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In recent years, the dominant image of the future has been the Singularity, and I am writing this just after Singularity Summit 2007 (www.singinst. org/summit2007/index.html), held in San Francisco, made the news. The Singularity, we suppose, will happen when our machines became capable of guiding their own evolution faster than we can. This may follow very shortly on true artificial intelligence, which will mean machines that can set their own agendas, learn from experience, and plan. It may not require machines that are conscious in the same sense that we are.
If it happens, we can expect progress to accelerate tremendously and the world in which we live to change more rapidly than we have ever seen before. The future, some say, will become unpredictable, even from week to week. Humans may become irrelevant to government, business, and commerce. The machines will be the dominant players, and humans will be something that has to be managed, kept from causing trouble.
And, says Joe Haldeman in The Accidental Time Machine, things may get even stranger than that! The tale begins with Matt Fuller, a research assistant in the physics lab of Professor Marsh. As part of his job he has built for the professor a gadget that emits one photon at a time for calibration purposes. But when Matt pushes the reset button, the gadget blinks out of existence for an instant. “Look!” Matt yells, but the professor just says neither one of them has had enough sleep and goes home.
Now Matt isn’t very ambitious and he doesn’t seem to be the brightest bulb in the pack. He used to be a grad student, but he’s let that slide. But he’s enough of a scientist not to leave his gadget alone. He pushes that reset button again and again, and each time the gadget is gone a bit longer, twelve times longer each time. Pretty soon, he realizes, it will be gone for hours, days, years, centuries. So he figures out how to attach himself to it—using a friend’s antique (metal) car—and pushes the button.
The next thing he knows, the car is a wreck in the middle of the road, he’s being arrested on suspicion of murdering the friend, and someone who looks a bit like him has handed a lawyer a fat check for his bail. The next step—you guessed it!—is to push reset again, which lands him in a Boston where technology has vanished, everyone is poor and devoutly Christian, the Second Coming is in the past, MIT is the Massachusetts Institute of Theosophy, and Jesus Himself wants to talk to him. It doesn’t matter that Matt can think of a dozen rational explanations for the Jesus image in front of him—holograms, pressor beams, etc.—for the pressor beams can cause pain if he doesn’t knuckle under.
Time to press that button again, eh? This time he has a companion, Martha, the graduate assistant assigned to him at MIT, and though the new future looks a lot more like what he was used to, it isn’t. In fact, once he gets acquainted with how it works the reader can’t help but think of the Singularity.
Haldeman doesn’t pound that in. But he does make it clear that managing humans and keeping them from causing trouble may be done in more than one way (neither of which appeals to me).
But Haldeman is one of the greats. His books rarely fail to be both thought provoking and entertaining, or appealing in other words. I commend this one to your fond attention.
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Shadowbridge,
Gregory Frost,
Del Rey,
$13.95,
259 pp.
(ISBN: 0345497589).
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Imagine a world where vast bridges curl across the seas, their origins lost to myth and legend. Multiple linked spans form spirals between which folk move on boats. The folk themselves—some are human, but there are also snake people and elves, among others, and the humans appear to be of a different race and culture on every span. Fortunately, when one passes through the gate to any span one acquires the local language. Local customs are another matter, as are the stories people tell each other to explain themselves and their history. Since there are so many spans and peoples, there are a great many stories, and the role of storyteller is an important one.
There are also a great many gods, who occasionally appear to people parked in the Dragon Bowls that extend from the sides of the spans, hoping for special dispensations or gifts. One such person was the idiot child Diverus, who was not parked on but chained to the Dragon Bowl by his owner in hope of wealth. But when the god appeared, the gift was invisible—Diverus was no longer an idiot, and he had sense enough to keep his mouth shut while his mistress sold him to a sort of brothel.
