Science Fiction: The 101 Best Novels 1985-2010

by Damien Broderick

  “In 1873, in the fir forest below Tacoma, Washington, a white woman with short black hair and a torn black dress stumbled into a Chinese railway workers’ camp.” Superstitious, like everyone in this novel, Chin takes her for one of the immortals, and seeks his bliss by taking care of her, at his uncle’s instruction. Speechless, save for grunts, blurts and ululations, Sarah Canary gains her name from this deficit when she is finally delivered (after Chin has been arrested and forced to hang an Indian accused of rape, not the last brutality in this unsparing book) into the appalling lunatic asylum at Steilacoom, WA.

  There they meet Dr. Carr, alienist, and his patient B.J.. A charmingly deranged young man uncertain of his own existence, B.J. is prey to perceptual distortions (again, like everyone else in the novel, though only he is labeled as mad). He sets the pair free and escapes with them in a picaresque, episodic, haphazard and entirely gratifying mission, leading to Sarah Canary’s final transformation and disappearance.

  Ugly, incommunicado, at home with birds but scarcely noticing the mostly devious humans she encounters, Sarah Canary is a projective screen upon which the hopes, lusts and terrors of everyone else are written. Is she literally an alien, in the science fictional sense—a being from another world, and therefore another species entirely? Certain scenes imply so, and as it happens Fowler herself considers this to be the case. Still, in postmodern mode, she warns us that interpretations of this sort must always remain, in the end, for each reader.

  Her Wizard of Oz crew, in their madcap wanderings, gather in the ebullient Burke, a naturalist, and his associate Harold, who has purchased from Burke a dead mermaid, hideously ugly, which proves to be something else entirely. Finally they collect Miss Adelaide Dixon, suffragist and magnetic doctress, whose public addresses in support of free love and women’s right to orgasm create just the kinds of ructions one anticipates in this brutal male environment at the edge of civilization.

  Miss Dixon sees in Sarah Canary (both names are always given; she is never Sarah nor Miss Canary) the escaped murderess Lydia Palmer, whom she wishes to save. Harold, a man driven to a desperate belief in his own immortality by the horrors of the Civil War, pursues Sarah Canary under a sort of taxidermist impulse. She is one of science fiction’s “women that men don’t see,” but women don’t see her, either, probably because she is not a women but a creature from an entirely different realm than the familiar bisymmetry of the sexes.

  Broken symmetries mark Sarah Canary and her oddly triumphant procession. The puzzle or koan is posed: Of what use is one wing to a bird? To a duck feigning injury, a great deal of use, faking-out any carnivores hungry for her chicks. What use is a single chopstick? Harold learns to his disadvantage, when he essays what 19th century sexist primness referred to as “female frailty,” i.e. rape. (Such delicacy does not attend the dominant racism that asserts “Find a crime, hang a Chinaman,” a dictum Chin must warily consider whenever he deals with the white demons and demonesses.) Chin sees the world as circles and straight lines, and the plot traces just such patterns, as if all these characters are acting out parts in a circus act. Indeed, from start to end the novel itches with fleas, not least in reports of a flea circus, its diminutive captives dressed as people. Is the human world just a flea circus to Sarah Canary and her own people? It is not impossible.

  One recurrent note in this unsentimental book is sounded by Burke: “Let us have no lies between us…. No dissembling. No cunning. No deceit.” Yet the story is built of little but cunning or clumsy deceit. It is the contrary of what Chin’s ancient culture, for all its own sexism, deems the essence of civilization: ren, “the tolerance or benevolence a man felt toward others… the most fundamentally human quality. The ideogram was the same as the ideogram for man.”

  All of this zany, challenging tale is told in a voice beautifully suited to its many Emily Dickinson epigraphs. Adelaide Dixon, secluded with her alien charge above a hostelry of drunken, riotous men, observes that “the wind blew water across the window with a sound like a handful of pebbles thrown by a secret lover.” B.J., too, finds semaphores in every random snap of a blanket in the wind. The world is written upon by messages that nobody else can decipher. “The moon came out again and the water on the window pearled against a background of black branches and black sky. Adelaide began to make black marks on the paper before her, marks that flew across the page like birds.” Like, perhaps, Sarah Canary hatched like a pupa from her dress that heals itself, flown naked into a sky where nobody can see her. Except us, lucky readers, in imagination.

