Science Fiction: The 101 Best Novels 1985-2010

by Damien Broderick

  Her son Ralph is her weakness. She takes him west to the Guild’s seaside mansion Invercombe, not far from the Bristol seaport, close, as well, to Einfell, where changelings huddle, poor detritus smashed by the touch of aether. Alice herself is addicted to the stuff, using its corrupting power to retain an unearthly beauty. She learns to employ the aether-entangled telephone mirrors that link the nation like magical wormholes, providing access to a kind of cyberspace or psychic netherworld into which the spirit might be uploaded even as the body grows transparent as glass.

  Is this, then, an essay in steampunk, a version of Gibson’s and Sterling’s remarkable The Difference Engine? (Punchcard “reckoning engines” are here, too.) Not quite. At almost every point in his narrative arc, or beautifully wrought longueur-filled meander, MacLeod looks somewhere else. He is deliberately avoiding the vulgarly obvious, but the price is considerable.

  In place of more conventional huggermugger, he gives us a diorama of Great Men and Women from the 19th and turn of the 20th Century. It is tempting to identify Ralph with a nascent Darwin, intent on finding in the Canaries (here, the Fortunate Isles) his own Galapagos. Together with the shoregirl Marion Price, with whom he falls radiantly in love, Ralph develops the theory of Habitual Adaptation. Their bastard child, Klade, raised by uncanny changelings, is a sort of Caliban whose name, in our world, suggests a group of organisms with a single ancestor, as well as a new Adam made from clay. While there are aspects of natural selection in the hypothesis, the term suggests more than a little of Lamarck. What is clear is that Ralph’s vile mother is the very embodiment of Social Darwinism, acting out a brutalized and simplified version of Darwin: nature red in tooth and claw.

  MacLeod has a large future, and we’re lucky to have him here, on this side of Alice’s mirror.

  79

  David Marusek

  Counting Heads (2005)

  THE OPENING forty-plus pages of this ambitious and rambunctious debut novel were originally published separately under the title “We Were Out of Our Minds With Joy,” and serve as the launching platform from which the rest of the bold and ground-breaking story takes off.

  In that prelude, we are introduced to the world of the 2090s, and a strange milieu it is. Previously, a massive terrorist assault known as the Outrage has contaminated Earth’s entire biosphere with NASTIES, nanotech assailants, leaving people to huddle within protected cities. But this forced retreat has really amounted to less than a tiny speedbump in the advance of technology and a go-go culture. The human lifespan is now practically infinite—if you can afford the rejuves. Everyone possesses a “mentar” of varying capabilities, mentars being AI “paste-brains” that help humans navigate the world virtually and in “realbody.” Synthetic crops feed the world’s billions. Beamed power from satellites in orbit around the Sun offers endless energy. And humankind stands on the threshold of colonizing the stars in vast Oships.

  Our protagonists in this first section are Sam Harger and Eleanor Starke. Sam’s an artist, and Eleanor’s a businesswoman-cum-politician. They fall in love in bizarre 21st-century style and later are awarded a child in the baby lottery. Their life seems ideal. But then Eleanor’s political rivals strike at her through Sam. He is mistakenly branded a terrorist and stripped of his immortality and other health benefits by Homeland Command. His very cells are booby-trapped, turning him into a literally stinking pariah, one of the “seared.” Section one ends with him reluctantly leaving his wife and child, Ellen.

  Cut to forty years later. The world has grown even stranger. Legions of clones—identified generically by the first names of their original donors, such as jerrys, evangelines, russes and jeromes—do society’s scutwork, while the “affs” lord it over them. In the middle are the average joes and janes who must struggle to pay for their rejuves, while eating the plainest fare from their NanoJiffys. The Outrage has just been declared officially over, and the city of Chicago—where our story occurs—is ready to lower its shields.

