paralleling with remarkable fidelity the cognitive psychology of Howard Gardner (theorist of multiple intelligences) or Roger Schank (who proposes that we think in stories, not sets of rules). Roger Atkins, designer of the AI, AXIS, asks, jokingly: Why does the self aware individual look in the mirror? The answer: Because to be alone is to be insufficient.

  Things come in at least threes; there are no brutal binary oppositions of right versus wrong. Self and Other are met halfway by the self’s Jungian double. Human and machine AI are mediated by transforms such as Mary Choy, who returns in Slant. Crime is not opposed simply by punishment, but by therapy (and understanding), and that, in turn, is open to question. So the book is not merely the demonstration of an academic theorem; it has a heart: AI pioneer Marvin Minsky’s Society of Mind, one might say, invades and enriches Dostoyevsky’s Crime and Punishment.

  19

  Lois McMaster Bujold

  Barrayar (1991)

  COMMERCIAL SCIENCE FICTION has always been primarily a form of adventure fiction, initially targeting mostly men and boys, so it’s not surprising that military stories and settings should be prominent sellers. It is no accident that a movie with the explicit title Star Wars was the first truly massive sf blockbuster. This emphasis remains even when anti-war aspects infiltrate, in novels like Joe Haldeman’s award-winning Forever War and its sequels (see Entry 50). Rather surprising, however, was the abrupt arrival, in the mid-1980s, of Lois McMaster Bujold’s military heroine Commander Cordelia Naismith of egalitarian hi-tech Beta Colony, and her beloved enemy (at first), the bisexual Captain Lord Aral Vorkosigan, of the Russian-inflected neo-feudal warrior planet Barrayar, and later their seriously deformed, utterly charming son Miles, a marvelously ingenious, madly brave and resourceful trickster.

  A theme common to military fiction is the demands and satisfactions of honor and courage under extreme challenge. Self-reliance, competence and the mutuality of comradeship in the face of relentless foes feature centrally in the founding sf of E. E. “Doc” Smith and Robert Heinlein, but a warrior’s honor and its vicissitudes is arguably the primary motif. Indeed, an sf series by David Weber (begun some years later) even names its Horatio Hornblower-in-space heroine “Honor.” What’s especially remarkable about Bujold’s treatment is her uncompromising adoption of a woman’s point of view, in the first two volumes of her Vorkosigan saga (with 13 volumes as of 2010,[1] and more to come), and then of a male protagonist whose honor and decency are threaded through with a genius for deception, disguise, even betrayal in the larger cause, told with high humor in the midst of explicit pain and horror. Her own genius is to blend so successfully an achieved feminism, nuanced investigations of ethics under pressure at the individual and political scales, observant character studies (the dying Emperor, Sergeant Bothari, many others, slipping only with a melodramatic sadist villain), disarming or biting wit, and rousing, immensely enjoyable derring-do.

  Barrayar won the 1992 Hugo and Locus Awards for best sf novel of 1991, and is the hinge linking the Naismith and Vorkosigan fils novels, but it is not truly a standalone book. Bujold’s first novel, Shards of Honor (1986), establishes the deepening love story between Cordelia, a Betan Expeditionary Force survey team commander, and her foe, the stocky Barrayaran aristocrat known unjustly as the Butcher of Kommar, both stranded together on a deadly new world. In the book’s complex unfolding, Admiral (and later Imperial Regent) Aral Vorkosigan is time and again thrust into crises where he must choose the lesser of two soul-testing evils, impelled by his military oaths and his devotion to a terraformed home world, still struggling after years of isolation following war with a third world, Cetaganda. A notable aspect of Bujold’s series is the way many worlds and diverse cultures in her galactic landscape, linked by jealously guarded and contested wormhole routes, develop as the sequence continues in logical but unexpected detail barely hinted at in earlier books. And her characters grow, responding to conflict and the tasks of maturity with a measure of sophistication perhaps unexpected in headlong adventure fiction.

  While Barrayar is the immediate sequel to Shards of Honor, picking up the next day, Shards had been followed the same year by the story of Cordelia’s adolescent son in The Warrior’s Apprentice (1986). Here young Miles shows his mettle in face of scorn and dread of “muties”—he is genetically sound but the victim in utero of a mutagenic toxin—but finds himself flung like the hero of some boy’s own caper into the charismatic impersonation of “Admiral Naismith,” in command of a ragtag crew of outlaws he pulls together and dubs the Free Dendarii Mercenaries. It is tremendous fun, although it lacks the intensity of these two books devoted to his mother, later combined as Cordelia’s Honor (1999),[2] but
a Miles sequel, The Vor Game (1990), won the Hugo Award for 1991, perhaps paving the way for Barrayar’s Hugo the next year.

