A Night Without Stars (Chronicle of the Fallers 02) – Peter F Hamilton (2016)
The planet Bienvenido is in crisis. It has finally escaped the Void, emerging into regular space. But it’s millions of light-years from Commonwealth assistance, and humans are battling the Fallers for control of their world. This rapacious adversary, evolved to destroy all sentient life, has infiltrated every level of human society – hijacking unwilling bodies so its citizens fear their leaders, friends and family.
A mysterious figure known as the Warrior Angel leads a desperate resistance. She’s helped by forbidden Commonwealth technology, which gives her a crucial edge. But the government obstructs the Angel’s efforts at every turn, blinded by prejudice and technophobia. As Fallers also prepare to attack from the skies, she might need to incite rebellion to fight this invasion. But the odds seem impossible.
Then astronaut Ry Evine uncovers one last hope. On a mission against the enemy, his spacecraft damages an unidentified vessel. This crash-lands on the planet carrying unexpected cargo: a baby. This extraordinary Commonwealth child possesses knowledge that could save them all. But if the Fallers catch her, the people of Bienvenido will not survive.
Blurb from the 2016 Del Rey Edition
One has to confess that beginning this book was a worry since it had been years since I read The Abyss Beyond Dreams, and as I’m not too good with even remembering the names of my loved ones, it’s rather too much to expect me to remember a large number of the standard Hamilton enormous cast.
However, this is set some 250 years in the future following the Great Transition (as it is now called) when the Void ejected the planet Bienvenido to an orbit about a sun, lost in the space between galaxies.
Society has advanced to a point (with the covert help of Nigel Sheldon’s ANAdroids) where rockets can be sent into orbit to destroy the alien trees which are bombarding the planet with Faller eggs. These are alien predators which ‘eggsume’ human bodies and reassemble them, but with alien Faller minds.
The world is tightly controlled by an authoritarian regime which not only withholds information about the extent of Faller infiltration, but restricts technology which could help, fearing that the Eliters with their inherited Commonwealth macrocellular clusters and advanced genetics will stage a coup.
There is therefore a mostly new cast, although some of the more long-lived characters, such as The Warrior Angel, and Nigel Sheldon’s Anadroids, are still extant.
Eliters who wish to have any sort of meaningful career have to keep their status secret, and there is an interesting contrast between Captain Chaing of the feared PSR secret police and Ry, an astronaut, both of whom are hiding their Eliter status in order to retain their position.
The good guys are in a race against time to assemble a defence against the Fallers before either a) the Fallers take control of the planet or b) the government nukes the rest of the world in an attempt to destroy their forces.
It is a far more satisfactory novel than Abyss which I found marred by the repeated format used in the Void trilogy. The Fallers themselves, as I have previously mentioned, are merely another incarnation of the Possessed from his Night’s Dawn trilogy, which also featured star systems being transported far away from their home galaxy into intergalactic space.
There is something missing, though. Hamilton is at his best when he can move from one extraordinary human (or alien) community to another. We love the AIs, and the wormhole technology, the fascinating environments that Man has created on a thousand planets, the ships, the Dyson spheres and the myriad alien environments. Hamilton cones into his own here in the thrilling climax, when we do indeed find wonder and surprises on other planets of the system.
This final section sings, in the way that Nights Dawn and the Starflyer sequence sang, but the rest is slightly lacking on wonder albeit very high scoring in pace and excitement.
Despite my criticisms there is no doubt that Hamilton is still streets ahead of other writers of the New Space Opera. His writing pervades you with its atmosphere and ideas and colours your day. I am a huge fan, but he can do better than this.
It is not clear if Brexit played any subconscious role in the plotting, but I am sure the conspiracy theorists among fans have already blogged their views on Hamilton having a man called Nigel trying to save society from the unwanted rules of a controlling and undemocratic power. The world is divided between two factions with entrenched views, none of which will accept the viewpoints of the other, and the government are shameless in lying about the dangers the population face. When the people leave, however, they realise that their life is now a bit shit, and they are left at the mercy of a vicious right wing government who continue to lie about everything and stay in power for two hundred and fifty years. There’s got to be something in that.
Ring – Stephen Baxter (Xeelee #04) (1994)
There’s an awful lot going on in this volume and, to be fair, Baxter has his work cut out tying the events in with the other Xeelee universe narratives.
The Paradoxa organisation has evolved in the wake of Michael Poole’s original journey to the future in ‘Timelike Infinity’ and the subsequent discovery that there were powerful and inimical aliens out there. Paradoxa has now become a powerful body whose remit is to preserve Humanity. What has also been discovered is that someone or something is destabilising our sun. Paradoxa has bred an engineered human, Lieserl, who will grow at the rate of a human year every day and whose personality will be downloaded into an AI which will be able to function within the sun. The organisation have also commandeered a prototype interstellar ship to take a thousand year trip along with a portable wormhole so that on their return – like Poole – they will be able to return through the wormhole from 5 million years in the future.
Things don’t go according to plan though, and the crew – who may be the only humans left in the universe – devise a plan to head for The Ring, the vast galaxy-devouring structure built by the godlike Xeelee.
It’s certainly a tour de force of Hard SF. Baxter throws in an entire gallimaufry of complex physics concepts, such as the photino birds, creatures of dark matter who can live within stars, structures millions of light years wide built of cosmic string, exotic matter and extraordinarily detailed explanations of the lifecycles of suns.
The Ring itself, once we finally reach the beast, is the ultimate (as of yet) Big Dumb Object, woven of cosmic string and with a diameter of millions of light years.
One could argue that Baxter here has possibly over-egged the cosmic pudding and that the narrative could have possibly have been dealt with in two separate novels, to give space for some of the many characters to live and breathe.
Clearly the science can not be faulted and where excitement can be found here it is in the wonderful tour-de-forces of scientific hyperbole which here and there manages to recreate that sense of wonder that is all too lacking in most modern SF.
If it fails anywhere it is maybe in a lack of suspense, the peaks and troughs of emotional tension, cliffhangers, the things that make us want to read on. Certainly there are action sequences, but they lack a certain vivacity, something common to Baxter novels.
Overall though, it’s a marvellous conclusion (at least in internal chronology) to Baxter’s Xeelee universe.
The Naked God (Night’s Dawn #3) – Peter F Hamilton (1999)
‘HELL JUST WENT QUANTUM
The Confederation is starting to collapse politically and economically, allowing the ‘possessed’ to infiltrate more worlds.
Quinn Dexter is loose on Earth, destroying the great arcologies one at a time. As Louise Kavanagh tries to track him down, she manages to acquire some strange and powerful allies whose goal does not quite match her own.
The campaign to liberate Mortonridge from the possessed degenerates into a horrendous land battle of the type not seen by humankind for six hundred years. Then some of the protagonists escape in a very unexpected direction…
Joshua Calvert and Syrinx now fly their starships on a mission to find the Sleeping God – which an alien race believes holds the key to finally overthrowing the possessed.’
Blurb from the 2000 Pan paperback edition.
The conclusion to Hamilton’s shelf-busting trilogy doesn’t initially quite match up to the brilliance of the first two books, but thankfully builds to a deeply satisfying climax.
In the conclusion, we discover that the sentient habitat Tranquility, which we last saw disappear while under attack from the forces of Al Capone, has reappeared among the Edenist habitats of Jupiter.
It would appear that all along the giant living Rama-style cylinder had built-in technology which would allow it to ‘jump’ through space in times of danger. The Kiint seemed unaware of this, however, and had already teleported back to their homeworld. The juvenile Kiint Haile also took along Jay Hilton, much to the disapproval of the Kiint.
