But for a Chrono-Displaced Person, the future can sometimes touch the past beyond death:
She is an old woman; her hair is perfectly white and lies long on her back in a thin stream, over a slight dowager’s hump. She wears a sweater the color of coral. The curve of her shoulders, the stiffness of her posture says here is someone who is very tired, and I am very tired, myself. I shift my weight from one foot to the other and the floor creaks; the woman turns and sees me and her face is remade into joy….
As is ours, perhaps through tears.
[1] Veronica Bond, interview with Niffenegger, Bookslut, 2003:
http://www.bookslut.com/features/2003_12_001158.php
[2] See Damien Broderick, Transrealist Fiction, Greenwood Press, 2000.
73
Justina Robson
Natural History (2003)
NATURAL HISTORY was runner-up for 2004’s Campbell Memorial award, a distinguished feat attained previously by such luminaries as Kurt Vonnegut, Ursula K. Le Guin, Ian Watson, John Crowley, Michael Bishop, Lucius Shepard, Kim Stanley Robinson, Neal Stephenson, and Greg Bear (three times). British Justina Robson, trained in philosophy, had already made her mark with Silver Screen (1999) and Mappa Mundi (2001), both shortlisted for the Clarke award. She suggests the main question raised in this space opera of Forged (modified and augmented human stock) and Unevolved (same old earthly us) is whether, “because of your physical form,” you are locked into a specified identity. In particular, “Whether you can still possess a human identity if you are some sort of radically different gigantic cyborg type of creature that lives among the stars.”
Voyager Lonestar Isol is just such a cyborg or MekTek, adapted for deep space and heading for Barnard’s Star when she slams into exploded alien detritus that pits her hull savagely and leaves her apparently doomed. She awakens in the debris an advanced M-Theory engine made of silicon Stuff that in a trice whips her 11-dimensionally to an enigmatic world near the galactic hub, and then home:
“Stuff is a technology and it is also people, indivisibly fused…. It is intelligent, responsive, compassionate, but it does not have an identity of its own…. Stuff watches. It chooses points where life of a certain developmental stage is sure to come across it, seeding the universe with points of access.”
Ironhorse Timespan Tatresi, a kilometer-long solar system bulk carrier, takes her to feathered Corvax, formerly a Roc, Handslicer class, for investigation, on behalf of a burgeoning insurgency of Forged against Monkeys or Hanumaforms (us again, their creators). The Forged are not slaves, exactly. Their own consoling ideology poses them as sole custodians of meaning and true freedom (their Form and Function, designed teleologically into them) that the Old Monkeys lack, dull creatures of Darwinian happenstance that we are. All that holds them back from decamping to a home world of their own, a seemingly abandoned earthlike planet found by Isol, is the regard in which they hold their mythic Forged Citizen “father-mothers.” Even this is a simplification, as Aurora quickly explains to Zephyr: “Clinging to Function is a puritan ideal.... Form is likewise irrelevant; only what you can contribute to the lives of others should be a measure of a soul’s value.”
Here is a striking echo of today’s conflicted ideologies over, say, reproductive, gay, and transgender rights to choice, and a foreshadowing of the shape these tussles will likely take in any early transhuman or posthuman future.
More generally, Robson’s political setting, which at first resembles black slaves against white masters, or Third World against First, or workers against capitalists, strikes the habituated sf reader as an echo of that enormous mythic future sketched so hauntingly by Cordwainer Smith, Underpeople ranged against the Lords of the Instrumentality (a comparison we also drew earlier, in Entry 31, with Walter Jon Williams’ Aristoi). Smith’s modified animal people struggled for redemption and self-determination against the true and augmented humans of Old Earth, Norstrilia and the rest of his crypto-Christian universe left unfinished due to his early death. Here, Tom Corvax is an aging, damaged birdman tech and VR bootlegger, dreaming a banned virtual human life.
