Science Fiction: The 101 Best Novels 1985-2010

by Damien Broderick

  Each and every object in the world knew its name; all, that is, save for the humans who lived here, because they had no dusting of mecha within them…. Jordan had found by experimenting that when you changed an object into something else, its mecha noticed and altered its name to suit. That had got him wondering: could you command an object to change its name; and if you changed an object’s name, would the object itself change to match it?

  Instantly, the savvy reader will spot the forerunner of both Rudy Rucker’s concept of an intelligent creation in his Postsingular (Entry 91), and also a hint of Wil McCarthy’s notion of programmable matter in his non-fiction book Hacking Matter, and associated novels (Entry 54). Finally, this is yet another instance of Schroeder messing with an overlay of faux magic, since knowing an object’s “true name” and using it to command (see Vinge’s seminal novella of that title) has long been a wizardly skill.

  Schroeder would later issue a satisfying prequel to Ventus, Lady of Mazes. And his Virga sequence is a glorious, masterful exploration of the “steel beach” theme of odd environments. But in Ventus, he melded perfectly the novel of fantastical, legend-breeding derring-do with the novel of postsingular humanity, producing a book that could be read and enjoyed on multiple scales, from the atomic to the cosmic.

  67

  Brian Stableford

  The Cassandra Complex (2001)

  [Emortality sequence]

  AT 17, IN 1965, Brian Stableford published his first (co-authored) story in Science Fantasy, and his first published novel followed at 21. By mid-2011, he had published 201 books in a profusion of formats and genres, unified by his interest in the interactions between science and narratives of the fantastic. After a degree in biology, he gained a PhD in the sociology of sf, and his long writing career has constantly pushed against the boundaries of commercial science fiction and fantasy. As a result, he became marginalized in a market where reliable commodities tend to bring far greater profits to publishers. In a recent interview, he was justifiably caustic:

  Stories require things to go wrong in order that they can be put right again, thus providing a basic pattern of challenge and climax and a satisfactory sense of closure. Many writers do, of course, find the prospect of progress innately threatening—it’s difficult for anyone over 40 to adopt any attitude to the future except terror or denial—but I’m more concerned with the way that the very nature of fiction favors story-arcs that afford a tacit privilege to the status quo, representing all innovation as evil simply because that’s the easy way to make a story gripping. Morally responsible futuristic fiction—which, of course, excludes all cinema and TV “sci-fi” and most printed sf—needs to find a way of steering around that problem…. Hopefully, there will always be heroic writers willing to work on that frontier, but as a marketing category, sf will continue to go exactly where it’s been headed since the term entered common usage: nowhere.[1]

  One of Stableford’s major achievements was his ambitious Emortality sequence of six novels, published out of order and not a commercial success, the last volume making it into print only due to its championing by a US editor.[2] While the first books released were Inherit the Earth (1998), set in the 22nd century, Architects of Emortality (1999), set in the late 25th century, and Fountains of Youth (2000), in the 31st century, the sequence begins chronologically with The Cassandra Complex (2001), anchored far more near-term in 2041. Dark Ararat (2002) follows an interstellar Ark into the 29th century, and The Omega Expedition (2002) extends beyond the year 3000. All six are developed from a large-scale effort at futurism published in 1985 by Stableford and fellow British writer David Langford, The Third Millennium: A History of the World 2000-3000 A.D.. They comprise an attempt at a genuinely searching and non-trivial futurist exploration of this millennium in which the quest for extended lifespan will be sought and finally achieved. The goal is emortality—a term coined in The Conquest of Death (1979) by biology professor Alvin Silverstein. Unlike immortality, which seems to promise eternal life through invulnerability or supernatural survival, emortality more reasonably offers protracted healthy youth, while remaining prey to super-diseases, lethal accidents, and ultimately the extinction of the entire universe.