One might argue that Hamilton’s work relies too much on militaristic action and graphic violence. Certainly, a large chunk of this final novel covers the ‘Liberation of Mortonridge’ – an attempt to free the population of a peninsula on one of the planets of the Kulu Kingdom.
A vast army of bitek ‘serjeants’ have been produced to invade the area and de-possess the inhabitants. This turns into a long and bitter struggle, but one which focuses more on the effect it has on the protagonists than on shoot-em-up action.
Much of the novel is also about explanations and revelations. More is discovered about the Kiint whose involvement (somewhat short of outright interference) with the history of humanity goes far far deeper anyone had realised.
In the previous novels, the possessed had taken entire planets into parallel dimensions. Here, we follow them to discover that their lives are not the Paradise they expected. It is discovered, as was suggested previously, that the possessors’ ability to change the shape of the bodies they inhabited encouraged cancerous tumours to proliferate, giving the possessed a far shorter lifespan than the immortality they imagined.
Joshua Calvert, the central character about whom all the storylines revolve, is sent on a mission to discover the Sleeping God of the Tyrathca, somewhere beyond the Orion nebula; a godlike artefact/entity ‘Big Dumb Object’ which may hold the key to solving the possession crisis.
Ultimately, and cleverly, the various storylines and character journeys converge to one point in time. Joshua himself questions the Sleeping God (a stable mirrorlike naked singularity orbiting a planetless star) on the coincidences which have led him (and other characters) to this point and is given an answer which, if not really plausible, provides a certain kind of satisfaction to the reader within the context of the work.
In this novel, the themes of transformation and revelation come to the fore. No character remains unchanged by their journeys through the crisis and ultimately, the whole of human society is transformed.
This, along with Robinson’s ‘Mars’ trilogy, is one of the last great works of SF of the 20th century. They are vastly different in tone, style, and their categorical positions within the genre, but they give me faith that SF can still – and will in the future – produce the sense of wonder which many thought had been long lost.
Ringworld – Larry Niven (1970)
‘With RINGWORLD, Larry Niven reaches full maturity as a writer of some of the most vivid and inventive science fiction the past decade has seen.
Niven has steadily constructed a logical and coherent piece of space all his own in a series of short stories of which Neutron Star, a Hugo Award Winner, was one.
Now, in RINGWORLD, he carries out the promise of the earlier structure and takes his familiar characters, the puppeteers, to a fantastically conceived scientifically logical world – the Ringworld of his title – a towering and beautiful concept. ‘
Blurb to the 1970 Ballantine Paperback Edition
Ringworld is undoubtedly a Landmark Science Fiction novel, winner of both the Hugo and Nebula Awards and possibly the definitive Big Dumb Object novel.
It’s a work which manages to succeed both as an ideas novel and as one of action adventure.
Niven is one of those SF authors who chooses to set the majority of his novels in the same fictional universe, in his case in a spherical region of space approximately seventy light years in diameter which is known to his readers as ‘Known Space’.
This one-author milieu is a common practice and works for both authors and readers since although the novels do not have to be directly linked, and may be set hundreds or thousands of years apart, the background is a familiar one for readers and allows authors to explore and develop aspects of already established elements.
‘Known Space’ for Niven had already been explored in short story format, anthology collections of which are available, and in the novels ‘A Gift From Earth’ and ‘The World of Ptaavs’, and so the background was already set for the ambitious ‘Ringworld’.
Louis Wu, a two-hundred year old pilot, kept young by the effects of a longevity drug, is recruited by the alien Nessus, a Pearson’s Puppeteer, thought to be insane by the standards of his ‘cowardly’ race (a species of two-headed, three legged highly intelligent creatures, driven by a racial urge of self-protection and avoidance of danger) to investigate an artefact surrounding a star far outside Known Space.
Along with a Kzin – a ferocious feline species – and Teela Brown – a human woman genetically predisposed to being lucky – Louis and Nessus set off to investigate the anomaly.
The synopsis, put so coldly, does not do justice to what turns out to be a far more complex tale of ingenious scientific extrapolation, alien psychology, hidden motives and sheer sense of wonder.
The artefact itself is a massive ring some ninety million miles in diameter surrounding a star (Niven uses the analogy of a strip of ribbon, fifty feet long, arranged on its edge in a hoop facing a candle at the centre of the circle created). The inner surface of the ring has walls a thousand feet high and contains what is essentially an Earth environment with enough room for three million times the surface of the Earth.
One of the most interesting aspects of this book is the relationship between the various alien races which is very much driven by the psychology of the races involved.
By the time this novel was written we had thankfully moved away from the prevalent idea that humans (usually American humans) were natural candidates if not to rule the galaxy then at least to guide its direction or dictate policy. In EE Doc Smith’s Lensman series for instance, Humanity is the chosen race, and certainly selectively-bred members of it are destined to take over as Custodians of The Galaxy. Niven has no such pretensions here. Humans, although having come out on top in a war with the rather Klingon-esque Kzin, are technologically inferior to other races with whom they have come into contact.
The Puppeteers seem at first to be somewhat comical creatures; small, white-furred, swan-necked, two headed beasts. They are pathologically cautious and seem harmless, but as the novel progresses, Louis and the rest of the crew discover not only their overwhelming technological strength, but their rather disturbing involvement in Earth and Kzin history.
Although altruistic, the Puppeteers will go to any lengths to protect their individual or racial safety, and describing them as ‘cowards’ is, as becomes clear, imposing a human value on an alien psychology. There is a parallel again here with Doc Smith’s Lensman series and Nadrek of Palain VII whose racial psychology was almost exactly that of the Puppeteers in that individual safety was the prime motivation of the Palainian psyche. Nadrek too, was also considered ‘‘mad’’ by members of his own race since he chose to expose himself to unwarranted danger by interaction with alien races.
Again, ‘Ringworld’ is also one of those novels that should have been left as a standalone piece. The sequels, although explaining the origins of the Ringworld, decline in quality as the series progresses. This, taken in isolation however, is a masterwork by a writer at the height of his powers.
Angel Stations – Gary Gibson (2004)
Gibson’s debut novel is a multi-character narrative space opera much in the style of Peter F Hamilton
Mankind has been able to travel out to the stars due to the discovery of Angel Stations; vast torus-shaped space stations surrounding wormholes which give instantaneous access to other stations in other parts of the galaxy.
The study of abandoned Angel tech has been a mixed blessing. It has allowed Earth to design probes which have been sent as far as possible toward the galactic core and which have discovered that processes have been set up to automatically set off novas and flood the galaxy with lethal radiation at very long but regular intervals.
The radiation is due to arrive at the planet Kaspar in days, and is likely to kill off the only other sentient race that humanity has discovered, currently at a pre-industrial feudal culture level.
Humans have also used Angel tech to alter human genes in military test subjects, producing a number of humans who are virtually indestructible and can, in some instances, see the future.
We follow a disparate group of people whose paths converge at the abandoned Angel citadel on the planet Kaspar as the wave of radiation approaches.
It’s an interesting debut, featuring echoes of Peter F Hamilton, Jack McDevitt and Fred Pohl’s ‘Gateway’.
Certainly the concept of older races ‘culling’ other life in the galaxy (usually by way of ancient machines) is a popular idea (see ‘Engines of God’, ‘Revelation Space’ and ‘Berserker’) and perhaps is in some ways a counterbalance to works in which ancient alien races are either extinct, coldly aloof or benevolent.
