 The Zenith Angle,
Bruce Sterling, Ballantine/Del Rey, $24.95, 306 pp. (ISBN: 0345460618). |
Bruce Sterling has been keeping an eye on the cyberculture from its beginning, and not always as a fiction writer. In the early 1990s he penned The Hacker Crackdown, an excellent portrayal of the way law enforcement was attempting to come to grips with the new threats posed by hackers. They didn’t have the hang of it then, but they recognized the threat and they were trying. Later Sterling delivered such novels as Distraction (reviewed here April 1999), which considered some of the populist implications of the cyberculture.
But now we live in the post-9/11 world of Homeland Security. Law enforcement is more paranoid than ever about computer break-ins, and the job prospects for those who understand computer security are much more rosy than for many other IT workers. But paranoia is not a healthy frame of mind.
So meet Derek Vandeveer, computer science professor, research chief at a major dot-com, computer security expert. He knows where the holes are, and when 9/11 hits, he lets himself be recruited by a government agency. Unfortunately, he doesn’t understand people very well. He abandons wife and child and submerges himself in the system. Before long he has lost his shirt in the tail of the dot-com bust, but he is figuring out why a top-secret satellite is having problems (not that the military wants to listen), allying himself with a bloody-handed spook, and interfering with a major cyberwar plot. Fortunately, as The Zenith Angle plays out, Vandeveer gains some wisdom, which lets him say for Sterling that the Terror that now rules our lives is but the Dot-Com Bubble by another name. It will pass, for the cyberculture is given to wild enthusiasms that, for all that they can be extraordinarily dysfunctional, are only temporary. Which is not to say that we don’t need cyberwarriors such as Vandeveer, for we do, at least temporarily, and they can learn enough while in the fray to tackle more routine distasteful jobs.
As usual, Sterling is well worth your attention.
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The Holy Machine,
Chris Beckett, Wildside,
$17.95, 242 pp.
(ISBN: 1592242103).
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A few years ago, I put Chris Beckett’s story, "La Macchina," in my Gedanken Fictions teaching anthology as an illustration of how negatively people can view science and technology that threatens their self-image. It’s not a new point to make, for as science has advanced it has upset the status quo apple cart a number of times, moving Earth from the center of the universe to the edge and from young to old, revealing humans as the descendants of apelike creatures, showing that continents float like ice cubes in a highball, contradicting the constancy of mass and time, announcing that the world was not predictable, and in the process infuriating authorities–both religious and academic–who insisted that it just was NOT so! And if it was, then saying so should be illegal. Lately we’ve been seeing the same sort of thing going on with technologically assisted reproduction (in vitro fertilization got past the "Oh! Horrors!" crowd, but now cloning is taking the heat), genetic engineering, and artificial intelligence.
That last was Beckett’s theme in "La Macchina," and his point was that if a robot acts like an intelligent, conscious being, then if we insist that it cannot be (and indeed, if it acts like one, it needs to have its memory wiped and rebooted), we look like idiots. As well as slavers and racists and sexists (who have all looked at intelligent, conscious beings in much the same way). Yet as history has shown, we can come around, and Beckett ended his story with a brief dream sequence featuring a "Holy Machine," a robot that had found a seat in a monastery where it could speak of the chain of being that stretches from inanimate matter to electronic intelligence.
The vein is clearly a rich one. It is therefore hardly a surprise that Beckett should dig deeper and in due time come up with The Holy Machine. The theme is much the same, but writ large. Where the reactionaries were local, now they have conquered all the world except Illyria, where rationalist refugees (intellectuals, scientists, and engineers) have built an enclave from which ideological insanity is barred. We see it through the eyes of George Simling, a spineless wimp who tends his mother, scarred survivor of the pogroms that created the refugees, when she overdoes her immersion in virtual reality; wonders when robots wander off; and when he finally discovers the joys of robotic sex and falls for "Lucy," begins to obsess about the hints she shows of developing self-consciousness.
The robots that wander off vanish. George discovers that they cross the border and are crucified. The Illyrian government is concerned, but not about the crucifixions. Robots are just machines, after all. If they aren’t working right, they just need periodic prophylactic memory-wipes and reboots. In other words, rationalists can be just as bone-headed as the religious idiots outside Illyria.
