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Paul Melko’s very readable first novel, Singularity’s Ring, adds some new thinking to the idea of the Singularity. Melko begins with something many contemplators of the Singularity have managed to overlook: technological progress is not an unbroken upward curve. It advances by fits and starts, marked by stumbles and even reverses. Given that thought, the change from pre-Singularity to post-Singularity may very well not be as sudden as many expect. Indeed, the leap from pre– to post– may fail, even catastrophically, and the attempt may have to be repeated, perhaps even many times.
In Melko’s world, the Earth is girdled by a Ring, a vast construction once inhabited by the Community, a sizable portion of humanity who had elected to have brainjacks implanted so they could share access to each other’s minds and to the artificial intelligence that ran the Ring. Some decades before the story, all members of the Community dropped dead. The Ring lay fallow, for non-members of the Community, lacking jacks, couldn’t get in. The remainder of humanity figured that they had made the posthuman transition and vanished through a rift in space on the border of the Solar System. However, the folks left behind had other things to think about, for they were enmeshed in the Gene Wars. When that was over, a new technology developed, using genetic engineering to remake humans from individuals into small groups or pods linked together by pheromonal communication. Most pods are two or three. There are some quads. Apollo Papadopulos is a quintet—Quant, Strom, Meda, Manuel, and Moira—being trained to captain a starship intended to go through the rift and perhaps find the Community.
The tale begins when they are on a survival exercise in winter mountains. An avalanche threatens their camp, and there is a single clue that must rouse the astute reader’s suspicions about whether the avalanche is natural. With a bit of good fortune and heroism, they survive. As they trek out of the mountains, they encounter a pod of bears. Such a thing is unheard of, as is their ability to communicate pheromonally with them (such communication is only within the pod, so far as they know). After their return to civilization, they encounter considerable suspicion of their report and searches fail to find the bears.
While waiting for their next training exercise, a last remnant of the Community (he was on ice at the time) seduces Meda and gives her a brainjack. Once in space, they encounter sabotage and an attempt by a military duo to kill or capture them. They escape, but now they have a long trek ahead, through the Ring (remember, Meda now has a jack), up the Amazon, past more attempts to do away with them, through the mountains, and more, to discover their own origins, the nature of the factions in their society, and the path to a second attempt at the true Singularity.
There is of course a great deal of detail and incident on the way to the conclusion, but I’ll leave that for you to discover and enjoy. The book is a thoughtful addition to the genre and well worth your attention.
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Spider Star,
Mike Brotherton,
Tor,
$26.95,
448 pp.
(ISBN:9780765311252)
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Mike Brotherton’s Spider Star has an interesting premise marred by main characters who can’t get their noses out of their navels long enough to think ahead, leaving subordinate characters to make things happen. And yes, I do complain from time to time about characters who just plunge ahead and never have an introspective moment, but sheesh! Brotherton’s heroes are something else again. (But see below for my moderating admission.)
As I said, the premise is interesting. It may even be the best part of the novel! We begin with a colony on the planet Argo, which once had indigenes. The prologue shows us an archeologist, Virginia, who is finding two-million-year-old things in a remarkable state of preservation. When she opens a box, it seems to be full of toys, demonstrating that in some ways the “Argonauts” were rather like humans even if they did look like big furry spiders. One of the toys activates and begins to tell a story. Later we will learn that the story had to do with the Spider Star, a mysterious place light years away, not a star, not a planet, where one faction of Argonauts obtained a superweapon to use against another faction.
Years later, meet Manuel Rusk. He is a mission specialist in training to lead an exploratory voyage. As part of the training he and his crew are looking for Argonaut remnants on Argo’s moon, and of course they find some. It looks like a base, and here’s the remarkable state of preservation again. There’s a door, and when he lightheartedly knocks, he triggers something in the sun that sends a fireball heading his way. They have just time enough to cherry pick the base before it is destroyed. And then the fireballs start flying toward Argo.
On Argo, Virginia is now married to Frank Klingston. He’s the only one around who has ever met aliens, for as an explorer he once ran into one and brought back a new space drive. Eventually we learn just how weird things can get when two lonely sentients meet a long way from home, but that is not germane at the moment. He gets offered the job of leading a mission to the Spider Star, rather annoying Rusk, who expected to fill that slot himself. The mission, of course, is to find the folks who supplied the superweapon and ask them how to turn the damned thing off.
And off they go. Once they reach the Spider Star—which is really quite an interesting place—they run into a variety of kinds of trouble, lose a few folks, and almost literally stumble into the answers they need. Rusk (especially) and Klingston are the navel-gazers, and to be fair I should grant that they are in over their heads and they do have some right to obsess over their inadequacies. Rusk was not trained to deal with aliens; he also feels unfairly bumped from the Numero Uno position he expected to have. Klingston was tapped because he got lucky once; he’s left his wife and kids behind and knows he may never see them again; he also knows that his chief claim to adequacy as a leader is his age and whatever wisdom or patience he may have acquired over the years. It works fairly well, considering, and Rusk actually winds up learning a lot from him.