  22

  Gwyneth Jones

  White Queen (1991)

  [The Aleutian Trilogy]

  IN LEWIS CARROLL’S delirious Through the Looking Glass, the White Queen is a chess piece person who lives backwards in time (since she lives on the other side of the mirror), and easily believes six impossible things before breakfast. Gwyneth Jones’s White Queen is Braemar Wilson, an aging British political revolutionary and trash media journalist of remarkable beauty, giving her nom de guerre to a movement opposed to an apparent colonialist alien invasion of Earth. Her beloved enemy is Johnny Guglioli, 28 year-old American eejay or engineering journalist, exiled to Africa, infected victim of a petrovirus that destroys the computing substrate “blue clay” dominant in 2038.

  Johnny becomes the object of infatuation of a hermaphrodite alien from a generation ship stranded on orbit, “tall and slight, with a touch of coltish awkwardness as if she hadn’t finished growing… and a dusky olive complexion that didn’t absolutely rule out many nationalities.” Plus what looks like a cruel disfiguration: the sunken absence of a nose, a harelip that reveals her canines. Despite this, most of those who see her in this West African town regard her as La jolie-laide—attractively ugly. Before long, s/he has reversed her knees, closed her hands into clawed pads, and is running like a wolf or perhaps a baboon. All this against a backdrop of the Eve wars—a gender conflict on a global scale—and the rise of a socialist USSA.

  So this is not your average love story, not even for science fiction which has been familiar with sexual oddities since at least Philip José Farmer’s The Lovers in 1952, where a man falls for a mimetic insect. The reverse mirroring of Carroll’s White Queen is everywhere at work in this first volume of what would become the Aleutian Trilogy, where the second book, North Wind (1994) takes place a century or so after the first, and the third, Phoenix Café (1998), 300 years after the aliens made themselves known and eventually, effortlessly, colonized the disrupted nations and cultures of the world, before packing up and leaving, using a faster than light system devised by a human woman scientist.[1] It is not surprising, then, that White Queen shared the inaugural James Tiptree, Jr. award for sf and fantasy expanding or exploring the understanding of gender.

  The threads of the story are many and hypercomplexly knitted, and for a long time it is almost impossible to unravel who is who, or why. Most of the characters are confused about each other—not just their motives, which is always rather mysterious in any serious novel, but their very nature. That’s because Jones is undermining identity, nature and nurture from the outset. The trilogy is not just a headlong postmodern work of art; it’s a poststructural construct. But don’t let that put you off.

  Since the 1940s, science fiction has worked the same way you best learn language and customs—by being immersed in a culture, as a child learns. Faux-sf, by contrast, operates the way school children used to learn French or Latin, arduously memorizing tables of vocabulary and grammar. Gwyneth Jones uses almost pure immersion, a method pioneered in Fred Pohl’s and Cyril Kornbluth’s Wolfbane (1959, revised 1986) and Frank Herbert’s Whipping Star (1970) and The Dosadi Experiment (1977). You sink or swim. This is either baffling and frustrating or exhilarating, especially in the first half of White Queen where there is very little hand-holding. Oddly, in the two sequels Jones is far more forgiving, perhaps because she is obliged to use traditional infodumps to bring forgetful or new readers up to speed quickly. Usef
ully, she has published a remarkably detailed and fascinating account of how she developed the background to the trilogy, and if readers start drifting or getting seasick they might consider turning to this essay, “Aliens in the Fourth Dimension.” Perhaps the key to these novels of identities and affiliations turned on their heads and then sideways is Jones’s critical postulate:

  I wanted my aliens to represent an alternative. I wanted them to say to my readers it ain’t necessarily so. History is not inevitable, and neither is sexual gender as we know it an inevitable part of being human.... I planned to give my alien conquerors the characteristics, all the supposed deficiencies, that Europeans came to see in their subject races in darkest Africa and the mystic East—“animal” nature, irrationality, intuition; mechanical incompetence, indifference to time, helpless aversion to theory and measurement: and I planned to have them win the territorial battle this time. It was no coincidence, for my purposes, that the same list of qualities or deficiencies—a nature closer to the animal, intuitive communication skills and all the rest of it—were and still are routinely awarded to women… the human world over.[2]

