Most intriguingly, Silk is also Chesterton’s Father Brown. Echoes of that sleuthing priest become apparent every time Silk sits down his friends and retails his deductions, several times in each volume. If we need it made explicit, in Exodus Wolfe has Silk respond to a man who says he loves mysteries with: “I don’t. I try to clear them up when I can....” In all these roles, though, Silk is unswervably honorable and good, yet humanly fallible: a rare figure in sf. Worldly accomplishments mean little to him; only the saving of his soul and those of his flock hold sway over him. All the thieving, fighting and political chicanery he must perform are aimed at nothing but establishing a peaceful atmosphere in which to minister to the common people of his city.
This focus causes Wolfe deliberately to keep the action bottled up within the precincts of Silk’s beloved and thickly detailed city. Only the tiniest fraction of events occur in alternate settings. The clichéd “Hunt for the Control Room” scenario found in most generation-starship tales is almost nonexistent. This one-in-four book is, in fact, almost an anti-generationship tale. Oh, there are the momentary expected frissons—such as when Silk finally sees the stars for the first time—but the whole story could have been transplanted with minor changes to, say, Dynastic Egypt.
Not to say that Wolfe pulls rabbits out of his hat and calls them “smeerps.” A writer of his invention and subtlety is probably constitutionally incapable of such a sin. No, Wolfe’s Simakian robots are utterly believable. His digital gods and their intrusive Windows are a fine invention. The Crew of Flyers who guard the Cargo (i.e., Silk and all his fellows) are weirdly tribal possessors of regressed knowledge.
Equally fine are Silk’s supporting cast. Maytera Mint, later General Mint, is a convincing Joan of Arc. The whores Hyacinth and Chenille could have stepped out of Brecht’s The Threepenny Opera. Silk’s superiors in his order—Remora and Quetzal—recall A Canticle for Leibowitz. Even Silk’s pet talking bird, Oreb, is granted a witty individualism.
The full-scale civil war between Silk and the illegal current government of Viron—a war foreshadowed in the second book and fully underway by the third—is also never less than realistic in its spurts of fury and weary pauses. As in Paul Park’s Wolfe-resonant Starbridge books (Entry 10), the birth of a new order is portrayed as a contorted and painful process.
Brecht, the playwright, can have the last word on Silk’s character and impact, from his drama The Caucasian Chalk Circle: “Great is the seductive power of goodness.”
[1] In accordance with this, Wolfe’s style and diction are considerably less erudite and recomplicated than in the saga’s predecessor, The Book of the New Sun. That sequence prompted the remarkable 440-page Lexicon Urthus, but to date the sequels have yielded only several useful pamphlets.
See http://www.siriusfiction.com/ for the encyclopedic annotations by independent scholar and publisher, Michael Andre-Driussi.
37
Michael Bishop
Brittle Innings (1994)
SINCE HIS FIRST short-story sale in 1970 (“Piñon Fall” in Galaxy magazine), Michael Bishop has revealed a questing spiritual intelligence uniquely concerned with moral conundrums. While his works are often full of both the widescreen spectacles associated with science fiction and the subtle frissons typical of more earthbound fantasy, his focus remains on the engagement of characters with ethical quandaries any reader might encounter in daily life. Whether to succor a dying relative at some personal expense; how to earn an honest living while being true to one’s muse; how best to establish essential communication among strangers forced to rely on each other for survival: these issues and others equally vital form the core of Bishop’s concerns. And his prescription for success most often involves not derring-do or superhuman efforts, but simply the maintenance of an honest, open heart and a charitable, brave soul. While only occasionally delving into explicitly religious themes, Bishop’s personal Christian faith—wide enough to embrace references to Buddhism, Sufism and other creeds—shines through in every tale.