  Each of these novels is independent, although several characters reappear, inevitably given the very long lives enjoyed by those preserved by cryonic biostasis or true emortality treatments. But the saga they weave is one immense fabric. Information and references to offstage events and characters are seeded throughout, just as realist novels are replete with unfootnoted references to historical commonplaces. The alert reader slowly accretes knowledge of this future, ranging from the engineered global stockmarket bouleversement or Great Panic of 2025, that allowed a few megacorps to take over the world, the rise of “hobbyist terrorism” after ’22 (the book was a hair too early for 9/11), the rise and fall of post-backlash feminist Real Women, the massive dieback and sterilization of humankind in vast plagues, through to the final conquest of death. Names recur: Adam Zimmerman, founder of the Ahasuerus Foundation (named for the fabled, deathless “Wandering Jew”), preserved for a thousand years to witness the outcome of his great plan, Mortimer Gray, historian of death, Madoc Tamlin, Michael Lowenthal.

  Deliberately, the novels comprise two trilogies, one of thoughtful classic sf adventure, the second following a kind of comic, playful path into an increasingly strange future where the traditional tropes of fiction simply break down because the old stakes (youth versus aging and death) no longer retain their ancient poignant value. It’s a mark of this comic aspect that important figures in the policier The Architects of Emortality are Charlotte Holmes and her boss Hal Watson, and the beautiful, clever, and insufferable Oscar Wilde, a geneticist who designs flowers (and naturally wears a green carnation).

  The best entry point is The Cassandra Complex, which uncannily resembles Prime Suspect, the dark, gritty, layered British television police investigation drama made famous by actor Helen Mirren and orginated by screen writer Lynda la Plante, although Stableford had planned the book before the first of that series was broadcast. It is easy, though, to visualize forensic specialist Inspector Lisa Friedman, PhD, as an aging Mirren, pressed at age 61 toward retirement by an arrogant younger woman Chief Inspector, and beset by nitwits.

  Woken and attacked in her code-locked bedroom by unidentifiable assailants convinced that she is hiding something crucial, denounced by the word TRAITOR daubed on her door, Lisa swiftly learns that her former teacher and lover Morgan Miller is missing. What’s more, his decades-long breeding project with half a million mice has been incinerated. Miller, it proves, has lately made tentative contact with both the Ahasuerus Foundation and their rivals, the Algenists, proponents of a Nietzschean dream of posthuman enhancement.

  Is either organization convinced that 40 years of breeding experiments have found a cure for death? Lisa can’t believe Miller would have hidden such an epochal discovery from her. But everything is more tangled than even she can imagine. Unfolding the plots and counterplots provides the action of the plot. What makes the book, and the series, truly interesting and rewarding is the amount of serious thinking about our future that Stableford has embedded in his novels.

  [1] Brian Stableford interviewed by Barbara Godwin (2006):

  http://www.infinityplus.co.uk/nonfiction/intbs06.htm

  [2] The tangled background is sketched in Stableford’s foreword to Les Fleurs du Mal (Borgo Press, 2010).

  68

  M. John Harrison

  Light (2002)

  BACK IN THE 1950S, sf satirists parodied a brainless future where people handed over tedious choices to machines but failed to rue their decision because the marrow was leached from their lives. Ironic, then, that the same fate is encroaching upon sf itself. Shelves are crammed with Stepford Sci-Fi. That mightn’t matter—people have a right to their denatured comfort food—if publishing conglomerates and their accountancy programs leave enough lebensraum for challenging books, the rich meat, texts
that don’t give up their meaning in a single glazed pass. True, such books have not yet all gone, but they struggle against strangling odds.

  That numbing grip can be seen in the slowed or blocked passage into American editions of many fine novels from the UK. Charles Stross, nowadays a spectacular success story, took years to get his novels into US print. Iain M. Banks, Ken MacLeod, M. John Harrison, Ian McDonald, others—did the British specificity of their locales (even their galactic locales), their independent accents, made such work unreadable to many who mistook their own backyards for the cosmos?

  Harrison’s Tiptree award-winning novel from 2002 arrived in the USA in a (handsome) Bantam trade paperback two years late, although without the chapter-head flourishes of the Gollancz edition. The Tiptree judges (whose remit is to find the year’s premier work exploring gender issues in sf and fantasy) declared Light “rich, horrible, sad, and absurd,” a novel that “says a lot about how the body and sex inform one’s humanity. It will reward rereading.” Indeed, it almost demands rereading.

