Science Fiction: The 101 Best Novels 1985-2010

by Damien Broderick

  70

  Christopher Priest

  The Separation (2002)

  FAR OUTSIDE the hackneyed ninety percent of sf demarcated by Theodore Sturgeon in his famous Law, Christopher Priest’s brand of science fiction is marked by adroitness, by quantum uncertainty, by feints and sleights of hand, by deliberate and gratuitous misdirection, and by wide-eyed perverse miscomprehensions that often result in enormous cockups. On a certain plane, it’s science fiction as a parable of the scientific process itself. The wily, seductive, secretive universe attempts to fool its humans, who must gradually strip away Temptress Creation’s seven veils, until the “beauty bare” of Euclid is revealed. Sometimes Beauty is a Gorgon, though. The path to knowledge is strewn with failed theories, misinterpreted observations, and no little human wreckage.

  It is no accident that the individual novel of Priest’s that has received the most public notice, The Prestige, filmed by Christopher Nolan, is literally full of such things, embodied in the sundry apparatus of stage magic, including multiple sets of double individuals, both identical and deviating from their mutual template. The book stood as the echt Priest tale—you witness a puzzling phenomenon; it maddens you; how do you interpret it?—until the coming of The Separation, which crystallized his modus operandi and voice even further, in elegant contours.

  On its surface, The Separation is “merely” an alternate-history novel centered around World War II. One might suspect it at first to be akin to Connie Willis’s recent award-winning duology, Blackout/All Clear, in which lightweight time travelers experience the Blitz as something of a theme park, while threatening consensus history. But distinguishing himself from Willis’s blander, more straightforward sf, Priest quickly reveals that he has something much odder in mind. If any comparisons are to be made, Kurt Vonnegut’s Slaughterhouse-Five, with its hapless protagonist unanchored in time and space, should be one correlative—although Priest has no interest in Vonneguttian whimsy—with Kathleen Goonan’s jazz-suffused In War Years (Entry 90) the other.

  The frame tale of the narrative opens in 1999, with a writer of popular histories named Stuart Gratton. At a book-signing, Gratton receives a handwritten memoir of WWII from a woman named Angela. The memoir is by one J. L. Sawyer. This first-person account occupies the next couple of hundred pages of The Separation. We follow the doings of Jack (the memorist) and Joe Sawyer, twin brothers, both bearing the initials “JL.” Jack, an RAF pilot, seems to be Angela’s illegitimate father, despite Joe having been married to Angela’s mother, Birgit. (Joe, Jack tells us, died in 1940 when a bomb destroyed his London ambulance.)

  With meticulous period detail, Jack describes his own wartime endeavors, focusing on an odd mission where he met not only Churchill’s double, but also Rudolf Hess’s doppelganger. Throughout the narrative, much is made of Joe and Jack’s exceptional physical and mental affinity that was shattered by their falling out over Birgit, their fateful “separation.” Priest conveys this in a number of subtle ways, such as having Jack enjoy the film The Lady Eve, with Barbara Stanwyck, where Stanwyck plays a dual role: one woman with two identities. The autobiography concludes with Jack a grateful old man.

  Mid-novel, at memoir’s end, we return to historian Gratton in 1999, and learn that his timeline is not ours. (Adalai Stevenson a USA President, followed in office by Nixon?) And Jack Sawyer’s memoir seems to have strayed across dimensions, since Angela, its courier, does not exist anywhere Gratton can find her. Next up is an account by Stan Levy, one of Jack’s wartime comrades, which seems to confirm this continuum-jumping: Levy maintains that Jack died in 1941 in a plane crash we earlier saw him survive. So it’s on to investigate Joe’s life as a conscientious objector, by objective documents and Joe’s own words. We see Joe father Angela, attend peace negotiations with the Nazis, and watch him undergo odd “lucid imaginings” about Jack, that culminate in spectral superpositions, collapsed into a final solid timeline, Schrodinger-style, by Joe’s sentience.

