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When we last met Alec Checkerfield (in The Machine’s Child, reviewed here in January/February 2007), he was sharing his brain with the mind-records of his predecessor clones, Victorian Edward and Elizabethan Nicholas, his beloved Botanist Mendoza was more than a bit confused at the constant shifting of voices and personalities, and the immortal cyborg troops of the Company (a.k.a. Dr. Zeus), once dedicated to rescuing the treasures of the past before their destruction by fire, flood, eruption, and war (etc.) for the delectation and enrichment of the future, were plotting rebellion against their masters, who had shown a distressing tendency to put unwanted servants in cold storage or even subject them to endless, agonizing (and ultimately fruitless) efforts to destroy them. And the year 2355, when all the Company’s records of the future fall silent, was fast approaching.
The Sons of Heaven completes the series. The Company still wants to destroy its staff and has engaged the services of a strange and vindictive folk who remind the reader of faerie (they live under the hill, they have a queen, they’re small) to find a poison that will do the job. They seem to have succeeded, or at least the test subject, cyborg Lewis, has been tossed into the bone pile. Yet Lewis isn’t quite dead, and when the queen’s young successor stumbles upon him, he responds to care enough to start talking, telling stories, asking for nutrients to aid his further recovery, and desperately craving to send word of the poison. Meanwhile the cyborgs have multiple factions, all scheming to overcome the Company in 2355 and make the future theirs. At least one faction thinks the world would be better off without people in it.
And Alec’s body is now dominated by Edward alone. Mendoza is pregnant with twins, clones, ready to be infused with the recorded minds of Alec and Nicholas. Alec’s—now Edward’s—piratical AI, Captain Morgan, has used the time-ship to find an idyllic island outside of time where the kids can be raised, and if the island sounds a bit heavenly, well, Baker has to justify the title somehow.
What happens in 2355? Things come to a head, of course, but you don’t need me to tell you that. Baker has a great many balls in the air, and she has displayed so much skill as this series has developed that you just know she will manage to set them all down on the table without dropping a one. On the way, she does a few tricks that strained my credulity a bit but never broke it. Her reputation is intact at the end, and even enhanced. The Company series seems bound to enter the records as a classic. Certainly it will be hard to top, though Tor assures us that Baker is not done.
Don’t miss it.
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Radio Freefall,
Matthew Jarpe,
Tor,
$24.95,
316 pp.
(ISBN: 0765317842)
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Matthew Jarpe’s first novel, Radio Freefall, is interesting but has serious difficulty in convincing the reader to suspend disbelief long enough to enjoy the story. The basic problem is the villain, Walter Cheeseman, who has a plot to unify and rule the world by convincing governments to give his private company, WebCense, more and more government functions, to the point where there is nothing left for government. Cheeseman isn’t there yet, but he already controls all news and entertainment and he’s working on it; if all goes well . . . My own thought is that he’ll get what he wants when pigs fly.
But never mind. The tale opens at a concert where mystery guitarist and singer Aqualung, with the Snake Vendors band, is exercising a gizmo that picks up and feeds back audience response to give the audience exactly the high old time they crave. Meanwhile Quin Taber is demonstrating a special computer, the “isolate,” that is proof against the Digital Carnivore, a life form evolved from an ancient virus. Taber was fired from WebCense when he tried to convince Cheeseman the beast was real. Now Cheeseman is trying to use the discovery to firm up WebCense control of the Net but not getting anywhere. But Taber is tracking the Digital Carnivore’s origins to ancient hackers and the rock band Animal Bones and discovering that its secrets appear to be locked with passwords drawn from a never-produced album.
Aqualung and his group get famous (feedback works!). Soon his true identity comes out: he is Adrian Rifkin, once of the Animal Bones. Cheeseman gets wind of this and sends out the squad to cut off his head, freeze it, and bring it in so its memories can be scanned. An old foe reactivates an unfulfilled contract on him. He escapes just in time, though, and soon winds up on the space station Freefall (which looks rather like the Stanley Cup) on his way to the Moon, which is resisting WebCense’s efforts to establish control. WebCense cuts off traffic to the Moon, trapping Rifkin, and soon it is clear that WebCense is going to send troops to destroy Freefall and kill or reprogram everyone aboard. Cheeseman is already telling the world, through the media he controls, that Freefall is in the throes of rebellion and systems failure. He’s sending rescuers, not troops. He really wants Rifkin’s secrets!