When the reboots become law, George steals Lucy and leaves Illyria, trying desperately to keep her true nature concealed while he encourages the growth of her consciousness. He is, of course, doomed to failure, but he grows up, becomes less of a wimp, meets other humans (including Marija, who just may be his future), and sees his actions change the world in a way neatly foreshadowed by the short story.
If Beckett can keep it up, he will soon be as well known for his novels as he already is for his short fiction.
 The Ordinary,
Jim Grimsley,
TOR,
$24.95,
368 pp.
(ISBN: 0765305283). |
Jim Grimsley’s The Ordinary is not very ordinary! Indeed, it is an interesting oddity, and it gets odder as it develops.
As it opens, Jedda, trader and translator, is accompanying a delegation from Senal, the world of the Hormlings, through a gate–a stone arch rising from the sea–to Irion, a very different world. Senal is crowded with thirty billion people, commands impressive technology, and is fighting an interstellar war against a horde of machines. Irion is only sparsely populated and has very little technology, though Jedda has heard tales of wizards. It is also flat.
As the delegation leaves the shore for the inland realms where they are to meet the queen, Malin, their tech fails. They are no longer in touch with the communications net, or the vast information resources they are used to, and they have to shift from motorized "putters" to wagons. Back home, on the other side of the gate, the communications failure stirs alarm. Military jets are sent to investigate, and the queen objects on the grounds that the Hormlings had promised to keep such tech away from Irion. Not that the tech did anyone much good; the jets crashed at the same place where all the other tech cut out.
Magic? We don’t believe in that, says the snotty head of the delegation. But now we have a casus belli, and here come the fleets of ships and bombers to subdue all Irion and give its wealth of room and resources to a people who know how to use them properly, and need them badly as well.
So the queen says something like "Shazam!" and all the ships and planes vanish into the depths of the sea. As soon as the suitably impressed Hormlings have been sent home–all but Jedda and a few others–she then closes the gate.
And Jedda gets hauled off to meet Irion himself, supposedly tens of thousands of years old, a wizard indeed, even a god, and learn just what an astonishing place the world of Irion is. For instance, it has a number of peoples, some of which echo neatly the conventions of fantasy. There is a god who made the world and its natives, for reasons that Grimsley hints at but I won’t. And it is perhaps not very far at all from Senal.
A previous novel, Kirith Kirin, focused on Irion in its past and won the 2000 Lambda Award. Related short pieces have appeared in the magazines. And Grimsley says he is by no means done with telling stories about the setting he has created. Judging from this one, future books will be ones to watch for.
Newton's Wake,
Ken MacLeod,
TOR,
$24.95,
316 pp.
(ISBN: 0765305038).
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Newton’s Wake is the latest of Ken MacLeod’s reports on the aftermath of the Spike or Singularity or–as he calls it–the Hard Rapture, when Earth’s artificial intelligences exploded into godhood, trashing the planet and enslaving or incorporating large numbers of humans before abandoning the scene and leaving a long string of stargates (the Skein) in their wake.
It opens as Lucinda Carlyle, representative of the clan that took control of the Skein and exploits it for profit and power, steps through a gate to the world of Eurydice. Nice place, she thinks. Occupied, but worth reclaiming. Although there is that kilometer-high machine made of diamond, clearly a posthuman artifact, over yonder. Alas, she soon awakens the machine, the locals prove to have more than adequate weaponry (a blaster that uses cosmic strings? Sheesh!), and she is captive.
She soon learns that the locals are escapees from the Hard Rapture. The diamond machine is the remnants of their ship. And out in space, unbeknownst to her, a mining ship is being taken over by a message from the machine; soon its equipment is manufacturing war machines, apparently for later use. Meanwhile, a local playwright is setting up a show that will remind everyone of old furies (and oh, how he does mix up his history, thanks to the loss of documents when Earth was trashed, not to mention a few centuries of time!). And the Carlyles are prepping for an invasion, though they will have to deal with competing groups such as the Knights of Enlightenment, who arrive on the scene quite promptly.