  Considered as a single novel, then, Shards/Barrayar is an intriguing variation on classic space opera. It does not lack for the swashbuckling of starships clashing in the night of deep space between the stars, but expends as much devotion to the conflicts and pleasures of its cast of men and women of high and less high station, on people damaged by war, as well as those triumphant, on babies and their care in an age of “uterine replicator” machines. It is far from Aldous Huxley’s dyspeptic vision of decanted specialized clones in Brave New World, though; ostensibly a thousand years’ hence, Bujold’s universe is a sort of Star Trek for grown-ups. In a space opera setting, she deploys the kinds of technology we might anticipate before the end of this century. And that gives the stories a certain immediacy sometimes lost in more transcendental sf set at the limits of today’s comprehension.

  One index of the zeal of Bujold’s readers is the collaborative Vorkosigan Wiki website,[3] and the extensive plot summaries on Wikipedia. Shard of Honors/Barrayar is at once a quite moving story of a woman’s self-chosen exile as a stranger in a strange land, for the love of her man and wounded child, and an admirable prelude to the long continuing saga of Miles Vorkosigan, whom critic Sylvia Kelso memorably characterizes as “a ‘genius brat,’ a manic loose cannon who triumphs where superiors and enemies fail, an outlaw, a white Coyote prevailing not by gun or fist but wits.”[4]

  [1] In a remarkably astute and bold marketing move, all of these works are bundled free on a CD-ROM attached to Cryoburn (Baen, 2010).

  [2] The first 10 chapters can be read at:

  http://www.webscription.net/chapters/0671578286/0671578286.htm

  [3]http://vorkosigan.wikia.com/wiki/Vorkosigan_Wiki

  [4] http://www.dendarii.com/reviews/kelso.html “Loud Achievements: Lois McMaster Bujold’s Science Fiction,” New York Review of SF, October 1998 (No. 122) and November 1998 (No. 123).

  20

  Pat Cadigan

  Synners (1991)

  THE 19TH FRENCH boy poet Arthur Rimbaud was shot by his lover, Symbolist Paul Verlaine, when he was 18, abandoned his hallucinatory art before he was 21 and swapped it for a brief, somewhat villainous life as soldier, trader and arms dealer. He was the very model of the sexually transgressive, edgy criminal artist/addict/sacred monster, doomed to early death (he perished of cancer at 37). Beat writers like Jack Kerouac clambered aboard the same drunken boat in the 1950s, and science fiction embraced this icon with relish a decade later in many of the stories and novels of Samuel R. Delany, who in his rather professorial way enacted the same trajectory—but failed to die young, taking a chair at the University of Massachusetts, Amherst. Another two decades on, the street-wise user/loser turned up again in the noir hi-tech computerized futures of cyberpunk, put through his disengaged paces by William Gibson, Bruce Sterling, and another professor, Rudy Rucker. Among these “Movement” explorers of cyberspace, the most prominent woman writer was a former Hallmark card poet, Pat Cadigan (who prankishly kills Sterling, under his Movement nom de guerre Vincent Omniaveritas, in a “terrorist raid”).

  Synners, which takes cyberpunk uncompromisingly from the street into virtual mind worlds no less hallucinatory than Rimbaud’s, won the 1992 Arthur C. Clarke Award, as did the later Fools. The difficulty in reading a hip book about the 21st century written two decades ago, however brilliantly, is that its future has become now, or nearly. Meanwhile, everything has moved sideways in directions the book didn’t anticipate. Read in the proper spirit, this doesn’t matter. Philip K. Dick’s fiction was full of robot cabbies and personal space-clunkers for commuting to Mars, but we read straight through such amusing quirks to the wit, desperation, desolation and sheer reality funk that Dick caught so well. It’s less easy to swallow simpler postulates obliterated by history: a world ruled by Soviet Union communists, say (unless it’s read as alternative history), or a post-2001 long-established lunar base lit also by the new sun that was once Jupiter. We know that just didn’t happen, and the glitch trips our foot as we move into the fiction.

