Science Fiction: The 101 Best Novels 1985-2010

by Damien Broderick

  Swanwick is himself a magician of words and images, setting traps and betraying our expectations. His first story was the accomplished “Ginungagap,” when he was 30; his second novel Vacuum Flowers mixed space opera with cyberpunk, and later he won applause for The Iron Dragon’s Daughter and Jack Faust, all splendid inventions. Here he brews a hallucinogenic recipe, intensely vivid, baffling, but intoxicating. In Stations of the Tide, which won 1992’s Nebula and Locus awards for best novel, nothing holds still for long. People readily move their point of awareness into skeletal surrogate bodies, and can fracture their minds into agents that impersonate them, act on their behalf, are absorbed back and extinguished. When an agent of the blockaded colony mind Earth is met, it is something out of Milton and Swift, an authentically monstrous manifestation in virtual reality:

  The encounter space was enormously out of scale, a duplicate of those sheds where airships were built, structures so large that water vapor periodically formed clouds near the top and filled the interior with rain. It was taken up by a single naked giant.

  Earth.

  She crouched on all fours, more animal than human, huge, brutish, and filled with power.... Her limbs were shackled and chained, crude visualizations of the more subtle restraints and safeguards that kept her forever on the fringes of the system.

  This vast, sweat-stinking, musky monster is a figure familiar from psychoanalysis: the archaic Mother, a sort of feral female phallic force, more mythic than misogynistic in Swanwick’s making. And like that clammy image from post-Freudian analysis, complete with vagina dentata, it invites the bureaucrat into its mouth. In the overwhelming presence of an Earth utterly overborne by technology out of control, he asks the agent:

  “What do you want from us?”

  In that same lifeless tone she replied, “What does any mother want from her daughters? I want to help you. I want to give you advice. I want to reshape you into my own image. I want to lead your lives, eat your flesh, grind your corpses, and gnaw the bones.”

  It is the childhood terror of Hansel and Gretel, of Jack and the Beanstalk giant. More explicitly, Earth demands: “Free the machines.” Terrified, these augmented humans must keep their ancient parent shackled if hardly powerless. The center of this novel is the power, the sexy lure (the novel is drenched in sex, often perverse), and the dangers of high technology. Such forebodings are not fanciful, considering our prospects perhaps only a generation away from nanotechnology, artificial intelligence, machine interfaces and human modification. Grimm’s fairy tales caught the rural voices of the nineteenth century and earlier. Do they work now in a world remade by science? Well, we carry our history with us, tucked away inside our narratives and nightmares. Will our descendents be human?

  That’s a question sf has posed in one form or another for decades, and is increasingly salient. Swanwick acknowledges as much in sly borrowings scattered throughout the tale, references to classic stories by Brian W. Aldiss (“Even as his body hit the waters of the fjord, it began to change. A flurry of foam marked some sort of painful struggle beneath the surface”—from “A Kind of Artistry”), the golden cyborg body of the transformed woman Deirdre in Catherine Moore’s “No Woman Born,” and figures from hard-edge poetry like Ted Hughes’ Crow. A key resonance is Gene Wolfe’s marvelous The Fifth Head of Cerberus, with its shapeshifting, mysterious aborigines. Missing these tips of the hat to the past won’t spoil the story, but Swanwick’s risotto blends many ingredients and flavors, from the Bible to Shakespeare and Milton all the way into Vernor Vinge’s Singularity, even anticipating Charles Stross’s wildly inventive posthuman futures. The book is a delightful and disturbing confection, reaching at once into the past and the future, and yet entirely itself, like Swanwick’s talent.