It’s not simply a derivative novel, however. Gibson has created some interesting concepts and has cursed the earth with a Blight, an Angel Tech derived virus which was unleashed while one of the protagonists was trying to retrieve it from one of the Earth’s criminal gangs.
Kim is a xeno-archaeologist who has the deaths of some of her colleagues on her conscience and has become addicted to absorbing ‘books’ which are the distilled memories of others. She has fallen on hard times and is working as an asteroid miner from the Angel Station in the Kaspar System.
She too has unleashed a plague of sorts, as one of the artefacts she retrieved from the Kaspar citadel during an archaeological expedition has become active. This has released self-replicating Von Neumann bugs which are slowly consuming all the human-built sections of the stations as well as their ships. The bugs are using the cannibalised material to make more bugs.
Meanwhile, members of a human cult – The Primalists – are hiding out on Kaspar in deep caves waiting for the radiation to kill all the sentient natives so that they can claim the planet as a new Eden. One of the aliens, however, is in possession of an Angel artefact that might be the key to deflecting the radiation and saving his species.
The Kasparians are an interestingly designed species able – in an odd mirroring of Kim’s addiction – to achieve sentience by eating the flesh and brains of a dead adult. Their children are pre-sentient animals and do not attain intelligence until this ritual has been carried out.
There are some loose ends left untied which no doubt means that sequels are in the pipeline.
Maybe it’s me but it seems many debut novels now are planned with sequels in mind. No one seems to want to write stand alone novels any more. Is this publisher pressure or a strategic move on the part of the author?
Eternity (The Way #2) – Greg Bear (1988)
Set some decades after ‘Eon’, the novel is split between the world of Gaia where the forces of Alexander the Great conquered the known world, and Earth, which is now controlled by the Hexamon.
On Gaia the granddaughter of Patricia Vasquez has inherited the clavicle which can be used to open The Way. In Patricia’s lifetime gateways appeared briefly and capriciously but now one has appeared and has remained stable for three years.
On Earth the planet is still undergoing a healing process following The Death. The Way has been closed off since the Sundering and the events of ‘Eon’, but now Pavel Mirsky – a Russian who should be dead – has returned. He is, and is not, Mirsky since he has been reborn in the far future and sent back with a message. The Way must be reopened and destroyed since it poses a threat to the grander plans of humanity’s descendants billions of years hence.
Meanwhile, the homorph Omny has been shown a forgotten chamber in Thistledown which contains the body of a captured Jart – the inimical and enigmatic aliens that are fighting a war within The Way – and also its downloaded consciousness.
Omny decides he has to upload the Jart into his own cyborg systems for study – well-knowing that there is a danger that the Jart mind could subsume him.
It has been pointed out before that when Bear wrote ‘Eon’ no one was expecting the fall of the Soviet Union and Bear’s future posits an intact USSR and a nuclear war which decimates the Earth.
This sequel is set some thirty years later and the issue of Earth history before The Death is perhaps wisely evaded. Given the nature of the subject matter, however, he could have gotten away with explaining that this was not our Earth but an Earth in which the USSR survived since we already have an Earth where the Empire of Alexander lasted to our time and beyond.
Bear, as I have mentioned elsewhere, struggles with sequels. This one certainly takes its time to get going and there’s a good third of the novel to be got through before things start speeding along.
It’s a decent read, but a very disappointing sequel to ‘Eon’. The concept of species that add other species’ DNA to their own (as the Jarts appear to) is something that Octavia Butler employed to far better effect in her Xenogenesis trilogy. There’s also the concept of highly advanced post-human/post-alien intelligences destroying entire galaxies at the end of time in order to save us all, which is more or less what Stephen Baxter’s Xeelee have been doing over a number of novels and short stories.
One would have expected that Bear would have raised his game to another level in this sequel, but it is sadly not the case.
Things speed up to a fairly thrilling climax and a couple of schmaltzy resurrections.
It’s not clear if it is intentional but there are some religious motifs scattered throughout. Posthuman avatars return from the far future in the guise of dead colleagues. There is much referencing of the words ‘gods’ and ‘angels’.
Indeed, the death of Garry Lanier is preceded by a vision of the resurrected Russian, Pavel Mirsky, and followed by a transcendence as the digital copy of Garry is translated into a posthuman avatar and taken into the world of ‘The Final Mind’.
His implant (which preserves a digitised copy of his consciousness and memories) when retrieved from his body contains the persona of his and Karen’s daughter who died twenty years previously and who can now be ‘resurrected’.
The issues raised related to identity and the definition of ‘human’ are very interesting but are not explored in any real depth.
Rendezvous with Rama – Arthur C Clarke (1973)
‘Rama – a metallic cylinder approaching the sun at tremendous velocity.
Rama – first product of an alien civilization to be encountered by man.
Rama – a world of technological marvels and artificial ecology.
What is its purpose in this year 2131? Who is inside it? And why?’
Blurb from the 1974 Pan paperback edition.
A giant cylinder is spotted entering the Solar System and a team of astronauts is sent out to investigate.
The cylinder is unfeasibly vast and (it is discovered) hollow, with gravity on the inside of the cylinder produced by centrifugal force. The interior surface is lit by enormous lamps, covered with a variegated landscape and divided in two by a band of sea which exists in a circle around the inside.
Perhaps Clarke’s best work, this succeeds (as did Niven’s ‘Ringworld’) by its sheer lack of explanation. In fact, the entire novel is, in some ways, an exercise in minimalist adventure, since despite the excitement of the exploration itself and having to rescue a crewmember who becomes stranded on the other side of the central sea, nothing really happens.
One cannot help, however, still being awed by Clarke’s depiction of this magnificently vast alien mystery which appears in our Solar System and allows us inside her enormous shell before shortly afterward disappearing.
Again, like Niven’s Ringworld, the novel was later lessened by inferior sequels (written in this case in collaboration) and which gradually eroded the awe and mystery which was an integral part of the original books. If you haven’t read the Rama sequels you’d be best advised not to bother. The writing is far inferior to Clarke at his best and one suspects that his literary input was minimal.
However, getting back to the original, this is a novel which well deserves the title ‘classic’ and still manages to evoke a sense of wonder set against a background of a universe vast and ultimately unknowable.
Exiles (Progenitors #1) – Dan Worth (2010)
Dan Worth postulates a future where humans have become a part of galactic society. Humanity has messed up here and there, such as on one planet where an interstellar human company has been supplying the natives with an addictive and lethal drug.
When the natives revolt and take over a space station Captain Chen is called to deal with it and ends up massacring a large number of innocent aliens. Her ex, a secret agent, Harris, is blamed for the debacle and posted to another system. Meanwhile, two archaeologists have discovered a million year old ship which appears to belong to the highly advanced Arkari. They find mummified Arkari on board and manage to acquire the log before the Arkari duly arrive and confiscate everything.
Anyhoo – the Arkari have been in space a lot longer than they’ve told anyone. The archaeologists get posted to the same planet to which agent Harris was banished in order to investigate the holy city of Maran which, it appears, holds its own secrets. It transpires that everyone is being manipulated by a mysterious enemy from the core of the galaxy.
They have already provoked a war between Humanity and the vicious reptilian K’soth, and now they hope to open a long-sealed wormhole porthole to let through some nasty terminator-style beasties from the end of time.
One can’t deny it’s a cracking read. Some of the dialogue and love scenes are a tad creaky but it’s still an engrossing novel and leaves one wanting more.