The gods also appear to others, as when the storyteller and shadow-puppeteer Leodora climbed a tower and a statue awakened to make a few ominously cryptic remarks. This is where Shadowbridge begins, with most of Gregory Frost’s impressive world-building yet to be revealed. First must come Leodora’s back-story: She was an orphan, consigned to life as a fish-gutter on a backwater island, mistreated by her guardian uncle, rejected by the locals as the daughter of a witch. But there is the drunkard Soter, who it is soon revealed once traveled with her father, the thoroughly legendary storyteller Bardsham. Soter even has the cases containing Bardsham’s shadow-puppets and booth, and when Leodora discovers them it is soon clear that she has inherited her father’s gift. Soter begins to tell her the old stories and teach her what he knows of the puppetry. Yet he is strangely reluctant to admit how good she is or to encourage her in her dreams of leaving the island for the spans.
But events conspire. A vaguely man-shaped piece of coral appears, and she is moved to pack it with the puppets. A young sea-dragon takes her for a ride, nude, and the villagers, who think dragon riding is for men only, are scandalized. The marriage her uncle has arranged to a local idiot is off. And she and Soter must flee to the spans, where of course her vast talent is promptly manifest, the statue speaks, and she finds Diverus whose god-given talent has turned out to be the ability to play any musical instrument ever made superbly. Since every storyteller needs a musician, the reader immediately suspects that Leodora is following a script the gods themselves have written, but if that is so, Frost is still a long way from revealing it. Instead he drops hints about Leodora’s father’s career, her mother’s death, the disaster that made her an orphan, and the mysterious Agents who may or may not be looking for her.
What’s going on? Frost doesn’t say, but this is just Book One of two. It’s fascinating world building, masterful set-up, and I am eager to see how Book Two goes when it appears in summer 2008.
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Firstborn,
Arthur C. Clarke and Stephen Baxter,
Del Rey,
$25.95,
367 pp.
(ISBN: 0345491572).
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The puff sheet calls it the conclusion to the Time Odyssey series, but the end of Arthur C. Clarke’s and Stephen Baxter’s Firstborn leaves room for more. Whether we will see more is a different question.
But to get to the matter at hand . . . The series began with Time’s Eye, in which some mysterious power transformed Earth into a patchwork of eras, climates, geographies, and peoples. Silvery spheres or “Eyes” floated in the air to watch how Russian astronauts coped when they met Genghiz Khan, British tommies met australopithecines, a UN squad from the Afghanistan front met the tommies, and everyone went up against Alexander the Great. Bisesa Durt, a UN observer, found the Big Ball in the Temple of Marduk in Babylon and after suitable revelations found herself at home, with the sequel, Sunstorm, about to reveal that some extrasolar enemy was about to make the Sun flare and toast humanity out of existence. There’s just time enough to build a massive shield in space. Humanity survives, battered but intact, but that alien foe is not about to quit. Firstborn opens with the discovery that a massive object is headed toward Earth. It’s not just a rock, for it destroys the first investigating spacecraft and resists every effort to deflect or destroy it. It’s a “quantum bomb,” and it has our name on it.
What to do? Evacuate? That’s a tall order, but before it comes to that Bisesa, fresh out of coldsleep, is inveigled by her daughter into a trip to Mars, where ancient Martians apparently managed to trap an Eye. Firstborn technology is not unconquerable. There is hope, and the chief point of the novel is the pursuit and realization of that hope.
A lesser point is the portrayal of the Firstborn, never met except by their actions, as a jealous people, dedicated to destroying potential competitors wherever they might arise. Near the end, Earth’s telescopes detect a galaxy full of giant light-sails and generation ships, a sky full of refugees. Since Earth has managed to defeat the Firstborn (at least for now), the next step would seem to be an attempt to contact some of these Others and build an alliance that might take the war home to the Firstborn. That could mean another trilogy, but I have no clue as to whether such a thing is in the works.
But we can hope.