Soon we find a Jamaican cultural archaeologist, Zephyr Duquesne, taking her swift if squeamish flight inside the flesh and metal body of an immense Passenger Pigeon person, Ironhorse AnimaMekTek Aurora. Impossible not to recall the E’telekeli eagle-man messiah from Smith’s long rebellion; just as impossible, grinning, not to recall “Blackie” Duquesne, E. E. “Doc” Smith’s anti-hero from the primitive Skylark space operas. Is this surfeit of Smiths and Forged a nod to that immense repository of sf iconography, whimsy, heartbreak and literary tools shaped for getting us into the inconceivable and back? No; it’s either an accident or a convergence of memoryless sf with very old images from folklore. Robson comments: “I have never read any Cordwainer Smith. Ever. I never read any Al Reynolds until this week. I never read any Bruce Sterling. Or Doc Smith. For many of my teenage years when I was doing my formative reading I didn’t dare actually read sf, so I used to imagine it off the covers and blurbs.”[1]
For all its conceptual underpinnings of problematic identity and struggles for independence or existential meaning, Robson’s novel is no improving homily but a New Space Opera ripping yarn. If her redeployment of numerous wheels does cause some grinding of the axles, some bald infodumping, it adds a certain freshly spun aroma to her saga of machined folks seeking Paradise Regained and finding... well, as so often in sf, epiphany and transcendence, of a sort.
Dispatched with Isol via Hypertube to the mystery planet’s surface for eight days of study, Zephyr is warned that while the Hypertube forms a continuous surface with our four familiar dimensions, “it is only a single Planck length in extent.” Crossing it, therefore, takes only 10 to the minus 43 seconds—to get anywhere. “Everything in transit, for that instant, no matter its size in our universe,” becomes superposed, jammed together—the secret, perhaps, of Stuff. “Nice, nice, very nice,” as Kurt Vonnegut chanted in his splendid sf fable Cat’s Cradle, “So many different people, In the same device.” That’s an entanglement you could drive a mystical insight through, and Robson does, along with her complex tale of self-making and self-transcending in spaces outer and inner:
Zephyr looked down at her own hands in her lap, the flower between them, against the heavy blue suit. “Ready.”
From all around her she heard a thousand voices begin to sing a happy tune.
[1] Justina Robson, personal communication.
74
Howard Hendrix
The Labyrinth Key / Spears of God
(2004-2006)
HOWARD HENDRIX’S four novels prior to our two-fold selection here—Lightpaths, Standing Wave, Better Angels and Empty Cities of the Full Moon—all exhibited an admirable and remarkable playfulness, an engagement with abstruse philosophical and metaphysical conundrums, embodied in likable characters and recomplicated plots. Each book was a little more assured and smooth than the previous; his fifth novel, The Labyrinth Key, and its sequel, Spears of God, continued that trend.
Had Neal Stephenson not already used the neologism Cryptonomicon for his own 1999 novel, that title would have fitted perfectly The Labyrinth Key, a book that seeks to erase the distinction between “theology and technology,” a centuries-old split that in Hendrix’s view has tainted our civilization in a nearly fatal manner. (This theme recalls the mystical engine of John Crowley’s Aegypt quartet, begun in 1987.) Using cryptography as his main leitmotif and tossing in resonant material from mythology, quantum physics and a dozen other disciplines, Hendrix fashions a book that ignites all the intellectual depth charges of a Robert Anton Wilson novel while simultaneously functioning on its surface level as a satisfyingly convoluted spy thriller.
Jaron Kowk is a man with a seemingly straightforward mission: to help America’s National Security Agency beat the Chinese in the “quantum crypto race.” But Jaron has gotten sidetracked in the labyrinth of history, running the threads of his researches deeper and deeper into the numinou
s alchemical past. Eventually, the fruits of his off-kilter hypotheses trigger his mysterious disappearance. But before he vanishes he broadcasts into the web a virtuality episode containing numerous clues to his findings.
Ben Cho is the man assigned by the NSA to pick up the trail of Jaron’s work. Interacting with Jaron’s widow, Cherise; with a Hong Kong detective named Marilyn Lu; with the Deputy Director of the NSA, James Brescoll; and with a handful of other oddball characters, some gonzo, some deadly, Ben will soon discover that his bond with Jaron goes deeper than expected. Amidst terrorist attacks, ploys and counterploys, Ben will undergo a strange transformation that allows him to become both the labyrinth of the universe and the key to its unlocking.