  25

  Stephen Baxter

  Timelike Infinity (1992)

  [Xeelee Sequence]

  RECALLING the advent of A. E. van Vogt, Robert Heinlein and other stalwarts of sf’s Golden Age in the 1940s, Stephen Baxter arrived with a bang—and at first his style and characterization were equally rudimentary. That did not matter much because, like those North Americans, this British newcomer half a century on was an instant master of mind-boggling ideas, throwing out sparkling Catherine wheels of wild notions that convulse the imagination. It was less important that his first novel, Raft, was stodgily told than that it was the tale of someone from our recognizable universe abruptly flung into another, where the force of gravity is a billion times as strong. What would that be like? With a Cambridge degree in mathematics and a PhD in engineering, Baxter knew what it would be like because he worked through the problem, just as the old-fashioned sf masters had. And his advantage was computers to help with the calculations, and spectacular new science in the journals, waiting to be used.

  By his second novel, Timelike Infinity, his styling was improved, but what held readers’ astonished attention was the scale of his declared ambition. The book plunged into the deep immensity of its title, and heralded a sequence (not yet completed) that reaches from the Big Bang birth of the universe to its guttering and death. For Olaf Stapledon, in First and Last Men and Star Maker, the history of humankind was many millions of years long but merely a chapter against the dark background of the cosmos. Stephen Baxter ventured upon an updated version but with a cast of characters, human and otherwise, that were increasingly well rendered.

  Baxter’s role for humanity starts just as humblingly, with the species crushed into subservience by the first alien species we encounter (the Squeem) in A.D. 4874, after thousands of bright, hopeful years protected from aging by AntiSenescence technology. The Squeem are bested, but a second alien species (the Qax, in their Spline living starships) occupies Earth. Jasoft Parz, once a wannabe rebel, is now the aging and compliant ambassador to the Qax Governor. A millennium and a half earlier, Michael Poole is designer of an exotic tetrahedral wormhole mouth that will be hauled from Jupiter space by the near-lightspeed GUTship Cauchy, to serve as a time gate. When this Interface is returned 1500 years later to occupied Earth, it allow the escape to the past of Poole’s fellow designer, Miriam Berg, and a group of ideologues, the Friends of Wigner, who hope to shape the future in humanity’s image by manipulating a conjectured Quantum Observer at the far end of time.

  The Qax, like the Squeem, are defeated, but humankind falls once more before a third alien species, the Xeelee near-gods and their nightfighters. A ferocious million year war finally sees the Xeelee victorious—but still under threat in turn. While the Friends of Wigner had hoped to shape the participatory universe—becoming, as van Vogt would put it, “masters of the Sevagram”—Baxter’s sequence of novels and short stories does not permit so comforting a fable of human exceptionalism. Nor, indeed, of the victory of any kind of life we would understand. That fate is reserved, as we learn in a sequel, The Ring, for dark matter photino entities able to reset the thermostats of all the stars in the universe, rapidly aging them to a dull red simmer that will persist for trillions of years. In their cozy cores, photino entities will endure, untroubled by supernovas and gammas ray bursters, to the very ends of timelike infinity.

  This cosmological drama is implicit in the very shape of Baxter’s stories. Time twists and loops, boiling with causality stresses, from the return to the solar system of the time-dilated wormhole tunnel at the start of Timelike Infinity to the immense engineering feat that contorts a cosmic string into a gateway a thousand light years across, spun up to nearly the speed of light. This Ring, or gravitational Great Attractor, is not the work of puny humans. It’s a colossal undertaking extending five billion years into the past, the greatest achievement of the Xeelee. Their goal is to preserve baryonic life—the kind built, like us, from quarks and electrons—against the depredations of the incomprehensibly strange alien photino birds. Since the Xeelee Baryonic Lords can’t prevail in our universe, they mean to escape to a more hospitable zone, or perhaps rewrite history so their foe is already defeated in the remote past. It was not a new i
dea in science fiction, but Baxter engaged its complexities with the attack of a late 20th century van Vogt:

  The battered, scorched corpse of the Spline warship… emerged from the collapsing wormhole into the Qax Occupation Era at close to the speed of light. Shear energy from the tortured spacetime of the wormhole transformed into high-frequency radiation, into showers of short-lived, exotic particles which showered around the tumbling Spline.

  It was like a small sun exploding amid the moons of Jupiter. Vast storms were evoked in the bulk of the gas giant’s atmosphere. A moon was destroyed. Humans were killed, blinded.

