Vinge seldom writes directly of this war between ancient gods, because conflict at such scale loses sympathy. His people are two children, Johanna Olsndot, 14, and her brother Jefri, only 7, survivors of a catastrophic Blight event unleashed in High Lab by their careless information-archeologist parents from Straum, a Beyond world abutting the Transcend. Inward lie Sjandra Kei, Harmonious Repose, and the Tines World. Fleeing in coldsleep from the feral symbiotic amalgam now dubbed the Straumli Blight, the children are rescued on Tines World by barbarians, the boy taken by the tyrannical Steel, the girl by Steel’s rival, Queen Woodcarver.
Tines are pack creatures somewhat resembling fierce dogs, each pack comprising a single consciousness mediated by ultrasonic bursts. If a single animal perishes, another may join the pack, altering the group consciousness. This lovely notion is fresh and fascinating (and was first introduced by Vinge in a novella, “The Blabber,” in 1988, which perhaps should be read before A Fire Upon the Deep). A rescue mission to save the kids and a treasure they possess, key to blocking and repelling the worlds-eating Blight, is undertaken by humans Ravna Bergsndot and resurrected Pham Nuwen (who appears as well in the prequel, 20,000 years earlier), and a pair of Skroderiders, Greenstalk and Blueshell, limbless aliens mounted on gaily decorated six-wheeled carts for mobility.
Equally charming, the faster than light Beyond communities are linked by an interstellar communications Net of deliberately limited bandwidth. Quoted text messages are much like 1990 bulletin board posts, with trolls, scammers, spammers and the clueless mixed in with valuable exchanges:
Language path: Arbwyth->Trade24->Cherguelen->Triskweline, SjK units
From: Twirlip of the Mists [Perhaps an organization of cloud fliers in a single jovian system. Very sparse priors.]
Subject: Blighter Video thread
Key phrases: Hexapodia as the key insight
Distribution:
Threat of the Blight
Date: 8.68 days since Fall of Relay
Is it true that humans have six legs? I wasn’t sure from the evocation. If these humans have three pairs of legs, then I think there is an easy explanation for —
These novels (in 2011, a third, Children of the Sky, continued the story of A Fire Upon the Deep) are big, meaty, crammed with goodness, fright, insight and entertainment: real science fiction in a world clogged with derivative “sci-fi.”
[1] This vexed topic is discussed usefully by Jess Nevins in
http://io9.com/#!5796919/may-day-1871-the-day-science-fiction-was-invented
31
Walter Jon Williams
Aristoi (1992)
SOME PEOPLE will be offended by this inventive, sexually and politically complex novel, but that shouldn’t put anyone off rushing to obtain a copy. In 1992, it was beaten to the Hugo award by two other masterpieces, Vinge’s A Fire Upon the Deep (Entry 30) and Connie Willis’s Doomsday Book (Entry 32), but Aristoi is their equal, a masterful book of ideas about the limits of human nature, consciousness, and culture in an age of virtual reality and nanotechnology.
Is it a utopia or a dystopia? That is, in fact, the question at its heart, and its resolution is one of the causes of potential discomfit. Robert Heinlein’s and Larry Niven’s tough-minded libertarian heroes are not always approved by social democrats, nor Joanna Russ’s and Samuel R. Delany’s uncompromising feminism and BDSM fables relished by rugged chauvinists, but it is possible to read both kinds of novel with an appreciation for their vigor, imaginative reach, and sheer narrative power. So, too, here. Gabriel is a youngish Aristo, not yet a century old, a copper-locked Mandarin of this future where Earth was destroyed by feral, runaway nano-goo, or Mataglap, originated in Indonesia and named for its berserkers. He has both male and female lovers, in the Realized World as in the oneirochron or virtual reality dreamtime. As the book opens, he and his imprinted dog Manfred, a surgeon, prepare to impregnate his lover Marcus, the Black-Eyed Ghost.