  Eleanor and Ellen Starke are still alive and in power. Until they are both assassinated. Eleanor dies permanently, but Ellen’s head is cryostatically preserved. Much of the plot revolves around attempts to get her reborn in the face of continued enemy action. But we also learn what happened to Sam Harger: he’s now known as Samson Kodiak, member of an extended “charter” family. We follow him through his dying days, as well as observing the twisty destinies of: young Bogdan Kodiak—a 29-year-old permanently stuck in adolescence; Fred and Mary, two clones; and Eleanor’s political ally, the ineffectual Merrill Meewee. Additionally, mentars such as Wee Hunk, Cabinet, Hubert, Concierge and Arrow play their parts, as one era closes and a new one opens.

  This novel is a trippy, gleeful tour through a “milling menagerie of transhumanity,” and anyone who revels in the heady (sorry for the pun), gonzo, densely recomplicated sf of John Wright (Entry 71), Charles Stross (Entry 81), Rudy Rucker (Entry 91), Cory Doctorow (Entry 94) or Karl Schroeder (Entry 66) will find this novel by Marusek to be a sterling addition to their ranks. Marusek is unstintingly generous in his speculations, which are all entertainingly wild yet convincingly realistic. He builds characters who are far from the clichés of the field. (No brave female spaceship pilots, cowboy data-hackers, mirrorshaded ninjas, or other faded types.) And he balances his plot perfectly between mega-scale and micro-scale events.

  With regard to his speculations, Marusek obviously focuses much of his intellectual weight on the repercussions of biological advancements. His future is one where bodies can be regenerated from nothing more than a preserved head and neck, leading to the truly Boschian image of a tiny embryonic form dependent from the terminus of an adult spinal cord. But of course he doesn’t ignore other developments in robotics and nanotech, integrating these areas beautifully. Likewise, he examines how culture and society remake themselves to accommodate new technologies. His portrait of the weird clone society is startling and novel. The big clone party—a magnificent literary set piece—that sprawls across the middle of the book will knock your socks off.

  Marusek’s characters grab you because they are, underneath their transhumanity, so ordinary and pitiable. The up-and-down married relationship between clones Fred and Mary and how their characters strive to grow is truly affecting. Additionally, Marusek cranks up that Philip K. Dick vibe of mankind struggling to maintain the borders between what’s real and what’s artificial, human and android. When Samson has to argue with his life-support chair, for instance, one hears echoes of Dick, as we do in the struggle of the russ named Fred to assert his individuality.

  Perhaps the major weapon in Marusek’s arsenal is his zesty language—reflecting a basically optimistic view of his future—and copious dead-on neologisms. These tools make the story shimmer and glow, hypnotizing the reader into true belief in the substantiality of his marvelous, alternately hilarious and melancholy new world.

  John Campbell’s famous instruction to his writers was to deliver a story that read like the contemporary fiction of the year it was set in. And that’s exactly what Marusek has accomplished here.

  80

  Geoff Ryman

  Air (Or, Have Not Have) (2005)

  GEOFF RYMAN is a notably adventurous writer straddling the boundaries of science fiction, fantasy, slipstream, experimental writing, queer-inflected fiction and, recently, “Mundane” sf. His work is poignant, dense with detail, requiring a concentrated reading—yet it has a luminous clarity and humanity that’s brought him awards and acclaim in Britain (his adopted base), the USA, and Canada (his birthplace).

  The Child Garden (winner of the 1990 Arthur C. Clarke and Campbell Memorial awards), Ryman’s superb novel of genetic engineering, came close to being the long-awaited work successfully bonding the force and aspirations of both literature and sf. Air, winner of the Clarke, the Tiptree, and the British Science Fiction Association awards, belongs to the same shortlist of candidates.

  This grittily realist, soaringly fantastical story of Mrs. Mae Chung, a
robust middle-aged woman and mother of grown children in the imaginary nation of Karzistan, bordering China and Kazakhstan, inverts almost every aspect of The Child Garden. It moves in a pavane amid the balanced forces of the I Ching and other divinatory manifestations of the four ancient elements: air, fire, water and earth. Kizuldah, the Happy Province of rural peasants, is saturated in its own past, even as the flood of a belated today and then an instantaneous tomorrow crams memory into ruinous mud while its insistent presence invades poor Mae’s mind like a plague of memetic computer viruses.