In due time, having learned a great deal about Eurydice, Lucinda manages to escape to a world where the DK group (communists organized into "production brigades") are preparing an ecosystem for the America Online farmers to rape and learns that they have a nifty new sort of starship. From there she makes it home, only to learn that she lost tremendous face when she blew the initial entry to Eurydice. Others are in charge now.
But she’s an enterprising sort. Before long she has an ambitious scheme in hand, and if it goes wrong thanks to betrayal and she winds up dead . . . Well, death is an inconvenience, but that’s all, thanks to nanotech and mental backups. Soon she’s back in play and discovering that reality can be a distinctly strange sort of thing.
MacLeod’s earlier books–The Cassini Division (reviewed here November 1999), The Stone Canal (June 2000), and the Cosmonaut Keep series (ending with Engine City, reviewed June 2003)–have earned him both praise and awards. This one is a fast-moving adventure that stretches the reader’s mind well out into the speculative borders of physics and does nothing at all to harm his rep. Recommended.
In 1970, Larry Niven gave science fiction one of its most cherished conceptions: The Ringworld, a ribbon of matter a million miles across and 600 million miles long encircling a sun and providing a surface area 3 million times that of Earth. If you want lebensraum, you got it!
The last entry in the series, reviewed here in November 1996, was The Ringworld Throne. By then, all Niven’s fans knew that humanity was descended from the Paks, who have a super-intelligent adult "protector" form triggered by eating a special food ("tree of life," which looks like yams) infected by a special virus not found on Earth; that the Ringworld is inhabited by a great many Pak-descended hominids of many forms (vampires, ghouls, monkeys, etc. . . .); that each protector is insanely dedicated to protecting its own line of descendants; and that local protectors were warring for control of the Ringworld. At the same time, the dominant species of Known Space (humans, Kzinti, and more) have sent ships to the Ringworld, every one of them eager to claim a prize of incalculable value. Fortunately, some protectors were using the Ringworld’s meteor-defense system to shoot down any ships that tried to land.
Now we have Ringworld’s Children, whose setting is simple: Ringworld is surrounded by ships engaged in the "Fringe War." It’s a standoff–no one can land, and no one can chase the rest off–but not stable. Louis Wu emerges from the autodoc, nicely repaired after his last adventure, and finds Tunesmith, the ghoul protector (the perfect sort, really, for to protect his bloodline, a ghoul must protect the food supply), busily repairing damage to the puppeteer Hindmost’s ship, studying how hyperdrives and nanotech work, and hunting for a solution to the Fringe War problem. Unfortunately, the problem is about to get much worse, for the human ships of ARM (the UN’s military body, which seems to think that anything it sees belongs to Earth) have anti-matter weapons, and that’s just what it takes to punch large holes in the Ringworld and kill everyone aboard. Not that ARM cares about that–they’re more interested in Ringworld tech than in Ringworlders.
And Boom! A hole, vast tides of Ringworld air rushing out into space, and what is Tunesmith going to do about it? For that matter, what can Louis Wu do besides get laid, keep his lies straight, find the last remaining Builder Pak, and stay out of the way?
If you’re familiar with the series, you will be delighted with this book. If you’re not, you may well wish to find the earlier volumes. If you want more, all I can say is that Niven does a pretty good job of clearing the stage at the end. The props still exist, but they’ve been pretty well battered and moved around. He could haul them out again, and surely to good effect, but it would be more work than usual.
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Bio Rescue,
S. L. Viehl,
ROC,
$22.95,
311 pp.
(ISBN: 0451459784).
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S. L. Viehl’s Bio Rescue is worth recommending to writing teachers as a way of demonstrating what NOT to do. At the most superficial level, Viehl apparently does not know how to delete, for every time she decided there was an alternative way of saying something, both ways are there, as in:
"‘IknowYou’d know,’ she said . . ."
". . . swam down to bitethroughsnap the little red ribbon . . ."
