Science Fiction: The 101 Best Novels 1985-2010

by Damien Broderick

  Hand’s gorgeously crafted fiction generally falls into slipstream categories, and of late has even ventured into pure naturalism (Generation Loss). But she proved herself to be an expert hard-edged speculator with the Glimmering and selected other works.

  For this apocalyptic saga of a world gone off the rails, Robert Chambers’s cult masterpiece, The King in Yellow, serves Hand in an untraditional, non-Lovecraftian way as a symbol of fin-de-siècle decadence and spiritual entropy betokening the grim ride ahead for humanity in a collapsing ecosystem.

  This book in Hand’s canon was preceded, tellingly enough, by her novelization of Terry Gilliam’s film 12 Monkeys, and Glimmering is a clear kissing cousin to that cinematic biological Götterdämmerung.

  Hand economically sets up her premise in a two-page prologue: in the year 1997 (but not precisely our historical 1997, rather a uchronic version), an overdose of new ozone-destroying chemicals, coupled with a massive methane release from polar regions and an enormous solar flare, trigger a change in Earth’s atmosphere, soon dubbed the Glimmering. Moiré sheets of cold colored flames replace our natural celestial view, and all electrical equipment in use at the instant of ignition is shorted out. This is clearly the end of civilization as we’ve abused it. Major adjustments are demanded. But with a blind stubbornness, the mass of mankind continues to hang on to old habits.

  Hand’s use of this particular trope—celestial phenomena changing our terrestrial physics—solidly allies her with such hardcore forebears as Fredric Brown (“The Waveries”) and Poul Anderson (Brain Wave) and might very well have had an influence on the similar premise of S. M. Stirling’s Emberverse series.

  One of those with his head in the sand—circa 1999, two miserable years into the disaster—is John Chanvers Finnegan, a gay man who is heir to a dwindling family fortune (initially founded on the sale of Victorian glass Xmas ornaments, ironically echoing the current gaudy appearance of the Earth itself). Finnegan lives in a decrepit Yonkers mansion with his elderly grandmother and house-keeper. The fact that he is dying of AIDS is understandably more vital to him than the world’s demise. What will shake Finnegan out of his semi-charmed life? A visit and miraculous gift from his mysterious friend, Leonard Thrope, a devil-may-care Byronic artist—or “sociocultural pathologist”—intent on bearing witness to death and dying in all its forms.

  Soon, Finnegan is reluctantly hosting stray pregnant waifs, seeing tangible ghosts, feeling love reawaken, and beginning to realize that he has been nominated for a larger role in the coming millennium than he had ever wished to play.

  Two motifs here signify Hand’s devotion to a pair of masterly writers who have influenced her greatly. The decaying, life-stuffed mansion speaks to John Crowley’s Little, Big, while the persistence-with-distortion of cultural norms and personal relationships amidst urban dissolution harks to Samuel R. Delany’s Dhalgren. Both Crowley and Delany have played a huge part in the formation of Hand’s own esthetic.

  Hand, of course, excels at her gritty depiction of a world on the skids. No stranger to postapocalypses ever since her Winterlong and its sequels, she has a keen knack for conveying the psychic adjustments people must make to continue surviving in the midst of chaos. Unlike some Irwin Allen panoramic disaster, Glimmering has a smallish cast of major characters, allowing Hand to build up in great and subtle detail their realistic portraits. The visceral thrills of life in the ruins are balanced precisely by Hand’s loving attention to individual psyches.

  With a dollop of Lucius Shepard’s Green Eyes (and is there a sly allusion to Shepard in the character of music manager Lucius Chappell?), a smattering of Mark Helprin’s Winter’s Tale, a pinch of Disch’s 334, and Hand’s own salty broth and spices, Glimmering is a unique and tasty dish that might be called Ragnarok Ragout.