But it’s rock and roll, kids. Great verve and momentum. Some sex, lots of drugs, and fond memories of cyberpunk (lots of plugging in going on) and Heinlein (independence in space). It would have been an intoxicating mix twenty years ago; today it’s a bit quaint and unlikely and played too straight to be meant as satire. If Jarpe can apply his talent for verve and momentum to more likely stories, he’s going to be a writer to watch for.
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Spindrift,
Allen Steele,
Ace,
$24.95,
354 pp.
(ISBN: 0441014712)
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Allen Steele continues his stellar Coyote series with Spindrift, which answers a question raised in Coyote Frontier: When Earth brought its new starbridge technology to Coyote, it also brought word that the first starbridge-using ship, the EASS Galileo, had vanished. Now we learn what happened, for the three survivors of the Galileo, along with an alien emissary, showed up at Coyote in the Galileo’s shuttle, and now they have come to Earth with complete reports.
Those survivors are the Galileo’s first officer, Ted Harker, who should have been captain but for the connections that gave an incompetent scion of nobility the plum; Emily Collins, the shuttle pilot; and astrobiologist Jared Ramirez, once complicit in the savant (uploaded minds) plot to wipe out a large portion of humanity to ease the population crisis, then sentenced to a life of hard time, and released because his expertise was needed on the Galileo. Why? Telescopes had picked up a mysterious huge object, perhaps a starship, traveling past Sol a couple of light years out. The Galileo’s mission was to investigate, and Ramirez was the closest thing Earth had to an expert on alien life. Unfortunately, he has a reputation as a genocidal mass murderer. It takes a while for anyone to warm up to him, but when he learns that the captain is prepared to take “emergency measures” if necessary, and Emily spots a missile strapped onto their ship at the last moment, he becomes part of a trio.
Steele has always enjoyed taking potshots at official stupidity, so now we have some notion of why the Galileo vanishes. The big remaining question is why Ted, Emily, and Jared survive. But in due time . . . The object—Spindrift—proves to look a lot like an asteroid, except with some odd features such as a huge hole that just might be an engine nozzle, and a few warm spots covered with carbon dioxide snow. Not to mention a starbridge in orbit around it. While our trio descends to the surface to explore, finding a port and descending weird staircases to find control rooms and caverns, the Galileo moves to investigate the starbridge. Alas, when an alien ship emerges from it, the captain decides it’s an emergency.
So. Three survivors with no way home. With little hope, they go into stasis, only to wake up some fifty light years away in the hands of the aliens. Who are they? What do they want? I have to leave something for the reader to learn on his/her own, so I won’t reveal any more, although since we already know an emissary comes to Earth, the mystery is a bit constrained.
If you’re a Steele fan, this one will delight you. It’s a fine tale in its own right, and it is a harbinger of future volumes, which must move humanity out among the aliens. Steele being fond of official stupidity, you can be sure Earth’s governments and other authorities will find ways of trying to mess things up, but Steele also likes to say that people of good will exist and can haul chestnuts out of fires.
If you’re not a Steele fan, read Spindrift, hunt down the other Coyote titles, and become one.
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Postsingular,
Rudy Rucker,
Tor,
$25.95,
320 pp.
(ISBN 0765317419)
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We’ve been hearing a lot about nanotechnology for years. The ultimate dream is teeny-tiny self-reproducing robots that can disassemble and assemble things atom by atom. A variant is smart dust, which can be as simple as networked sensors to sprinkle on a battlefield so they can report weather, troop movements, and so on, or something a bit more complex. For instance, if they were equipped with little arms so they could glom onto each other, they might provide a way to materialize objects out of smart dust floating in the air. Equipped with a bit of computing power and given the ability to reproduce themselves, they could bathe us in a networked intelligence or intelligences.