  Its most traditional elements are Harrison’s consummately wrought space battles, fought in infinitesimal fractions of a second by a brutally truncated starship captain wedded to her ancient sentient K-ship White Cat. These scenes are genuinely prodigious. This is intense genre textuality at full throttle, yet shaped with a pre-Raphaelite tenderness. But Harrison is deconstructing exactly the visceral, stoned excitement we gain from such scenes. He is showing us the bitter emptiness at the core of K-captain Seria Mau Genlicher slaughtering people from the leached yearning of her own worthlessness.

  Out in the flat gray void beyond, a huge actinic flare erupted. In an attempt to protect its client hardware, the White Cat’s massive array shut down for a nanosecond and a half. By this time, the ordnance had already cooked off at the higher wavelengths. X-rays briefly raised the temperature in local space to 25,000 degrees Kelvin, while the other particles blinded every kind of sensor, and temporary sub-spaces boiled away from the weapons-grade singularity as fractal dimensions. Shockwaves sang through the dynaflow medium like the voices of angels, the way the first music resonated through the viscous substrate of the early universe before proton and electron recombined.

  In the epoch of the blog, we now have access to Harrison’s own mordant, rich commentary on his intentions in creating this lapidary work of art. It is not especially surprising that a working draft title was Empty Space. What fills the novel to flooding is the paradoxical fullness and emptiness of space: the foamed, invisible dazzle of quantum virtual particles rushing in and out of reality, sustaining our apparent solidity. At the core of the narrative is the Kefahuchi Tract, fecund waste land boundary of the black hole seething in its infinitely dense vacancy at the heart of the galaxy. On its shores, its Beach, are the derelict traces of extinct species drawn to its transfinite, transgressive promise: whole abandoned star-plying planets, great enigmatic machines.

  Everywhere in this cosmic absence and emptiness is always more, and then, as Harrison insists, always more after that.

  In a parallel tale, his present-day serial killer mathemagician, the obsessed and terror-haunted Michael Kearney, plunged dizzyingly as a child into the fractal endlessness of the sea’s edge, an aperture of insight that finally gives humanity faster than light travel. Ed Chianese, the novel’s third chief player, is client and then tormenter and cuckolder of a mock human New Man named, absurdly, Tig Vesicle. “Chinese Ed” retreats from the intoxicating confusion and fertility of his and Seria’s 25th century interstellar world (pursued by the standover Cray Sisters, a British joke on the once notorious brutal Kray Brothers) into a VR cartoon of noir mean streets. Ed the twink, as usual in such picaresques, is being educated; like some zany in a Philip K. Dick Ace Double, he is being programmed as a medium, a precog, a shaman of the Tract.

  But in the cauldron of this simmering bouillabaisse of broken people, other fishies mingle, flesh peeling from their hearts, perhaps curing their egregious and haunted lovers. Kearney’s waif wife Anna, in her abiding sexual solicitude, her regaining of her self, is not a character one would find in Stepford Sci-Fi. Nor is the great-limbed Annie, Ed’s simple-minded rickshaw girl saint. It would be easy to read this casting of characters as mean-spirited, even misogynist; that would miss the point utterly, as the Tiptree judges understood. But so, too, would be the temptation to see Light as just a recuperation for the 21st century of, say, Alfred Bester’s The Stars My Destination, for all that Kearney cries out like synesthetic Gully Foyle, in the moment of his apotheosis:

  “Too bright,” he said…. The light roared in on him unconfined: he felt it on his skin, he heard it as a sound…. The vacuum around him smelled of lemons. It looked like roses.

  As the Shrander, an awful horse-skull entity in a maroon wool winter coat that haunts Kearney’s blighted trajectory to heaven, explains: “Everywhere you look it unpacks to infinity. What you look for, you find.” It’s like that with Harrison’s marvelous, difficult, rewarding novel, indeed his entire oeuvre, which constitutes a reproach to the McSci-Fi racks and a healing proof that the form of science fiction is not exhausted after all. More, and then always more after that.

