Science Fiction: The 101 Best Novels 1985-2010

by Damien Broderick

  But to add in the teleportation is to raise the story to its science-fictional acme. Subject to clinically defined abuse from his father, Davy learns under this stress that he can teleport. He reacts with caution and disbelief at first. (Taken into account by Davy is the meta-knowledge about such things derived from real literary works such as Stephen King’s Firestarter, and, yes, the Bester book, a factor often neglected in sf and fantasy novels.) But once he determines the reality of his situation, he proceeds in a manner, not without mistakes, that fulfills both the daydreams and nightmares of the reader. Without once succumbing to easy and indulgent “Mary Sue” self-identification, Gould nonetheless inhabits Davy’s voyage of discovery intimately, making the miraculous process so real and logical, consorting so well with a physics paradigm, that the reader is convinced that such a wild talent could only be investigated and exploited in the very fashion Gould outlines.

  Gould’s prose—Davy’s voice—is sharp and complex and flavorful, without being mannered or idiosyncratic or dense. The narrative has that legendary Heinlein verisimilitude and affability so often imitated but seldom duplicated. The quick cuts between physical locales that are the very hallmark of teleportation are handled brilliantly, so that the reader feels simultaneously whipsawed yet grounded.

  When the book moves into thriller territory—Davy conceives revenge upon the Islamic terrorists who killed his mother, and thus runs afoul of the USA’s National Security Agency as well—some of the quotidian domesticity of the novel is lost. But the thriller mechanics—a little prescient of the X-Men movie franchise—are ably manipulated, and Davy’s actions up the ante in a way that had to happen, unless Gould had improbably chosen to detour into some kind of minimalist Dying Inside cul-de-sac.

  The sequel, Reflex, very competently and entertainingly extends Davy’s and Millie’s story, which, alas, is not the case with the reboot volume, Jumper: Griffin’s Story, composed as a movie tie-in. But the initial thrills of Davy’s wild talent epiphany, and the blossoming out of his powers, are fully delivered in the first superior volume, a landmark of its kind.

  28

  Maureen McHugh

  China Mountain Zhang (1992)

  ONE WONDERS precisely how Maureen McHugh feels about her accomplished first novel, a hard-hitting, elegant hybrid of mimetic and speculative modes, some twenty years after its publication, given that the broad premise of its somewhat dystopian future (dystopian, that is, from the American perspective) seems closer to fulfillment than ever. Is she proud of her uncanny prophetic vision, or dismayed at her Cassandra-like status? After all, her book’s monitory message stayed under the culture’s radar for two decades. Whatever the author’s extra-literary sentiments, she can continue to be pleased with the fine literary quality of this striking debut.

  Fictional forecasts of what was seen as America’s imminent, nasty and assuredly well-deserved doom probably first materialized about twenty-four hours after the founding of the nation. Popular during the late Sixties (see Norman Spinrad’s 1970 story “The Lost Continent”), such deliciously self-flagellating depictions of decline remain in vogue today, as witness the masterful novel Julian Comstock by Robert Charles Wilson. McHugh’s book falls midway along the timeline between Spinrad and Wilson, and identifies a threat to the USA little acknowledged at the time of the novel’s composition.

  Our main protagonist, China Mountain Zhang (Zhang Zhong Shan), twenty-six-years old at novel’s outset, is a gay man, half Chinese, half Latino, living in New York City in the tail end of the twenty-first century and laboring as a construction worker. Zhang’s decrepit, stunted USA has undergone a “Second Depression” and socialist revolution, the Cleansing Winds period, and is entirely in thrall to the Chinese hegemony. Zhang must hide both his sexuality and mulatto nature to get ahead in conformance with Chinese prejudices. But in the opening section of the novel (all portions embrace vivid first-person narration), all his dissembling comes to naught, as a curious non-sexual affair with his boss’s daughter blows up in his face, and he finds himself unemployed.