Since this is one of the things copy editors are for, and since I’m reading an "uncorrected proof," we can hope these gaffes won’t be there when the book hits the stores. But then there are deeper issues, such as the setting, a system with multiple inhabited planets, two suns, and hordes of large moons. It makes great theater, but not good astronomy. Asteroids with volcanic eruptions make great theater too, but asteroids are too small and cold to have molten cores. And there are new elements (arutanium), vastly different intelligent species merrily producing little hybrids, and other signs that if the author knows any science, she doesn’t care about scientific verisimilitude.
On the other hand, the cover blurbs Viehl as a "bestselling author," so she must have fans who don’t care either. Or who find other features of her writing powerful enough to overcome the drawbacks. What they get here is an awkward attempt to blend military SF with James White’s medical SF (the Sector General series), but without any medical problem solving. The heroine is Dair, born as the badly damaged child of a plague-stricken alien rather like a porpoise. A human researcher rescued her when her kin would have destroyed her, took her to the clinic, and had her rebuilt with human tissues and organs. As a sign of human lack of respect for the integrity of the local species–even though Viehl asserts that respect a number of times–Dair gains a very humanoid form. Her gillets were rearranged to look like hair, she has arms and legs, and as she discovers when she eventually mates with a local, even her intimate anatomy has been rearranged.
At any rate, Dair is now a SEAL, or "surgically enhanced/altered life-form." When she matures, she commands a fighter squad of other local SEALs, and when the opportunity arises she agrees to shift from fighter work to medevac work. But she promptly runs into political and romantic complications that sort themselves out as she defies orders, teaches a hydrophobic wolflike creature to swim (that’s hydrophobia as in water-fearing, not rabies, though the fellow and all his kind are pretty temperish), goes head-to-head with an egomaniac male of her own species, joins him to lead off an attack by local hyperpredators, and winds up mated in a final sappy clinch-and-fade.
I had to struggle to finish this one.
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Olympic Games,
Leslie What,
Tachyon Publications,
$14.95,
234 pp.
(ISBN: 1892391104).
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It was no struggle at all to read Leslie What’s Olympic Games. Ancient Zeus was famous for playing around, but he made a mistake when he seduced the naiad Penelope and then turned her into a tree, for in due time the tree was cut down and Penelope found herself embedded in an elegant door. In due time again, the door made its way to America and became the centerpiece of a country cottage, where eventually a lonely young man called Possum stumbled on the secret of releasing her. Meanwhile, Zeus and Hera made their way to Manhattan, where Zeus kept up his philandering ways, Hera kept on kvetching at him, and one drunken night Hera got knocked up by a beetle.
Go figure. Or join Zeus as he runs off to start up a man’s cult, complete with drumming, howling at the moon, and getting plastered on metaxa. Great fun! Especially once he realizes that Penelope is still around. Except that Hera, her weirdly deformed son, and a friend or two are looking for him. And Possum and his retarded friend Eddie, who seems destined to become the next Oracle, are standing stoutly in the way.
What’s answer to the age-old question of what settles such matters is just what must unman every manly man: a woman’s tears. But What’s tongue is firmly in her cheek throughout, so we don’t have to think she means this as the solution to all the rest of the world’s problems.
But still . . .
Is science fiction really the "literature of ideas" that we have fondly called it for Lo! These many years? Philosopher Mark Rowlands agrees to the extent that he has coined a new term–"Sci-phi"–to link SF with philosophy, though he prefers to take his SF from movies rather than print (perhaps because thanks to video rental stores and cable reruns, it may be more available). The result is his The Philosopher at the End of the Universe: Philosophy Explained Through Science Fiction Films, wherein he uses Frankenstein, Star Wars, The Matrix, Total Recall, Terminator, Minority Report, Aliens, Blade Runner, Independence Day, and The Sixth Day to explicate absurdity, the meaning of life, personal identity, free will, morality, the mind-body problem, and more. His aim is to make philosophy accessible, for, he says, people often know a great deal more philosophy–thanks to films like these–than they know they know.
Is he successful? Despite a rather breezy style, he touches on a great many topics in philosophy (he can mention such disparate people as Arnold Schwarzenegger and Immanuel Kant in the same sentence!). I suspect freshman philosophy students would find this book a very appealing substitute for or supplement to their present dry texts, and indeed I plan to pass this one on to the philosophy prof at my college.
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