Science Fiction: The 101 Best Novels 1985-2010

by Damien Broderick

  This training unwittingly hones Jack and Sam for moving on up to the Second Ether, where the Zeitjuego between the forces of Chaos and the stifling Singularity is waged, (Amusingly, the “Second Ether” figures in their own world as a kind of pulp serial that happens to be true!) Soon, they are recruited by the exotic Rose von Bek and embark on an attempt to re-fashion the multiverse to incorporate love and justice, while Jack also continues his Orphic search for his lost love, the female jugador Colinda Dovero.

  Moorcock succeeds admirably in creating a romping tall-tale atmosphere for the early parts of his book. At times he captures the kind of off-kilter description and dialogue beloved by R. A. Lafferty. At other times, the work is reminiscent of Ishmael Reed in his Yellow Back Radio Broke-Down, with a tinge of William Burroughs. The mix is potent, heady and ultimately unlike anything else.

  The middle volume in this series, Fabulous Harbours, disarmingly and unexpectedly consists of a short-story collection. Moorcock chose to link an assemblage of disparate stories with new bridges. But Harbours keeps faith with Blood by opening with an appearance by that earlier volume’s colorful lovers, Jack Karaquazian and Colinda Dovero. But it turns out that the pair has traded both their original universe and the charms of the Second Ether (where the Zeitjuego, or Game of Time, is played) for residence, however temporary, in yet a third universe.

  This timeline is inhabited and to some extent shaped mainly by the von Beks, that delicious, dilatory, decadent, deceitful clan whom Moorcock often chronicles. One tentacle of the family is ensconced in London’s mythic Sporting House Square, where a gathering ostensibly spins the tales that form this book.

  These stories (many of which evoke the ambiance of The Boys’ Own Paper as if written by J. K. Huysmans) range across time and space, from a pirate-infested America to a Thatcherite England. Through many of them strides a red-eyed albino with a soul-sucking sword, whether called Elric (“The Black Blade’s Summoning”) or Ulrich (“The Affair of the Seven Virgins”; “Crimson Eyes”) or Al Rik’h (“No Ordinary Christian”). Karaquazian and Dovero gradually fade from view (although their ally/antagonist, Captain Quelch, remains in various disguises), and the reader finds himself repaid for their absence by the doings of the comical, alluringly abominable von Beks.

  At the literal and figurative center of the book is “Lunching With the Antichrist.” This tale explicates and embodies the core of Moorcock’s esthetic. Portraying a fragile, isolated period when many factors conspire to permit a utopian moment to exist, this subtle, elegiac tale achieves the impossible: it causes the reader to feel nostalgia for a time and place that never actually was.

  In his introduction, Moorcock opined: “I believe our visions reveal our motives and identities. I also believe that one day our visions of a perfect society will be subtle enough to work. Here, for the time being, is a vision of an imperfect world that is somewhat better than our own...” Playing anarchic demiurge, Moorcock simultaneously entertains and remolds our shared life nearer to his heart’s desire, reinforcing the trilogy’s themes.

  The War Amongst the Angels provides, in pluperfect Moorcock fashion, an inconclusive conclusion perfectly consistent with the author’s open-ended philosophy of existence, where everything is “permanently conscious, permanently changing, permanently dying.” This final book charts the intersection of these two axes of story more fully, and at the coordinates zero, zero, the Multiverse is remade.

  The War Amongst the Angels opens as a rather old-fashioned memoir penned by one Rose von Bek (born Margaret Rose Moorcock, niece to an author named Michael!). As in “Lunching with the Antichrist,” an aching nostalgia permeates Rose’s tale of her life. Her twentieth-century world—where continent-spanning tramway lines and zeppelins abound, and where WWII transpired rather differently—is on the verge of coarsening, and quite a few of the deservedly elitist von Beks find it all rather discouraging. Of course, many of the family may seek refuge and adventure by walking the moonbeam roads into the Second Ether, that realm of warring angels where mortals blossom into their frightening avatars.

  Interleaved with Rose’s narration are chapters told from the viewpoint of Jack Karaquazian, who has found his lost lover Colinda Dovero, but now stands poised to lose her if he is to rescue the Multiverse from the clutches of Law and the Original Insect.

