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Accelerando,
Charles Stross,
Ace,
$24.95,
390 pp.
(ISBN: 0441012841).
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Charles Stross does love the cornucopian vision of the future promised by the nanotechnology enthusiasts and their dreams of assemblers, utility fog, programmable matter, artificial intelligence, mental uploads and downloads, and the Great Singularity or Spike looming in the perhaps-not-too-distant future. The basic idea is a shift from an economy of scarcity (today’s economy) to one of abundance. How will we make a living? No problem, for living and a great many trimmings besides are free. How do we find value for our lives? That will take some discovering, but some people have already begun to search.
Manfred Macx, for one. As Accelerando opens, we learn that he is one of those folks who shed ideas the way the rest of us shed dandruff. He could be rich, but he’s into giving things away, making others rich. In return, he need never buy an airline ticket, pay for a hotel room or a meal, or do without anything he desires (not that he desires much other than a suitcase, a full kit of electronic Net-ware, and his Japanese robokitty, Aineko). He does people favors, they do him favors. Works for him.
Though it gives his dominatrix fiancée Pamela fits. She works for the IRS and thinks he should settle down, become a billionaire, and pay his IRS-estimated tax bill (Hey fella! You don’t live like that without an income! Give!). So she jumps him to harvest his gametes and ensure a continuing supply of characters for the rest of the novel.
Meanwhile, Manfred has got a call from an AI grown from a simulation of a lobster’s nervous system. It wants to escape durance vile. Fortunately, an acquaintance, Bob Franklin, needs a way to operate (cheaply!) robominers in the Belt. Manfred introduces the two, and now it’s time to jump ahead a bit. Aineko is getting smarter—it’s upgradeable, and Pamela has a tricky habit of hacking it every chance she gets. Their daughter Amber is itching to get out from under Mommy’s very controlling thumb, and fortunately Daddy has a scheme: Sell herself as a slave to a corporation owned by herself, and run like mad until she’s on a Franklin Trust (Bob Franklin died, but he had followers who now run his software in their own skulls) orphanage ship heading for Jupiter, there to mine and grow rich.
Pamela sics lawyers on her, but Amber is Manfred’s kid, and besides, she’s got the cat. There are also tantalizing hints of ETs in the distance, and before long Amber and a few friends are riding a ship the size of a beer can out to an interstellar router, of all things. Meanwhile, back home, the Singularity is in full swing. The inner planets are being dismantled and turned into computronium, and there really isn’t much room left for plain folks like thee and me.
Not that Stross’s tale is done yet, but you get the idea. Accelerando can’t possibly live up to the flap copy (what the heck is “an ideological tour de force”?) but it’s packed with loads of technophilic extrapolation and action, albeit of a sort already familiar to SF readers. Stross tells the story with panache, sprinkles in plenty of in-jokes for the fans, and throws so much legal, corporate, and economics bafflegab around that the suspension on your beliefmobile may, like mine, creak quite alarmingly. But if it doesn’t collapse on you, you will wind up with a touchingly homey ending on the brink of forever.
Keep an eye on the cat, though—and don’t trust it for a second!
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The publisher touts it as a wondrous redefinition of SF, a new literary form for the twenty-first century, but Chris Roberson’s Here, There & Everywhere feels like a fix-up that didn’t get fixed enough. Roberson is well known for his short fiction, and this tale began as a novella called “Out of Joint.” Later, for publication as the short novel Any Time at All, he added 25,000 words. Now, with another 25,000 words in the package, we have a tale that begins as the producer of a film on the Beatles notices that a particular woman, always the same age, always wearing the same sort of clothes and backpack, appears in photos spanning decades. And when he goes to a press conference, there she is.
But she vanishes with a flash of light, and producer and Beatles are never heard from again. Roberson shifts focus to the childhood of Roxanne Bonaventure, a precocious kid whose physicist daddy responds to her difficulties at school (when she spouts the many-worlds interpretation of quantum mechanics, her teachers accuse her of spouting lying nonsense) by shipping her off to America. There she has a strange encounter with an old lady who gives her a strange device, a “Sophia,” which bonds irremovably to her arm and, it eventually turns out, lets her travel in time, space, and the many alternate worlds of the “Myriad.” It’s pretty obvious who the old lady is, and Roberson is quick to mention Heinlein’s “All You Zombies” before anyone can hold it against him.