  Priest’s novel is obviously a sobering meditation on war and peace, centering on the 20th-century’s greatest bellicose cataclysm. In the end, it’s an equivocal examination. The pros and cons, benefits and costs of Jack’s familiar war timeline are well known to us, but rendered stingingly fresh by Priest’s handling. It’s Joe’s pacifistic timeline that’s more problematical, leading to a half century of global stagnation. Would such a stasis-ridden, albeit Communist-free future be acceptable, if it meant no Dresden firestorm, no Hiroshima? Readers are left to decide for themselves.

  But it’s as a portrait of the uncanny workings of the haunted house multiverse, along the lines recently expounded by such physicists as Brian Greene, that The Separation really excels. The seepage and fluctuations between Jack and Joe speak to us of clashing branes, of Borges’s “The Garden of Forking Paths,” of Nabokovian doubles such as Humbert Humbert and Quilty. What is the nature of consciousness across the multiverse? Do Jack and Joe share a single mind? (Echoes of Brian Aldiss’s hilariously horrific “Let’s Be Frank” intrude.) Priest ingeniously depicts such conundrums and leaves the unpacking to us.

  In Philip K. Dick’s seminal The Man in the High Castle, the Nazi timeline of the main narrative is solid as pain, with only brief glimpses of “better” alternate histories afforded to those trapped characters. In The Separation, every timeline (critic Paul Kincaid identifies at least four) seems equally fungible, equally privileged, equally threatened, a whole sheaf of “insubstantial castles fading.” Arguably, this indeterminate multipolar universe offers more “freedom” than Dick’s locked-down scenario. But it’s a freedom, Priest cautions us, that takes formidable strength of being to survive.

  71

  John C. Wright

  The Golden Age (2002)

  JOHN C. WRIGHT arrived apparently from nowhere in his mid-forties, with this immensely detailed far future romance, a trilogy (really a single huge book) instantly fluent in sf’s imaginative costume drama:

  She was speaking with an entity dressed as a cluster of wide-spread energy bubbles. This costume represented Enghathrathrion’s dream version of the Famous First-Harmony Composition Configuration just before it woke to self-awareness, bringing the dawn of the Fourth Mental Structure…. Beyond them, a group of vulture-headed individuals were dressed in the dull leathery life armor of the Bellipotent Composition, with Warlock-killing gear.

  The Golden Age, runner-up for the 2003 Locus award for best first novel, suggested that here we had a writer who (like John Varley) had lain awake in agonies of insomnia devising all these wheels within wheels and their special designations. Wright’s far future palpably grows from immersion in the genre’s long, braided conversation, and for all the abundance of wheels there’s very little wheel-reinventing here. A lengthy and useful interview with Nick Gevers offers frank witness to his grateful borrowings:

  A. E. Van Vogt formed my childhood picture of what a hero was. Van Vogt portrayed a man who was more sane, more rational, than his foes, was able to overcome them. No other writer’s works fill me with the sense of awe and wonder as does Van Vogt.

  Jack Vance and Gene Wolfe are masters of style, and I filch from them without a twinge of remorse.[1]

  The clearest influence on Wright’s voice, and a welcome one, is Jack Vance. Here is Wright in typically Vancian mocking dialogue:

  “Now we have heard him speak; and our open-mindedness is rewarded; for we now learn that [he] believes that what he does is to benefit mankind, and to spread our civilization, which he claims to love. A fine discovery! The conflict here can be resolved without further ado.”

  Elsewhere, he recalls the impact of van Vogt’s sf on him, “the sense of wonder that the grand... tradition of space opera embraces. I am trying to write a space opera in his style, so I never have a super-starship ten kilometers long when a ship one hundred kilometers long will do; I never blow up a city when I can blow up a planet.” So Wright was the latest of the ambitious deep future New Space Opera boom—David Zindell, Stephen Ba
xter, Paul McAuley, Iain M. Banks, Peter Hamilton, Alastair Reynolds, Wil McCarthy (most of them with entries in this book). His Prologue, “Celebrations of the Immortals,” sketches in a mere 350 words a truly wondrous carnival of beings gathered for the Golden Oecumene’s millennial High Transcendence. All human and posthuman neuroforms are represented, fictional as well as real, high transhumans returned briefly to earthly estate from their calculational realms, projected future descendants, “languid-eyed lamia from morbid unrealized alternatives.” It is a beguiling pageant.

