Analog -- The Reference Library

Of course, Murphy rules the universe. Let’s have a war here at home, with orbiting battle stations responding to every sign of electrical activity with circuit-frying electromagnetic pulses. That takes care of computers, power stations, automobiles, airplanes, and civilization itself. It also cuts short the release of greenhouse gases from fossil fuel combustion.

That is, no more global warming. But the sunshade is still up there, turning down the heat. Add a spot of nuclear winter. Now we have an ice age, known to the scattered survivors of humanity as the Greatwinter. Once Greatwinter wanes, however, humanity finds that those orbiting battle stations are still up there and still zapping any sign of electrical activity. If there’s any hope of rebuilding technological civilization, it can’t be by the path we followed. No dynamos, no radios, no computers.

Yet Sean McMullen reminds us in Souls in the Great Machine that there is more than one way to skin a cat. His setting is Australia some 1,700 years after Greatwinter’s Waning. Travel is by rail, with trains powered by wind (vertical, revolving sails) and pedal (passengers who work hard enough get paid for making the trip). Communication is by "beamflash" network, towers that use mirrors by day and flares by night to send messages.

Computers? Meet Zarvora Cybeline, Highliber of Libris, the great library at Rochester. She is building one in secret and discovering that it can help her outplay a game champion, solve routing problems, decode encrypted messages, and much more, much more efficiently and quickly than any mere human can. Yet her "calculor" uses humans–armed with abacuses!–instead of transistors. The key is breaking calculations down into repetitive elements to be performed quickly and reliably by human "components" arranged just so. And once she gets rid of the subjective element, it works (it really would, too).

Of course, the human element remains. Her calculor components do need some rudiment of arithmetical skill, so she must recruit and kidnap to build her machine. Her guards find love among the components (so does she!). As the calculor succeeds, it shifts balances of political power, creates rivalries, and–as she repeatedly insists– "remakes the world." Human jealousies and frustrations create currents that will sweep beyond the reach of the beamflash culture to desert nomads and result in a threat to civilization. A rake will become a hero, a noble right hand a mighty opponent, and awesome relics of an age ago will be revealed.

Of course, Zarvora has a secret agenda. She is building her calculor for a purpose, and all those human elements get rather in the way. I can’t be too specific about her aims, but early on McMullen makes it clear that the technology that built the sunshade is still active, as are the battle stations, and the Highliber clearly wishes to do something about them.

How can such primitive technology reach into space? Here McMullen displays considerable cleverness. He’s quite convincing, as he indeed is in most other aspects of this very satisfying saga of empire and technology. You’ll enjoy it.

Gravity Dreams, L. E. Modesitt, Jr., TOR, $24.95, 399 pp. (ISBN: 0-312-86826-X)

L. E. Modesitt, Jr., is a writer deeply concerned for the impact of humanity upon the world. This concern shows clearly in fantasies such as The Order War and science fiction such as the Ecologic Envoy series and The Ghost of the Revelator (reviewed here last January). It is thus no surprise to see it again in his latest, Gravity Dreams.

The setting is a far-future Earth whose societies, such as Dorcha, are dedicated to maintaining a rather paranoid status quo. Long before, the Ancients turned themselves into "demons" and nearly destroyed the world. Sensible people prevailed, however, exterminated the demons, and devised ways to detect and destroy any demons they found thereafter. They have some high-tech toys–transportation is by "gliders" that seem to use some sort of anti-gravity propulsion–but most of their efforts are devoted to stabilizing philosophies such as Dorcha’s Zenlike Dzin, which emphasizes seeing things as they are.

Now meet poor Tyndel, running for his life from the demon-hunters. Just a few days before, he was a junior master of Dzin, tasked to be a hinterland town’s schoolmaster. Faced with a smartass kid, he confronts the boy’s father and is made captive in a cave, bound, and infected with the dust that creates demons.

In due time, armed with demon-strength, he bursts his bonds, smashes his way out of his prison, and returns home to find those demon-hunters at the gate. They murder his beloved wife, and he starts running toward the border with Rykasha, the land of demons.

He comes to in a bed. A woman, Cerelle, is there to tell him the demon secret is nanotechnology–nanites–that give health and longevity, strength and power. Also, she says, you owe us for saving you. We think you’ll make a great starship pilot.

