Science Fiction: The 101 Best Novels 1985-2010

by Damien Broderick

  The Expansion—our current era—is over, killed by the exhaustion of cheap energy sources. Now humanity lives in the Contraction. Untenable skyscrapers are left to rot. Genetically engineered megodonts turn millwheels that store animal energy in spring batteries. And agronomists struggle with every tool in their biopunk kits to provide enough calories for the globe’s suffering population.

  It’s this last domain that occupies centerstage in The Windup Girl. Anderson Lake is a farang spy resident in Thailand as a factory owner, really seeking to exploit the country’s hidden and acknowledged biological resources. But he has the misfortune to fall for Emiko, the Windup Girl. A slave and member of the underclass of artificial humans, Emiko wants nothing more than her freedom. But she harbors secret potentials that will alter all the personal and social equations on which Lake only imagines he has a firm grasp, leading, at least in Thailand, to something of a Ballardian entropic interlude in the world’s recalibration.

  Bacigalupi’s evocation of his future Thailand is dense and sensorily rich. The sweat and stink and perfumes, the heat and humidity, the colors and sounds accrete into a palpable texture. The technological accommodations and cultural shifts of the Contraction are complexly arrayed. (Citizens of this future find that the rare, clunky, coal-fired automobile moves appallingly fast.) This is world-building, not bereft of monitory impulses either, of the finest caliber.

  But it’s the dynamic and unpredictable interactions among the cast that are the most entrancing aspect. In his corrupt, mercenary way, Anderson Lake is a soulful artist of the world’s flora. His resonance with outsider Emiko is telling. Emiko’s status is a fresh riff on the perennial “underpeople” trope, best exemplified by Cordwainer Smith’s Instrumentality mythos and Richard Calder’s Dead Girls sequence (Entry 26), which also revels in a Southeast Asian milieu. Captain Jaidee represents the best of officialdom. But a venal villain almost steals the show: Hock Seng, Lake’s toadying factory manager, who out-Heeps Uriah.

  The whole mix evokes the louche tropical ambiance of a Graham Greene or Somerset Maugham tale, and calls for a director of Howard Hawks’s stature to render The Windup Girl as another To Have and Have Not. Bogart as Lake, Bacall as Emiko and Brennan as Hock Seng? When CGI avatars are perfected, why not?

  In a recent review of the anthology Welcome to the Greenhouse (an apt alternative title for The Windup Girl), Bacigalupi opined that science fiction

  seems to affirm that children will still be children and that even in a devastated future, thrilling antics await. We want that affirmation. We are desperate and grateful for it. And our storytelling methods respond to that basic human hunger. Fiction, by its nature, is optimistic. Even the most apocalyptic of… scenarios… contain people. Fiction is an artificial construct in itself, in that it presumes that there is a story to tell, with its protagonists and antagonists and arc of discovery, or learning, or change. My biggest fear is… that fiction itself is extinct. That in the future there will simply be no tale to tell.

  So long as writers such as Paolo Bacigalupi fight the good fight on the printed page, that ultimate threat of narratological extinction will be staved off a little longer, although, as Bacigalupi knows and shows, the battle will not be painless or without losses.

  97

  Nancy Kress

  Steal Across the Sky(2009)

  LIKE CHERIE PRIEST (Entry 98), Nancy Kress reversed the typical late-twentieth, early-twenty-first-century career arc of many a genre writer, as exemplified by a figure such as George R. R. Martin, whose sf beginnings have been swamped in his later Tolkienesque success. She moved from the relatively freeform paradigm of fantastika to the more rigorous and structured realm of science fiction, and proved herself a fan favorite and peer-acknowledged master, having racked up three Hugo awards and four Nebula trophies for her innovatively speculative fiction. Anyone taking notice of her 1981 debut fantasy novel, Prince of the Morning Bells, would have had no inkling of this lurking swerve in her career.

  With Steal Across the Sky, Kress manages to blend her scientific concerns with issues of spirituality, getting the best of both worlds (and mirror worlds are an explicit theme here) into her book.