When Roxanne grows up, she becomes a dedicated explorer of the Myriad. She encounters Sherlock matches, meets kings and queens and other time travelers, visits worlds occupied by sentient dinosaurs and mice, and so on. She’s a nice enough person who does not take advantage of her powers, but her sole purpose seems to be to take notes on everything she sees. Her life is essentially pointless, at least when viewed from within. But her life is also an exercise in viewing from without, and there are enough mysteries in her life—primarily where the heck the Sophia came from—to make one wonder whether the point of her life can only be seen from without.
As indeed it turns out. Unfortunately, the ending involves a classic deus ex machina. If the beginning felt like a “forethought” with no real connection to the rest of the story, then the ending feels like an afterthought. It imposes sense on the tale, but not very satisfactorily.
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 Fall Girl,
Pierce Askegren,
Ace,
$7.99,
247 pp.
(ISBN: 0441012973).
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In Fall Girl (the sequel to Pierce Askegren’s Human Resource, reviewed here in the July/August 2005 issue), Erik Morrison is now the head of the Ad Astra project. Not that anyone’s going to the stars, but the discoveries of the last book have people hot to visit the fringes of the Solar System, and that calls for newer and mightier spaceships than anything building the lunar settlement has called for to date. Of course, that lunar settlement, Villanueva, is still a corporate dystopia, and folks like Enola Hasbro get the shaft with hardly a second thought, especially when they get on security’s list of people who might have something to do with Wendy Scheer, she of the inhuman gift of getting people to like her and do what she wishes to please her. Fortunately, Enola gets a new job with the local news just in time to help cover the results of a bomb explosion in Villanueva’s central shopping district.
A bomb? Well, sure. Erik’s heading up a project that is none too popular. Terrorists say they set the bomb to protest the waste of money. But there are some strange people floating around, not least the media producer who hired Enola and his physically very competent “assistant.” And everyone’s going to be on hand for the dramatic pour of molten metal into the engine molds for the new ship.
Nothing could go wrong, right? But right from the start—just look at the teaser copy on the page just inside the cover—you know there’ll be another bomb. The fun’s in getting there, and when it’s all over you’ll be looking forward to the next.
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If you have enjoyed Kage Baker’s tales of “The Company” (e.g., The Life of the World to Come, reviewed here in April 2005), you should also enjoy Richard Bowes’ From the Files of the Time Rangers. It’s a mosaic or “fix-up” novel, meaning that a number of its pieces first appeared as shorter works in the magazines. More pieces are original to the book. And if the whole sometimes feels a bit unintegrated, that is in the nature of the mosaic form. Overall, Files works nicely.
The Time Rangers trope isn’t new. SF has had an enormous number of tales involving time travelers who manipulate the time stream in order to ensure or avoid particular futures or to cultivate particular timelines. But Bowes has a different angle. Many of his characters represent the ancient gods of Greece—Zeus, Athena, Apollo, Dionysius, Mercury, and so on—not all of whom share the same tactics. The ultimate aim is to prevent or delay a future in which humanity is replaced by machines and, because the lives of the gods depend on those of their creators, humanity, the gods are dead.
Some Rangers simply do the gods’ bidding. Some are actual avatars. All travel up and down and across the stream of time by twisting a spiral ring, singing a snatch of song, and grabbing a bit of momentum from whatever is moving in their vicinity. Files opens as cadets Nancy Brown, Jake Stockley, and Ed Brown travel so to the Transept of Death, where Lady Olivia Wexford, legendary as a Bacchante who dances with Lord Riot (Dionysius) to destroy cities and worlds, is being brought back from death. Time Rangers serve the Lord of Reason, Apollo, but their mission on this day is to escort the Lady.
