Science Fiction: The 101 Best Novels 1985-2010

by Damien Broderick

  It is typical of Stross’s full-on method that he declines to define “timing channel attack,” which is a sneaky method of undermining encryption by observing how long it takes to complete various aspects of the coding or decoding process. That doesn’t matter, nor should there be any problem in the book’s inundation of references from a dozen or a hundred different disciplines, not least Internet lore, mined by his jackdaw and inventive mind. This is how high bandwidth science fiction works. If some item baffles you, rush on and rejoice in the confusion. Or, if you are obsessive, Google it.

  Stross’s text points in both those directions simultaneously. As the decades pass, as the rate of change accelerates, his characters become Googlized. And even with their inbuilt channels of information and communication, they are lost like us in the hydrant gush of available knowledge. All around them, intellectual tools are mutating into predatory lifeforms. Feral tax auditing software roams the solar system, entire economic systems convulse in ecological firestorms of contest. And then there are the aliens... which, of course, are just as likely to be autonomous spam attacks as anything we would recognize as people.

  Accelerando is a Fantasia-bright cavalcade of borrowed and adapted landscapes—the Atomium globe from the 1950 World’s Fair, the deck of the Titanic emulated in a virtualization stack, a phony debased Islamic heaven—transplanted to Saturn’s icy atmosphere or a virtual reality world inside a soda can starwhisp or an alien router network. Does it work? Can it work? It is an impressive attempt upon the impossible. For all its Catherine-wheel sparkle and intellectual bravura, there is evidence that the impossible must remain always out of reach—but kudos to the brave writer who attempts it!

  82

  Robert Charles Wilson

  Spin (2005)

  FOR SOME YEARS, ambitious but quiet sf novels by American-Canadian Robert Charles Wilson have established him as one of the finest writers in the genre, his books at once as beautifully written and moving as many a mainstream work, yet impelled by well conceived sf speculations. Increasingly, these have taken a powerfully audacious cosmogonic turn, especially in his Aurora award-winning Darwinia, with its dizzying conceptual breakthroughs, The Chronoliths (Campbell Memorial Award in 2002), and Spin (a finalist for the Campbell Award, and Hugo winner in 2006) and its sequels Axis (2007) and Vortex (2011).

  As always with truly fine sf, we tussle with a disconnect between the small intimate scale of human lives, motives, joys and agonies, and the immensity of cosmos and deep time. Perhaps the wisest technical solution for an sf writer is to display the latter’s grandeur and sublimity through the confusions and evasions of ordinary people faced with shocking insight and life changes.

  A year or two from now, the sky goes utterly black. A dark shell has enclosed the entire globe, blotting out stars, Moon, infalling meteorites and luckless astronauts in orbit. Satellites fall from the sky in shreds. Yet the Sun also rises in its accustomed celestial clockwork. Or does it? The sunspots are gone. This solar disk, or rather its emulation, radiates like a dream of pre-Galilean Plato. Yet the tides sway in the lost Moon’s embrace. Someone up there likes us enough to keep the planet’s ecology ticking over. For what reason? Who are these Hypotheticals? The first glimmerings are not gained for several years. The gateway in the sky is permeable, it turns out, but the universe beyond is running faster than our daily round. A hundred million times faster. Or rather, the world’s time has slowed, and the shield protects life from the storm of blue-shifted radiation outside.

  It is as if the entire world were trapped on orbit at the event horizon of a black hole, appalling gravity braking the planet’s time in a demonic demonstration of relativity theory. But this terrifying anomaly is the tool of a science beyond anything we know. The media start calling it the Spin; everything customary, it seems, is spinning out of control. Beyond its opaque shroud, the entire universe spins like a crazy playground carousel. Cosmic time sleets through its hourglass. Within decades, by shroud time, the Sun is doomed to boom into red giant expansion, presumably obliterating the world. The galaxy itself will age and wane even as children like youthful Tyler, Jason and Diane (we meet them first in budding adolescence, as the stars go into hiding) grow up, fall in and out of love and power. A human lifespan is matched finally to the aging of the cosmos, or our corner of it.