Hendrix has a lot of fun setting up a raft of competing conspiracies: besides the NSA, the CIA and the Chinese secret service, there’s the Tetragrammaton, the Kitchener Foundation, an outlaw segment of the web named Cybernesia, and, most mysterious of all, the Instrumentality. Hardcore sf readers will recognize this imaginary polity from the stories of Cordwainer Smith, and Hendrix is deliberately invoking Smith’s creation, with its not-so-hidden guiding hand that grips humankind’s future. With tongue firmly planted in cheek, Hendrix tells us that one “Felix C. Forrest,” a spook in the 1940s, was a pivotal figure in the net of conspiracies. Of course, “Felix C. Forrest” was another of Paul Linebarger’s pen-names. With his levels upon levels of watchers, and numerous triple- and double-agents, Hendrix approaches the giddy heights of an Edward Whittemore novel. Add to this such Egan/Stross riffs as “virtualization bombs” and “cryptastrophes,” and you have a potent mix indeed.
Hendrix succeeds almost uniformly in blending spy-caper action with mind-boggling discourse quite believably and non-lumpishly. The one glaring flub along these lines is the theoretical lecture on topology which Ben Cho delivers while getting a lap dance in a strip club. But this improbable scene occupies only a minuscule slice of what is otherwise a bang-up hybrid of Kabbalah and terrorists, transcension and realpolitik.
The sequel to The Labyrinth Key, Spears of God, moves at such a relevant yet discrete tangent to its forerunner that no prior knowledge of Hendrix’s work is necessary to appreciate it, yet it forms an invaluable extension.
Latin America features ecological “islands” called “tepuis,” jungle realms so isolated from their neighbors that evolution proceeds in unique ways. In one such pocket biosphere lives a tribe called the Mawari. They are possessed of a strange meteorite that fell to Earth generations ago. This worshipped object carried biological agents that infected the Mawari and gave them strange mental powers. Now, their existence made known to outsiders, the tribe will become the focus of the First World’s greed. But what the Westerners don’t realize is that by breaking the isolation of the Mawari, they are infecting the whole world with the germs of a potential apocalypse (or salvation, if the two can even be distinguished).
Central to the fate of the Mawari are scientists Michael Miskulin and Susan Yamada, on an expedition to the region, backed by the finances of Miskulin’s rich uncle, Paul Larkin. They find all the adults Mawaris slaughtered, and only four children left in hiding. The scientists bring the orphan children to America and the refuge of Larkin’s home.
It eventuates that the slaughter was engineered by one General Retticker, in charge of a military project to create the perfect soldier. He wants to reverse-engineer the mental powers of the Mawari for his own uses, and has his own pet scientist, Darla Pittman. Ignorant of the genocide necessary to secure her a certain meteorite sample, Darla goes to work eagerly. Retticker’s strings are being pulled in turn by a weird cabal: Doctor Vang, leader of a conspiracy to boost mankind onto a new evolutionary plateau, and his associates, evangelist George Otis and adventurer Victor Fremdkunst. This cabal plans to trigger the end times by stoking war in the Middle East. The last major player is Jim Brescoll, head of the NSA, with his own designs on the Mawari survivors. But the wild card is that the four Mawari children—Alii, Aubrey, Ebu, and Ka-dalun—have plugged into the global infosphere and are about to start pulling cosmic strings of their own.
Rudy Rucker speaks often of science-fictional “power chords,” those fantastical tropes so seminal that they keep cropping up in the genre. As Howard Hendrix explicitly acknowledges, the notion of stony visitors from space and their unseen or enigmatic cargoes is one such. Meteors and meteorites present a rich topic that can never go stale, so long as humanity remains ignorant of what exists beyond our atmosphere. Hendrix masterfully incorporates into one vast tapestry perhaps every myth, historical incident, scientific fact and way-out speculation about meteorites. It’s doubtful that a better or more all-encompassing novel on this power chord could be written, barring new discoveries.
Hendrix has always been known for blending rather New Age-ish mystical themes with his hardcore scientific speculations, and this book is no exception. The actual textbook information about celestial stones and the more far-out yet informed speculations about the biological agents they might carry are married to a kind of “indigo children” myth about the next level of human development. It’s generally a happy marriage, and Hendrix succeeds in convincing us that human evolution could very well have been directed all along by these “spears of god.” Perhaps Hendrix is, on a final level, paying subtle homage to Philip Jose Farmer and his “Wold Newton” mythos!