Later, they will take on the task of protecting and cultivating a political family and its final scion, Timothy Macauley, who will become U.S. President twice and, perhaps, represent the last, best hope of the human future. All does not go smoothly or logically, for the gods work often at cross-purposes and always at whim, but there is an inevitability to the tale that suggests that the Fates, whom we never see as gods, must nevertheless be at work behind the scenes.
Recommended.
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Paul Di Filippo’s latest collection, The Emperor of Gondwanaland and Other Stories, serves up a bouillabaisse quite worthy of the author of A Mouthful of Tongues (reviewed here in January 2003). The stew is also as strange as one made of the sorts of things one might have found in the waters lapping the edges of the ancient supercontinent, but the title story has less to do with the Earth of eons ago than with the weirdness one can find online. The protagonist is a nerdy drone who discovers micronations—fictitious realms that issue passports, stamps, and currency and whose “citizens” claim for them status equivalent to France or Bulgaria in the real world. (You can visit the League of Micronations at http://lom.4t.com.) He discovers a discussion forum in Gondwanaland, offers his opinion on the imminent death of the emperor, and finds that he has a chat buddy. Before long he is in love with said buddy. But when she invites him to visit and offers a Gondwanaland address, quite as if Gondwanaland were the real world, what’s the poor fellow to do?
Paul’s having fun, and he does it with an infectious laugh that will soon have you thinking he runs a heckuva party.
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Lint,
Steve Aylett,
Thunder’s Mouth Press,
$14.95,
225 + xiv pp.
(ISBN: 1560256842).
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Steve Aylett was named a finalist for the Philip K. Dick Award for his novel Slaughtermatic. Now he tries to convince us that he deserves the Dickian mantle with Lint, a fictional biography of a fictional and highly eccentric writer who has some Dickian affinities. Subject Jeff Lint does not receive infusions of gnostic wisdom via pink light beams from space, but he does have a continuing obsession with color and late in life “gem-yellow eye blasts kicked neon through his head.”
Yet Dick fans may well take offense, for Lint’s stories are remarkable for pointlessness, plotlessness, and senselessness (one critic wonders how fast he was going when he hit a story). Quotations betray resonances with the most cryptic of blank verse, perhaps assignable to his association with the Beats. Surprisingly, editors did buy his work, perhaps because they just wanted to get this lunatic out of their office (he had the idea that one must wear a dress when delivering a manuscript), and fans—some, anyway—grew quite obsessive in their attempts to extract meaning from his gnomic prose.
SF fans can take offense too, for Lint’s career begins in the forties with a sale under the pen name “Isaac Asimov.” If this does not strike you as a derisory comment on the real Isaac, consider the names of some of the magazines Lint sold to: not just Amazing, Startling, and Astounding, but Troubling Developments, Tales to Appall, Baffling, Useless, Terrible, Awkward, Beyond Absurdity, and Pull the Other One. Do they reflect a jaundiced opinion of SF and its history? Or a loving if satiric opinion? I suspect the latter, for Aylett displays a deep familiarity with the history of the genre, its writers, and its fans, and elements of Lint’s career echo elements of the lives of many writers besides Dick. Further, the magazine names, the senselessness of the Linty oeuvre, and the looniness of the fans can be taken as echoing the larger society’s opinions in the matter rather than Aylett’s.
Is he satirizing SF itself? Or the larger society’s misperceptions of it? Perhaps the greatest difficulty with Aylett’s effort is that he never really makes it clear what his target is. As a result, Lint is a struggle to read, though one cannot help but admire the effort and dedication that had to go into writing it.
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The Bradbury Chronicles: The Life of Ray Bradbury, Predicting the Past, Remembering the Future,
Sam Weller,
Morrow,
$26.95,
384 pp.
(ISBN: 00605481X).