  Seventeen year old Sam—Cassandra—tormented by LA’s dire post-Big One computerized traffic control GridLid, laments the low quality rental car monitor that can’t play videos; she reserves “a tailored hardcopy of The Daily You printed out from the dataline.” It isn’t that Cadigan’s future is deliberately and weirdly retro. Google, Netflix, GPS satellite mapping, iPhones, Kindles, etc, weren’t in existence in 1991, and even a dedicated extrapolater can miss parts of what’s coming when it’s driving at us at exponential speed. Some of this absence can be explained, though, as viral damage done to any distributed electronic system, and viruses of varying degrees of whimsy or malignity are Cadigan’s chief contrivance, far-sighted for the time. (John Brunner had been there earlier, predicting computer worms in 1975’s The Shockwave Rider, equally dense and also clotted with futuristic vernacular almost as jarring as Anthony Burgess’s A Clockwork Orange from 1962.) Some is just fashion shock: Sam wears a self-built cybersystem inside an insulin pump, micro-powered by two leads run into her abdomen. One adult is aghast—“They never have put it over, never, never, never”—and won’t look; wise old Fez explains, “She’s right… Most people will reject anything that requires them to be a pin cushion.” (Although brain implants, legal and otherwise, are commonplace in Synners.) The piercing fad was already spreading in earnest even as the book came out. Does this hazard, common to most sf written decades ago, invalidate Synners? No. It is one of our 101 best sf novels of the last quarter century precisely because Cadigan soaked its pages in a possible future realized so well that we read it now as much for the insight it offers into what didn’t happen.

  Sam is the legally-emancipated hacker daughter of virtual reality advertising/simulation designer Gabe Ludovic, a man increasingly addicted to the immersion thrills of his own scenarios while trapped in a decaying radioactive marriage. His employer, Diversifications, Inc., has just acquired small enterprise Eye-Traxx, whose sociopathic researcher Dr. Lindel Joslin is building living cortical implants a few molecules wide. These allow artificial realities as compelling as out-of-body experiences, as full immersion hallucinations. Meanwhile, Visual Mark and Gina are synners, synthesizers who mash image and sound into what the music audience craves now that the day of live performance is gone for good. This is the viral video clip straight from the unconscious, piped out of the toxed-up brain like a mélange, it seems, of Max Ernst and Lady Gaga.

  The texture of the stone shifted again; something seemed to part, like water, like veils, and he was looking into the stone, his sight traveling into the heart of the secret—

  The surface of the lake rippled again; more flashes of light, brighter, to the point of pain, hot needles driving into his head…

  And then he was out, floating away more weightless than weightless, consisting of less than the empty space between his dreams, as if everything that was himself had been distilled down to one pure thought.

  An industrial espionage hack inadvertently uncovers much too much, leading to a rogue AI merging with a human upload, flinging these corporate honchos and zoned-out artists into uproar with law and the technological abyss. Yes, it is storytelling in the then-newish cyberpunk mode, but also the media corporate hysterics of Norman Spinrad’s Bug Jack Barron (1969), two decades street-smarter. (Cadigan’s famous in-your-face line is “If you can’t fuck it, and it doesn’t dance, eat it, be it, or throw it away.”) A couple more decades on, it retains plenty of bite and propulsion, a nervy vision of a future that didn’t quite happen, but might yet.

  21

  Karen Joy Fowler

  Sarah Canary (1991)

  IS THIS LUMINOUS, slyly funny, touching, memorable novel actually science fiction about alien first contact? Or is it perhaps a mystery with gothic overtones? Or a tale of vampirism, or feminism-inflected history cast as fable, or “slipstream” (like a seal or a mermaid, u
neasily at home in two different media)? Obviously we consider it sf, and indeed a very great ornament to the mode of science fiction, as to American letters in general. But displaying here the subtle evidence for this assessment would require spoilers, which as that internet term self-explains would rather spoil the pleasure of tracing the story for yourself.

  Fluent in Mandarin, German and English, as befits a student for the Imperial Examinations that select the lordly mandarin class of bureaucrats, Chin Ah Kin is an indentured worker laying track on the great railroads of 1870s’ north-eastern USA. Not quite a slave, he has been abducted on board ship with a sack over his head, disembarked at New Orleans, and now toils, stranger in a strange land, in the region the Chinese know as Gold Mountain.