  We next inhabit the viewpoint of Angel, a female kite rider in the futuristic sport favored by Zhang as spectator, involving aerial competitions with advanced hang-glider-type technology where the riders cybernetically jack into their crafts. Returning to Zhang’s life, we find him desperately taking a job at a research station at Baffin Island near the Arctic Circle, hoping that the “hazardous duty” perks involving an educational stipend will allow him to advance. The next contrasting vignette involves Martine, a middle-aged woman settler on Mars.

  Zhang returns, a student at Nanjing University, maturing and suffering at the intersection of illicit love and society’s imperatives. Alexi, Martine’s husband back on Mars, offers our next sidebar, before we encounter Zhang in post-grad mode, sophisticating his native skills. Catching up, four years on, with his old New York City boss’s daughter, San-xiang, provides insights into the problems of the ruling class. Finally, Zhang returns to New York, dallies for a time with old lover Peter, begins teaching, and, at the book’s broad-ended conclusion, finds his future wide-open and beckoning, in contrast to the stymied dead-end vision of his youth. A true journey’s end, but also merely the first step on a longer path.

  McHugh’s novel walks a beautiful tightrope between cyberpunk and humanist modes, leaning ultimately more toward the latter side. True, her techno-socio-political speculations and gritty/gleaming world-building are top notch, in the Sterling-Gibson manner. This contrasting portrait of China with the USA’s condition is typical.

  In New York [thinks Zhang] I ride a subway system built sometime in the 1900’s, here buses segment and flow off in different directions. There’s a city above the city, a lacework super-structure that supports thousands of four-tower living units and work complexes like the University complex we live in… and there’s food here I’ve never seen or heard of, from Australia and South America and Africa, at outrageous prices. Everyone here seems rich.

  But such touches take a back seat to character development, the bildungsroman nature of the tale. The reader’s primary interest always resides in Zhang’s muddled course through life’s minefields, as he acquires more and more tools with which to carve out a life for himself, coming to recognize his flaws, remedying what he can and accepting the rest. It’s a primal journey that provides strong hooks into the reader’s affections and sympathies.

  With its multiple viewpoints and slice-of-life concerns, McHugh’s novel harks to an infrequently sampled but distantly admired landmark of an earlier generation, Thomas Disch’s urban and urbane 334. Echoes of fragments of Samuel Delany’s “We, in Some Strange Power’s Employ, Move on a Rigorous Line” and “Time Considered as a Helix of Semi-Precious Stones” also intrude their presence. Stripped of any surrealism or epistemological weirdness, McHugh also somehow owes a debt to Philip K. Dick and his focus on the “little man.” This is one of those rare sf novels where neither war nor espionage, neither mortality nor crime, neither paradigm shifts nor transcendence serve as plot engines. Instead, in accordance with Ursula K. Le Guin’s famous essay, “Science Fiction and Mrs. Brown,” we inhabit deeply an average soul, and in so doing share what Zhang characterizes as an “inner light” resident in us all.

  29

  Kim Stanley Robinson

  Red Mars (1992)

  [Mars Trilogy]

  TO UNDERSTAND the nature and scope and thrust of Robinson’s much-admired, diamond-hard Mars books, it’s first necessary to get past one major shibboleth: the word “infodump.” In an interview, Terry Bisson said: “Someone once described your Mars books as an infodump tunneled by narrative moles. I think it was a compliment. What do you think?” Robinson replied:

  No, not a compliment. I reject the word “infodump” categorically […and] I reject “expository lump” also, which… are attacks on the idea that fiction can have any kind of writing included in it. It’s an attempt to say “fiction can only be stage business” which is a stupid position
…. [T]he world is interesting beyond our silly stage business. So “exposition” creeps in. What is it anyway? It’s just another kind of narrative…. And in science fiction, you need some science sometimes; and science is expository; and so science fiction without exposition is like science fiction without science, and we have a lot of that, but it’s not good.

  This forceful demand for unhindered access to a full complement of writerly tools is no mere crochet on Robinson’s part, but a radical stance that would allow him to craft a big bold story on the widest possible canvas, a work utterly new and contemporary that paradoxically employed some of sf’s oldest, almost Gernsbackian methodologies.