A new Earth2 has been terraformed, and other worlds colonized (such as his Illiricum, the World of Clear Light, which Gabriel nano-architected). Control of this hideously dangerous technology is reserved for the most capable and superbly educated, selected as in Confucian China by relentless and formidable examination. These Aristoi are gifted in a special way: their personalities are fragmented, in a benign variant of multiple personality disorder, and individuated into daimones able to function together or separately, advising, processing information, taking over in moments of crisis where special expertise is critical. This radical idea is, like Greg Bear’s in Queen of Angels (Entry 18), not unlike some current theories of cognitive psychology. These model minds as neurological societies or parliaments, reaching back to Freud’s It, I and I-Supervisor, and to Jung’s archetypes of the collective unconscious, as well as to medieval dread of demonic possession. It is Gabriel’s supreme mastery of these indwelling personae and access instruments—Spring Plum, Reno, Augenblick, Bear, Welcome Rain—that justifies his role as master of an entire world, literally worshiped by his mother and her devotees. It enables him to pursue an unknown master criminal whose vicious activities seem set to undermine everything the Aristoi culture represents.
The skills of an Aristo or Ariste are not limited to knowledge and sage-like command of his or her own body. An entire science of powerful signs and gestures shapes behavior in this future, like the prowess of the Bene Gesserit sisterhood in Frank Herbert’s Dune sequence, with their secret hand signals and dominating Voice. In this case, though, the Postures and Mudras are common currency, part body language, part coercive authority. “Gabriel knew how the psyche worked, how it was mirrored by the body. How to trump every stance, every pose, every physical mode; how to pursue an inevitable course though another’s mind.” Here is the extreme form, the Mudra of Domination:
The precise jut of the thumb was meant to imitate the ideographic radical for alarm, which appeared in every sign marking a hazard… and the set of the middle two fingers was authority, which appeared on every public building, in every classroom.... The mudra as a whole was supposed to stop people in their tracks, to stun their will, to make them malleable—even if only for an instant.
Under this custodial authoritarianism, the Demos or polloi thrive, healthy, well-fed, in an environment of placid beauty. None so startled, then, as the Aristoi, learning that a world has been created illegally, stocked with diseased and warlike humans, arrested at the level of Renaissance Europe. The culprit appears to be Saito, another Aristo, abetted by a woman sexually involved with Gabriel. Confident in their mastery, Gabriel and several associates travel to the benighted planet, are captured and brainwashed. But then—
The novel is so tightly organized around certain principles and their undoing or betrayal that any further discussion will risk spoiling your enjoyment if you haven’t yet read it. If that’s the case, we encourage you to finish Aristoi and only then come back here.
Cordwainer Smith’s brilliant, timeless stories of the Instrumentality and the Underpeople told of a utopia/dystopia of submissive long-lived people dependent on the slavery of uplifted animal people. It was broken by conspiracies high and low, returning freedom, disease, brief lifespan, religious faith and (allegedly) vivid meaning to its citizens thus shocked awake. These were not necessarily ideas appealing to most sf readers, but the magic of Smith’s images and voice made them classics of the genre. The same motor drives Aristoi. Legendary Captain Yuan, whose golden monument stands above Kuh-e-Rahmat, the Mount of Mercy, on Earth2, proves to be responsible for this atrocious undertaking—all its cruelty, ignorance, abbreviated lifespan. His motive, as in Smith’s Rediscovery of Man, is a renewal of societies trapped in decadent torpor and self-congratulation by the Logarchy, the Platonic system of social hierarchy and Guardians Yuan himself founded.
Williams follows this elaborate set-up to its inevitable end. Subverted in his own array of daimones, Gabriel is helpless—until a deeply hidden final Voice emerges, a battle sub-personality that operates to free him wh
en he is distracted. His inner creatures take him to liberty, in sidebars that accompany the martial arts action:
WELCOME RAIN: There’s got to be a way into him…
SPRING PLUM: “A visible spear is easy to dodge, but it is difficult to defend against an arrow from the dark…”
GABRIEL: I am feinting!
VOICE: We’ll cut each other to bits at this rate.
CYRUS: Groin.