I didn’t count up how many pages of the book were devoted to the navel-gazing, but it felt like the book could easily have been ten percent shorter and as a result fifty percent better. As it is, it’s really better than adequate, and if you don’t mind the navel-gazing, it’s better than that.
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Jeffrey A. Carver began writing about living stars many years ago, with From a Changeling Star (1989), introduced the robot character Jeaves in Down the Stream of Stars (1990), and began the Chaos Chronicles with Neptune Crossing (1994), in which John Bandicut discovered an alien device, the “translator,” on Triton, acquired a resident quarx, and was sent off on a mission to save Earth from a malignly targeted comet, leaving his girlfriend Julie behind. Next stop was Shipworld, floating above the galactic plane, new friends, and missions to save the galaxy from the schemes of ancient artificial intelligences who—like Saberhagen’s Berserkers—crave the destruction of all organic life. Now we have Sunborn, and Bandicut and his friends are off to stop an engineered hypernova in the Trapezium, which, if it blows, will destroy stars and worlds—including Earth—for 2,000 light years around. They have a desperate appeal from a hyperdimensional creature named Ed and help from a pair of sentient gas clouds escaped from a parallel universe. And the plot leaps quite madly from pot to kettle to frying pan to fire. The pace never lets up, except to revisit Sol System, where Julie is serving as intermediary between the translator and the humans who see this ancient device as a fount of technological wealth. But the translator has other ideas, for the threat to Earth is hardly over. Look yonder, and there is a tiny alien device aiming to divert more comets toward Earth, and only Julie is in a position to intercept the threat. Will she follow Bandicut’s course to Shipworld and beyond? Will she ever meet Bandicut again? If she does, how will she and Bandicut’s current love-interest, Antares, get along? Since Antares is a Thespi Third-Female, a mating facilitator of sorts, is Carver about to get kinky? And what of the ancient foe? The current battle is only a battle, not the war, which has been running for eons. Is there any long-term hope?
Carver isn’t done yet. In fact, he has several more volumes to go to wrap up his remarkably expansive vision.
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Mike Resnick’s Starship: Mercenary follows Starship: Pirate and Starship: Mutiny as space opera in the classic vein, but with plenty of touches of pure Resnick. The earlier books introduced Wilson Cole as an officer of the Republic’s space navy. He is extraordinarily competent and honorable to boot, which is just what got him stuck on the Theodore Roosevelt, a superannuated warship staffed by misfits and screw-ups. When the ship’s captain tried to destroy a world and its people just to keep the enemy Teroni from seizing a fuel dump, Cole intervened and saved the day. For his efforts, he was court-martialed. But since he had long since earned his crew’s loyalty, they busted him out of jail, stole the Teddy, and took off to play pirate.
But Cole is far too honorable to make a good pirate. Once that becomes clear, and he has enlisted a couple of appealing characters—one a Pirate Queen straight out of the old pulps, and one an alien who collects Dickens books and pretends he is David Copperfield—he becomes a mercenary. Copperfield is his business manager until he comes too close to biting off more than Cole can chew. Cole manages, but the ship takes enough damage to need repair, so they visit Singapore Station, a big space station, where they meet the Platinum Duke. More mercenary missions ensue, and Cole acquires ships and a few ex-navy sorts who quite agree that the Republic is a wickeder entity than the Teroni.
As we’ve known from the beginning, the next book will be Starship: Rebel, followed by Starship: Flagship. The line of progression is clear. Cole is building a navy of his own. We know where Resnick is going with this; the fun is in the details (such as his Pirate Queen). And perhaps in a bit of speculation . . .
According to Resnick’s timeline of the Birthright Universe, Flagship will be set in 1970 G.E., and his first tale of the post-Republic Democracy is set in 2122. That’s a sizable gap, and we may be forgiven if we choose to speculate that in it Wilson Cole gets to be emperor.
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Valley of DayGlo,
Nick DiChario,
Fitzhenry & Whiteside,
240 pp.,
$28.95 hc
(ISBN: 9780889954106)
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Nick DiChario’s Valley of Day-Glo is an absurdist curiosity that should appeal to anyone whose sense of reality is a bit off center. The scene is centuries in the future, long after Hed’iohe, the Creator, destroyed the whites, yellows, and blacks—the Honio’o—with environmental catastrophe, leaving only the descendants of the Iroquois Indians, one tribe of which, the Gushedon’dada, has but three members left. Mother Who’s Afraid of Virgina Woolf?, Father The Outlaw Josey Wales, and their son eunuch-boy Broadway Danny Rose have taken their names from icons of Honio’o culture.
In the heat of argument, alas, Mother strangles Father. Then there is nothing to do but bundle up the body and go a’questing for the rumored Valley of Day-Glo, where death may become life. Alas again, they run into the Senecas, who are big on reviving pre-Honio’o ways and show a disturbing tendency to cannibalism. Fortunately, revolution overthrows them just in time for the last two Gushedon’dadas to find the valley. In due time, Broadway Danny Rose even becomes a hero, stops being a eunuch, and discovers the giant talking coffee pot that holds his fate.