  In this feverish, abundant, user-pays utopia, foppish Phaethon of Rhadamanthus House finds himself inexplicably ill at ease. Before the first volume is done, this flawed sun god will test the very nature of his identity and that of his beloved wife Daphne, and of his clone father Helion (another solar name, for an engineer who works literally in the bowels of the Sun), contest with artificial minds thousands of times more potent than his own, spar with human variants collective and modified, and test his nerve in a puzzling challenge that combines the curse of Orpheus with the temptation of Pandora.

  Is this libertarian Golden Age truly one, with all its immense wealth, cruelty, absolute responsibility to and for self? A certain hard-luck case complains, to comic effect, “You are wealthy people. You can afford to have emotions. Some of us cannot afford the glands or midbrain complexes required.” Or might it be a Golden Cage, penned shut by the caution of immortals within a Solar System that can be reshaped (the Moon brought closer, Venus relocated farther from the Sun, the Sun’s chaos itself tamed) but not escaped.

  There are no aliens in this future, no superluminal physics, no time machines, and apparently the single extrasolar expedition failed long ago. (Our suspicions on this score pay off in the second volume.) Who attacks Phaethon with such determination, guile and ferocity? Are there alien invaders after all? Or perhaps Sophotechs (AIs) gone to the bad, which is to say become as self-interested as their charges? Or is Phaethon, like many of sf’s amnesiac supermen, a terrifying rogue force about to reduce order to ruin if his self-inflicted shackles are opened, or carry all into some transcendence beyond the year’s festive High Transcendence?

  The trilogy is on one level a travelogue, and Phaethon’s misadventures a pretext to display spectacular scenery. In this case, though, the spectacle is rarely as simple as a catalogue of advanced technology (although there is lots of that, and rather nice it is, too), or dazzling settlings. One poor man is obliged to trudge downstairs all the way from geosynchronous orbit, a 40,000 kilometer plod, compiling his food and drink from air and wastes as he descends a space elevator’s core—a ludicrous but enviably crazed plot move. No, the spectacle shares something with the posthuman cognitive explorations of Walter Jon Williams (Entry 31) and Greg Egan (Entry 38).

  Tens of thousands of years hence, or perhaps millions, these people differ in mentality as much as in flesh or chip, or so we are told. If this is rarely enacted satisfactorily, perhaps it’s because that would exceed our capacity to grasp, and Wright’s to imagine. Still, it is enchanting to consider the segmented and spliced levels of Phaethon’s own consciousness, the ways in which his inward construction of the world can be tweaked, betrayed, filtered, manipulated, clarified, the profusion of people in the Golden Age: the Hundred-mind near the kindled star of Jupiter, the gelid frozen brains of Neptune with their envious designs for good or ill, the idealized computer eidolons of the Aeonite School, Warlock neuroforms with intuitive skills derived from non-standard neural links between brain modules, and Invariants with a unicameral brain immune to filtering and hence dwelling within an utterly stark Weltbild—hideously deprived, not unlike our own current condition yet perhaps saner.

  On and on it goes, in a sort of extended commentary, from the right, on Olaf Stapledon’s classic, minatory, marxist Last and First Men. If all this sounds didactic, it is not, just. Wright has a quirky sense of humor, combined oddly with a rather ramrod young fogy sense of propriety (he deplores the louche way sf editors and writers freely address each other by their first names). And his characters are not wholly given to mighty projects, although Phaethon, it is true, unblushingly craves “deeds of renown without peer”; one AI likes to manifest in the collective virtual world as a penguin, fishy-breathed but able to fly so fast he leaves a vapor contrail. Wright’s ingenuity, density, wit, sly comedy are all very enjoyable.

  [1]At http://www.sfsite.com/05a/jcw127.htm

  72

  Audrey Niffenegger

  The Time Traveler’s Wife (2003)

  UNTIL YOU READ this elaborate time-twisting invention, you might be tempted to dismiss The Time Traveler’s Wife, best-selling debut novel by Audrey Niffenegger, as romantic confectionary. It is considerably more than that, despite the flaws in any sf book written by someone who’s redesigning the screwdriver so she can invent the steering wheel. It is a powerfully mimetic novel grounded in a strange premise, fantastika enriched by copious detail drawn from the real world of the author.