  Cracks in shattering spacetime propagated at the speed of light…

  Quantum functions flooded over Michael Poole like blue-violet rain, restoring him to time. He gasped at the pain of rebirth.

  Poole is destined at last to see the extinction of all stars, all matter in our cosmos—to be the last human witnessing the death of the universe. Like his mentor and later collaborator, Arthur C. Clarke (Light of Other Days, the Time Odyssey sequence), Baxter is playing for keeps.

  26

  Richard Calder

  Dead Girls (1992)

  [Dead Girls Trilogy]

  IN OUR contemporary world of twelve-year-old killers and sixteen-year-old supermodels (who work in a field where burnout hits by age twenty), it takes little extrapolative power to forecast a future even more skewed toward the commodification of youth and beauty, sex and death. But to tease from such bare extrapolations their most outrageous implications, then to embody the theory in believable characters moving through an ultra-tangible world seen through a scrim of gorgeous, supercharged prose the likes of which sf has seldom enjoyed— Ah, that takes the perverse genius of a Richard Calder.

  Calder’s first novel was the astonishing Dead Girls, in which we are introduced to two adolescents of a decaying future: Ignatz Zwatz and his doll-girl Primavera. In the next century a rogue nanoplague—escaped from android sex toys—now feasts among humanity, transforming all the female children of its tainted male carriers into sterile dolls: half-organic, half-”quantum-magical” succubae. Plainly, should all young females be born dolls, humanity will be extinct. Interspecies war is declared, countries are ravaged, economies collapse, niche-life blooms. Narrated by Ignatz, a smitten traitor to his race, Dead Girls is a helter-skelter eroticizing of Peter Pan, a cinematic barrage of strange emotions and outré images.

  The sequel, Dead Boys, carries forward the tale with all of the wild-eyed obsessional hysteria of its predecessor. Yet it’s a more cloistered, less expansive book, suffering a bit from “middle-itis.”

  Primavera is now a truly dead “dead girl,” her ravaged CPU womb literally kept in a bottle by the despondent Ignatz, as drug and talisman. Through the wormhole womb Ignatz’s unborn daughter, Vanity St. Viridiana, sends messages from the future, attempting to remake the past. The artificial Elohim—the dead boys of the title—now make their appearance as Inquisitorial persecutors of the dead girls. As Ignatz falls deeper into the womb-spell, past, present and future become inextricably tangled, until history goes “nonlinear.” His very identity is usurped by that of a dead boy, Dagon. The book ends on what seem to be “the last bars of reality’s finale.”

  What is most missed in Dead Boys is Primavera’s presence, not really compensated for by her sketched-in daughter. Also, the entropy of this scenario is so thick that the Asian atmosphere—so rich in the first book (Calder himself is long and intimately conversant with Thailand)—becomes skeletal.

  However, with its high-calorie, mucilaginous mix of Egyptology and Jack the Ripper, Nabokov and Beardsley, flesh and metaphysics, the first two books croon like Nine Inch Nails covering nostalgic music-hall ballads.

  Dead Things is the capstone to the trilogy, and reveals a very intelligible path and destination laid out, not always apparent to naïve readers from the start.

  The first book was certainly the most straightforward and “normal,” capable of being read almost exclusively—albeit too simply—as gorgeously bejeweled cyberpunk, an objective correlative to our contemporary sexual hangups. With the second, Calder’s mimetic universe shattered. Quantum-level tamperings inherent in the CPU wombs of the Cartier androids fractionated time and space, producing a certain line of history in which our lovable lad Ignatz Zwatz became Dagon the Elohim, slaughterer of the doll-girls he once adored, and slave to a plague known as Meta, defined thus in Dead Things: “Meta is a psychosomatic disorder which affects, not just those who possess the disorder, but everything they perceive. It affects the fabric of space and time itself. Meta is all.”