  52

  Jonathan Lethem

  As She Climbed Across the Table (1997)

  LIKE NEIL GAIMAN, Jonathan Lethem and his career have long ago transcended the science fiction genre of their roots, soaring into the literary stratosphere occupied by PEN conferences and assignments from Rolling Stone magazine to hang with funk legend James Brown. Perhaps the clearest token of this status occurred when his recent domestic relocation from Brooklyn to the West Coast became fodder for the New York tabloids. While he remains genially avuncular toward the genre, producing introductions, for instance, for the Library of America Philip K. Dick omnibuses, it is undeniable that starting no later than his fifth book, Motherless Brooklyn, he was no longer a part of science fiction, despite his continued usage of the tropes of fantastika.

  Yet once upon a time, it was possible to view Lethem’s work as wholly integral with the field, where it received regular reviews (not the case today), and surely with As She Climbed Across the Table, he played completely and brilliantly within the boundaries of the genre.

  Lethem’s first novel, Gun, with Occasional Music, was a gonzo dystopia. In the world inhabited by Private Inquisitor Conrad Metcalf, Muzak has infiltrated all audiovisual media, resulting in orchestral newscasts, abstract TV, and newspapers filled with captionless photos. Asking questions is a forbidden act, save to those of the Inquisitor’s Office and to the few independent PI’s like Metcalf. Artificially evolved animals (who function much like the Toons in Roger Rabbit, a tragicomic underclass) and artificially evolved children—”babyheads”—mingle with the repressed normal humans, neurotics who all suffer from this society’s absurdist strictures.

  Amnesia Moon solidified Lethem’s street creds in the sf world. In the near future, things have come apart. Alien invasion, psychotropic warfare, environmental disaster—the cause of our downfall is any, all, or none of these. But the effects are indisputable. The world is now divided into zones of altered reality, subject to the shaping influences of the occasional lucid dreamer, whose flights of fancy become other people’s reality (as in, of course, so much of Philip K. Dick’s work, and Le Guin’s The Lathe of Heaven).

  Living in a shattered Wyoming community that evokes the ambiance of a dozen classic apocalyptic venues all run through a blender, our protagonist, Chaos, appears to be such a powerful figure, yet one wounded by amnesia and kept in subjugation by fellow dreamer, the Palmer Eldritch-like Kellogg. One day Chaos’s disgust and unease reach the boiling point: he assaults Kellogg and hits the road, determined to discover his past. Along for the ride comes Melinda Self, furry thirteen-year-old foil, a ruefully humorous, tough-minded daughter figure.

  His hegira takes Chaos through a handful of twisted communities, eventually depositing him in a relatively functional San Francisco.

  As She Climbed Across the Table, Lethem’s third novel, mixed centered surrealism and loopy groundedness, and is as smoothly exhilarating as Eric Clapton’s guitar licks, and possibly just as classic. And like any pop masterpiece, it goes down so smoothly that you don’t notice the philosophical barbs until you’re being reeled in. With its emphasis on academic-centered hard physics R&D, it could be a Gregory Benford novel (COSM, say) in postmodern drag.

  Physicist Alice Coombs has made a certain decision of the heart: to fall in love with an artificially created pocket universe named “Lack,” whose only manifestation in our continuum is a picky nothingingness that ingests random objects. Naturally Alice’s newly discarded lover, Philip Engstrand, pompous soft science maven, is dismayed at losing his soulmate. This book—narrated in Philip’s hurt, ironic, hilariously bewildered tones—is the story of how Philip seeks to reclaim Alice from Lack.

  Miraculously, As She Climbed functions equally well on a multitude of intriguing levels. It’s plain old soap opera, the eternal triangle of girl, boy, and spacetime discontinuity. It’s a retelling of “The Emperor’s New Clothes,” illustrating how people can delude themselves into believing that “nothing is something.” It’s a cheesy “invention rapes inventor” tale, like Dean Koontz’s Demon Seed. And it’s a pungent satire of academia, with just the section on Georges De Tooth, “resident deconstructionist,” worth a dozen lesser ca
mpus novels.

  Moreover, Lethem finds time to riff on several fellow authors: James Tiptree (another Alice), is evident in the heroine’s feelings for Lack: “It’s a basic response to... embrace the alien.” Crash-era Ballard can be heard in this project by one of Philip’s grad students: “[He] had applied for funding to study the geographic spray of athletes on a playing field following an injury. He wanted to understand the disbursement of bodies around the epicenter of the wounded player.. .” And Terry Bisson’s story, “The Shadow Knows,” featuring an alien emptiness in a bowl, seems another definite referent.