A talent capable of being decanted into many different molds, genre and otherwise, Bishop’s skills and vision translate from one medium to another without diminishment or concealment. Never content merely to repeat his past triumphs, he has steadfastly ventured into new territory with every book. He surely broke fresh and fertile ground with Brittle Innings, where, employing the obvious metaphor, he hit a literary home run. With echoes of Eudora Welty, John Steinbeck and William Faulkner, as well as the cinematic drolleries of the Coen Brothers, Brittle Innings is a leisurely paced speculative summer idyll not bereft of suspense, infused with the alternating languorous and frenetic rhythms of baseball, the sport which informs its every sentence.
A promising high school ballplayer in rural Oklahoma during the early years of World War II, seventeen-year-old Danny Boles is recruited by team-owner Jordan McKissic—Mister JayMac—for McKissic’s Georgia farm team, the Highbridge Hellbenders. After making his way east, not without traumatic difficulties that literally render him speechless, Danny arrives in the town of Highbridge to plunge into a milieu unlike anything his sheltered life has previously prepared him for. In the McKissic lodging house (whose lines evoke a “fairy-tale castle”), Danny is introduced to an assorted passel of idiosyncratic players, wives, nieces, crew and townspeople. Surely the most dramatic figure is Jumbo Henry Clerval, an enormous ugly shambling grotesque who can wallop a baseball with a tremendous force that makes him the most valuable member of the Hellbenders.
Assigned to room with Henry, Danny quickly finds himself intrigued by the enigma of Jumbo. He discovers the strange man to be a pacifist loner possessed of a quick wit and a large if stilted vocabulary. Throughout the single season of ballplaying that the book spans, Danny and Henry become friends. Learning Henry’s secret origin—the man is the one-and-only immortal monster created by Dr. Victor Frankenstein—Danny becomes complicit in his patchwork friend’s quest to refine his artificial soul and survive with some nobility among those who disdain him.
Meanwhile, a lovingly detailed series of dusty games that culminates in a pennant battle, each contest individualized into a pithy Iliad, is laid out before us, with Danny’s triumphs and failures shaping him into maturity. He falls in love with Phoebe Pharram, JayMac’s niece; he encounters the prevalent racism of the era; he learns of the fate of his long-absent father; and he navigates the webwork of emotions among his teammates with some skill. But right upon the verge of individual success, Danny finds his future wrenched onto a cataclysmic track, one which embroils Jumbo Henry Clerval as well.
Bishop’s sure hand amasses a wealth of period details here—without any ungainly infodumps—which succeed in recreating a vanished decade down to the stitching on the very baseballs. Narrated in the first-person by Danny, this book unfalteringly captures the young man’s unique voice, a mix of naiveté and hard-earned wisdom. The embedded memoirs of Jumbo Clerval offer an enthralling mini-epic of the monster’s post-Shelley career, resonant with any number of sf tropes. And a delicious ambiguity is maintained for a long interval: is Clerval truly what he claims to be, or simply a deluded giant born of woman like everyone else, who has fabricated this interesting history to ennoble himself?
But in the end the clues tip toward the verity of Clerval’s past, placing the narrative firmly among Bishop’s other, perhaps more explicitly hardcore sf excursions. Mary Shelley’s inspirational novel is rightly revered as the grandmother of modern science fiction, by critics such as Brian Aldiss. The inclusion of the titular monster here makes Brittle Innings automatically part of the sf canon.
Told as an extended flashback from Danny’s 1991 perspective, the tale is drenched in a luminous nostalgia for what amounts to a Golden Age (despite the period’s acknowledged defects), a “once upon a time” venue where mythic beings—not only Jumbo, but the other players as well—still walked the earth. This Bradburyian evocation of a legendary prelapsarian past is one of the effects sf does all too infrequently, but to which the
mode lends itself splendidly in the hands of a master such as Bishop.