  Of all the hot-button topics that sf can address, religion surely has to be Number One. Consider Robert Heinlein’s Stranger in a Strange Land, Lester del Rey’s “For I Am a Jealous People,” James Blish’s A Case of Conscience, and Mary Doria Russell’s The Sparrow (Entry 46) as examples of provocative thought experiments about God and the afterlife. Kress’s contribution certainly merits inclusion in that honor roll of theologically explosive novels.

  Kress starts with a simple yet deep premise and then unfurls it to a wide, enigmatic banner. An alien race calling itself the Atoners arrives at Earth in the year 2020. (In a clever conceit, First Contact is achieved through a website!) They ask for volunteers to visit a variety of planets on which reside our human cousins, “kidnapped” and relocated by the Atoners themselves 10,000 years ago. The Terran volunteers have one mission: to witness—actually, to ferret out sans alien help—some specific yet undisclosed wrongfulness inflicted millennia ago upon the human race. When this knowledge is finally gained, it proves to be sheer dynamite. We won’t give away the surprise, except to say that the revelation regards the human soul, and will have immense impact back on Earth. “It was a bomb the Atoners were sending back with these twenty-one young people, a bomb that would hit all the continents at once, igniting controversies hot enough to scorch them all.”

  So much for Part One of the book, which resembles a kind of The Man Who Fell to Earth in reverse, given the plight of the human observers adrift on two alien planets, Kular A and Kular B. Our main emotional and rational locus in this investigation, splendidly limned, is Cam O’Kane, an American woman full of youthful impatience, survivalist vigor and lateral insights into the culture of Kular A. In communication with her counterpart on Kular B, Lucca Maduro, she manages to uncover the ancient alien misdeed, which involves tampering with our species’ genetic heritage.

  Part Two of Steal Across the Sky documents the chaotic, consensus-reality-shattering effects this discovery has on human civilization—and on the private lives of the Witnesses who returned. Kress employs a clever “multimedia” approach, shifting among many points of view and offering us fake “documents,” to create a dazzling patchwork impression of global upheaval.

  Kress achieves a hybrid glory in her bipartite novel. The first half certainly harks back to the anthropologically inclined novels of Michael Bishop (A Funeral for the Eyes of Fire) and Ursula K. Le Guin (The Dispossessed, especially for its similar mirror world motif), offering us “thick” immersive descriptions of a puzzle culture. That the puzzle culture is an underlying human one, by genetic evidence, only adds to the sense of estrangement. (This trick is often employed by another master, Jack Vance; see Entry 48.) Kress’s book also resonates with Gardner Dozois’s Strangers, a grim catalogue of cultural misunderstandings, culminating in a shocking truth.

  The second half of the novel reads like one of those classic Damon Knight vehicles, such as “I See You” or A for Anything, in which a radical bit of technology (an omniscient viewing device or matter-duplicator, respectively, in Knight’s work) rips the foundation stones out from under all human existence. That Kress chooses to show the power inherent in a simple meme (the revelation of what humanity has lost by alien tampering) instead of a gadget is indicative of the way our perspective and attitudes have changed since Knight’s day, as the value of information has become paramount over material objects.

  In the end, the ultimate depths of the revelation are left unplumbed, and Kress refuses to write the explicit future of humanity. But the almost Lovecraftian lesson remains clear: contact with the larger universe is bound to expose us to concepts our puny human brains are almost unable to process.

  98

  Cherie Priest

  Boneshaker (2009)

  HAS STEAMPUNK jumped Captain Nemo’s clockwork shark yet, at
the end of this first quarter century of its prominence?

  The genre—succinctly described as a mix of archaic tech (either real or fanciful), the supernatural, and postmodern metafictional tricksterism, set in the consensus historical past or alternative timelines—was first christened in 1987, a lifetime ago as cultural and literary fads are measured, in a letter to Locus magazine from the writer K. W. Jeter. Of course, the actual roots of the form extend back even further, perhaps as early as 1965, when a certain television show named The Wild, Wild West debuted.

  Certainly, literary styles and tropes, once invented, can be exceedingly long-lived. The Gothic is still with us today, and flourishing, despite being a couple of centuries old. So long as a type of fiction offers unexplored narrative possibilities, it will continue to be employed by those writers who find it congenial.