Trust Rudy Rucker to give this all some bizarre twists in Postsingular. Jeff Luty is a geek scarred by his past. He wants to revise reality so nasty accidents can’t happen, and his method of choice is nanotech disassemblers (nants—and who but Rucker would name the nant box a “nant farm”?) that can record every detail as they disassemble the world so it can be run as a virtual simulation. The test run is on Mars. Fortunately for the world, Luty has an employee, Ond Lutter, who figures out how to take advantage of reversible computation with an abort code that will make the nants put everything back the way it was. Unfortunately, Luty doesn’t like the idea, fires Ond, and unleashes the nants on Earth. Ond uses the abort code and saves the world, but that’s only the beginning.
Ond’s marriage is in trouble. His wife leaves. He’s stuck with his autistic son, Chu. A friend who catches squid for a living finds squid disappearing from their tank. Ond comes up with orphids, smart dust that eats nants (they’re nanteaters, of course) and also provides networked AIs (beezies) to supplement intelligence. It’s not supposed to eat and simulate the world. And as soon as it’s released, it settles on everything around, tagging, linking, revealing even the invisible giants from the Hibrane, the universe next door, who don’t like nants or computers or, indeed, technology. They also don’t want us Lobraners to drop in on them. When Chu figures out how to visit the Hibrane, they capture him and Ond and erase the technique’s description from everywhere it was stored in the Lobrane.
Now the tale must be carried forward by a group of “kiqqies,” the Big Pig Posse, who use the orphid-net beezies to find food and shelter but otherwise look pretty homeless. It’s up to them to get Chu and Ond back, queer Luty’s continuing efforts to eat the world, and find a way to match the Hibrane’s safer version of omnipresent intelligence and memory enhancement.
Any true singularity pretty much by definition has to be so over-the-top that it would stun present-day minds. This is over-the-top as only Rudy Rucker can do it and therefore a worthy stab at portraying the cognitive impact of a singularity.
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Payback City,
John Barnes,
E-Junkie
$4.00,
422 pp.
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Way back in 1997, John Barnes wrote Payback City for a British publisher that promptly trimmed its list and blew him off. When he tried to sell the book elsewhere, no one wanted it. And when September 11 happened, the book became absolutely unsalable.
It’s a damned shame, too, for though the book has flaws, it’s the book’s strengths that are the problem. Barnes—in 1997—predicted an Islamic fundamentalist attack on an American city. The method he describes is not that of 9/11, nor are the reasons exactly the same, but the roots are there in a powerful anger toward the US, fed by opportunists who want to make money or gain power. Indeed, a political staffer who is suspected of treasonous activity at one point talks about the need for a New Order that would amount to a global version of Homeland Security. At this point I started wanting to call Barnes a prophet. His later comments on how various intelligence agencies failed to talk to each other, put the pieces together, and prevent disaster reinforced the feeling.
Another strength is that Barnes is very good with his characters, including the leader of the attack team, who really likes living in America and wishes he didn’t have to do what he’s planning, but he has loyalties and anger and America has it coming. This empathy is part of what makes Payback City a “liberal” thriller, for which Barnes says there is only a small market. Most thriller readers want conservative messages, including villains with many fewer redeeming qualities.
But it’s definitely a thriller. The scene is Detroit, where arson investigator Kit Miles is a busy fellow. His sister LaTonya is an FBI agent in Washington, currently undercover in the office of a Republican congressman from the Detroit suburbs; she is looking for evidence that his head of staff, Barry Martin, is committing treason. Adhem is the captain of a small advance team from the Maghrebi (western North Africa) Republic. He has a girlfriend and life is sweet, but der tag is only nine days away and someone has stolen three crates containing 450 super-firebombs from a cache (fortunately there are more caches and more—and more powerful—gear). Kit runs into the results when the bombs start getting used. Meanwhile LaTonya is getting suspicious of a bill that will admit to the U.S. one hundred Maghrebi engineers (with military backgrounds) to work for a Detroit company. A little investigation reveals that Martin’s phone traffic touches bases in Japan and the Maghrebi Republic.
The pattern comes together with deadly inevitability. The firebombs are replaced. The arson team learns only that they exist and gets hints that they may be a part of something much larger. Someone mentions the value of using an advance team and prepositioning armaments for a military attack. That bill goes through, and despite suspicions LaTonya and her FBI boss cannot stop the president from signing it. Nor can they interfere with the arrival of the Maghrebis, for they are prepositioned across the border in Canada, and as soon as the bill is signed, they cross. And then . . .
It’s payback time, and you know what payback is. Detroit should be happy this is only a novel.