  That, at any rate, is one’s impression, noticing certain telling aspects of the world not always included in commercial sf. What distinguishes The Time Traveler’s Wife from, say, a clever traditional sf entertainment like Poul Anderson’s There Will Be Time (1972) is its very ordinariness, its refusal, by and large, to use this abnormal intrusion as an opportunity to showcase the time traveler’s technical prowess, political nous or prejudice, trans-historic destiny. Here is a revealing interview quote from Niffenegger:

  I like science fiction, but it’s not really what I read. So I wasn’t trying for science fiction… what I was initially interested in was having one fantastical or strange thing and then regular reality. There’s this idea that you change one thing about the world and everything else moves around it. This idea that you’re allowed to play with reality somewhat. In my art, I’m somewhat surrealistic…. I like changing things.[1]

  What Niffenegger was reaching for was not “surrealism,” although she didn’t know it, but rather a term and a strategy devised by Rudy Rucker—transrealism.[2]

  Sf is all about changing things, but what happens when you are telling a contemporary story—even one where a six-year old girl is likely to be visited by her forty-something, stark-naked future husband—and an external event overwhelmingly intrudes into your own life, into history, into your book. “The part that happened around 9/11 was interesting,” Niffenegger says,

  ... because, of course that happened when I was almost done with the book and I thought, wow, I can’t really let this go un-addressed. For the most part real world events don’t really make it into this book because I didn’t want to date it and I didn’t want it to be about the world. It’s really about this relationship. I figured, you have this gigantic thing and if you don’t at least nod at it, it’s going to seem glaring in its absence.

  This is one version of the insistence of the empirical, the return not of the Freudian repressed but of the everyday, in this case amplified into gritty terror that serves in the narrative, for a brief moment, as an icon of the traveler’s uncanny, dreadful, fated, powerless standpoint, ever moving, never moving. Niffenegger comments, “It’s something that bugs me about actual science fiction, this effort to provide all the answers and make everything work out very neatly.” But of course her novel is “actual science fiction,” at least if Flowers for Algernon is sf. Still, she is right to feel qualms; more than actual science fiction, her novel is actual transrealism, a coloration of sf enlivened and enriched by uncertainty, familiarity used against itself to provide a jolt not only of shocked surprise but also, paradoxically, of recognition.

  Both of which are features of this emotionally moving slipstream novel. Librarian Henry DeTamble and his once and future wife Clare Anne Abshire (“this astoundingly beautiful amber-haired tall slim girl… this luminous creature”) take turns narrating their time-slipped love. Henry has been flipped into the past hundreds of times from childhood, stranded

  naked as a jaybird, up to your ankles in ice
water in a ditch along an unidentified rural route…. Sometimes you feel as though you have stood up too quickly even if you are lying in bed half asleep. You feel blood rushing in your head, feel vertiginous falling sensations. You hands and feet are tingling and then they aren’t there at all… and then you are skidding across the forest-green-carpeted hallway of a Motel 6 in Athens, Ohio, at 4:16 a.m., Monday, August 6, 1981, and you hit your head on someone’s door, causing this person, a Ms. Tina Schulman from Philadelphia, to open this door and start screaming because there’s a naked, carpet-burned man passed out at her feet.

  That classic, patient, self-ironic narrative is one of the two voices of the tale, but really both comprise a single civilized middle-class point of view (wealthy upper middle-class, in Clare’s case) relaying the kind of love affair seldom recounted outside genre sf, between two entwined lovers and their sometimes wretchedly haywired world. Unlike fantasy treatments of time slippage (by Jack Finney or Richard Matheson, say), Henry’s quirk is eventually attributed to a very rare chromosomal disorder, Chrono-Displacement, which gets passed along to his and Clare’s daughter Alba.

  At 10 years of age, when they meet in the future, this child tells him that he has been dead for five years. So Henry knows in advance that he will die when he is 43. While time travelers have a modicum of free will (or so it seems), they cannot change their timeline to avoid perils, since that would entail altering the future’s known past, something forbidden by the laws of physics. Inevitably, then, the story is deeply tragic—in the mode of fated Greek tragedy but more personal and realistic—and its denouement both disquieting and painfully poignant.