Elements of it do seem familiar, however. The concept of people being led to a planet simply in order to unwittingly loose hordes of crazy aliens into the galaxy was used by Hamilton in ‘Pandora’s Star’ and there are other reviews which comment on the similarities to Babylon 5. The Arkari (who have living ships and who are as economical with the truth as a Thatcher government) are the Vorlons here, and the mysterious Shapers appear to be the Shadows.
However, no writer works in a vacuum, and these are archetypal forces – Order and Chaos, which have been employed in various fashions in fantasy and SF since the dawn of the genre.
Summertide – Charles Sheffield (1990)
It can be argued – at least by me – that SF is the reflection of the collective unconscious in that it tends to pick up on society’s fears and obsessions, such as the rash of ‘aliens among us’ stories in US Nineteen Fifties novels which paralleled a social paranoia – fostered by the Establishment – of Communism spreading like a disease.
CG Jung, who popularised the concept of the collective unconscious (although in his case he was talking of inherited concepts of archetypes) would no doubt be fascinated by SF’s dalliance with The Elder Race, usually a highly intelligent alien species who have disappeared from our universe, leaving enigmatic samples of their civilisation behind, often in the form of what has come to be known in SF circles as ‘Big Dumb Objects’.
‘Summertide’ is packed with Big Dumb Objects, left by a vanished race termed ‘The Builders’. Their vast and often impenetrable artefacts have been found across the galaxy, still in working order after millions of years although humanity has been able to discover only a few of the Builders’ secrets in the five thousand years since the first ones were discovered.
Hans Rebka, an agent of The Phemus Circle (a connected ‘clade’ of systems and planets) is suddenly removed from his mission to explore the Builder artefact Paradox, and sent to the Dobelle system to retrieve one Max Perry, an agent who seems reluctant to leave his post on the waterworld of Opal.
Dobelle is a binary system within which two planets, Opal and Quake, revolve about each other, although the worlds are connected by a Builder artefact called The Umbilical, a kind of extended space elevator. It has working carriages which can ferry passengers between the worlds.
Others are also heading to Opal. Darya Lang, an expert in Builder artefacts; Julius Graves, an Ethical Councillor of The Fourth Alliance; Atvar H’sial, an arthropod Cecropian and her interpreter slave, J’merlia; and Louis Nenda, an augmented human from the Zardalu Communion, with his slave hymenopt, Kalik.
All of them have put in requests to visit Quake; requests which have proved problematic.
Every 350,000 years the system experiences a Grand Conjunction in which the gas giants and suns move closer to Opal and Quake. The normal conjunctions are called ‘Summertide’ and cause tidal waves on the waterworld of Opal, and earthquakes and extreme vulcanism on Quake. Lang has discovered that artefacts around the galaxy have shown changes at various times and, factoring in the various distances, has concluded that the signals from all the artefacts will reach the Dobelle system simultaneously during Summertide.
When Rebka and Perry find that some of the visitors have forged Perry’s signature in order to commission an umbilical journey to Quake, they are forced to travel there and attempt to get the visitors back before the full force of Summertide kills them all.
There is a motif of duality running through this novel. Dobelle is a binary star system and the two planets which orbit each other are connected via the Umbilical artefact. Apart from Darya Lang, the vistors to Opal arrive in pairs. Atvar H’sial and her slave. j’merlia; Nenda and Kalik, and Julius Graves. Graves’ duality is due to the fact that he has an extra brain inserted into his body which has, quite against expectations, developed into a separate personality.
There is also a set of twins, and at the finale there are two alien objects, the details of which I won’t go into.
Sheffield deserves wider recognition. He writes exciting readable, popular space opera in which the science can not be faulted.
Having said that, there are flaws in ‘Summertide’. Set at least five thousand years in the future there is very little sign that human society has evolved any. That’s somewhat inconceivable. It’s also a tad unlikely that Hans Rebka would be diverted from a crucial mission just to analyse Max Perry and somehow cure him of a malady of the mind. Small quibbles, but quibbles nonetheless.
Probability Moon – Nancy Kress (2000)
‘A Desperate Bid to Save Humanity
Humankind has spread out into interstellar space using star gates – technological remnants left behind by an ancient, long-vanished race. but the technology comes with a price.
Among the stars, humanity encountered The Fallers, a strange alien race bent on nothing short of genocide. It’s all-out war, and humanity is losing.
In this fragile situation, a new planet is discovered, inhabited by a pre-industrial race who experience ‘shared reality’ – they’re literally compelled to share the same worldview. A team of human scientists is dispatched, but what they don’t know is that their mission of first contact is actually a covert military operation.
For one of the planet’s moons is really a huge mysterious artefact of the same origin as the star gates… and it just may be the key to winning the war.’
Blurb to the September 2002 Tor paperback edition
Some time in the distant past and Elder Race scattered ‘gateways’ around our galaxy which connect instantaneously to each other.
Humanity has explored some of the galaxy via these wormhole portals and discovered several humanoid races with near-identical DNA to Humanity, suggesting that many planets had been seeded with Humanity millennia ago.
One of the races discovered, The Fallers, is implacably hostile and Earth is now engaged in a war with them, as they too have access to the gateways.
A scientific expedition has been sent to a humanoid-occupied planet called World, where the peaceful residents have a religion/philosophy based around Flowers and what the Worlders describe as ‘shared reality’
The Worlders have evolved some form of empathic contact amongst themselves which causes anyone not in agreement with the majority world-view to receive headaches. Thus, harmony is maintained, as is ‘shared reality’.
The central figure of the novel, about whom the narrative revolves, is Enli, a young female Worlder. Enli has been declared ‘unreal’ by the Department of Atonement and Reality following the death of her brother. She is therefore a leper among her own kind. As an ‘unreal’ she is excised from the world-view of her people and is treated as though she is invisible.
Meanwhile, a Terran scientific expedition has returned to World following the hasty recall of the previous team without explanation. The Worlders have yet to determine whether the Terrans are ‘real’ or ‘unreal’.
Enli is summoned to the Department of Atonement and Reality and given a post at the Terran base, on the understanding that she will spy on the Terrans and report back to the Department.
The real reason that humans have returned to World is that one of its seven moons has been discovered to be a vast alien artefact, created by the long-vanished Gatebuilders.
While the team on the planet work toward understanding the Worlders and why and how they evolved their ‘shared reality’, Colonel Syree Johnson on the ‘Zeus’ is trying to unlock the secrets of the alien moon. It slowly becomes apparent (at least to the reader) that the two investigations are fundamentally connected.
Enli is the thread which runs through this, the first in a posited trilogy) and follows a journey of rejection, acceptance by a new community, guilt and confusion at having to spy on her friends. She is also bullied and manipulated by her various spymasters, but carries on with her own strange goals set in her mind, and ultimately redeems herself and becomes ‘real’ again.
This is in contrast to the character of David Allen, a young man only placed on the mission through his politically powerful father.
David begins his journey as a confident, almost arrogant linguist, but one whose behaviour sinks slowly into the irrational, before descending into madness.
There is also Ahmed Bazargan the Iranian head of the mission; Gruber, the German geologist and Anna, the biologist.
Kress didn’t seem to have time or space to develop these characters to any great degree, which is a shame. Bazargan has an interesting habit of running Persian poetry through his thoughts and sharing it with the rest of us, but doesn’t add an awful lot to the plot.
Similarly, we have a lot of Colonel Johnson’s back-story; her terrifyingly strict military family, her soldier ancestors who died in battle, the loss of her leg, her grandmother’s stern rebukes. In fact, it seems we have more of Colonel Johnson’s past life than of her present. The scenes on the ship seem somewhat sparse compared to her memories and the rich scenes down on the planet.