  The Mars trilogy-plus-one is the late twentieth century’s equivalent of War and Peace by Leo Tolstoy, immense (more than 2600 pages), full of solid research deployed to illuminate historical forces and the specialness of a chosen time and place, made vivid by supportive storylines employing a large troupe of actors. In Robinson’s case, of course, his history hasn’t yet happened, so facts had to be supplemented with informed speculation, and he could not utilize actual personages. Nonetheless, his Mars sequence has about it the tactility and complex realism of history, and could almost serve as a blueprint for some NASA return to space (although its emphasis on partnering with the Russians and the Japanese might have to be updated with references to Chinese and Hindu partners). More crucially, these chronicles of the future are what cultural theorist Fredric Jameson, Robinson’s postmodern Marxist mentor, would call dialectical history—not a typical sf celebration of raw technology, but a contestatory, painful journey toward a plausible utopia.

  Red Mars opens in the year 2026 and finds its focus with John Boone, the first man to step on that alien world, soon murdered, and his close companions,. the “First Hundred” settlers. Ensconced on a planet hostile to life, coping with harsh conditions and already fracturing into rival parties, they split into those who wish to terraform the planet (the Greens, led by Sax Russell), those who wish to leave it as pristine as possible (the Reds, led by Ann Clayborne), and Areophanists who hope for an entirely new way of Martian life.

  A revolution in 2061 undoes many of their programs, bringing down the great skyhook or areosynchronous cable 37,000 kilometers long, 10 meters across, untethered from its asteroid anchor so that it lashes down around the equator of the world:

  The cable was now exploding on impact... and sending sheets of molten ejecta into the sky, lava-esque fireworks that arced up into their dawn twilight, and were dim and black by the time they fell back to the surface.... The second time around the speed of the fall would accelerate to 21,000 kilometers an hour, he said, almost six kilometers a second; so that for anyone within sight of it—a dangerous place to be, deadly if you were not up on a prominence and many kilometers away—it would look like a kind of meteor strike, and cross from horizon to horizon in less than a second. Sonic booms to follow.... Clips shot from the night side surface were spectacular; they showed a blazing curved line, cutting down like the edge of a white scythe that was trying to chop the planet in two.

  Robinson does not fail to turn an eye toward the unstable situation back on Earth, ruled by corrupt, corporate transnationals, which mostly intend to strip Mars of its resources. But progress proves inevitable.

  Green Mars chronicles the transitional period where the fourth planet is first able to host unprotected plant life. A soletta, a huge delicate cone of mirrors 10,000 kilometers across, hangs between Mars and Sun, focusing extra sunlight for heat and power. Infalling ice asteroids fill the basins with renewed oceans and rivers that support a new biosphere, thickening the atmosphere. Interference from Earth continues, until the home world’s own problems overwhelm the old hegemony. Drastic life extension technologies devised on Mars allow the early settlers to remain youthful for many decades, personally embodying their ideological and political concerns into a rapidly changing future for the once-red planet.

  After a second revolution, and in preparation for a third, Blue Mars spans a century and more. Mars is raised to solar system ascendency, opening up first the solar system and then the stars for humankind. As with the long historic sagas of James Michener, a familial line of blood and genes unites the eras—but now each generation extends across hundreds of years, creating not just new habitable worlds but a new kind of society deserving (in Robinson’s view) of this opportunity.

  A pendant book, The Martians, contains a whopping twenty-eight laterally illuminating extensions of the saga, some counterfactual to the trilogy, ranging across a wide spectrum, from a “reprinting” of the Martian Constitution followed by scholarly commentary, to abstracts of scientific papers; poetry; myths; and in the ultimate selection, “Purple Mars,” the depiction of a slice of Robinson’s own life during the composition of the trilogy.