  Air is the next technology after the Internet, 2020’s mercantile version of what sf has long postulated—access to a group or gestalt mind. It is Google in the head, without need of chips, display, data gloves or keyboard, Theodore Sturgeon’s and Joe Haldeman’s gestalt connectivity for the age of quantum superspace and petaflop computation. It is the all-at-once of M-Theory’s timeless unity of space and change, accessed via a Format burned into the brain that—in trial runs in Karzistan, Tokyo and Singapore—uses an under-construction UN software template.

  Unluckily, the Format test suggests that it is liable to disrupt and even madden unprepared brains exposed even briefly to Air’s 11-dimensional ubiquity. The rival, slower Gates Format struggles for preferment, seizing eagerly on the UN test’s collateral damage. From the big centers of power among the Western Haves, these global contests cascade in surprising ways over the ill-equipped but richly complex social arrangements of the Have Nots—who, naturally enough, bitterly resent being labeled as such by their patronizing benefactors.

  Local fashion-advice specialist (and dirt-grubbing farmer) Mrs. Chung is perhaps the most extreme victim of these side-effects. In the moment of formatting, an elderly, blind, sweet-natured neighbor dies in her arms, so their minds become entangled. With typical comic bravura, Ryman explains that this is because they share an email address in the timeless realm of Air. Mae Chung’s personality is infused with the dead Mrs. Tung’s yearnings and her now forever-unchangeable history, like one infested by a dybbuk or demon.

  A secondary effect of her unique immersion in Air is enhanced creativity. Mae gains access to the world’s plenty, learning to use the old-fashioned Web via a classy digital TV to contact markets for her fashion business, which soon goes global. This clever, illiterate woman’s faltering but growing competence is delightful to watch. Her naivety allows her to promote her wares with flyers teaching a women’s circle of fellow villagers

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  for this is the last corner of the world not yet awash in spam. Ryman has stressed that the setting is wholly invented, although it owes something to his experience of Turkey. The village of sinewy Karz peasants and tolerated, beautiful but delicate Eloi is richly evoked, utterly believable.

  Because Air is authentic literature, Mae’s emotional involvements, her love affairs, her friendships and their subtle or brutal ebbs and flows, form the tense focus of the narrative. Still, to a degree no mundane novel could permit, the fanciful sf element of Air plays an equally compelling and impelling role. Echoing the tidal disruption that Air’s full implementation threatens, the very snows of the high places cupping the village hang at the edge of melting and flood. It is a threat only Mae and her memorious but increasingly spiteful ghost can detect. Mae knuckles down in face of this threat, learns meteorological arcana and bullies her way to the expensive software needed to interpret the local weather data she and her charge laboriously gather. As water rushes finally across earth, the fire of her unstoppable will snatches many of her mocking fellows to a redemptive safety that only an Air-powered bodhisattva could have managed.

  Against this hard-headed peasant empiricism, Mae’s immersion in Air reveals reality’s mutability under desire. She rips asunder a wire fence by a sort of quantum magic: “The fence was mere fiction. So she tore it.” By the same means, an absurd, even grotesque, miracle brings Mae a pregnancy like nothing seen since the age of myth and legend. Mae is a sort of paradoxical Virgin Mother figure, and her joyous son, scalded and blind like Mrs. Tung but awash in Air’s music and light, is a sort of Redeemed New Human/Buddha/Christ, conceived in a loving, sexual feast. Yet the novel itself rejects interpretation:

  “Everything has always been and has always happened at once. Which means nothing causes anything else. Which means stories only happen in this poor balloon-world of ours. Stories have no meaning. Nothing can be interpreted. Everything just is, without meaning.... It is all just one big smiling Now.”

  The wondrous art wrought in Ryman’s Air shows some of its meaning plainly, calling forth grins, astonishment and tears. More of its meaning is tucked away inside, like the hidden curled-up dimensions of M-Theory’s spacetime, and (resembling The Child Garden in its closure) like the final pages of the third book of Dante’s Divine Comedy, beyond words or imagining high and low.