  It is a conceit that echoes Greg Egan’s first sf novel Quarantine (1992), but while Egan’s was a dazzling noir exercise in quantum prestidigitation, Wilson’s moves with a lovely melancholy through three decades of terror, accommodation, power ructions, Faustian ambition (Mars is seeded with life, which flourishes as people on Earth watch), dreadful insight, contained apotheosis. And all of this history is wrought small—or rather, at a meaningful, intuitive human scale—in the reflecting life of a handful of people, most of whom are neither the rulers of the world nor sf’s frequent secret mutants destined to rule the sevagram (although Jason verges on both conditions).

  There is a sort of Evelyn Waugh or Anthony Powell elegiac quality suffusing Spin, and more than a touch of F. Scott Fitzgerald’s Gatsby, replacing a more headlong melodramatic genre brutality. Tyler Dupree, a physician of modest gifts, writes much of this book in a graphomanic surge, driven by a healing virus that is making him more than human, in, predictably, a modest way. His voice is placid, resigned, displaced from center yet with a deepening self-assurance. He opens with words borrowed from his brilliant friend, the Odd Johnish Jason Lawton: “Everybody falls, and we all land somewhere.” This resembles Maugham or the Waugh of Brideshead Revisited. Indeed, during his harrowing, Tyler finds a batch of “swayback Somerset Maugham novels more tempting” than a biography of his famous friend (with its measly five references to himself in the index).

  “We’re as ephemeral as raindrops,” Jason tells him, in a posthumous letter. When stoical, good-hearted, perhaps faintly Aspergerish Tyler falls, he picks himself up and trudges on to the end of the world, driven perhaps by his dogged, doggish, heartbreaking devotion to Jason’s gifted sister Diane. She traps herself in despairing commitment to just the sort of mad fundamentalist dogma people fall into when the world seems to fail their heartfelt longings.

  Time is the hero of this novel; the opening chapter is headed “4 X 109 A.D.,” four billion years hence—as far into the future, very nearly, as we are now from the accretion of our planet. How Tyler fetches up there with Diane, racked as he is with an alien disease in a drastically changed social order, comprises the curve of the tale, like an arch across the heavens, which alternates between this deep future where the sky is clear again, and the back story beginning in the second chapter titled, suitably, “The Big House.”

  Tyler’s mother is house-keeper to wealthy Carol and E.D. Lawton. E.D. is a ruthlessly Campbellian competent man whose aerostat company forges vastly profitable global communications links once GPS and commsats have been smashed by the Spin. Tyler’s late father Marcus was once E.D.’s partner, but now the orphaned boy watches the world of his lost heritage from across the lawns to the Big House. Just so, of course, humankind watches the cosmos, small fry at the edge of an expanse crowded with godlike Hypotheticals who gradually come into some sort of numinous focus as the entwined narrative threads strive toward maturation and completion.

  Tyler, perhaps inevitably for this kind of role, seems a bit of a sap much of the time, tending his hopeless lifelong crush on Diane, duped (for the greatest good, naturally) by Lawton pere and fils alike, witness to great doings, and even, amanuensis and handy factor to some of those pushing the levers of world historical change, playing his obliterated part. At the end, he has earned hope, and perhaps finds it. Wilson writes like an autumnal, melancholy angel.

  83

  Liz Jensen

  My Dirty Little Book of Stolen Time (2006)

  JENSEN is not marketed as a genre author, nor reviewed in genre venues. And she doesn’t exactly rate big coverage from mainstream, establishment publications either—a result, arguably, of her slipstream nature
, and her consequent falling between two camps. These factors make it unlikely that genre readers will have a deep familiarity with her work. And that’s a shame, given her superb prose, witty fantastical conceits, narrative drive, and mature sophistication.

  Her five books prior to our selection here were all fantastical in nature, and set the stage for our ultimate candidate. Herewith, then, a brief course in Jensen 101.

  Jensen’s maiden voyage was Egg Dancing, and it possessed all the satirical verve and zing of a Kit Reed or George Saunders production. Bedraggled, hapless Moira Sugden is married to your typical mad gynecologist, Gregory, who is, unbeknownst to Moira, using her as an incubator to test his new treatment that will theoretically create a “perfect baby.”