75
Ian McDonald
River of Gods (2004)
IT’S FREQUENTLY complained that nearly all science fiction characters have been white, male and middle-class, even if some of them are superficially green, sexless or galactic emperors. Star Trek was applauded for allowing a few black and women actors to serve on the Enterprise, but their roles were restricted essentially to bit parts. When more recent mass media sf introduced black American actors, they often carried their stamp of Otherness with them. Teal’c in Stargate SG-1 was an impressive black man, but alien, as was the Klingon Worf in Star Trek: The Next Generation. More disturbingly, the lustful, comically sordid, money-grubbing Ferengi in later Star Trek all too obviously echo the vile caricatures of Jews published by Nazi newspapers like Der Sturmer.
Doubtless none of this was deliberate, but it certainly reflected anxieties and prejudices among many readers and viewers. How refreshing, then, to find in River of Gods and the short stories that followed it, collected in Cyberabad Days, an intensely felt, overwhelmingly detailed portrait of India in the middle of the 21st century, in which most of the cast are Hindu or Muslim in a landscape at once instantly recognizable yet radically unfamiliar to most of us in the West. (A similar shift, as we’ll see, underpins Paolo Bacigalupi’s multi-award winning The Windup Girl—Entry 96—set in a future Thailand.)
That these compulsive, densely imagined works came from an Irish white man is surprising and impressive. McDonald had never set foot in India, but his detailed research and eidetic memory allowed him to create a persuasive bone-deep experience for Anglo-American readers. River of Gods deservedly won a year’s best award from the British Science Fiction Association, and was shortlisted for the Hugo and the Arthur C. Clarke awards. Several years later, even more awards and notices attended his novel Brasyl, set with equal conviction in equally unfamiliar South American landscapes of the 18th and 21st centuries. McDonald’s special genius is the evocation of post-colonial landscapes, reflecting his own childhood during the euphemistically-named and terror-drenched Troubles of Northern Ireland.
River of Gods is large in every sense: 600 pages of tightly-written, often almost hallucinatory prose that shifts its tone from character to character, setting to setting, each change in register perfectly fitted to the moment, and often to the consciousness driving forward in that moment. It is not comfortable, and requires attention, which it amply rewards.
While the British were ousted from India in 1930, August 15, 1947 was the official Independence Day. So 2047 is the centenary of India’s freedom from colonial rule, but a partitioned landscape of squabbling sub-na
tions seethes under a rainless Greenhouse sky, awaiting the deferred monsoon:
The few seconds of heat between airport and air-conditioned car stun Vishram. He’s been too long in a cold climate. And he had forgotten the scent, like ashes of roses. The car pulls into the wall of color and sound. Vishram feels the heat, the warmth of the bodies, the greasy hydrocarbon soot against the glass. The people. The never failing river of faces. The bodies. Vishram discovers a new emotion. It has the blue remembered familiarity of home-sickness but is expressed through the terrible mundane squalor of the people that throng beneath these boulevards. Homenausea. Nostalgic horror.
Vishram Ray, a would-be standup comic in Glasgow, now returning to the ancient city of Varanasi (Benares, Kashi, on the holy Ganges) in the sub-state of Baharat, is youngest son of a wealthy power corporation owner who is experimenting with a zero point energy machine that opens into other universes. This project, like many of the most complex tasks in India, is controlled by artificial minds, aeais, that under the US Hamilton Acts must never exceed a certain sub-Turing limit.
Inevitably, self-organizing Generation Three AI programs 20,000 times smarter than us do just that, and are pursued and “excommunicated” with extreme prejudice by the Krishna Cops of the Ministry. Mr. Nandha is one of these functionaries, dedicated to his role, neglecting his beautiful young soapi-addicted wife in this nation where sex-selection has allowed four boys to be born for every girl. The most compulsive soapi is Town&Country, a sort of VR Dallas acted by faux AI thespians who know they are programs but assert their own unique individuality.
Science Fiction: The 101 Best Novels 1985-2010 Page 26