"Like hell!" cries Tyndel. Despite his Dzin, he just cannot accept what he sees. Boneheaded and stubborn, he is shipped off to a distant space station to pay his debt to demon society with grunt labor. Yet eventually he does come to realize how that society is organized: Any high-tech society suffers from a conflict between enabled power and human folly; it can survive only if everyone behaves responsibly, accepting and paying debts such as his own.

Those who refuse to behave responsibly are "adjusted" with special brain nanites. Because the process impairs mental functions, the Rykashans go to some lengths to bring people such as Tyndel around without it. In his case, they succeed and he winds up fulfilling all the fondest dreams for his future.

There’s a maguffin, of course–a mysterious anomaly in space that interferes with interstellar travel. Some think it’s God. Modesitt tells us that it has something to do with nanotechnology though he gives no basis for that beyond the simple claim. Whatever, Tyndel winds up solving most of the mystery and establishes himself as a hero.

The space adventure side of the tale will be all that many readers want, and they will be thoroughly satisfied. Modesitt never fails on that level. But he is more than an adventure writer; he is also quite a thoughtful fellow, and I found his musings on the need for responsibility in a high-tech society the more fascinating aspect of this novel.

The Cassini Division, Ken MacLeod, TOR, $22.95, 240 pp. (ISBN: 0-312-87044-2)

Ken MacLeod deals with nanotechnology too, in The Cassini Division, but he is considerably less thoughtful about it. After a period of chaos marked by the Fall of Capitalism, the "Green Death," when the environmentalists waged war to save the world, and the Crash, when computer viruses destroyed the basis of civilization, humanity is flourishing thirty billion strong. Capitalism is dead, replaced by a triumphantly anarchistic sort of communism, the Greens are extinct, and the Outwarders, who spawned those viruses, remain to be dealt with. Nanotechnology has made people virtually immortal and replaced electronic computers with mechanical Babbage engines built of nanoscale parts (they are apparently less subject to computer viruses).

Who are the Outwarders? The rich, the powerful, and the nerds fled Earth’s chaos for space and wound up at Jupiter, where they downloaded themselves into virtuality, became the "fast folk," went mad, and attacked with those viruses. Their slaves, human minds bound to robot bodies, escaped through a wormhole to New Mars, ten thousand light-years yonder.

Now meet Ellen May Ngwethu. A thorough and appalling bigot about artificial intelligences and mental downloads, she believes that only meat counts and that competitors for meat humanity’s seat on the pinnacle of creation must be exterminated. She is also a leader of the Cassini Division, the elite military force that guards the border against the Outwarders and dreams of destroying them utterly. She is on Earth, hunting out the old physicist whose past work made the wormhole possible, hoping to learn how to pass through it to visit New Mars. She finds him, but he will cooperate only if the Division tries to negotiate with the Jovian Outwarders instead of attacking outright. Ellen controls her bigotry, goes along, and discovers that the Jovians seem much more benign than history suggests.

Through the wormhole, then, and here is New Mars, where AIs are recognized as persons, of all things! Rampant capitalists are eager to send a fleet back through the wormhole to trade with the Jovians, and so they do. The plans to attack the Jovians are cancelled and Ellen is chastised, but she is firm in her paranoia. She prepares a backup plan just in case the Jovians prove treacherous.

Ellen is a classic hero–the Old Guard on the ramparts, ready to be proved right and to win the day and then to retire into the depths of a cave until her time rolls round again. She is wrongheaded and insane, but one has to admire her determination and persistence and applaud her for yanking the proverbial chestnuts out of the fire.

No matter how wrongheaded or nuts they be, says MacLeod, such folks are useful. I suspect he also wishes that communism had not proved to be such an abject failure.

Starfish, Peter Watts, TOR, $23.95, 317 pp. (ISBN: 0-312-86855-3)

Peter Watts’s Starfish is a decent novel that suffers from bad blurbing. The back cover trumpets that "An ancient enemy of humanity is rising out of the depths of the ocean" quite as if we have here a case of intrepid heroes meeting the Thing from the Depths. But there is nothing in the tale that remotely resembles that, and the reader, expecting to meet the Thing at every turn of a page, is constantly disappointed.