  Her second book, Ark Baby, also centers around fertility and marriage, but is cast not as a contemporary melodrama but rather as a mixed steampunk/near future satire. One track concerns rogue veterinarian Bobby Sullivan. Sullivan lives in the then-future era of 2005, when all of the UK is suffering from an inexplicable sterility plague. (His humiliating specialty is ministering to pets which act as child surrogates.) Forced to relocate, for various reasons, to a rural peninsula called Thunder Spit, he finds his life intersecting with two strange women, the twins Blanche and Rose Ball. The heroic sexual efforts of this trio will eventually shatter the sterility plague. But the contemporary track takes a back seat to the wacky and resplendent Victorian half of the book. Here, we witness the strange birth and career of Tobias Phelps, offspring of the Gentleman Monkey and a contortionist female. Phelps will eventually find the love of his life in the form of the immense Violet Scrapie, despite Violet’s having had the misfortune once to cook up the carcass of Tobias’s father. Jensen sews up the two halves of her canvas expertly, melding past with present.

  With her third book, Jensen confirmed her delightful and irrepressible hummingbird habits, flitting to yet another mode. With The Paper Eater, Jensen creates one of the best dystopias of recent memory, easily comparable to the work of Max Barry and Rupert Thomson. The man of strange habits from the title is Harvey Kidd. The realtime frame tale finds Harvey on a floating prison ship, where chewing on scrap paper to produce papier-mâché has become his sanity-preserving habit. (His skin is grey from ingested inks!) As Harvey interacts with his cellmate, we eventually learn his life story. With echoes of Matt Ruff , Philip K. Dick, J. G. Ballard and William Gaddis, Jensen’s third book is a small neglected masterpiece.

  Jensen surprises yet again with her fourth book—because at first she seemingly reverts to the near-mainstream domesticity of Egg Dancing. But as we soon learn, she’s really taking us to a different territory altogether. War Crimes for the Home is the life story of Gloria Winstanley, an elderly Cockney lady with a life full of “secrets and lies,” to use the relevant title of Mike Leigh’s 1996 film. Like Moira’s mother in Egg Dancing, Gloria is an old lady confined to a not unpleasant but nonetheless stifling nursing home. Her son Hank and daughter-in-law Karen make frequent visits but are unable to disturb Gloria’s façade, alternately dreamy and abstracted or irritable and spiteful. Gloria claims she has Alzheimer’s, but the reality is vastly more complicated. Gloria’s memory, we eventually learn, was tampered with hypnotically during World War II. In parallel tracks (as with Ark Baby), we witness the seminal events of the War that damaged Gloria’s psyche, as we also witness the events in the present that just may heal her, albeit with a certain measure of pain.

  The reign of warped souls continued in her fifth book. The Ninth Life of Louis Drax ventures firmly into Patrick McGrath or early Ian McEwan territory: New Gothic. The child character, a nine-year-old French boy, who tells his story in a truly eerie, psychotic yet wise-beyond-his-years voice, has survived a cascade of near-fatal childhood accidents. Like a cat with nine lives, he’s used up eight, he feels, and is now embarked on his ninth. And what a life it turns out to be. An accident during a family picnic sends Louis into a coma. He is placed at a longterm-care institution. Attendant upon her son is devoted mother Natalie Drax. Seemingly no more than a bereaved parent, Natalie hides dark secrets about her and Louis. From his coma Louis is able to witness events and influence people telepathically—Jensen’s delicious black icing on the cake of madness. This book is the closest you can come in print to a film by Pedro Almodovar.

  To counterbalance Drax’s grimness, Jensen turns in My Dirty Little Book of Stolen Time to more or less pure farce. What she delivers is, improbably, a timeslip romance, but not the debased and simple-minded bodice-ripping kind. It’s a mix of Tom Holt and Kage Baker, Harry Harrison and H. G. Wells, James Blaylock and Lemony Snicket.