BEAR: A reserve of qi is rising through your heels.
Thus at last, with suitable irony, Captain Yuan’s plan is fulfilled, in the name of opposing it. It is too soon to know if this is a just ending, let alone a happy one. Come back in 10,000 years.
32
Connie Willis
Doomsday Book (1992)
NOT MANY science fiction novels, which still are mostly centered on cool ideas and awesome spectacle but with only serviceable characterization, can make you laugh gently and then bring real tears to your eyes. Doomsday Book—named for the Domesday census record made in 11th century England and Wales—does both. It shared the Hugo award with Vernor Vinge’s brilliant space opera A Fire Upon the Deep (Entry 30), plus a Nebula and a Locus award, and little wonder. It is an unforgettable fiction of time travel that uncompromisingly pulls us and its luckless time travelers into the heart of the 1300s, a century poisoned by “scrofula and the plague,” that “burned Joan of Arc at the stake.”
Nineteen year old medieval historian Kivrin Engle connives at visiting Oxfordshire in 1320 for her practicum, the first researcher to go so far into the past. She assures her doubtful supervisors that this date is safely before the arrival of the Black Death in 1348. Massively inoculated (but, as project physician Mary Ahrens notes with a sympathetic wince, without her nose cauterized against the filth and stench), Kivrin is trained in languages and dialect, hair grown out, clad in handspun, hand woven garb. But of course something goes badly wrong, stranding her in the early years of the Death.
What goes wrong, ironically, is an abrupt influenza epidemic in her own time, which she carries into the past. It has caused the equally dazed, infected time machine operator to mess up the target date fix. Soon the flu flattens almost everyone in the time project, killing some of them, marooning Kivrin in one of the most lethal epochs of all recorded history. Ailing and contagious herself, she is at least consoled by the discovery that the villagers are immune to the flu—because it is, in fact, their ancient dormant virus she’s caught in the 21st century, and they all got over it last year, in 1347. It has been disturbed and set free during a cemetery dig in preparation for her trip before she’d had her T-cell enhancement.
These two quite distinct illnesses, then, one viral, the other bacterial, separated by 700 years, both at Christmas, create a poignant double helix of story. In the future, Oxford is quarantined with hundreds falling sick. In the past, as bubonic plague spreads remorselessly, people simply die and are left unburied by the few ill, exhausted survivors. Kivrin records her side of this pitiful tragedy in her notebook, whimsically named her Doomsday Book; now it is that, in very truth.
Time travel is a favorite Willis theme. It allowed Oxford historians in her early prize-winning story “Fire Watch”[1] to visit London’s St. Paul’s cathedral during the Blitz, and find themselves engaged in desperate efforts to extinguish German incendiaries that threatened the ancient church. Kivrin is mentioned as a young woman who always looked as if she had been crying “since she got back from her practicum. The Middle Ages were too much for her.” Doomsday Book explains why. A later, huge two-part Hugo-winning novel, published as Blackout and All Clear, returns to London under aerial attack by the Nazis. But Willis can also use time travel for delightful confusion and silliness, as she did in Hugo and Locus award-winner To Say Nothing of the Dog, which is ostensibly a very silly hunt for some hideous Victorian artifact known as “the Bishop’s Bird Stump,” in Coventry Cathedral which was in fact badly damaged during the Blitz. In line with its title, borrowed from 19th century humorist Jerome K. Jerome, the novel and its hapless protagonist meander in time-lagged confusion through landscapes sometimes closer to Lewis Carroll than to sf. It is very funny.
The merriment in Doomsday Book is far more muted, gentle and verging always on gallows’ humor. Willis is very good at showing the nuisance and irritations of dealing with pests, uncomprehending or uninterested staff, bureaucratic snafus, the ordinary annoyance of everyday life. Dr. Ahrens is miffed by awful and inescapable commercial Christmas jingles.
Mary was standing at the curb, opposite the chemist’s, digging in her shopping bag again. “What is that ghastly din supposed to be?” [...]
“Jingle Bells,” Dunworthy said and stepped out into the street.