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L. E. Modesitt, Jr., adds another link to the long chain that is the saga of Recluce with Natural Ordermage. Recluce is an island on a world where magic takes the classic form of order versus chaos, except that the two are clearly kin to concepts familiar from physics. Chaos, for instance, is like entropy; when a chaos-mage releases a bolt of chaos-fire, it vaporizes whomever the bolt hits, maximizing entropy. Order is pattern, and in previous books we have seen order-mages able to sense the bonds between molecules and atoms. Indeed, when the black wizards of Recluce forge iron they infuse it with order to give it strength. Not surprisingly, those who can manipulate order or chaos (only rarely can anyone handle both) are highly valued. Once identified, they are assessed and trained and sent where they will be of most use. Recluce favors order, and chaos-talents are exiled. So are order-talents who cannot be trained.
So meet Rahl. He’s a scrivener (scribe) copying books by hand for his father. He has a small amount of order-talent, visible in the way he can coax ink to ripen and girls to surrender. That last is what gets him in trouble and may be what calls him to the attention of the local mages, who in due time ship him off to Nylan. Unfortunately, though he has definite talent—enough to be destructive—he seems unable to learn how to control it. He has to try something, and then he can either do it or not. He is, he is told, a natural ordermage. Quite untrainable, a danger to have around. So they train him in clerkship, teach him Hamorian, and ship him off to Hamor, a dictatorship that has a rather no-nonsense attitude toward order and chaos: Both are valuable but they must be kept in balance.
Poor Rahl. He feels much put upon. If only people would tell him what they expected, what to do, instead of expecting him to just figure it out. It just ain’t fair! And it ain’t about to get better. His job is to be a clerk in the office of the factor who handles Recluce’s trade. Unfortunately, he soon grows suspicious of certain irregularities and winds up a drugged amnesiac, wrapped in a carpet, and shipped off to be a slave in Hamor’s steel mills. In due time, his memory begins to return, his talents draw attention, and he undergoes training by someone who understands a bit more about how to get him to focus his attention.
Finally, he gets it! He feels less unfairly treated, and when he is posted as an order-mage back to the factor’s town, he is just in time to nip a dastardly scheme in the bud. He’s something of a hero now, and his development has really only begun. The next volume of the duology will see much more, and I suspect Modesitt will pay more attention to the Hamorian approach to balance.
This volume begins slowly, but Modesitt can be counted on to develop the momentum and excitement even as he develops well-rounded characters and a thoughtful frame. As always, he’s well worth your attention.
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Modesitt doesn’t write many short stories, but he has done enough to fill Viewpoints Critical: Selected Stories, which includes three originals, one of which (“Black Ordermage”) is set in Recluce. Is he as interesting in short form as in his novels? Well, in his very first story, “The Great American Economy” (Analog, May 1973), he managed to provide a preview of cybercrime. That alone may be enough to convince you to pay attention to his thoughts.
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Now and Forever,
Ray Bradbury,
William Morrow,
$24.95,
209 pp.
(ISBN: 0061131563).
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Ray Bradbury is as famous as ever, but his stories aren’t what they used to be. (Or perhaps this reader isn’t what he used to be.) As a case in point, pick up a copy of Now and Forever, which offers a pair of never-before-published novellas, “Somewhere a Band is Playing” and “Leviathan ’99.” The latter, a tribute to Melville’s Moby Dick, is the weaker of the pair. It was first produced as a radio script nearly forty years ago and later became a stage play of which Bradbury says, “The critics’ reviews were unanimous in their vitriol.” He’s chipped away at it since, with the present final result. Ishmael is a young spacefarer, bunked with the alien Quell aboard the Cetus 7 whose mad captain is in pursuit of a giant world-gobbling comet, which he seems to see as loaded with willful malice. So the mad chase is on, with disaster at its end, but Bradbury’s voice is all atmosphere and little sense. Certainly there is little sense of astronomical verisimilitude, as we see when he has Quell announce that his home is some ten million miles and five light years distant, and never mind that there is no star at that distance from Earth.