  The year 1897 in Copenhagen finds our young heroine-narrator, Charlotte Schleswig, struggling to make a living as a whore. Burdened by the care of a gluttonous and slatternly mother—Charlotte insists that Fru Schleswig, the slovenly pig, cannot possibly be related to a beautiful princess such as herself—our working girl is always on the alert for a more lucrative scam. She believes she’s landed on easy street when she and her mother get a housecleaning job with Fru Krak, a rich and egotistical widow. While the elder Schleswig labors away sweeping up dust bunnies, Charlotte pilfers whatever’s not nailed down to pawn.

  Fru Krak’s husband, it turns out, mysteriously vanished seven years ago. His disappearance is connected with a locked room in the basement of the Krak manor. Charlotte’s curiosity is aroused, and she breaks in one night with her mother. They discover a curious contraption, and before you can say “Terry Gilliam’s Time Bandits,” they are accidentally transported to our era’s London. There they find Professor Krak, hale and hearty, living among a surreptitious refugee community of fellow time-traveling Danes.

  Charlotte is transfixed by the modern age, especially when she falls in love with a dashing young Scottish archaeologist, Fergus McCrombie. Soon she induces Professor Krak to sponsor a Christmas visit back to 1897, to introduce Fergus to her native era. Once back in “history,” everything goes wrong. Charlotte is separated from both Fergus and the Professor, and only her own ingenuity can restore the lovers.

  Jensen has immense fun with this setup. Her depiction of period Copenhagen is rich and sensorially deep. (Nor is this choice of nationality for Charlotte merely arbitrary. Jensen invokes, both overtly and covertly, the spirit of Hans Christian Andersen and his famous fairytales as a template for Charlotte’s life story.) Of course we also get the expected but still humorously contrived reactions of a visitor from the past to modern life, as well as some neat chrono-paradox mindblowers. The characters are all humanly endearing, with every high-minded, principled stand undercut by carnality or vice-ridden selfishness. And yet the whole narrative is full of warm good-heartedness. All of these virtues are couched in Jensen’s vibrant prose that goes down easy, yet is full of nuggets of observation and wit. “The Pastor…was a paunchy man in his middle to late years, with clattering false teeth that seemed to roam his mouth like a tribe of nomads in search of land on which to pitch camp.”

  Discovering the work of Liz Jensen is like stumbling on a time-machine in a basement: you have no idea of where it will take you, but you know it’ll be a hell of a ride.

  84

  Cormac McCarthy

  The Road (2006)

  LIKE ALL FICTION and much art, sf displays figures acting (or stymied) in a landscape. As noted in earlier entries, for most literary fiction its figures and landscape are familiar to the intended reader, and their portrayal is nuanced, shaded, closely examined to a degree possible only with the already well-known. By contrast, so-called genre fiction usually has different goals and means: characters are often gaudy, overlit, driven by wild passions, moving through extravagant landscapes sketched with comic strip boldness and exaggeration.

  Sf is especially remarkable for its emphasis on inventive settings, landscapes none of us has trodden outside dream or imagination. One extreme is the landscape of final desolation, of apocalypse and post-apocalypse—the world blighted by global nuclear war or genocidal pl
ague, or literally destroyed, the Sun gone nova, whole galaxies obliterated in immense spectacle. In Greg Bear’s The Forge of God (1987), chunks of neutronium and antineutronium are fired into the Earth’s core by aliens; the mutual annihilation tears the planet apart. Charles Pellegrino and George Zebrowski’s The Killing Star (1995) wrecks Earth with targeted relativistic bombs striking at 0.92 of light speed, and finally the Sun itself is destroyed as a few survivors flee into deep space.

  Cormac McCarthy’s Pulitzer-winning novel The Road is not rationalized in this fashion, and the post-catastrophe landscape through which his unnamed man and boy trudge, pushing their shopping cart from frigid mountains to fouled sea, is never explained. Most life other than human is dead: no trees, crops, grass, birds, fish. The sky is gray and cold, rain and snow and drifting ash blight the world, which rumbles with immense distant upheavals. Ten years earlier, the nameless man and his pregnant wife experienced the end of their world: “The clocks stopped at 1:17. A long shear of light and then a series of low concussions. He got up and went to the window… the power was already gone. A dull rose glow in the windowglass.”