  As Dead Things opens, Meta still holds full sway, and has for the thousand years of Dagon’s bloody life. He remembers nothing of his existence as Ignatz, except perhaps the vaguest subliminal stirrings. But all that is about to change. Captured by the last survivors of the old paradigm and forcibly re-educated about the origins of his Meta-dominated multiverse, Ignatz must swallow The Reality Bomb, then detonate himself at the Omphalos of the continua in order to restore non-Meta health to existence. But the exact nature of the baseline reality is one final surprise left in Calder’s bag of tricks, a revelation that adds both more humanity and less cosmic importance to the trilogy.

  Of course, all this convoluted plot—which might just as well be derived from any van Vogt novel—is hardly the main reason to read Calder. In all three volumes, what we are lusting after is the brilliantly corrupt baroque inflections of his text, the leering gloss he provides on everything from superheroes to Grail Quests; Krazy Kat to Gnosticism; Wonderbras to the French Revolution; Xena, Warrior Princess, to Poe. Reading Dead Things is like having an imp-sized George Bernard Shaw or Oscar Wilde sitting on your shoulder and regaling you with cynical witticisms as you watch all five hundred cable channels simultaneously.

  There was a feeling in this book that Calder had indeed exhausted these particular obsessions of his in this particular manner. Where he ventured from here proved that his talent could open just about any rococo door he chose.

  27

  Steven Gould

  Jumper (1992)

  SF AUTHOR Rudy Rucker (Entry 91), who does a lot of critical thinking about the nature of the genre, has given us a very useful specialized literary term with the introduction of “power chord” to our vocabulary. By this musical analogy, Rucker is referring to the massive, Wagnerian tropes that are at the center of our field, signature concepts so freighted with accreted meaning—starflight, aliens, time travel—that merely to strum them is to invoke something majestic and powerful. But of course, the writer gets no subsequent free ride for merely plunking out such heavy-metal notes, but must ably follow up the initial strumming with a maestro’s flair.

  Teleportation is one such leitmotif, whether achieved mechanically or organically. As a special ability inherent in the mutant human body, the trope is especially impactful, conferring on the possessor great power and great responsibility, to use the famous Stan Lee linkage, and appealing to mythic daydreams of most readers. The history of the genre is rich with stimulating instances (although, curiously enough, not as many stories as are devoted to telepathy and other mental quirks), most notably Alfred Bester’s The Stars My Destination, a masterpiece which has probably deterred more over-awed writers than it has encouraged.

  But Steven Gould proved ready for the challenge of beating Bester at his own game, and in his debut novel no less. Although Gould limited himself to depicting a lone teleporter, and not a whole society of them, he nevertheless codified this wild talent in such a masterful, concrete, vivid, exciting fashion as to lay down the gold standard for any future writers looking to harp upon this particular power chord.

  Gould’s achievement represents the brilliant intertwining of two strands of story: the strictly personal, mimetic, “human-interest” plot, and the rigorously speculative yet fabulist development of the quasi-magical power of “jumping.” This fusion harkens to the ideal definition of a work of science fiction, where naturalis
tic fidelity and speculative ideation go hand in hand. In reality, neither strand can be separated from the other, without destroying the book, but it helps the discussion to consider them separately in this somewhat artificial distinction.

  First, the human dynamic. First-person narrator Davy Rice is seventeen years old at the start of the book, and his voice is pitch-perfect (although occasionally a little of the inter-teen dialogue is creaky). Davy exhibits the quintessential adolescent mix of bravado and fear, overconfidence and trepidation, optimism and nihilism, insight and blindness, knowledge and ignorance that would be predicated, given his unusual upbringing. Knocked down yet eager to battle on, to survive and flourish, he follows a unique course of action that is utterly believable given his deftly sketched personality and history. Likewise, Davy’s father and mother emerge as fully rounded human beings, not mere game pieces. Millie, Davy’s girlfriend, stands forth as similarly multi-dimensional, especially in her reactions to learning Davy’s secret. Gould’s anatomization of how society works shows deep, mature understanding as well. Given all this, if one could, impossibly, remove the “jumping” from the book, a coherent and well-done novel would remain.