It’s not a novel that’s making any profound points or seeking to change anyone’s life, but then it never pretends to be. It’s a light enjoyable read and I look forward to reading more in the series.
Century Rain – Alastair Reynolds (2004)
‘Three hundred years from now, Earth has been rendered uninhabitable due to the technological catastrophe known as the Nanocaust.
Archaeologist Verity Auger specialises in the exploration of it surviving landscape. Now, her expertise is required for a far greater purpose.
Something astonishing has been discovered at the far end of a wormhole: a mid-twentieth century Earth, preserved like a fly in amber. Somewhere on this alternate planet is a device capable of destroying both worlds at either end of the wormhole. And Verity must find the device, and the man who plans to activate it, before it is too late – for the past and the future of two worlds…’
Blurb from the 2006 Ace paperback edition.
It is the near future. The Earth has been devastated by the Nanocaust, rogue nanomachinery which has destroyed all life on Earth and plunged it into an Ice Age. Humanity is divided into two camps; The Threshers, who live in an orbital tangle of habitats around the earth called Tanglewood, and the Slashers, who change and augment their bodies with the nanomachinery which destroyed Earth.
The Slashers have delved deep into the galaxy, mainly due to their discovery of the hypernet, a network of stable wormholes left by some presumably vanished race.
Verity Auger is a Thresher archaeologist, studying the frozen ruins of Paris. When a student dies on a field trip she is given the chance to avoid a tribunal by going on a special mission. A hypernet portal has been discovered inside Phobos which leads to another Earth, an Earth where it is Nineteen Fifty-Nine and where World War II never happened, and which appears to be locked within a vast artificial sphere.
Meanwhile, on that Earth, in Paris, Floyd and Custine, two detectives-cum-jazz musicians, have been hired by a Msr Blanchard to investigate the murder of one of his tenants. Her name was Susan White and she turns out to be a Tanglewood agent who has the information that Verity was sent to collect.
it’s good to see Reynolds moving away from his ‘Revelation Space’ universe to try something new. Certainly, his descriptions of Paris in Nineteen Fifty-Nine are evocative and atmospheric and, without knowing what Paris was like in Nineteen Fifty-Nine, or indeed, in a Nineteen Fifty-Nine where the war never happened, it’s hard to say how authentic it is.
Reynolds manages to do the ‘noir’ style very well, and his wisecracking American detective, Wendell Floyd, is straight out of a Nineteen Forties movie. It’s almost as if the author is lulling you into a false sense of security on this alternate Earth before bringing on the War Babies, genetically engineered troops designed to look like children and programmed to kill. The War Babies have been on E2 (as this Earth is termed) for at least twenty years and have grown old, but are still a deadly and terrifying force to contend with.
Without there having been a war (The German advance was repelled in 1940) scientific and social progress did not advance as it did. There are no rockets, atomic bombs, ballistic missiles or computers and even the musical scene is stagnant. Jazz is popular, but any ‘new’ forms of music are discouraged by the establishment. Indeed, the Nazi ideal seems to be re-emerging in France where a political figure called ‘Chatelier’ is on the rise while Hitler (now a feeble figure, wasted by disease) is taken out for walks through Paris by his few remaining elderly supporters.
Reynolds has not lost his touch and naughtily leaves a few questions unanswered.
Orbitsville Departure – Bob Shaw (1983)
Orbitsville Departure by Bob Shaw
My rating: 3 of 5 stars
‘Two hundred years ago mankind found Orbitsville, a vast sphere whose habitable inner surface comprised living space equivalent to five billion Earths. The resulting migration was enthusiastic – and nearly total.
Earth itself is a backwater now, a place with which the people of Orbitsville maintain only marginal contact. But just because it’s backward doesn’t mean it isn’t dangerous…’
Blurb from the Orbit 1991 paperback edition
Shaw wrote mostly stand alone novels, so it’s interesting to see what he does with a trilogy. We return to Shaw’s ‘Orbitsville’ some two hundred years after the events of the first novel. Society has moved on from the peculiar neo-Elizabethan monarchy of the first novel and Earth is depopulated, having transported most of the human race to the interior of the vast Dyson Sphere that is Orbitsville, containing a habitable surface equivalent to millions of Earths.
The vastness of this alien construction is contrasted by the lives of various individual humans, such as Garry Dallen, a law enforcement officer seconded to Earth, whose wife and child are brainwiped with an energy weapon during a bungled raid on Garry’s office building.
The perpetrator is a drug addict who had already used the weapon to destroy a computer which contained details of his embezzlement operations. Garry subsequently gets involved with Sylvia, the wife of a dying scientist who believes he can prove that his ‘soul’ will live on after death.
All the major characters end up on the same ship to Orbitsville and Shaw has cleverly arranged it so that everyone has a good reason for being there.
However, Orbitsville’s outer skin of ‘ylem’ after two hundred years of tedious impenetrable inertness has now begun to exude green flashes of light, pulsing, at first slowly but increasing in intensity.
Like the lights in Orbitsville’s shell, the narrative starts very slowly and builds to a climactic finish in which the creators of Orbitsville are partially revealed.
I’ve always felt a sense of anticlimax when the presumed dead races who created big dumb objects are discovered. It’s better to leave them as a mystery, and Orbitsville Departure’s Elder Race is no exception.
‘Rendezvous with Rama’ is a perfect example of how to do it right (we’ll gloss over the co-written sequels which added nothing of any substance) and again Fred Pohl’s ‘Gateway’ was a stunningly constructed novel which was sadly lessened by the sequels and the exposure of the mysterious Heechee.
If in doubt, leave your mysterious dead races where they belong, in the imaginations of the readers.
Chindi – Jack McDevitt (2002)
Chindi by Jack McDevitt
My rating: 4 of 5 stars
‘The universe has been explored – and humanity has all but given up on finding other intelligent life. Then an alien satellite orbiting a distant star sends out an unreadable signal. is it the final programmed gasp of an ancient, long-dead race? Or the first greeting of an undiscovered life form? Academy starship captain Priscilla Hutchins and the once-maligned Contact Society are about to learn the answers… to more questions than they could possibly conceive of asking.’
Blurb from the 2003 Ace paperback edition
Once more, Hutch is piloting a group of alien-hunters. This time it is the much maligned First Contact Society, who have discovered part of a transmission emanating in orbit around a neutron star.
As much as one wants to love this book (and one can’t really fault it as a decent SF novel) one can’t help feeling that McDevitt is repeating himself on several levels. Again Hutch gets close to a man, and yes, he dies tragically. Almost simultaneously, the artist Tor, one of Hutch’s ex-lovers, manages to grab himself a berth on this new expedition, along with an undertaker and a famous starlet.
It appears there is a network of stealth satellites scattered through at least our part of the galaxy and they are recording and transmitting data to somewhere else. That somewhere else happens to be an odd arrangement of gas giants, their attendant moons, rings and one building set on a moon which orbits this whole arrangement and its spectacular views.
The Retreat, as it is named, is abandoned but had two occupants who are buried nearby.
However, this is not the relay’s destination, for the party discover, refuelling from the gas-giant’s plentiful hydrogen, an asteroid converted into a ship which, it transpires, is a vast travelling storehouse of images and artefacts collected from thousands of races.
Hutch, having lost her newest man in an explosion at the neutron star, does not want more of her passengers to die, but they do. Some are attacked and eaten by angel-like aliens on an idyllic world.
Then, they insist on exploring the Chindi – as they name the ship – and, as was expected, it decides to leave.