  Like a movie by Luis Buñuel, War is exceedingly slippery and shifty. Characters come and go, mutating their forms and personalities, across an unstable landscape. Yet within these parameters, Moorcock manages to tell some old-fashioned tales of heroism and adventure (albeit with a parodic edge) and describe scenes of urban and rural beauty as if he were Fielding writing Tom Jones. Like Philip José Farmer, Moorcock agglomerates various historical and fictional mythic figures—Wild Bill Cody, Tom Mix, Sexton Blake, Dick Turpin—into his yeasty mix of characters, blurring the borderline between those composed of “mere” words and those fashioned of flesh and blood.

  If the Beatles’ film Yellow Submarine had been scripted by Fellini (the Italian director lends his name to a holy chalice in this novel), the result might have been The War Amongst the Angels. And ultimately, the experience of reading the entire Second Ether trilogy is akin to living through the explosion of a warhead. Fragments shoot off in all directions, smoke and noise abound, and one’s sense of wholeness is shattered. And yet in the eye of the explosion lives a curious peace.

  40

  John Barnes

  Mother of Storms (1995)

  DISASTER THRILLERS with headlong action and a large, hyperactive cast are a staple of the movies, but not so much, these days, in print sf. Civilization often crumbled or was blown apart in apocalyptic sf of the immediately post-Hiroshima period, but widescreen assaults on the planet do not transfer well to the page. Michael Crichton managed it in The Andromeda Strain (1969), as did Stephen King’s immense The Stand (1978, uncut edition 1990), but classic sf largely stayed away until Larry Niven and Jerry Pournelle’s two blockbusters, catastrophe thriller Lucifer’s Hammer (1977) and Footfall (1984). Despite significant sales, neither of those led to a boom in the subgenre. A notable example that worked well, however, despite itself and by scrambling over its own limitations, is John Barnes’ Mother of Storms.

  Barnes is a man of parts: PhD in Theatre, former Assistant Professor of drama and communication in a small Colorado college, more recently industrial semiotician, novelist, he drew quick attention with his first book, Orbital Resonance (1991), a Heinleinian tale told from the viewpoint of a young teen girl. His subsequent books, some obviously hasty, were ingenious and gritty but often encrusted with sadistic violence. This bent is seen most repulsively in rape-filled Kaleidoscope Century (1995) which introduced the global mind virus One True. Barnes is not recommending dire behavior, but his books are frequently told by psychopaths or at least the morally numbed.

  Mother of Storms throttles back on this tendency, but does manage several brutal sex scenes. One leaves horny college kid Jesse the worse for wear, when he has his way with cyborged XV star Synthi Venture: “Finally he is limp, sore, hurting, and her rough hand trying to bring him up again is unbearable… blood welling to the surface in a couple of places.” XV, introduced in 2006, is full-immersion shared experience, and Synthi (real name Mary Ann Waterhouse, who wants nothing more than to escape her ubiquitous celebrity) is a jacked-in porn journalist who travels to news hotspots and has brutal sex with Rock and Quaz. It’s a satiric projection of today’s extreme cable TV played more for world-weary revulsion than arousal, against a backdrop of hundreds of millions of deaths in a colossal runaway planetary storm of diabolical proportions.

  It’s 2028. The Flash did serious damage to the US in 2016 (it seems to have been a big electromagnetic pulse attack, with a nuclear strike thrown in). The Alaskan Free State separated peacefully in 2018, but is now being eyed by the Siberian Commonwealth, which keeps illicit trajectory weapons on the Arctic seabed. The newly powerful UN chooses to take the threat out with a preemptive strike
from near-space, hitting them with a barrage of antimatter missiles. An unfortunate side-effect is the disruption of vast pockets of methane clathrates under the ice, released into the ocean, bubbling up into the atmosphere 173 billion metric tons of methane, a powerful greenhouse gas. “That’s just about nineteen times what’s in the atmosphere in 2028,” an omniscient narrator informs us, “or thirty-seven times what’s in the atmosphere in 1992.”