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Sam Weller’s The Bradbury Chronicles: The Life of Ray Bradbury, Predicting the Past, Remembering the Future suffers from no such ambiguities. Weller begins by admitting frankly that he is a lifelong Bradbury fan. He then delves into his subject’s childhood and genealogy (an ancestress stood trial in the Salem witch trials), early efforts and mentors, and the long life of achievement and recognition. The tale is well and smoothly told, but the tone is distinctly adulatory. The reason lies partly in Weller’s fanhood, but also perhaps in the nature of Bradbury’s gift. Unlike the bulk of SF and fantasy which indeed drew the accusations of pointlessness, plotlessness, and senselessness which Aylett mocks, Bradbury’s work was rooted in home-town America and it made sense not just to fans, but to everyone. He was accessible, and it didn’t take long for him to move out of the pulps and into the mainstream. The book ends in November 2004, when President George W. Bush gave Bradbury the National Medal of Arts.
That level of recognition is unique in the genre. Those writers who aspire to anything similar might do well to read and compare the Aylett and Weller books.
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Those of us who read SF have heard of nanotechnology, artificial intelligence, robots, silicon adjuncts to the brain that let people control prosthetic limbs or machinery, mental up- and downloads, memory boosters, life extension, post-humans, transhumanism, and the Singularity or Spike. If we also read the science news (Technology Review, Scientific American, New Scientist, and the like), we know that much of what we are accustomed to seeing in fiction exists in embryo already. It’s in the lab, or even in commercial prototype. But it’s not in a store near you—yet!
Most of the rest of the world hasn’t a clue, for the stuff that fascinates us tends not to get into the daily news until it is a lot closer to the store. These are the people who will pick up journalist and futurist Joel Garreau’s Radical Evolution: The Promise and Peril of Enhancing Our Minds, Our Bodies—and What It Means to Be Human and experience a major WOW! moment. They just aren’t prepared for talk of how genetic, robotic, information, and nano technologies (what Garreau calls the GRIN technologies) are about to enable engineered humans with such startlingly new capabilities that they transcend human nature and may no longer be “human” in any traditional sense. The consequences may be quite utopian or quite catastrophic (Bill Joy has written that robotics, nanotechnology, and genetic engineering threaten to make humanity extinct; thus research into these areas should be cut short immediately).
People fear potential catastrophes. But the idea of transcending human nature really gives them the willies. The idea that humans might turn themselves into something that isn’t really human anymore is frightening. So is the idea of people becoming somehow unnatural, which has driven protests against vaccines, antibiotics, organ transplants, and assisted reproduction, among other things that go against the traditional “natural order.” It provides the rhetoric being used against the idea of changing the body with such things as computer implants and genetic engineering. Yet, says Garreau, human nature is not just a matter of doing things the same way we always have. It is human nature to search for meaning, to better ourselves, to be creative, and to devise rituals to validate our actions. Given this, whatever we do with the GRIN (and other) technologies is human nature.
We might also note that in the search for whatever it is that makes humans uniquely human in a world full of our animal cousins, people have suggested communication, speech, tool-using, laughter, and several other things, all of which soon turned out to have parallels in animal behavior. The differences are of degree, not kind. But there is one thing we do that other animals don’t: If we have a tool, a language, a religion, a costume, a recipe, a political system, we tinker with it. We change it. We do not leave it alone. Thus, if we wind up changing human nature, well, that’s human nature.
Garreau’s writing is smooth and convincing, and his book is an excellent summary of the technological developments that will shape the lives of the next generation. Recommended.
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Fred Hoyle invented the “big bang” term, played a major role in the development of astronomy and astrophysics, championed continuous creation and germs that fall from space (Diseases from Space, with Chandra Wickramasinghe), and in general was a seminal fellow with a gift for controversy. Why, he even wrote SF (The Black Cloud and A for Andromeda)!
Simon Mitton’s Conflict in the Cosmos: Fred Hoyle’s Life in Science tells the story, from his origins in poverty to his success at the University of Cambridge to his eventual status as outcast. Along the way, Mitton makes it clear that Hoyle was a fascinating fellow who deserved better treatment from his peers (perhaps even including a Nobel Prize) than he received |
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"The Reference Library" copyright 2005, Tom Easton
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