  Lethem’s beautifully balanced, metaphorically rich prose propels this blackly jolly fable to a surprising yet satisfying conclusion. By book’s end, a sense that the author had accomplished his takeoff taxiing and was now fully in flight for more cosmopolitan cities pervades the pages.

  53

  Ken MacLeod

  The Cassini Division (1998)

  [Fall Revolution]

  BY A STRANGE irony, this astringently cynical novel is best known for one phrase, a sarcastic put-down of the Vingean Singularity: “The Rapture for the nerds.” The irony is that the story is exactly about what happens to humankind after a real Singularity accelerates and transforms technogeeks into a state inconceivable to the (apparent) losers who are Left Behind.

  These Outwarder “fast folk” upload themselves into immensely powerful computer substrates on Jupiter, dismantle its moon Ganymede, turning it into an exotic-matter wormhole that stretches to a very distant star. Their human slaves use that traversable spacetime link to escape to a world they name New Mars, ten millennia in the future, where they set up a libertarian anarcho-capitalist utopia.

  What ensues is a clash not just of civilizations but of utopias, as the Union—those deathless humans who inhabit the inner solar system after the Fall Revolution of 2045 and savage viral attacks from Jupiter on their electronic infrastructure—reject capitalism and embrace a kind of Darwinian communism. It is a drastic imaginary sandbox few American writers would consider playing in, and indeed Ken MacLeod, like his colleague Iain M. Banks (see Entry 17), is a Scot. It’s no coincidence that two other non-Scottish masters of transhuman sf, Charles Stross (Entry 81) and Hannu Rajaniemi (Entry 101), also live in Scotland, a territory known for its fierce independence and resentment of authority.

  The Cassini Division is the equivalent, in MacLeod’s Fall Revolution history, of Special Circumstances, the spy commando operatives of Banks’s post-scarcity Culture utopia. MacLeod’s viewpoint agent is beautiful, youthful but old. Ellen May Ngwethu (a surname that means freedom) is convinced that the long-quiescent fast folk are preparing a new assault on the despised mere humans. The Command Committee remain doubtful, and consider her suggested solution to be nothing better than genocide. But Ngwethu holds firm to the ideology developed by Korean and Japanese labor-camp prisoners, the True Knowledge, cobbled together from the few pre-20th century books available to them: Stirner, Nietzsche, Marx and Engels, Joseph Dietzgen (“The moral duty of an individual never exceeds his interests. The only thing which exceeds those interests is the material power of the generality over the individual”), Darwin and Herbert Spencer. Their doctrine is uncompromising, “the first socialist philosophy based on totally pessimistic and cynical conclusions about human nature:

  Life is a process of breaking down and using other matter, and if need be, other life.… There is nothing but matter, forces, space and time, which together make power. Nothing matters, except what matters to you. Might makes right, and power makes freedom. You are free to do whatever is in your power, and if you want to survive and thrive you had better do whatever is in your interests….

  All that you really value, and the goodness and truth and beauty of life, have their roots in this apparently barren soil.

  This is the true knowledge.

  We had founded our idealism on the most nihilistic implications of science, our socialism on crass self-interest, our peace on our capacity for mutual destruction, and our liberty on determinism. We had replaced morality with convention, bravery with safety, frugality with plenty, philosophy with science, stoicism with anesthetics and piety with immortality.

  And the outcome of this extreme teaching, where the word “banker” is the ultimate obscenity? Why, a culture “sustainable materially and psychologically, a climax community of the human species, the natural environment of a conscious animal…. We called it the Heliocene Epoch. It seemed like a moment in the sun, but there was no reason, in principle, why it couldn’t outlast the sun, and spread to all the suns of the sky.”

  The Outwarders in their Jupiter Brain, though, breaking free at last from their virtual reality trap or mass psychosis, seem ready to turn all the matter and energy in the solar system into more data-crunchers. To them, ordinary augmented humans are “counter-evolutionaries.” On distant New Mars, meanwhile, ten thousand years in the future but linked by the wormhole to their era of origin, capitalism has created an alternative utopia with AIs and uploads (rejected as mere machines by the Union), copied minds. The dead can be revived from smart-matter storage, a marvel of the free market.