Well, atmosphere was always Bradbury’s forte, and when he was young he brought it as a breath of fresh air to science fiction and fantasy. The result was popularity beyond the genre ghetto and an unleashing of other atmospheric writers. But at his best, Bradbury brought more than atmosphere to the page, as he does with “Somewhere a Band is Playing.” This one opens as a man, writer James Cardiff, leaps from a slowing train onto a shabby train platform. Summerton is the town, and its quite appealing residents turn out to be immortals who make their livings as writers. It’s a charming conceit, threatened when one of Cardiff’s competitors appears and threatens to spill the beans about Summerton’s existence. But Summertonians are accustomed to confrontation by the outer world. They have moved before, lock, stock, and barrel, even the buildings and cemetery, and they will again if they must. Cardiff is invited to come along, for if he found them he is surely one of their kind. But he feels obliged to return to fiancée and friends. Will he ever come back? Can he, if they move and hide themselves again?
There’s more sense to “Somewhere,” and as well a poetic charm of the sort familiar to Bradbury fans. There’s also a lot of atmosphere, verging on treacly sentimental twaddle.
Your mileage, of course, may vary.
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According to James Patrick Kelly and John Kessel, the greatest contribution of cyberpunk to the SF genre may have been its “uncanny ability to broadcast [the science-fictional idea that the physical, mental, and moral structures that most of us live by are radically contingent] to the culture at large.” It did do that, using an idiom of streetwise loners in a world without recognizable mothers, teachers, office workers, and so on, which made it pretty much a cartoon view of the world. Classic cyberpunk was declared over and done with two decades ago, but the themes that marked it continued, both in SF and in other media (Kelly and Kessel call Wired magazine “the Popular Science of cyberpunk”), including TV, film, and advertising.
What were the cyberpunk themes, or its “signature obsessions”? Kelly and Kessel list global perspective on the future, stress on infotech and biotech especially that with the potential to transform the human body and psyche, a gleefully subversive attitude toward traditional values and received wisdom, and a crammed prose style. Much of this of course marks SF at least as far back as the forties, and it is very easy to find it in current work, which they prove in Rewired: The Post-Cyberpunk Anthology. Here you will find stories by classic cyberpunks William Gibson and Bruce Sterling, but also by Michael Swanwick, Cory Doctorow, Charles Stross, Paul DiFilippo, Mary Rosenblum (her “Search Engine” is the only tale from this magazine), and nine more.
Names to conjure with, and stories to match. Not a dud in the lot. Enjoy it.
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The late Ted Sturgeon was one of the greats. If you believe what Harlan Ellison says in his foreword to The Nail and the Oracle, Volume XI: The Complete Stories of Theodore Sturgeon, he may even have been the greatest SF writer ever. Sure, he was quirky, but he could write like an angel and he well deserves the adulation directed toward his ghost since his death in 1985. The present volume collects a dozen of his works from 1957 to 1970, “his prime story-writing years.” One of the stars of the collection is the famous “If All Men Were Brothers, Would You Let One Marry Your Sister?” Another is “Runesmith,” cowritten with Harlan. For the rest, order a copy. Sturgeon, as long as he’s been gone, is not a writer one regrets reading. |
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Every year, the Science Fiction Poetry Association hands out its Rhysling Award (named after Heinlein’s blind bard of the spaceways) to what its members deem the best examples of short poems and long poems. Members of the SFPA nominate one in each category, and all the nominees are presented to the membership in an annual anthology. The 2007 Rhysling Anthology holds 79 of the best SFF poems published in 2006. Some did not impress me, but a few did. Lawrence Schimel’s “Kristallnacht” is a retelling of the Cinderella tale that echoes eerily of history. G. O. Clark’s “Spot in Space” is a nice commemoration of the dawn of the space age. William Sanders’s “The Last Madman” could be taken as a paean to Prozac and its ilk, but that’s not the way to read it, not at all.The best poetry is both provocative and disturbing. You will find here a number of examples to support that statement. |
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"The Reference Library" copyright 2007, Tom Easton
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