  In the fashion of blockbusters, Barnes shifts the action every few pages between a large cast spread far and wide: Jesse Callare and his hopeless crush on Naomi, a hot college activist who blends a sort of Fox News version of feminism and left radical environmentalism; Synthi, with her preposterously augmented breasts, buttocks and internal abdominal sheathing; Diogenes, Jesse’s highly placed meteorologist brother, who believably imparts a lot of the background information while his young wife and child fret; US Republican President Grandma, Brittany Lynn Hardshaw and her criminal sidekick Harris Diem; print journalist Berlina Jameson, an Afropean expelled from Europe in 2022 during a resurgent racist ethnic cleansing of all but whites; wealthy GateTech boss John Klieg who buys up or patents key technical advances before anyone sees their implications; the obsessed, vengeful father of a raped girl slaughtered to make an illegal XV; and most importantly, ex-spouses Carla and Louie Tynan. Carla is another meteorologist, cruising the world in her submersible while veteran astronaut Louie, one of the few humans to stand on Mars, is the sole crew of an abandoned space station, both of them jacked-in to a worlds-girdling cyber system about to accelerate headlong into a Vingean Singularity (see Entry 30)…

  As with techno-thrillers of the Tom Clancy kind, a vast amount of information is thrown at the inundated reader:

  “…extra heat is extra energy, and one place atmospheric heat goes is into hurricanes, especially when you consider the interaction with surface water. Bigger hurricanes, more hurricanes, hurricanes where there’ve never been hurricanes…”

  And

  The replicating code that carried messages to reprogram nodes could be duplicated and modified, intelligence added, and the whole turned into a datarodent (so called because it listened and ratted on whoever it could).

  As climate crisis intensifies at dizzying speed, mega-hurricane Clem vents a gusting outflow jet that spins the storm west to east, picking up power and water vapor from the Atlantic, devastating Europe as well as America. As more than a billion people die, Louie mobilizes replicators on the abandoned Moon base, and with his machine-amplified intelligence repurposes his orbital home into an interplanetary vehicle that plunges into the outer solar system to collect and hurl back into Earth’s atmosphere frozen gases to soothe and disarm the terrifying world storm. In the aftermath, Carla and Louie, uploaded into a grid as large as the solar system, running a million times faster than human consciousness, speak to the chastened world through Mary Ann’s implants, a transcendent narrative of the history and destiny of humankind that folds together greed, kindness, exploratory hunger, the pleasures of familiarity and domesticity:

  There is no lens that doesn’t distort, no two lenses that can be true at once, and yet some distort less than others; and yet, again, however much the story and the picture might bend, seen through all of them, the story will finish in all of them.

  As it does, in a kind of triumph that reaches beyond the pain and disgust and dread into a future promise “when every voice can be heard—indeed, every voice that speaks must be heard, forever.”

  41

  Gregory Benford

  Sailing Bright Eternity (1995)

  [Galactic Center Saga]

  EVER SINCE the first fictional robot showed some signs of failing to tug at its chrome-plated forelock in the presence of its human masters—and this would have occurred circa 1920, with the appearance of Karel Capek’s R.U.R.—the theme of rebellion among the mechs has been an sf “power chord,” subject to endless fresh reinterpretations. Perhaps the first author to move this theme of fractious and intelligent killing machines off Earth and out into an interstellar setting was Fred Saberhagen, with his sharply inventive, but somewhat repetitive Berserker stories, the first of which appeared in 1963, and established the template which would later see such media success in the Battlestar Galactica and Terminator franchises. Around the same time, Keith Laumer explored this meme from a slightly different angle with his Bolo tales, many of which featured sentient killing machines friendly to their human masters.

  But few authors have endowed the trope with as much power, majesty and scope as Gregory Benford, in the six-book saga known as the Galactic Center sequence that commenced with 1977’s In the Ocean of Night. (Actually, given the fact that this opening novel contains material originally published in 1970, and the concluding salvo appeared in 1995, Benford devoted a round quarter-century of his writing career to the project.) Benford blended the simpler theme of robot dominance of humankind with various cosmological, philosophical and existential speculations to produce a star-flecked tapestry spanning some 35,000 years of galactic history.