There is then a race against time to rescue Hutch’s ex-lover, left behind on the giant asteroid ship.
Again, McDevitt’s Americocentricity is irritating, although I was amused that Hutch, accessing the news from Earth, was reading about a new serial killer in Derbyshire, a county already famous for its violence and multiple murder mayhem.
McDevitt’s aliens are irritating too, as so far, the races have not been alien enough. In the Chindi one of the first things the explorers find is a tableaux of some world where a wolf-like creature is standing before a table wearing a dinner jacket.
Thinking this through, quite apart from any issues of sexism, one has to say that the jacket, not even specifically the dinner jacket, as a fashion phenomenon, is not that recent and occupies a tiny fraction of the diverse gallimaufry of humanwear, and is also a generally western concept. For an alien race of wolf-like creatures to have come up with something similar and to have been discovered by humanity in the epoch in which this fashion was popular rather stretches my disbelief. These are Star Trek aliens, furry or bumpy-headed humanoids who think the same way we do, or at least, the same way Americans do.
Against Infinity – Gregory Benford (1983)
‘ON THE POISONOUS, ICY SURFACE OF GANYMEDE, A MAN AND A BOY ARE ON A DEADLY HUNT
Their prey is the Aleph – an unknowable alien artifact that has roamed and ruled Ganymede for countless millennia, Indescribable, infinitely dangerous, the Aleph haunts men’s dreams and destroys all efforts to terraform Ganymede into a habitable planet.
Now in a modern world an ancient struggle begins, as a boy seeks manhood, a man seeks enlightenment and a society seeks the power to rule the universe.
In GREGORY Benford’s first novel since Timescape, men discover that the Aleph is their prey, their victim – and their destiny.’
Blurb from the 1984 Pocket Books paperback edition
Manuel is a young Ganymede native, born on the Jovian moon during the early part of a terraforming operation. Manuel’s work is to help his father, Colonel Lopez, and his team with various duties, the bulk of which involves tracking down and hunting ‘warped’ organisms; mutated descendants of creatures the scientists designed to scrub the planet and its atmosphere of methane and ammonia.
It would appear, however, that the colonists and human-designed wildlife are not alone on Ganymede.
Alien artefacts have already been discovered in other parts of the outer Solar System but on Ganymede there is a functioning artefact nicknamed Aleph; a mobile, shape-shifting rock-burrowing entity. Aleph is mining Ganymede for its own esoteric reasons and has resisted all attempts to destroy and capture it.
Now Manuel, his colleague Old Matt and a psychotic cyborg called Eagle have encountered Aleph again and are planning to capture and destroy a creature which may have been tunnelling through Ganymede before Man even evolved.
In comparison to Benford’s ‘Artefact’, written around the same time, this emerges as a far superior work, albeit shorter.
There’s a very pacey feel to it which is helped by that fact that the action jumps ahead in leaps and bounds and we see not only Manuel’s maturation from boy to man but the gradual transformation of the face of Ganymede from an icy moon to a functioning biosphere.
It would have been interesting for Benford to have expanded a little more on the terraforming/biodesign element which is fascinating in itself. I am left wanting to know more about Earth and the society that is evolving in the asteroids at this point but, as I have always praised writers who left some questions unanswered, I shouldn’t really press this issue too far.
From what we gather from the final section, Earth has moved on politically to become a Marxist world, a political system which only survives by expansion and which, necessarily, so Benford informs us, needs a Capitalist system at the fringes. This is an intriguing concept and one on which I wish Benford had expanded more fully throughout the book.
Ultimately, one is left a little unsatisfied, which is unfair to Benford since this is an interesting and thought-provoking work, well thought-out and featuring mostly Latino protagonists.
Sequel to ‘The Jupiter Project’
Pushing Ice – Alastair Reynolds (2005)
‘The burgeoning new economies in near-Earth space are fuelled by a steady stream of comets, steered back home by huge nuclear-powered mining ships like Bella Lind’s ‘Rockhopper’. they call it pushing ice.
Bella and her crew are desperate for some much needed R&R – until Janus, one of Saturn’s ice moons, inexplicably leaves its natural orbit. as it heads out of the Solar System at high acceleration, layers of camouflage fall away: it appears that Janus was never a moon in the first place. Now this moon-shaped machine is approaching the star system Spica, two hundred and sixty light-years away.
‘Rockhopper’ is the only ship anywhere near Janus, so Bella agrees to catch up and shadow the machine-moon for the few vital days before it falls for ever out of reach. But in doing so, she sets her ship and her crew on a collision course with destiny that will test friendship and loyalty to the limits: for Janus has more surprises in store – and not all of them are welcome.
‘Pushing Ice’ is a trademark Alastair Reynolds novel: a deep space adventure story with a scope as big as the galaxy itself.’
Blurb from the 2005 Gollancz paperback edition.
Bella Lind, Captain of the space-freighter ‘Rockhopper’ is ‘pushing ice’ in the sense that the ship is mining comets for water ice. At the end of a scheduled tour of duty the Rockhopper is due to return but is requested, as the nearest ship in the vicinity, to report to Saturn’s ice moon, Janus. As it transpires, the moon is not a moon but a vast ship, showing signs of reactivation which The Powers That Be back on Earth want examined before it disappears.
The Rockhopper begins to shadow the alien ship which is heading in the direction of Spica.
The Chinese also launch their own ship, aiming to pre-empt the West’s assured monopoly on alien technology.
Reynolds being Reynolds, however, nothing is ever simple or straightforward.
The novel opens in a far-future civilisation which is planning to send a message back through time to the founder of their interstellar culture, Bella Lind.
While following the alien ship, Bella’s chief engineer and best friend, Svetlana, suspects that Earth is not being entirely honest and believes that that earth’s estimate of their fuel reserves has been faked in order that the crew will spend more time with Janus. Svetlana is not believed and relieved of her duties, following which it is discovered that the alien ship has trapped the Rockhopper within an advanced space-time field and that they are travelling far faster than they imagined, with the added revelation that far more time has passed back on Earth than anyone expected.
The Rockhopper therefore then attaches itself to Janus and Svetlana, now vindicated, takes control and places Bella under arrest.
Years pass and the colony aboard the alien hijacker grows, leeching power from the vast resources of Janus. Then, the moonship begins to grown an additional shell around itself and when the humans cut through it, they find that they have now come to rest within a vast construct, light years across, and they are not alone.
Reynolds can’t be faulted as a writer. He seldom disappoints, although his recent novels away from his Revelation Space universe have left me yearning for the industrial gothic beauty of his Gigeresque worlds and characters.
Here, we go on an epic journey which covers decades, admittedly peopled by fully-rounded interesting characters and which has the central relationship between two strong female characters running right through like the letters in a stick of rock.
There are some secretive aliens who, although they provide the humans with a rejuvenation treatment, know far more about the Spican Structure than they are prepared to discuss.
As always, Reynolds gauges his readers remarkably well and leaves huge ‘sense of wonder’ mysteries unexplained.
One has to admire a writer who is brave enough to do that. The question is, will he be brave enough to avoid the temptation to go back and explain it all in a sequel.
The Well of Stars – Robert Reed (2004)
‘The Great Ship is home to a multitude of alien races and a near-immortal crew. They have toured the Milky Way for millennia, the best and the brightest from a thousand worlds, but the true purpose of the ship has remained hidden. Now, time is running out. The huge spacecraft is heading for the dark, immense region of space known as The Ink Well, and the only entity in the universe more vast and mysterious than The Great Ship is lying in wait…’
Blurb from the 2005 Orbit paperback edition
Reed is a stylist. Claiming to have no influences in the SF canon, the Nebraska-based author is very much an individual voice, although there are echoes of Simak in some of his early work.