  (And indeed, in a more literal sense, Harrison provided more in 2006, returning to this universe in Nova Swing, for which he won the Arthur C. Clarke and Philip K. Dick awards.)

  69

  Richard Morgan

  Altered Carbon (2002)

  IT’S EXCEEDINGLY rare to find a debut novel as accomplished as Richard Morgan’s Altered Carbon. Inevitable comparisons must be made to the initial smash that William Gibson’s Neuromancer caused, since Altered Carbon certainly qualifies as pure third-generation kick-ass cyberpunk, a lineal descendant of the 1980s. It’s simply one hell of a ride.

  I woke once more, this time to a rough numbness in the surface of my skin, like the feeling your hands get just after you’ve rinsed them clean of detergent or white spirit, but spread throughout the whole body. Re-entry into a male sleeve. It subsided rapidly as my mind adjusted to the new nervous system.

  Morgan’s future involves fully recorded personalities downloaded into fresh bodies, “sleeves” that are either synthetics or clones or essence-wiped adult humans. The setting is 26th century Earth, mainly the city of San Francisco. Here we find our narrator/protagonist Takeshi Kovacs, “sleeved” in a new body and set loose to find out the truth behind the apparent suicide of billionaire Laurens Bancroft. The client who hired Kovacs is Bancroft, the suicide victim himself. Kovacs is an Envoy, a near-psychopathic trained killer-soldier from the stars, now installed in new flesh. The living Bancroft is derived from a backup copy of the dead man, and lacks the memories of his own final hours due to deficient backup timing. Bancroft believes he was murdered, and details Kovacs to find his killer.

  Almost instantly, Kovacs is plunged into the elaborate and deadly politics of both the local scene and the whole Earth milieu. A large cast of suspects, allies, enemies and innocent bystanders complicates matters. There’s Kristen Ortega, local cop, who just so happens to be the lover of the body Kovacs is wearing, that of a fellow cop uploaded out of his flesh to the penal Stack for various crimes. There are professional assassins Trepp and Kadmin, who are stalking Kovacs. There’s the AI that runs the hotel Kovacs is staying at, the Hendrix, who becomes Kovacs’s partner. There are organlegging doctors; hackers known as Dips who take byte-sized pieces of personality backups in transit; and an assortment of whores, drug-dealers and other unsavory types. Most importantly of all, there’s merciless crime lord Reileen Kawahara, with whom Kovacs has tangled before. When Kovacs begins to step on her toes, the violence amps upward.

  Morgan has the essentials of noir fiction nailed down tight. The wisecracks in the face of death, the elaborate similes and metaphors (“less noise than a Catholic orgasm”), the institutional corruption, the way alliances get made despite principles rather than because of principles. The plot is more tangled than six Chandler novels put together, yet Morgan manages to
unknot it all at the end. Kovacs is as nasty a hero as any outside of a James Crumley novel, yet we root wholeheartedly for him. And the speculative content is impeccable: a sharp central concept (reminiscent in many ways of the core notion in David Brin’s Kiln People), lots of deadly hardware, and plenty of socio-political ramifications.

  One possible gripe is with the unlikelihood that five centuries have passed since our day. Morgan picks this distant era because he needs to set up a degenerate elite of ancient powerbrokers. (Bancroft and Kawahara are both three centuries old.) But would such things as the UN, tobacco cigarettes and LED readouts survive unaltered over such a span? What institutions and customs remain to us from Shakespeare’s time? It’s much more likely that the passage of five centuries would result in a future with many fewer familiarities. But once you get over this initial implausibility, the action of the book is freed to zigzag madly from one explosive action scene to another, all of them elaborately constructed and recomplicated. Morgan’s unflagging attention to meticulous detail confirms the old saw about genius being an infinite capacity for taking pains.

  Morgan shows us that, given a wealth of talent and ambition, no writer need be afraid to tackle any mode of fiction deemed played-out. All those who suspected that the landmark fusion of noir and sf William Gibson pioneered had been done to death will find their rebuttal here.