  But steampunk has exfoliated beyond the merely literary, into the daily lives of its fans. Like Civil War re-enactors or medievalist members of the Society for Creative Anachronism, steampunks now include those for whom the novels and stories have been superseded by cosplay, crafting, music, partying, artwork, manga, anime, feature films and the creation of props or working hardware. For every reader and writer of steampunk fiction, there are probably hundreds or thousands of other activists who gleefully embrace some non-written manifestation of the steampunk ethos.

  Generally speaking, by the time a subculture such as steampunk secures the attention of major media, resulting in extensive coverage of the craze, that phenomenon is already on the way out. But despite numerous and growing features about steampunk in the global press, such does not seem to be the case this time. The juggernaut that is steampunk, like Dr. Loveless’s giant mechanical spider in the 1999 film version of The Wild, Wild West, seems capable of crushing all naysayers.

  Yet what of the literature itself—now transformed into something of an appendage—that spawned the movement? Has it exhausted all the radium bullets in its Gatling gun, or is fresh work still capable of surprising the reader? Contemplating Cherie Priest’s bright-faced contributions, one can hold out hope for continuing literary quality and novelty within the sub-genre.

  Priest’s career arc is contrary to that of many authors, writers who began in the smaller arena of sf and then moved to the bigger and better-paying fantasy venues. She commenced with a fantasy trilogy consisting of Four and Twenty Blackbirds, Wings to the Kingdom, and Not Flesh Nor Feather, before venturing into science fiction of the archaic sort. But she immediately displayed a ready grasp of the tropes. Funky brass and leather and thick-lensed goggles are a trademark signifier of steampunk. Frequently, though, beyond a certain fashionableness their utility is negligible. So when Cherie Priest goes to the trouble in her novel Boneshaker to provide a clever rationale for the existence and prevalence of such eye-gear, you know you’re in for a meticulously conceived and executed ride, featuring an adolescent protagonist whose actions are circumscribed within a tiny venue, in a book that nonetheless sports a fully adult texture and range.

  Seattle, 1863: the giant tunneling machine of mad inventor Levi Blue manages to destroy a sizable portion of the city and unleash a subterranean gas—the Blight—which zombifies all who inhale it. (The gas is made visible through those special goggles.) The citizens respond by walling off the infected district and leaving those trapped inside to die—or worse. Sixteen years later, Blue’s ostracized widow, Briar, lives in the ghetto just outside the wall with her teenaged son Zeke. Intent on clearing his father’s name, Zeke takes off one day across the wall, and Briar has no recourse but to follow.

  Priest’s focus on a steampunk wasteland is playfully and productively anomalous. Generally, the genre likes to focus on intact and functioning societies, whether dystopian or mundanely civil. Her depiction of the interzone as an outlaw realm of freedom, however dangerous, evokes the punk dream of life outside establishment strictures—a dream too often actually neglected in the genre that borrows half its name from that music. The horror tropes are another entertaining divergence from standard steampunk templates.

  Likewise, the parallel domestic quests of mother and son (Priest divides the action in half between Zeke and Briar) is a freshening of both motivation and character from the rote adventurers the reader often encounters in this type of tale.

  Priest’s small, carefully constrained sphere of action (some widening dialogue pertains to the Civil War still raging back East, long after our version had ended) does, however, feel claustrophobic and slightly unambitious at times. But within that limited domain, she manages to impart a vivid sense of strangeness and adventure.

  Fresh off her success with Boneshaker, Cherie Priest maintained her heady steampunk momentum with Clementine (2010). As you might suspect from its less-weighty title, which surely will evoke childhood memories of a silly ditty, Clementine is more of a romp—less fraught and dire—than its predecessor, despite being set in that exact same fictional universe. Consider it as the best episode of The Wild, Wild West never filmed.

  Focus is initially on two larger-than-life characters, veritable forces of nature, who entertainingly and suspensefully split alternating chapters of the narrative until their paths finally cross. First comes Captain Croggon Beauregard Hainey, ex-slave and now a legendary sky-pirate. Hainey is in hot pursuit of his own stolen airship, the Free Crow, which a dastard named Felton Brink has stolen and rechristened Clementine. Brink is heading to Louisville, Kentucky, bearing a mysterious cargo, and Hainey wants revenge. (The secret of the cargo will tally with the re-naming of the ship, if you like clues.)