38
Greg Egan
Permutation City (1994)
“BAUDELAIRE can screw himself. I’m here for the physics,” remarks a young woman in Greg Egan’s Locus award winning story “The Planck Dive.” Physics is what Egan provides in most of his sf: physics (and metaphysics) at the margins of the known and beyond, physics rendered not so much in storytelling’s ancient visceral imagination as in a kind of cool, ironic allegory of equations tormented to the limit. This is a very odd kind of writing, even for hardened sf readers. Like the work of Polish novelist Stanislaw Lem, it requires an appetite for fresh thoughts superbly deployed. Even so, Egan’s second sf novel, Permutation City, won a prestigious jury prize, the Campbell Memorial award.
So such late-generation, highly cerebral science fiction prose is not always easy to read. It can be annoyingly expository, no matter how hard Egan tries to disguise the fact as he renders his radically strange futures. But it is always an ambitious and artistic bid at the impossible. His prose and his ideas extend us as we struggle with their formidable, uncompromising clarity. Indeed, one commentator has observed: “Permutation City, which features unlikeable characters, wooden dialogue, and a depressing storyline, is one of the most thought-provoking works of science fiction ever written.”[1]
That is why Egan emerged in the 1990s as perhaps the most important sf writer in the world. In many respects he remained an undeveloped literary artist. Even his finest work totters by comparison with the complex best of some other writers surveyed in this book, texts that engage us more completely in their imaginative embrace. But Egan’s forté was established from the outset: to deploy with clean, brilliant ingenuity some astonishing or seemingly paradoxical insight from science and philosophy. He is enviably in command of the latest neurosciences, molecular biology, advanced computer programming, artificial and natural intelligence, evolutionary theory. His politics is crisp, astute, pitilessly candid. If his style is—level (let’s not say “flat”)—it isn’t just because he enjoys deflating pretension. His antiheroic yet very drily witty voice is the natural register for a disillusioned, clear-eyed observer.
That is also an apt description of the major characters in Permutation City, even though one of the principals spent years in a psychiatric facility scribbling anagrams like “Pin my taut erotic/Art to epic mutiny/Can’t you permit it/To cite my apt ruin?” (There is a clue here, which you can trace back to the title.) Finally, advanced nanosurgery corrects his mad delusions. But are his ideas really delusional? In 2050, Paul Durham is convinced—can remember, vividly—that he has experimented on himself in 2045, uploading his consciousness into a virtual reality environment, using a technology now mature enough that the wealthy use it at death as a form of resurrection into a better world. Paul and his Copy cooperate in an audacious test of an extreme theory.
The nature and implications of that Dust theory develop elaborately through the novel, but in essence it’s this: what happens when a self-aware human mind run on a computer has its process interrupted, each calculated step delayed until finally it is running like a flickering movie? Answer: the gaps are unnoticeable to that mind, in much the way we can’t notice our visual blind spot, or the ceaseless saccadic jittering of our eyes. But then what happens if the sequence of experiences is run randomly: not ABCDE, but BDECA? Durham learns that life goes on unchanged, from the inside. Fragments of experience stitch themselves together into a seamless continuity. (There are problems with this conclusion, and trying to resolve them is part of the fun of the book.)
Egan has noted:
I recall being very bored and dissatisfied with the way most cyberpunk writers were treating virtual reality and artificial intelligence in the ’80s; a lot of people were churning out very lame noir plots that utterly squandered the philosophical implications of the technology. I wrote a story called “Dust,” which was later expanded into Permutation City, that pushed very hard in the opposite direction, trying to take as seriously as possible all the implications of what it would mean to be software…. I just look at things from the characters’ perspective and ask myself what their problems and anxieties would be.[2]
[1]Manuel Moertelmaier:
http://hagiograffiti.blogspot.com/2009/04/solomonoff-induction-breaks-egans-dust.html
[2]http://gregegan.customer.netspace.net.au/INTERVIEWS/Interviews.html#Aurealis
Durham tests his ideas by building a hidden virtual world that, in effect, generates itself even after the computers it is running on stop processing its program. This, he argues, is possible, despite its apparently absurdity, if a continuous consciousness can be implemented, via coordinate transforms, as a gappy sequence of states scattered randomly like dust through time and space. If that sounds crazy, it’s worth noting that the physicists Fred Hoyle, Julian Barbour and Max Tegmark independently proposed that the entire universe operates rather like this.