  81

  Charles Stross

  Accelerando (2005)

  LIKE GREG EGAN a decade earlier, Charles Stross seemed to come from nowhere and leap immediately to the top rank of science fiction and fantasy writers. This is an illusion in both cases (each had published early short fiction), but especially so for Stross, who for years pounded on many dozing publishers’ doors with several exciting book manuscripts before Festival of Fools was eventually bought by Ace, released as Singularity Sky, and went straight on to the Hugo ballot for best novel of the year. As did his audacious post-Singularity novelette “Nightfall” (poking its tongue out at Asimov’s most famous title). Neither won, but it was a remarkable debut.

  Stross’s work has proved enormously popular, and justly so. With Accelerando, the quasi-novel compilation of his sequence of nine astonishing stories from Asimov’s, begun in 2001 with “Lobsters,” Charles Stross was sealed as the new Poet Laureate of the Vingean technological singularity. “Elector,” the penultimate chapter, was on the 2005 Hugo shortlist for best novella, which made a total of four Hugo nominations, one Nebula nomination, two Sturgeons, one BSFA, and a Seiun shortlisting before Accelerando was published. It won the 2006 Locus award for the year’s best novel. By the middle of the first decade of this century, Charles Stross was no longer just the sf writer to watch—he had well and truly arrived. In 2009, he became the first author to have a novel on the Hugo shortlist in six consecutive years, and in 2010 both a novella and a novelette on the ballot.

  The Accelerando project’s five years of development (it is tempting to apply this sort of corporate language to Stross’s dense techno-speak art-artifact) yielded an early twenty-first-century counterpart to John Brunner’s compressed future shock 1969 Hugo-winner, Stand on Zanzibar, complete with rich idiomatic sidebars or side loads of Baedeker guidance to the non-native.

  The rogue corporation rears up slightly and bunches into a fatter lump; its skin blushes red in patches. “Must think about this. Is your mandatory accounting time-cycle fixed or variable term? Are self-owned corporate entities able to enter contracts?”

  That’s funny, and fun, as well as knowing. Some readers complain of infodumping of the most blatant kind, yet that device seems unavoidable when a torrential cascade of novelty is the very topic of a work of art. Approached with an appreciative generosity of response, these dollops of data are tight, compressed, inventive, brilliantly illuminated gems, or perhaps genomes (or memomes) that will unfold, in a prepared mind, into wondrous ecologies of image and idea. The changes implied by headlong acceleration are by definition too immense, too subtle, to be portrayed or perhaps even imagined. Stross has the audacity and, luckily for us, the imagination to come close to pulling it off.

  Manfred Macx is a venture altruist (“Manfred’s on the road again, making strangers rich”)—Stross is not afraid to have us smile even as he jolts our preconceptions—a decade or so hence, encrusted with computer wearables and the latest wifi connectivity, affianced until recently to Pamela, a dominatrix headhunter for the IRS who tries to persuade global megacorps to cough up the tax they owe. Their venom
ous bond is manipulated sardonically by their robot cat, Aineko, which is being hacked and upgraded on the sly by Pamela. This nicely observed android animal—“It sits on the hand woven rug in the middle of the hardwood floor with one hind leg sticking out at an odd angle, as if it’s forgotten about it”—might be the secret narrator of the novel. Its augmentation and expansion toward the condition of a low-level demiurge mirrors the transitions of humankind and our posthuman Vile Offspring.

  In a bondage scene of hilarious erotic vividness, Pamela gets herself pregnant with their daughter Amber, who will carry much of the long arc of the story to the Singularity and beyond, as human minds export themselves increasingly outside the skull into machine substrate exocortices. In turn, Amber’s son Sirhan (well, son of one of her many instantiations) takes the generational saga to the destructive Childhood’s End-style transcension of the solar system into a Matrioshka Brain (energy-hungry Dyson shells of computronium hosting untold trillions of superminds), the return from death of an extremely augmented Manfred, and a blind plunge beyond the provincial Milky Way to a realm where a galactic superintelligence seems to be mounting a “timing channel attack on the virtual machine that’s running the universe, perhaps, or an embedded simulation of an entirely different universe.”