The tale begins with a visit to a rift zone deep in the Pacific, where normally small abyssal fish grow for some unknown reason to monster sizes. A power plant is being built here (and at other such zones), and people will live on site to maintain it. Who? Meet the first two, one relatively normal, one twisted by a past of abuse. The latter can stand the constant exposure to hazard–including attacks by monster fish one can tear apart with bare hands–while the former breaks and leaves. The Powers That Be pay attention, and when the deep base is fully staffed, the staff members are as strange as their environment. They get stranger, too, for something about that environment creates in them an empathy that is almost telepathy.

Then they find a strange device not far from their base. It has a "brain"–a smart gel constructed of neurons–and it is radioactive. Indeed, they soon realize, it is a large nuclear bomb, and its brain is running simulation after simulation to figure when an explosion, right here on a major crack in the planet’s crust, would have maximal effect on coastlines over yonder.

Why? No one knows. But now there’s a visitor, a psychologist studying the crew’s functioning. When he returns to the surface, he is quarantined; eventually he is told that there is a strange bug in the deeps. It’s responsible for the local giantism, and its chemistry is different; a holdover from the dawn of life on Earth, it lost the Darwinian competition. But people are worried. . . .

I suppose the blurb-writer’s "ancient enemy of humanity" has to be the primordial bug, but since humanity has never met it before, the label is a bit off. Watts’s true enemy is much more human stupidity, the sort of thing that turns children into walking disaster zones, treats adults as interchangeable things, insists that unchecked fertility is a Good Thing, and blindly trusts that our artificially intelligent creations (smart gels) must share our priorities. That is indeed an ancient enemy, and it may in fact be our undoing.

As Watts develops that point, he tells an absorbing tale set in a bizarre world and hinging upon intriguing technology. He’s done his homework well, and it shows. The book’s single greatest flaw is surely its last few paragraphs, so madly desperate that they damage the suspension of disbelief at the very last possible moment.

Teranesia, Greg Egan, Harper, (ISBN: 0-061-05092-X)

Greg Egan’s Teranesia is both intriguing and topical. It opens on a tiny island in the sea off Indonesia, where Prabir Suresh minds his baby sister, Madhusree, while his parents research local butterflies whose organs and life cycle are not quite like those of any other butterfly on the planet.

Prabir is intelligent, imaginative, and creative, and in this lies disaster. He goes to school via the ’Net, where he also chats with strangers from all over the world. Warned by his parents not to reveal personal details, he borrows his father’s name and history. He also poses as a sympathizer of the anti-government revolutionaries. It is thus not surprising that when Indonesia erupts in political turmoil, he becomes an orphan. Nor that he blames himself.

Yet he is a resourceful chap. He gets himself and Madhusree into a boat and gets to another island. In due time, they reach a refugee camp and then an exceedingly empty-headed postmodern intellectual relative in Toronto. And years later, when they are both young adults, Madhusree gets a chance to join an expedition to Indonesia to investigate a flurry of strange creatures whose anatomies are different from those of any of their kin.

Surely, he thinks, the old home island must be involved. Madhusree will be in danger. He thus opposes the trip, and when she goes anyway, he follows, hoping to protect her.

Of course, his real reason, secret perhaps even to himself, is guilt. And kid sis is no longer a kid; she really can take care of herself. But Prabir hasn’t caught on to a number of things yet. Go he must, and fall in with a researcher so that he–and the reader, of course–gets to see what is really going on: sudden changes in genomes, not just random mutations, but drastic leaps due to a mysterious molecular mechanism of unknown origin. And a hint that it can
effect people as well as butterflies and birds, plants and snakes.

Teranesia works in several ways–character, plot, science, politics. It entertains and satisfies, and if you feel as I did that Egan stopped a bit short of what could have been an astonishingly nifty revelation, please consider that perhaps the unimaginable is best left unimagined.

Saucer Wisdom, Rudy Rucker, TOR, $23.95, 277 pp. (ISBN: 0-312-86884-7)

Rudy Rucker has made a name for himself as a writer of both science fiction and popular science (e.g., Infinity and the Mind and The Fourth Dimension). In my opinion, he is stronger in the latter role, for his fiction, though it is often based in the math of infinity and extra dimensions, tends to be quite light.