So should you, for though it remains unpublished (and perhaps unpublishable) by any major house, Barnes has made it available for a very modest price. He includes a lengthy essay on the background of the novel, the political science behind his analysis (and he has a poly sci degree), things he was right about, things he was wrong about, and the difficulties of publishing a “liberal” thriller. He does not spend much time on the perennial “timeliness” problem of thriller writing, but he could. Thrillers thrive on connections to topical issues and current fears and obsessions. When those change, a thriller can become obsolete overnight, and I have had occasion in the past to remark on those unfortunate writers whose books became obsolete shortly before they were published. Yet even though Payback City became obsolete in terms of current events on 9/11, it did not in terms of underlying issues. Maybe he should just relabel it alternate history!
Go get it. It’s four bucks you won’t regret spending.
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Gregory Benford’s visions of the future have long been peopled with human characters with mechanical/electronic add-ons and machine characters (mechs) with biological add-ons. Such things are accepted by SF readers with few qualms. We’ve been hearing of robots and cyborgs for a long time! The general public, however, knows them from TV and film, where a good part of the time they are monsters. Yet they are coming. Robots are already moving into our homes, and not just as toys (think of the Roomba vacuum cleaner). We already have cochlear implants for the hard of hearing, and researchers are working on electronic implants to improve the lives of quadriplegics and the blind. Memory and sensory enhancements for the rest of us seem just over the horizon.
How far will it go? Can a human being be so modified that he or she is no longer considered human? Maybe not as long as we’re talking about implants, but what about mental uploading into a machine? If when I get old and decrepit I have my mind copied into a truck’s computerized control system, am I still Tom Easton? Can I still vote? Do I still have a “soul” (whatever that is)? How much does the shape—or existence—of my body matter? Such questions are being seriously considered by researchers today; in fact, MIT’s AI Lab has a theologian on staff!
As for robots, they’re getting smarter, and perhaps one day we will have to recognize them as persons that, just like meat humans, deserve rights, legal standing, and protection from slavery and other forms of abuse. They won’t be “just machines” anymore! Will they be “human”? What does “human” mean, anyway?
If these issues intrigue you, get Beyond Human: Living with Robots and Cyborgs. Gregory Benford and the pseudonymous Elisabeth Malartre are by no means the first to address them, and as they note, the book was finished in 2005, so it does not consider the latest developments (some of which fit neatly into their discussion). The approach is non-technical and thus well suited to general readers. At the same time, they cite examples galore from SF to illustrate their points, which should make the book of extra interest to readers with SF backgrounds.
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Night Smoke,
Bruce Boston,
ill. Marge Simon,
Kelp Queen Press (kelpqueenpress.com), $18.00, 68 pp.
(ISBN: 9780968993460).
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Bruce Boston just sent along his latest little book of poems, Night Smoke. He’s still among the premier poets of science fiction and fantasy, his work rich with genre tropes and images and Boston’s own unique visions. The title piece concerns men and women, relationships and sex. Fire burns up face, body, heart, desire, with a culminating horror of revival, passion, and ash. And yes, he’s a little less cryptic!
If you like poetry, order a copy. It’s a limited edition of 300, though, so good luck.
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A Thousand Deaths,
George Alec Effinger,
Golden Gryphon Press,
$24.95,
340 pp.
(ISBN: 1930846479)
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The late George Alec Effinger was a seminal figure in SF, much appreciated by many readers, among whom must be counted Mike Resnick, who has already plugged a number of Effinger’s stories into his own anthologies and here pens the introduction to editor Marty Halpern’s work. A Thousand Deaths collects a number of the Sandor Courane stories, often autobiographical in important ways, for Courane, like Effinger himself, must face death in many ways. Here you will find the famous The Wolves of Memory, in which social misfit Courane is exiled to a planet that devours memory and must confront the machine, TECT, that rules humanity. In other tales Courane is an SF writer or editor, and the stories themselves, in Mike’s words, are “the most creative, the most off-the-wall stories that George or just about anyone else ever put to paper.”People who write introductions can be forgiven for waxing a bit hyperbolic. That’s what they’re supposed to do, after all! You’ll enjoy finding out whether Mike needs forgiveness. |
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"The Reference Library" copyright 2007, Tom Easton
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