Since ‘Marrow’, sales of which elevated Reed’s profile to the level of best-selling SF author (rather than modestly selling quality SF writer), his books have moved away from mid-America based (yet complex) slow moving tales to a form of post-cyberpunk space opera.
Here, in this sequel to ‘Marrow’, Reed once more employs one of his favourite devices, the near-immortal superhuman, or rather, an entire population of them, travelling through space on a ship the size of Jupiter which has a world entombed in its core.
The Great Ship, as it is known, attracts the attention of the polyponds, separate parts of a gestalt Gaian entity which inhabits an entire nebula.
Reed’s writing style is deeply poetic, stylistically romantic and oddly appropriate for the society he has created. Near-immortal humans on the Great Ship see little change and neither does their society. The almost baroque style seems therefore entirely apt.
Reed is not an author prone to writing sequels, having only done it once before in his career to my knowledge, and one does have to ask how much the conception of ‘Well of Stars’ was influenced by the success of ‘Marrow’.
I have noted previously a problem Reed occasionally has with ending his novels, and he seems to have left this open for a third voyage on the Great Ship.
The ending provided here is somewhat unsatisfying and relies rather too much on a Deus Ex Machina provided by ancient aliens who have been living in hiding on the ship for thousands of years.
Having said that, his work is generally superior to most other contemporary SF and this is a genuinely good novel, but one feels that he could have done better.
Marrow – Robert Reed (2000)
‘The Ship is home to a thousand alien races and a near-immortal crew who have no knowledge of its origins and or purpose. At its core lies a secret as ancient as The Universe.
It is about to be unleashed.’
Blurb from the 2001 Orbit Edition.
A ship constructed from the raw elements of a Jupiter-sized planet, five billion years old, enters our Galaxy some time in the far future. Humanity lays claim to it and so founds a mobile civilisation augmented by ‘passenger’ races who travel about the galaxy.
Mutated humans, the ‘Remoras’, like their namesake fish who live ion a symbiotic relationship with sharks, live on the exterior of the ship, effecting repairs to the hull and maintaining defences against asteroids and other dangers.
The Immortal Captain discovers a secret at the core of the ship, an iron planet the size of Mars which is racked with volcanic activity but sustains a diverse eco-system which has adapted to such Hellish conditions.
An exploratory group of sub-captains and scientists finds themselves stranded on the planet, which has been christened ‘Marrow’.
Robert Reed is an author new to me, although I’ll certainly be looking for more from him. Of course, I am presuming that Reed is a man, which may not be the case, as James Tiptree Jr (aka Alice Sheldon) could testify were she here to tell us, God Rest Her Soul.
It reads very much like a female writer. I’m reminded of Octavia Butler and Marge Piercy in terms of style and characterisation. Yes, it’s that good!
Reed paints vivid portraits of a cast of characters all of whom are virtually immortal, and he seems to have gone to the trouble of thinking seriously about how someone whose genes automatically kick in to repair all but the most fatal of injuries would behave and think.
Having endowed his humans with indefinite life-spans Reed is free to extend the timescale of his novel and so, perhaps as an ancient human would review her memories, occasionally leaps decades or centuries forward in time to catch up with the characters and resume the action.
The science is perfectly balanced against the human stories and never overwhelms one with techno hyperbole, although from what I can determine, the science is well-researched and clearly presented.
There is a poetry in this novel which renders it readable and adds a mythic quality which accentuates the backdrop of immense size, age, distance and timescale.
Interestingly, the three main characters are female, complex, ambitious and powerful. Their male counterparts, although in some cases just as powerful, tend to be psychotic, devious or simplistic, and not really as interesting.
There’s some neat plot twists and turns, some clever ‘wee thinky bits’ and teasingly brief glimpses of the ship’s alien and machine life-forms.
At heart though, it’s a book about being human and what the concept of immortality might actually mean in real terms.
If we incorporate into ourselves genes which will almost instantly heal even the most terrible of injuries, up to and including decapitation, how would that affect our sense of personal danger? What plans can we lay when we can expect a lifespans of upwards of a hundred thousand years?
This is what Science Fiction should be.
>
Orbitsville – Bob Shaw (1975)
‘When the young son of Elizabeth Lindstrom, the autocratic president of Starflight, falls to his death, Vance Garamond, a flickerwing commander, is the obvious target for Elizabeth’s grief and anger. She is not a forgiving employer and Garamond has no choice but to flee.
But fleeing Elizabeth’s wrath means leaving the Solar System behind for ever and hiding somewhere in deep space.
Pursued remorselessly by earth’s space fleet, the ‘somewhere’ that Garamond discovers is an unimaginably vast, alien-built, spherical structure which could just change the destiny of the human race.’
Blurb from the 2000 Gollancz SF Collectors Edition
In the first of a rare trilogy from Shaw he examines the theory of the Dyson sphere, a theoretical construction which is, as might be imagined, a sphere, but one which whose diameter is the same size as the orbit of the Earth. It is believed that such a sphere would be able to contain a star such as our own, and given sufficient orbital rotation, would provide a habitable area on the inner surface equal to several hundred million Earths.
Vance Garamond is a Starflight Captain reporting directly to Elizabeth Lindstrom, President of a starfaring society in which only one other habitable planet, Terranova, has been discovered. Earth is overcrowded and Lindstrom, a psychotic and psychopathic dictator, is parcelling up the new planet and selling strips of it off to the highest bidder.
While awaiting his audience with the President before a routine assignment Vance is asked to entertain her nine-year old son. Distracted by his thoughts, Vance does not see that the boy has climbed up into the arms of a statue and before he can react the boy falls and cracks his head on the pedestal, killing himself instantly.
Realising that his life is now forfeit when the borderline-insane Elizabeth discovers her son’s death, Garamond collects his wife and young son and smuggles them aboard his spacecraft. Along with his crew they head out for the stars, knowing that their chances of finding a new habitable world and so being able to escape the President’s wrath is minimal.
Garamond has one hope in that he has what amounts to a treasure map; ancient research consisting of a chronological series of alien stellar maps in which a star apparently disappears.
Setting off for this point in space, Garamond discovers that the sun has been encased in a sphere of indestructible material, with an entrance at the equator. Inside, the inner surface has been terraformed and its surface area so large that it would provide the same space as several million Earths.
Radio and radar do not work within the sphere, and it is suggested that its creators meant it as a honeytrap for intelligent life, as the alien races which are discovered living within the sphere have reverted to an idyllic pastoral existence.
It’s a gloriously retro novel for its time. Elizabeth’s Presidential position has regal overtones quite apart from the symbolic relevance of her name. Other critics have seen the influence of Van Vogt here, and certainly the tone and the scope is redolent of novels such as ‘Empire of The Atom’ or ‘Mission to the Stars’ although the characterisation exceeds anything Van Vogt produced in either work.
It is also maybe a response to the ‘Big Dumb Object’ trend which arguably began with Niven’s ‘Ringworld’ and was followed most famously by Clarke’s ‘Rendezvous with Rama’. Certainly, it would appear that Shaw’s novel was the first major use of a Dyson sphere, the concept of which was later used by other authors such as Stephen Baxter in ‘The Time Ships’ and on TV in ‘Star Trek – The Next Generation’.
Revelation Space – Alastair Reynolds (2000)
A debut novel from Reynolds which gives us hope for the future of Space Opera.