  The “intuitive communication” of the Aleutians, mistaken for telepathy, is a sharing of microscopic airborne packets of information gradually suffusing the world, augmented by grooming and gobbling “vermin”—the wanderers that summarize each alien’s current state of mind and history. These unisexed people give birth to offspring that reincarnate one of some three million genotypes that have persisted forever, but with constant updates that provide a sort of Lamarckian evolution. This bold postulate is milked for all it’s worth in a formidable display of science fictional creativity. Luckily, Jones is a masterful writer; as Kathleen Bartholomew notes, “Her prose is etched in silvered glass, with acid: it is hard and bright and sharp, and it smokes.” Here is an example, where Johnny is traumatically raped by Clavel, his alien poet stalker:

  The naked chicken-skin baboon crouched over him. It took his hand and buried it to the wrist in a fold that opened along its groin. The chasm inside squirmed with life. Part of its wall swelled, burgeoning outward.... Something slid out of the fold: an everted bag of raw flesh, narrowing to a hooked end.

  Science fiction as challenge—as exploration of otherness—has never been more confronting.

  [1] A superb short analysis of this third volume, by feminist critic and publisher L.Timmel Duchamp, is at: http://ltimmel.home.mindspring.com/phoenix.html

  [2]http://homepage.ntlworld.com/gwynethann/ALIENS.htm

  23

  Paul McAuley

  Eternal Light (1991)

  [Four Hundred Billion Stars Trilogy]

  THERE MUST have been something special added to the water consumed at science fiction conventions circa 1980, a laggardly, relatively unexciting time in the field. Or perhaps, as in John Wyndham’s The Midwich Cuckoos, a generation earlier some visiting aliens tampered with a batch of human embryos. Or could a fallen meteor possibly have kickstarted an evolutionary leap among those who came in contact with it, as Philip Jose Farmer postulated for his Wold Newton stories? In any case, these fanciful explanations might not be strictly necessary to account for the burst of Hard Sf writers that came to fresh prominence around this time. We might just call it the zeitgeist, and let it go at that. Something similar would happen a generation later, with such figures as Alastair Reynolds and Peter Hamilton, indicating a mysterious cyclic and emergent process fruitfully and forever at work at the heart of the genre.

  First to arise in this earlier renaissance wave was Charles Sheffield. He was quickly joined by John Stith, Roger MacBride Allen, Paul Cook, Colin Greenland and Paul McAuley. Their work took off from ancestors such as Larry Niven and Poul Anderson, bringing fresh possibilities to the subgenre of technologically rigorous yet mind-blowing sf.

  In the current landscape, Sheffield is gone, deceased too young, and Cook, Allen, Greenland and Stith have either fallen silent or departed the high-profile mainstream of publishing. But happily, Paul McAuley remains at the top of his game, an acknowledged master. His first novel and its two sequels, especially the third book for which this entry is named, betokened his burgeoning talent to all who were paying attention at the time.

  Four Hundred Billion Stars possesses a Stapledonian title somewhat at odds with its Michael Bishop innards. In a galactic scenario where mankind, despite 600 years of interstellar activity, remains precariously enthroned at best, Dorthy Yoshida, astronomer and telepath, is sent to a benighted, artificially jiggered planet, P’thrsn, where a small group of fellow human researchers is intent on unriddling the ancient enigmas concealed by the seemingly savage sophonts. In a manner somewhat reminiscent of—yet decidedly less trippy than—Robert Silverberg’s Downward to the Earth, she makes immersive mental contact with the natives and notches up a victory toward the survivability of our species.

  Of the Fall was a minor, lateral extension of this future history. Set earlier in the galactic backstory, on the colony world Elysium, the book conflated elements of Heinlein’s The Moon is a Harsh Mistress and any of Poul Anderson’s Polesotechnic novels, such as War of the Wing Men. Hidden beneath excess plottage at its core, a perennial sf sentiment: “Knowledge is an abstraction won from the whirling chaos of the universe, neither constant nor concrete.”

  Bouncing back from Elysium’s tedium—without wasting these backstory tidbits—and rejoining the sharply delineated and appealing Dorthy Yoshida in a new culminative adventure proved the winning stroke to signal McAuley’s expansion of his prowess.