  With his blend of realpolitik, scrupulous scientific accuracy, visionary future history and microcosmic affairs of the mind and heart, Robinson’s books obviously owe a debt to Robert Heinlein’s novels of pioneering in space, such as Farmer in the Sky and especially The Moon is a Harsh Mistress, until now the gold standard of space colonization and rebellion stories. But Stan Robinson’s own well-known outdoorsman activities provide the empathy and sensibilities that allow him to depict the geology, geography, topography and nitty-gritty tactility of life on the planet. He achieves a unparalleled blend of minute short-term focus and Stapledonian long-view perspectives.

  Robinson’s achievement here would inform his own subsequent near-future Science in the Capital series about imminent global climate change, but no real heirs have yet stepped forward to emulate his patented mix of sober engineer’s blueprints and pioneer’s utopian zeal.

  30

  Vernor Vinge

  A Fire Upon the Deep (1992)

  [Zones of Thought]

  DESPITE CLAIMS pushing the genre back to The Epic of Gilgamesh, modern science fiction is not much more than a century old, or perhaps two.[1] That might explain why so many of its great ideas, its unique storytelling devices, are the creations of only a few brilliant, fertile innovators. The most obvious is H. G. Wells, who gave us time machines, war between worlds, invisibility, scientific hibernation into the future, manipulation of animal stock into human form, and many more. Mary Shelley is acknowledged for Frankenstein and his monstrous medical breakthrough, Isaac Asimov for psychohistory and robotics, Jack Williamson for terraforming. Few genuinely new ideas have been spawned more recently, but mathematician Vernor Vinge is the patent holder on one: the Singularity. In his 1986 novel Marooned in Realtime (a close candidate for this book), he projected a vivid sense of accelerating technological change, so swift in its closing intervals that within years, then weeks, then days, then faster still, humanity catapults itself into a kind of black hole of unknowability, transcending all that we are and have been, driven to this state by computer minds first equal to our own and then very, very much greater.

  Having seen this daunting prospect as an almost inevitable end of the road for humankind, or for any intelligent species, Vinge found that he’d painted himself into a narrative corner with no obvious escape. If every civilization either obliterates itself or passes into an incomprehensible condition of Singularity, hidden behind a veil we can’t pierce with our limited minds, how can a science fiction writer continue with her craft, his bold extrapolations? Vinge’s solution was another startling move on the story-telling game board. Suppose the universe is partitioned, as portrayed in his 1993 Hugo and SF Chronicle award-winning novel A Fire Upon the Deep. We see no faster than light (FTL) space craft, no visiting or colonizing aliens, experience no technology equal to magic, precisely because of where we live, here two-thirds of the way out from the core of the Milky Way. Actually, Vinge postulates, the universe is divided into Zones: the Unthinking Depths near the heart of the galaxy where mind is almost impossible, the Slow Zone where we live, the Low, Mid and Top Beyond near the rim, and the empty gulfs of intergalactic space, or Transcend, where post-Singularity being
s dwell, equal to gods but segregated from us by the cramping laws of local physics.

  Of course, today’s physicists have no more reason to postulate such a segmented cosmos than those in Wells’s time had for his gravity insulator “Cavorite”—something that crops up, amusingly, in A Deepness in the Sky (1999), the prequel that won the 2000 Hugo, the Prometheus, and the Campbell Memorial awards. It doesn’t matter. Science fiction, as we noted in the Introduction, need not mirror what happens to be known at the time of writing, or even when a story is read. What’s needed is the mimicry of authenticity, an attempt to suggest ways in which future or ancient or alien knowledge might impinge on today’s verities and shake them up, using rules of reason and logic to explore their impact. Vinge is a scientist, but he is also a great storyteller; the Zones of Thought is a delicious gadget allowing him to take us into a kind of history of the future that nobody had ever imagined. And to escape, in one bound, the trap he’d set for all sf writers in postulating an inevitable Singularity lurking in the shoals of tomorrow. But this does not limit his tale. Even walled out by the sluggishness of the inner galactic Zones, Powers are terrible in the true sense, and, when they go bad, are Blights, vast, all but unstoppable, utterly menacing.