“James!” Mary said and grabbed hold of his sleeve.
The bicycle’s front tire missed him by centimeters, and the near pedal caught him on the leg….
The carillon had finished obliterating “Jingle Bells” or “O Little Town of Bethlehem” and was now working on “We Three Kings of Orient Are.” Dunworthy recognized the minor key.
Mary and James Dunworthy are academics of the old school, not a bit like the lone geniuses of much science fiction: rumpled, no longer young, slightly foggy, civilized, caught up in faculty squabbles and small accidents even as Kivrin gets lost in time.
In 1348, Kivrin arrives in pain, with early flu symptoms, ready to accost passers-by with “O holpen me, for I am ful sore in drede,” and “I have been y-robbed by fel thefes.” Wretchedly sick, she is aided by Father Roche, who takes her for an angel appearing in a wash of light. Later, against his vows, guilty, he falls in love with her. The plague is already spreading. Feigning amnesia, Kivrin is succored at a nearby manor house, learns to respect and love these people of another century, yet can do nothing but witness in horror their dying. As her little friend Agnes falls toward death, she rails in her Doomsday Book against God:
You bastard! I will not let you take her. She’s only a child. But that’s your specialty, isn’t it?
A little later, the girl is dead.
Kivrin washed her little body, which was nearly covered with purplish-blue bruises. Where Eliwys had held her hand, the skin was completely black. She looked like she had been beaten. As she has been, Kivrin thought, beaten and tortured. And murdered. The slaughter of the innocents.
It is a powerful, clear-eyed look into the reality of most of human history, appropriately echoed in the epidemic of the 21st century. Willis speaks to the heart as well as the mind in this superb, affecting novel.
[1]http://www.infinityplus.co.uk/stories/firewatch.htm
33
Octavia Butler
Parable of the Sower (1993)
THE UNTIMELY DEATH in middle age of Octavia Butler, African-American female sf writer—and that descriptive phrase is so infrequently necessitated by reality, that it serves as both luminous beacon in Butler’s case and indictment of the genre and the culture at large—cut short not just an exemplary career of probing, daring speculative fiction, but also removed a figure who had served in numerous extra-literary ways as an inspiration to an under-served segment of the sf reader and author ranks. The only solace her mourners could take was that Butler had produced a substantial and fairly sizable legacy that seems in no danger of vanishing with her. Although much goodness was undeniably lost, including the third unwritten book, Parable of the Trickster, meant to conclude this series, after Parable of the Talents.
Butler was a hard-headed and hard-nosed individual not beholden to any party line, as her final novel, Fledgling, might well reveal, given its gender-powertripping, quasi-pedophile, vampiric sexual antics. And in fact, Parable of the Sower and its sequel surprisingly owe more to Robert Heinlein’s Farnham’s Freehold and Stranger in a Strange Land than to, say, Alice Walker or Toni Morrison, writers with whom Butler might be expected—by the unenlightened and uninitiated—to share sensibilities.
The first Parable is the story of Lauren Olamina, a young woman coming of age in
an America gone to hell. Armed enclaves offer the only precarious security in a world of rapists (who seem, contrary to history, totally uninterested in equally succulent boyflesh), cannibals, and marauders.
Given the chance to attain her majority in relative peace, Lauren develops into a woman with a literal Destiny. Formulating her own unique philosophy/religion, training herself to be the very model of Heinlein’s Competent (Wo)Man, she is one of the few prepared to survive upon the destruction of her walled burb, which sends her and a ragtag assortment of companions on a quest down ruined highways for a safe place to found a community based on her well-articulated and intriguing Earthseed principles.
These Earthseed principles revolve around the inevitability and dominance of Change, offering a kind of stripped-down Buddhism fit for nature red in tooth and claw. Olamina as prophet is certainly no hippie-dippy Michael Valentine Smith. But the seductiveness of her platform has inspired real-life adherents, in the same way that the geek culture has adopted Heinlein’s “grok.”
Science Fiction: The 101 Best Novels 1985-2010 Page 12