  Eternal Light begins with an astrophysical action passage surely meant to recall the famous start of Doc Smith’s Triplanetary. Smith: “Two thousand million or so years ago two galaxies were colliding; or, rather, were passing through each other. A couple of hundreds of millions of years either way do not matter, since at least that much time was required for the interpassage.” McAuley: “It began when the shock wave of a nearby supernova tore apart the red supergiant sun of the Alea home system, forcing ten thousand family nations to abandon their world and search for new homes among the packed stars of the Galaxy’s core.” And although McAuley’s updating of the Smithian paradigm is notably short on ravening particle rays and giant vacuum tubes, it nonetheless hews to the spirit of wide-eyed space opera, albeit tinged with more ethical nuance and sophistication, thus setting a template in the field for future works.

  Yoshida, still reeling from the half-understood revelations received on P’thrsn about the Alea, mankind’s enemy, is kidnapped by Duke Talbeck Barlstilkin, one of the Golden, or near-immortal human elite. They embark on a mission with many others of various persuasions on a big ship to a rogue star and accompanying planet hurtling toward Earth at a sizable fraction of lightspeed. There, Barlstilkin suspects more information on the Alea will be found, with Dorthy’s help. Travelling separately in a small ship is Suzy Falcon, ex-fighter pilot eager to wreak revenge on the aliens, and her companion, an artist named Robot. When all these factions are plunged through a wormhole to the very center of the Galaxy, where the ancient enemy of the Alea lurk, they must undergo a mental and physical odyssey of enlightenment.

  McAuley’s foray into what we might think of nowadays as patented Gregory Benford territory (Entry 41) also benefits from its flavors of Frank Herbert’s Dune sequence, homages to Samuel Delany’s seminal Nova, and even a few sprinkles of Zelazny’s cavalier, black-souled immortals in the portrait of Barlstilkin. The dense sensory tangibility of the various venues (although surprisingly limited for most space operas) contribute to the impact of the book, as do the portraits of Suzy and Dorthy as pawns (specifically, female pawns) who manage to achieve high degrees of freedom and self-actuation. A touching and surprising emotional coda rounds out the book’s virtues.

  The majestic long-term, wonder-inspiring perspectives of the book, squeezed down into the realtime adventures of the cast, are summarized by Professor Gunasekra when he says, “If more people understood the time scale on which the processes of the
macrouniverse operate, we should not be a species blown up with hubris.”

  Science fiction as a guide to an easygoing confident humility and sense of one’s true embedded place in the scheme of creation. That’s McAuley’s vision in a nutshell.

  24

  Michael Swanwick

  Stations of the Tide (1991)

  “THE BUREAUCRAT fell from the sky.”

  Miranda, where he lands, is a world on the edge of cataclysm as precession swings its poles. The ice melts, drowning most of its land ecology under the centenary Jubilee Tides, threatening the colonist humans. Evolution has pre-adapted most of the world’s creatures to this cyclical calamity, so that birds and animals can morph into marine form. Perhaps the fabled native indigenes, the haunts, do so as well. As the geological crisis nears, troops from the orbitals gather the locals in readiness for evacuation. Crowd violence is poised on a hair trigger. Precious artifacts are removed, and what can’t be saved is smashed or burned. The mood is one of carnival, an extended Día de los Muertos, a frenzied Day of the Dead. Hunting for an item of forbidden technology in this forcibly and resentfully primitive culture, the bureaucrat harrows a kind of hell in a landscape of convulsive transformation.

  Throughout the book, this nondescript bureaucrat, a representative of the orbital Division of Technology Transfer, remains nameless, but by no means juiceless and anonymous. Attended by his nano-maker briefcase-cum-AI, he takes on shifting roles as he crosses the world Miranda in the Prospero system. Is he himself Shakespeare’s magician Prospero, from The Tempest, or is that the (perhaps phony) magician Gregorian, whom he seeks? The briefcase might as well be named Ariel; an information system is called Trinculo, a jester from that play. Maybe Gregorian is, rather, Caliban, roaring out his desire to rape the planet Miranda. Or is the bureaucrat a suffering, postmodern and ambiguous Jesus—taught Tantric sex by a superb, tattooed Magdalene, Undine—dragging his crucifix through 14 Stations of the Cross told in the novel’s 14 tidal chapters, to his final transformation? Or perhaps a potential Judas—or indeed Satan banished and fallen from heaven—ready to betray his own kind? Gregorian, meanwhile, was born of a virgin surrogate mother, fathered by a man from the celestial Puzzle Palace… another contorted hint.