Definitely absurd. But DiChario has made it make an amazing amount of sense. He comments on many foibles of the modern world and even explains himself by saying, “It’s not the truth that’s important, Danny, it’s the story, and it’s what we discover about ourselves in pursuit of the story that makes all the difference.”
Why else do we read fiction?
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Robert J. Sawyer’s Identity Theft and Other Stories offers seventeen tales from various sources, including this magazine. I’m not going to take time to describe the stories—you’re familiar with his work—but the publisher is not one familiar to many US readers. Fitzhenry & Whiteside is a Canadian house that deserves cross-border attention. I’ve mentioned it in the past in connection with some of Julie Czerneda’s work, and here it is again with two books of very different flavors that are both worth your time and money.
If you want absurdity, go with the DiChario. If you want a more traditional, accessible approach, grab the Sawyer.
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Ellen Datlow has a long history of editing SF&F magazines and anthologies behind her. Now she brings us The Del Rey Book of Science Fiction and Fantasy, filled with sixteen great stories by old writers (Elizabeth Bear, Carol Emshwiller, Maureen F. McHugh, Barry Malzberg, Pat Cadigan) and new (e.g., Margo Lanagan). It’s a varied mix with a number of excellent and moving tales. Christopher Rowe’s “Gather” offers a nice new twist on the post-apocalypse tale. Gather is a young man who dwells in a community ruled by priests who consult their bibles about everything, including things that could not possibly be in any ancient scripture. But then he gives us a glimpse of a bible, with its glowing blue screen, and a piece of paper shows the face of God, who dwells apart from people on the other side of the river. Except that on the paper God is surrounded by people. And that is enough to start Gather on an adventure; don’t be surprised if the story turns out to be the first chapter of a novel. Lucy Sussex’s “Ardent Clouds” concerns a woman who loves to photograph volcanoes, often under the direction of a distant man who often seems to know just when things are about to pop; fortunately, she respects folk customs. Barry Malzberg’s “The Passion of Azazel” bends the folktale and ritual of the scapegoat into a tale of rapture in a quite astonishing way.
A varied mix, and excellent. If you cannot find enough enjoyment here to be worth the price of a trade paperback, the fault lies not in the stars, nor in Datlow’s editing.
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Nancy Kress has written some remarkable novels but her shorter works are just as grand. To see why it’s those shorter works that have won all her awards, order a copy of Nano Comes to Clifford Falls and Other Stories. More than one story here is a tour de force. Consider “Ej-Es,” of which she says she “got to do something I’ve always wanted to try. I wanted to introduce the words of a made-up language, one or two at a time, and then write the final paragraph entirely in that language.” It’s a short paragraph, but it works in a uniquely powerful and eloquent way. “Product Development,” one of the Nature shorts, is a remarkably deft short study of media dependence. She also likes to explore the future of artificial intelligence, as in “Savior,” in which an alien spacecraft parks itself in Minnesota for centuries, completely ignoring human beings. And there are ten more for you to enjoy.
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The National Academy of Sciences recently released the third edition of Science, Evolution, and Creationism, “written to serve as a resource for people who find themselves embroiled in debates about evolution. It provides information about the role that evolution plays in modern biology and the reasons why only scientifically based explanations should be included in public school science courses.” It also discusses the evidence for an Earth much, much older than 6,000 years. To anyone with some science background, it is a clearly written and even eloquent review of modern science. However, it seems unlikely to convince those who take their various scriptures so literally that they reject the validity of scientific evidence and scientific thinking. It insists that science and religion are not in conflict and cites many religious thinkers who agree that the two fields are not incompatible. But—admittedly in the interest of not antagonizing an important segment of its potential audience—it downplays the truth that for some sects, scripture is the only admissible explanation for the origin of the universe, Earth, life, and humanity. Scriptural explanations definitely do conflict with scientific explanations, and to the extent that religion and science endeavor to explain the same things, they do conflict. Only when religion confines itself to discussions of the nonexistent (the supernatural, or the spiritual), does it not conflict with science, which can only say about such things, “No evidence.” And as Carl Sagan once said, absence of evidence is not evidence of absence.
Does that seem harsh? So be it. The only value of religion that I have ever been able to discern is that it helps people live amicably together, and that tends to work best in religiously homogeneous societies. In pluralistic societies, it far too often breaks down. Indeed, the very fact that this book is necessary provides an example of that breakdown. Evolution is not debated by most religious groups. It is an issue only because in our society, with its profusion of religious groups, there is a minority of very vocal extremists, some of whom have actually said that their ultimate aim is to throw modern science—biology, paleontology, astronomy, physics, anthropology, psychology, and more—out of the schools because it leads people to reject traditional modes of thought. Civil rights, feminism, the Pill, equal opportunity, TV and film, modern music, and any kind of liberal thinking are anathema to them. The decadent modern world must be restored to the God-fearing, hymn-singing, patriarchal status of yore.
Fortunately, there are only a few such extremists. Most on the creationist side of the debate are more focused. I would like to think that this little book had a chance to reach them, but I am skeptical. On the other side of the debate, you may find yourself trying to convince a school board to resist the creationists and refuse to damage science education. This book could provide you with data and arguments to help.
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"The Reference Library" copyright 2008, Tom Easton
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