  On Hainey’s trail is Maria Isabella Boyd, a woman “nearly forty years old and two husbands down,” in her own words. Not that Boyd has ever relied overmuch on men. She’s been a Confederate spy, an actress and a general survival expert. Now, having been hired by Allan Pinkerton himself, she’s a private detective/cop. She’s leery of her first assignment, but determined to give it a go.

  When Hainey and Boyd meet, it’s a titanic dustup that ultimately settles down in strained cooperation. The rigors of their madcap odyssey will mellow that prickly relationship into respect and friendship, and leave each antagonist with a forced but genuine friendly feeling for their rival.

  Priest’s tale in this sequel benefits from a wider canvas. With Boneshaker being set exclusively in Seattle, and mostly in that city’s walled ghetto, events got slightly claustrophobic, and we did not see as much of her alternative-history America as we might have wished. Clementine remedies that small deficit, as our heroes ricochet around the West and Midwest, and we get a larger sense of the festering Civil War back East.

  Priest exhibits a minute and juicy particularity about her imagined past, grounding us in tons of sensory details. We can feel the jouncing flight of the dirigibles, smell the booze-redolent cellars and cheap hotel rooms of the tale. When Boyd is sent in a long trip in an unprotected two-person airship, the Flying Fish, we shiver with her, and brace for the dangerous descent. The Flying Fish is the proud creation of one Algernon Rice, another Pinkerton agent, and Rice’s rich depiction and coherent actions, despite his being basically a walk-on character, illustrate the care and ingenuity which Priest lavishes on even the most minor personages in her story. She’s mastered the Dickensian trick of doing quirky-memorable-but-not-overbearingly-so.

  With a woman and a black man—three black men, actually, given Hainey’s two memorable sidekicks, Lamar and Simeon—at the center of her tale, Priest could have chosen to go all heavy-handed pot-of-message on us. But although both Boyd and Hainey do get off some good quips and ripostes refuting their alleged second-class status, the theme of equality remains objectified mainly in their actions, residing at a subtle, almost subliminal level. The thrilling tale is Priest’s main concern here—as it rightly should be—as she lets adventures serve as enlightenment in a most admirable fashion.

  A third volume, Dreadnought (also 2010), broadened and deepened the saga of what Priest has called her “Clockwork Century.”

/>   99

  Lauren Beukes

  Zoo City (2010)

  SCIENCE FICTION is the literature of change, yes indeed. But by this maxim, the genre reader generally understands an incremental, if-this-goes-on type of change. Even stories set ten millennia into the future presuppose a steady drumbeat of historical stepping-stone changes, one neatly following another, even if there are periods of “two steps forward, one step back,” or vice versa. There are variations to this algorithm, of course, involving unexpected but nonetheless conceivable changes. Suppose cheap fusion power were perfected. Then society would change radically, but still along comprehensible lines. Or suppose Armageddon arrived, via alien invasion or human folly. A massive, catastrophic change, but, again, with predictable lineaments. Black swans are a given.

  Yet from time to time sf contemplates what might be best dubbed “paradigm shifts,” incredible, unforeseeable alterations in the very functioning of the universe. In Poul Anderson’s Brain Wave, the Earth swims into a different cosmic zone, and brain functioning accelerates for every creature on the planet. In Jack Vance’s “The Men Return,” the narrative opens in the long-established aftermath of such a quantum change, and we witness the transition back to “normality.” Greg Egan’s “Luminous” postulates a rival region of space whose alien mathematics threatens to swamp our precarious habitat. Sometimes, new branches of science retroactively warp the consensus history we take for granted. In both Ian MacLeod’s The Light Ages and The House of Storms (Entry 78) and Stephen Baxter’s Anti-Ice, strange substances—aether and anti-ice—thrust our continuum down orthogonal paths.

  Such is the case with Lauren Beukes’s Clarke Award-winning Zoo City, a fit companion to the MacLeod and Baxter volumes. Beukes’s second novel, after the well-received Moxyland, is set in a Johannesburg, South Africa, circa 2009, that is both familiar and estranged.