In a plot at first startlingly similar to Jack McDevitt’s ‘Engines of God’, archaeological findings on the recently colonised planet Resurgam seem to suggest planetary genocide some 900,000 years before. The archaeologist and central figure, Dan Sylveste, is being hunted, both by a highly trained assassin and a Triumvir of augmented humans, who are all dragged in to the machinations of an artificial intelligence whose motives may not bode well for the future of the human race.
It’s a deep and complex novel, rich in detail and texture and not a little gothic.
Reynolds is keen to keep the science accurate, and much of the plotting and timescale is affected by the time dilation effect. The assassin, Khouri, for instance, begins the book mourning the loss of her husband, as due to a clerical error, their cryogenic suspension units were shipped to different destinations. The TD effect means that if she were to set off to join him he would be decades older than she, or even dead, by the time they were reunited.
The triumvir, spending all their lives on board ship, have spent ten years searching for Sylveste, while he, through regular rejuvenation treatment, has lived some three hundred years on a planetary surface.
It is refreshing to see a writer take on – rather than ignore – the scientific reality of space travel, and explore the ramifications of what it could mean in human terms.
In characterisation, Reynolds has created very believable – in some cases grotesque – characters, leaving aliens as part of the back story. The Shrouders and the Pattern-Jugglers are, as real aliens probably should be, very alien and unknowable, and Reynolds wisely avoids spending much time describing or humanising them, other than briefly relating past events in Sylveste’s life and his encounters with both species.
The alternate aliens in this novel are the humans, many of whom, by the 24th century, have either genetically altered their bodies, augmented them with machine grafts and nanotechnology, or have changed physically through life in zero gravity environments.
Society is mostly grim. Chasm City on the planet Yellowstone, like most of human society as far as we know, has been affected by the melding plague which attempts to hybridise any computer-controlled environment it affects. Thus, the city is slowly changing, its buildings and soft/hardware growing randomly like a silicon cancer. Heavily chimerised individuals have become hermetic and live in sealed palanquins to protect themselves from contamination.
The heavily augmented captain of the triumvir’s spacecraft is badly affected by the plague and is slowly being grafted onto the systems of his own ship.
Gadgets and scientific marvels abound. Reynolds throws them in almost effortlessly, but never forgets that his characters are essentially human.
It’s a very impressive work of modern Space Opera in a highly individual style.
So what’s it about?
Much of it is about motive and why we do the things we do, and examines in various ways, the concept of ‘self’. Some of the characters have agendas even they don’t know about. Khouri, the assassin, for instance, takes on the assignment to kill Sylveste because she has been assured that her husband was not sent to another planet and will be waiting in suspension for her on her return.
However, she is subject to loyalty treatments and has her mind invaded by a malign alien AI. Is she then truly responsible for her own motives and actions?
Similarly, another of the Triumvir has had his mind rearranged by the alien Pattern-Jugglers, as has Sylveste, who also is forced unwillingly to allow his father’s AI simulation to ‘possess’ his mind, and may all along have been controlled by an alien AI.
Most of the main characters have had their minds in the control of someone else at some point, which raises a certain level of Dickian paranoia.
The centre of paranoia is certainly Sylveste. He lives a life in which he can trust no-one, maybe not even himself. His biographer turns out to be the daughter of his arch enemy, although she manages to convince him eventually that she loves him. Other enemies attempt his assassination at his wedding, and after a political coup, he is imprisoned and blinded.
Ultimately, he discovers that he is a clone of his own father, and may not have been in control of his own life for at least the last three hundred years.
It’s a fascinating and very refreshing piece of work, gobsmackingly good in fact, and is highly recommended for students of post-Dickian SF psychological analysis.
Gateway – Frederik Pohl (1976)
Structurally, ‘Gateway’ is composed of a series of psychiatric sessions, punctuated by the story, told in flashback, of the patient, and the events which made him rich and brought him to the psychiatrist’s couch.
The book is also peppered with random downloads from various sources (the AI psychiatrist’s record of the session; postings from the Gateway notice board; letters to the press; transcripts of training lectures etc) which add depth to the narrative while making oblique comments about the society of the time.
Our protagonist, Robinette Broadhead, makes an interesting hero. It’s a tribute to Pohl’s powers of characterisation that Broadhead – essentially what one may describe as a coward, and who at one point beats up his girlfriend – comes across as a likeable and sensitive character.
Gateway is an asteroid, somewhere within the orbit of Venus, which, millions of years ago, was a base for the long-vanished HeeChee. The HeeChee left behind several hundred (still-working) ships, each capable of automatic return trips to a series of preset – but unknown – destinations.
Some prospectors returned with valuable HeeChee artefacts or scientific data. Others returned dead. Some never returned at all.
Broadhead gambles his lottery-won fortune to buy a trip to Gateway and the Russian Roulette chance of flying to an unknown destination to discover something that would make him rich enough to solve all his problems.
Obviously since we know Broadhead did become rich and is now in therapy (under the treatment of Sigfrid, the AI psychiatrist) his problems were not solved.
The beauty of this book is that we are left – as we generally are in life – with unresolved issues.
Had there been no sequels, this would undoubtedly stand as a masterpiece, but the three ensuing books, in which the mysterious HeeChee are discovered, and their disappearance explained, erode the mystery which is such a valuable part of this novel.
As a stand-alone novel, it leaves one with that poignant feeling that the book is going on without you somewhere.
Pohl is the nearest thing we have to an American Socialist SF writer. Where other writers would concentrate on the militaristic or larger social consequences of an overpopulated world with few resources, Pohl concentrates on the issues of individuals, and those individuals who exist on the lowest social level (Broadhead grew up in one of the communities which harvest the specialised protein fungi which grows in the shale of one of earth’s many food-mines. Wealth seems the only way to escape the poverty trap.)
Pohl’s society is also a liberal society, and it’s nice to see that, in the mid-seventies, he could include gay characters who weren’t defined solely by their sexuality. Broadhead himself has a sexual experience with a male crewmate which is discussed firstly during a therapy session. Broadhead first avoids the subject, then dismisses it as situational homosexuality, in that he was frustrated on a long trip with an all-male crew.
Later, this episode is told in flashback via first-person narrative, in which Broadhead describes it in fonder, even more romantic terms.
Every character seems fully rounded, and they are skilfully presented as people with flaws, with faults, and no one lives happily ever after. It is not, however, bleak. It is an optimistic view of human aspiration and endeavour.
The most intriguing character is the HeeChee race itself, and in this novel at least, Pohl carefully avoids the temptation to put flesh on their bones. He does not even provide the bones. Nothing is known of them, other than what can be deduced from their abandoned ships and tunnels.
Jack McDevitt’s ‘Engines of God’ employs the same device, and, as in ‘Gateway’ the novel is stronger for it.
One could argue that The HeeChee are a metaphor for either Happiness or God. The thing that we would risk all to search for, sure that it will bring us security and independence. Broadhead confuses wealth with spiritual and personal contentment, although at times it is his own fear of either failure or death which prevents him from achieving either.
The chance of a huge bonus for a scientific mission ends with Broadhead escaping the event horizon of a black hole, forced to leave his girlfriend trapped inside, subject to the effects of time-dilation and living through only a few seconds for every year that passes in Broadhead’s life.
The narrative guides us to Broadhead’s loss in parallel to the course of the therapy sessions which take us to his eventual confrontation with his own memory of the event, and the belief that he killed her, or worse, that she is still trapped, living out her last days over the coming centuries.
Without doubt, Pohl’s best work to date.
Death Robots From Mars 
Recent Comments