As part of the lure needed to extract millions in development funds from rich dead Copies already uploaded into cyberspace, Durham hires a brilliant young woman, Maria Deluca, who has managed to tweak artificial life cellular automata into evolving without instantly going extinct. The upshot is the creation of a simplified world, with its own physics and history: a blend of Second Life and Tetris or Sudoku. In principle, this Autoverse world is capable of supporting life and, when run for billions of simulated years, evolving new intelligence. Maria is dubious, especially when the authorities tell her it’s all a scam and ask her to spy on Durham. But he is offering a lot of money for her to map out such a new world (as he is paying a great deal to cyber-architect Malcolm Carter to design a virtual reality city suitable for mega-rich Copies), and Maria’s mother is dying but cannot afford the scan needed for her to join the Copies in a VR afterlife.
Egan develops these threads, and more, in impressive, thought-out detail, every page dense with ideas, swift cut and thrust, unexpected implications. When finally the uploaded humans in Durham’s Permutation City venture into the vastly evolved world sprung from Maria’s coding, communicating their role as creators of that world to its insect-like inhabitants, they confront a comeuppance at once terrifying, inevitable, and brilliantly… Eganesque.
39
Michael Moorcock
Blood (1994)
[Second Ether trilogy]
ALMOST ALL of Michael Moorcock’s work dovetails into a huge and impressive edifice of mind-boggling complexity. In his Multiverse, characters cross continua with abandon, donning and dropping masks, changing gender, dying, being resurrected, smiling ruefully with world-weary panache throughout innumerable creation-and-destruction cycles of the plenum. Like Philip José Farmer or James Branch Cabell, Moorcock produces intertwining tales that, however satisfying and enthralling in their own right, acquire deeper significance when slotted into their overarching framework.
Besides being another exotically glazed brick in the wall of this titanic, lifetime structure, the Second Ether trilogy, which opens with Blood, represented, according to Moorcock’s own publicity, a “culmination of [my] ideas and themes.” And indeed, Blood and its companions do possess a different tenor from much of the saga: the sense of futility and doom that weighs down an Elric, say, has been modified here by a palpable air of hope. The final chapter is even titled “The Moral Multiverse.” But many of the machinations and personas of the larger players in this endless Game of Time will still seem very familiar to any readers of Moorcock’s earlier books—not in itself a hindrance to enjoyment.
Like many of the volumes in Moorcock’s canon, Blood follows a certain pattern. The reader is initially plunged into a universe analogous on some level to ours, which seems whole and self-sufficient. Gradually, figures and forces from a higher plane begin to intrude, revealing the real scale of affairs, which tend to culminate in a fruitful apocalypse.
The small world Moorcock focuses on here is a unique and vibrant creation. On a timeline where Africa
is predominant and whites are a degenerate and despised minority, the South of America is a black-ruled mélange of planters, riverboaters, gamblers, and white slaves. Compounding this strangeness is a different set of physics, one which taps floating spots of “color” for power. Unfortunately arrogant mankind, by drilling too deep for more and more color, has created the Biloxi Fault, a flaw in spacetime that has dangerously warped the fabric of this world.
Supreme in this society are the professional gamblers, or jugadors (the prose here is a beguiling mix of English, Arabic, Spanish, and French, a kind of Cosmic Cajun). Two of the most famous are Jack Karaquazian (note the family resonance with Jerry Cornelius) and Sam Oakenhurst. Bound by their chivalry and codes of honor, they travel from the Terminal Cafe on the edge of the Fault up and down the Mississippi, brawling, loving, and playing their Borgesian games, “games of such complexity and subtle creativity, using the most exquisitely delicate electronics (or more recently pseudo-electronics) to create realities whose responsibilities and mathematics sometimes terrified even the most experienced of gamblers.”
Science Fiction: The 101 Best Novels 1985-2010 Page 14