  Some of the characters reappear from MacLeod’s 1996 Prometheus award winner, The Stone Canal. Each of the four Fall Revolution volumes can be read independently. The first, The Star Fraction (1995)—a nominee for Arthur Clarke award, also winning the libertarian Prometheus award despite its Trotskyist coloration—is less accomplished than the splendid sequels. The Sky Road (1999) skews this history interestingly.

  Ellen Ngwethu’s quest, in The Cassini Division, is for the vanished genius Isambard Kingdom Malley, whose flawed theory of everything was still close enough to the truth that the wormhole project and a working starship drive were based on it. Malley lives among dropouts from the Union: he’s a non-co, a contemptible non-cooperator in the new communist order. She finds him, and in the Division’s spacecraft Terrible Beauty they take the wormhole route to New Mars to arrange cometary kinetic attacks on the posthumans of Jupiter ten thousand years in the past. MacLeod’s blend of upscale tour-of-utopias (all the chapters are named after classic works of this kind: Looking Backward, News from Nowhere, A Modern Utopia, In the Days of the Comet, etc), ideological spats (New Martian capitalists use gene-engineered upgrades, the communists stick to machines, including nano-difference engines), and traditional thrill-a-minute calamity storytelling makes this one of the best novels about the Singularity: a veritable rapture for nerds!

  54

  Wil McCarthy

  Bloom (1998)

  A HOT-SHOT polymath, Wil McCarthy has been a rocket engineer for Lockheed, a popular-science columnist, a TV movie scenarist, and the inventor of what could turn out to be one of the landmark inventions of all time, programmable matter, discussed in his 2003 book Hacking Matter.[1] His company RavenBrick is developing early forms of smart matter, such as windows that respond selectively to heat, rather as spectacles do to ultraviolet light, the first step on the way to materials with tunable quantum dopants that let them mimic other substances. Somewhere in there, he published nine novels, ranging from effective to brilliant, the most recent when he was just 39. It is an early career to make Robert Heinlein seem like an amateur.

  What marks McCarthy’s fiction is its blend of well-conceived and often extravagant plotting, believable characterization, vivid and accurate settings, and classic faux-scientific handwaving that seems altogether credible, even as the reader’s mind boggles. This mix is no accident; McCarthy notes:

  The problem with action/adventure fiction is that most of it is dumb as rocks. The problem with literary fiction is that for all its beauty and depth, there’s usually not much going on. In between these two extremes lies what is generally known as “genre” fiction, i.e., the romance, SF, horror, mystery and suspense stories that most of us actually read.

  Bloom was his fifth published novel, released when he was 32, and certified his arrival as an sf master. A further sequence of four novel
s, known collectively as The Queendom of Sol, was launched two years later with the astonishing The Collapsium, about a man who uses nanorobots to build his own small planet in the Kuiper belt after first assembling thousands of miniature black holes, devises fax teleportation for the Solar System, and then in a fit of urgency invents the principles behind an inertialess space drive, and flies off to rescue the Sun from imminent destruction. And that’s just the start. The series is a four course meal, stuffed with nutritious alternative physics that might even turn out to be true. Bloom, by contrast, is a bracing energy drink and a brisk workout that leaves you muscle-burned but satisfied.

  John Strasheim, a cobbler on austere Ganymede in 2106 who makes shoes weighted down with gold, that now-abundant metal, is a part-time journalist whose book on the destruction of Earth and the rest of the inner solar system is a minor classic. The moons of Jupiter, and other small habitats of the outer solar system, remain free of the dreadful Mycora nanoplague infestation that emerged in New Guinea and almost instantly sporulated across the world, turning flesh, buildings and rock into seething versions of itself. These technogenic lifeform spores poured out into space, eating energy from sunlight, infecting and absorbing everything out as far as the asteroids, when the cold began to hamper their spread. But only the most vigorous and devoted efforts by the Immunity—the cultures of the outer system—can fend them off.