  The first two books—In the Ocean of Night and Across the Sea of Suns—may be regarded as a diptych or even a single novel broken in two. The first book opens in the now-bypassed “yesterday’s tomorrow” of 1999, and finds astronaut Nigel Walmsley making the first contact with an alien intelligence within our solar system. In Across the Sea of Suns, Walmsley and crew are embarked, some sixty years later, on humanity’s first interstellar voyage. Reaching another planetary system, they find themselves stranded there at book’s end—but with hopeful portents.

  Readers expecting an immediate continuation of Walmsley’s career when Great Sky River appeared must have suffered a short, sharp shock. But trust in Benford’s schemes would ultimately prove to be rewarded. Instead of a resolution to Walmsley’s quandary, the action takes place tens of thousands of years into his future, after humanity’s glorious ascent and painful fall, against hordes of mechanical rivals.

  On the planet Snowglade, the small tribe known as the Bishop Family live a harried life as prey to intelligent machines—“techno nomads.” (Think a combination of William Tenn’s Of Men and Monsters and Thomas M. Disch’s The Genocides.) Mutated into new clades along Stapledonian lines, these weakly posthuman humans employ a scavenger’s bricolage technology and rely on the advice of embedded software ancestors. Led by headman Killeen, the Bishops find a starship and escape their deadly world.

  In Tides of Light, they arrive at their intended refuge planet only to find it being gutted by a huge cosmic string under intelligent direction. Picking up Quath, a new ally from the myripodia aliens, they push inward toward the seething Galactic Center. Arriving in Furious Gulf, they find a hidey-hole with other humans, the “esty,” “a space-time kernel” embedded in the warped cosmic substrate around a massive black hole. The artificial esty is a whole universe of wonders in itself. And there, impossibly, Killeen’s son and heir Toby meets up with—Nigel Walmsley.

  Sailing Bright Eternity at first unfolds Nigel’s backstory to a listening Toby, hooking up past to future with the literal and metaphorical wormhole connections that the ancient man, preserved by various Einsteinian time contractions and paradoxes, has experienced. He recounts the discovery of the Old Ones, immaterial intelligences like gods, subsisting in enormous filaments of information floating in space. He discloses the ultimate aim of the mechanicals: to engineer their essences into the soup of particles at the Omega Point at the end of all time. After learning all this, Toby embarks on his own odyssey across the Labyrinth of the esty—with deliberate shades of Huck Finn’s river quest. Curiously enough, this quest comes to resembles Moorcock’s warped New Orleans passages in his Second Ether volumes (Entry39).

  Through the efforts of all the players, acting in fashions that mix predestination with free will, the mechs will eventually be subdued into a more beneficial role, and the Syntony will blossom: a new paradigm for intelligence to inhabit. As Benford signs off his Timeline, caps sic: “END OF PREA
MBLE. LATER EVENTS CANNOT BE THUS REPRESENTED.” We have passed into post-verbal Singularity territory.

  Benford’s chapters in this final volume are like nuggets of dwarf star matter: small but full of gravity, as if together they can assemble a pointillistic portrait of something too big to depict with conventional strokes of the narrative brush.

  Nigel thought of them as The Phylum Beyond Knowing. They spoke to him as he sat there… Only the voice. One rolling articulation, threaded with chords. But without words.

  Information is order. By the Second Law of Thermodynamics, order is a form of invested energy…. Information is order is food.

  While memes swim in the warm bath of cultures—both Natural or mechanical/electronic—others could operate as pure predators. These use the energy equivalent of information. They can swallow data banks, or whole mentalities—not to harvest their memes, but to suck from them their energy stores. When a lion eats a lamb, it is not using the lamb’s genetic information, except in the crudest sense. Predators do not propagate memes; they feed upon them.

  So there arose in mental systems the datavores.

  His language when dealing with cosmological issues acquires a bardic heft worthy of Poul Anderson. His metaphysical musings foreshadow the kind of quasi-religious speculative physics that scientist Frank Tipler would later engage in.

  In the Xeelee sequence, begun some 15 years after Benford’s, Stephen Baxter (Entry 25) achieved a future history of the same magnitude and nature as Benford’s, one perhaps even more complexly baroque. But no one has surpassed this ground-breaking achievement in mapping the unmappable depths of space, time, and consciousness.