So what can we say of his latest, Saucer Wisdom? It claims to be "a nonfiction novel," "a work of popular science speculation." As a novel, it’s as light as anything he’s ever done. As pop sci, it’s intriguing and outlandish and more than a little egoistic (the saucer folks, through their intermediary, assure Rucker that people will still be reading this book two millennia hence!).

The premise is that Rucker has met a strange character named Frank Shook, who says he has gone for rides in flying saucers, forget all that malarkey about Grays and sexual molestation, and here’s the dope on what they’ve told him about paratime. Rucker visits the Shook shack and discovers that his informant contacts the aliens by setting up a multiple feedback rig involving three TV sets and video cameras. They then abduct him, returning him in the same instant, and "Suuurrre!" says a skeptical Rucker. Except that Shook now has a sheaf of notes on what the aliens told and showed him while he was gone.

Now we hear of life boxes and dragonfly cameras, a TV (UV–universal viewer) system with as many channels as we now have web pages, piezoplastic (it contracts under electrical impulses) sewer cleaners, dildos, vehicles, and fabrics, radiotelepathy, and more, more, more. Not much will be unfamiliar to the science fiction audience, which has seen such things in a host of stories over the last few decades. The general audience will be more impressed, for this is not the sort of thing they have encountered in Discover or Popular Science or their favorite Sunday supplement.

And just perhaps, Rucker’s prognostications will turn out to be on the money. Keep an eye out for any mention of piezoplastic in the business news.

Dark Life: Martian Nanobacteria, Rock-Eating Cave Bugs, and OtherExtreme Organisms of Inner Earth and Outer Space, Michael Ray Taylor, Scribner, $23, 287 pp. (ISBN: 0-684-84191-6)

Michael Ray Taylor, professor of journalism, brings us Dark Life: Martian Nanobacteria, Rock-Eating Cave Bugs, and Other Extreme Organisms of Inner Earth and Outer Space as a fascinating account of living things most of us are totally unaware of. He is a bit partisan about the "bacterial" forms in the Martian meteorite, which now seem quite clearly to be mineral artifacts, but there is no real question about the bacteria found in deep caves and deep-sea rift zones (as well as embedded in rock drilled from deep beneath our feet). With his focus on cave bacteria (not surprising since he is a prominent caver), he tracks their discovery and the realization that their activities may be responsible for dissolving classic caverns such as Carlsbad from the bedrock. Similar bacteria may even be responsible for kidney stones and other ailments.

Chemistry and Science Fiction, Jack H. Stocker, ed., American Chemical Society, 292 + xxii pp. (ISBN: 0-8412-3248-2)

I recently heard from David Brin, who wanted to recruit my assistance in his effort to encourage kids to read SF. He has agreed to underwrite the first and second prizes in a contest–to be promoted and coordinated by this magazine–designed to encourage and reward the development of Web sites that assist educators in using SF to liven up their curricula. The contest has yet to be officially announced, so don’t get excited yet. Do, however, think of what you might do to earn a piece of David’s money.

You could begin by looking at Julie E. Czerneda’s Packing Fraction & Other Tales of Science & Imagination and No Limits: Developing Scientific Literacy Using Science Fiction, reviewed here in the July-August column. You could also get a copy of Jack H. Stocker’s Chemistry and Science Fiction, which grew from a symposium of that name at the Spring 1992 meeting of the American Chemical Society. It contains some pretty basic history of the field, essays that focus on chemistry in SF (e.g., Asimov’s Thiotimoline stories), in Sherlock Holmes, and in Star Trek, and three reprinted stories. Of particular interest in this context are three essays on "Science Fiction: A Classroom Resource," "Using Science Fiction to Help Teach Science," and "Space, Time, and Education."

The Science of Star Wars, Jeanne Cavelos, St. Martin’s, $22.95, 245 pp. (ISBN: 0-312-20958-4)

Another potentially helpful book is Jeanne Cavelos’s The Science of Star Wars, which covers much more than chemistry–there are robotics, biology, astrophysics, and more–and provides a reading list of additional titles (and a few Web sites).