Asimov's Science Fiction: April/May 2013 (38 page)

Everett Singh earns a berth on a four-person crew of one of these dirigibles, the
Everness,
at first as cook, and toward the end via heroic derring-do. At the very end, he and his doughty crewmates, including Sen, his nascent love interest, are off into another multiverse plane via the Infundibulum and into the next novel in the series.

If this sounds calculatingly formulaic, well, in a commercial sense it certainly is. But while Everett Singh in that sense is indeed the perfect teenage Young Adult series hero, he's a much more sophisticated character than, say, Harry Potter, since Ian McDonald is a much more sophisticated novelist than J.K. Rowling, and is not watering down anything here.

Everett is a fully rounded character, with real personal depths and existential angst and desires, as well as fully adult intellectual abilities. That he is a Brit of East Asian descent is not irrelevant, nor are his skills as a soccer goalie or his father's divorce from his mother, nor his guilt at leaving his mother and sister behind worrying about where he has disappeared to.

All of which, serial nature aside,
makes
Planesrunner
perfectly enjoyable for a so-called "adult" readership, and therefore publishable as a science fiction novel, period. After all, I myself wrote a novel with a teenage heroine on a vision quest on four successive exotic far-future planets in search of her true name and calling and a lost love,
Child of Fortune.
And although I've met quite a few parents who enthusiastically gave it to their teenagers, it was not published as a "Young Adult" novel, nor ever marketed or reviewed as such.

So just what makes a science fiction novel a "Young Adult" science fiction novel?

Okay, it must have a teenage protagonist, like
Planesrunner
and
Railsea.
But so does
Child of Fortune.
Okay, the story should probably be centrally a colorful picaresque quest of some sort. But so is the story of
Child of Fortune.

Maybe it should tiptoe around explicit sexual description.
Planesrunner
and
Railsea
do.
Child of Fortune
doesn't.

Must it be written in forthrightly transparent prose?
Planesrunner
is. But
Railsea
certainly isn't.

So maybe the real question should be who or what is a "Young Adult Reader," and is the adult publisher's concept of who and what that is the same as that of an actual teenager?

When I was no more than twelve or thirteen, I decided I wanted to read
Moby Dick
—hey, a sailing ship with a crazed captain chasing a great white whale, way cool, right? So my dad checked it out of the Adult section of the library for me and I read it. After which my dad asked me what I thought about it.

"I really liked it," I told him, "but it's kind of slow, don't you think? Some of the descriptive stuff seems too long, too wordy, too ponderous."

Decades later, after I had become a published writer, out of curiosity, I reread
Moby Dick.

I really liked it, even more so as a adult and a writer myself, able to better see what Melville was about metaphorically, metaphysically, philosophically, in those long static discursive passages. But they still slowed down the reading of the novel more than they should have. Too long, too wordy, too ponderous.

Which, as we shall see, brings us to
Railsea.
Not because it is too long, too wordy, too ponderous, which it is not, but because it is a "Young Adult" novel with the requisite teenage hero and picaresque plotline that is also a forthright and very slyly sophisticated literary take on
Moby Dick.

Having read
Moby Dick,
my twelve-year-old self would have full appreciated what China Miéville was doing. Nor does my present incarnation feel he was being written down to.

Railsea
takes place on some planet, somewhere, somewhen—or rather nowhere and nowhen except on a purely
literary
"plane" in Miéville's for the most part purely literary multiverse, what he calls the "New Weird." This has mostly consisted of fantasies. The new part is that these novels, whether set in contemporary London, or on other planets, or whatever, not only pay no attention to the boundaries of what is known of the laws of mass and energy in our universe, but as often as not make no pretense at confining themselves to any consistent set of physical rules in the author's fictional setting, either.

Chez Miéville, a novel, after all, is in reality an entirely fictional creation, within which what is, is real. But what is real on any given page can be whatever the author wants it to be for his literary purposes, internal consistency not being required. This is not only fantasy, it is, in a sense, the antithesis of science fiction, literary tennis played not only with the net down, but with the rules of the game changeable at any given moment by the whim of the author.

But
Railsea
is something different. Weird it certainly is, weird to the max, but a kind of weird hard science fiction. The setting is a world somewhere, some-when, some plane of the multiverse, maybe even some post-apocalyptic future of this one. There's really no way of telling,
and it doesn't really matter. The geography of the planet is not only utterly disconnected from that of our Earth but largely mysterious to its own inhabitants, who are familiarly human.

These humans live on islands, archipelagos of islands, in the Railsea of the title, or for the most part fairly close to the shores of the continents. The Railsea is exactly what the name implies, an ocean not of water, but of railway tracks, an endless spaghetti maze of them replete with switches, plied not by ships but trains; merchant trains, pirate trains, scavenger trains, war-trains, and whaling trains.

Well not really
whaling
trains. The culture, economics, and even hunting techniques of these trains may be those of nineteenth century whaling ships, but what they are chasing are not enormous cetaceans but giant
moles.

The seafloor. . . er, I mean the railfloor, is inhabited, infested, with all sorts of animals and insects, outsized or not, more of them than not voraciously dangerous to the point where humans fear to "go off the rails" to set foot on this terra infirma. The top predators are the giant moles, more massive than the railtrains hunting them.

This is the setting of the novel, and while it is improbable in the extreme, it is as much "science fiction" as any steam-punk novel, since nothing here violates any of the physical laws of our own piece of the multiverse. It all remains internally consistent, and while it has the same sort of retro charm as steampunk, it isn't exactly nostalgic.

The teenage hero of this Young Adult novel is Sham Yes ap Soorap, a boy who goes to railsea aboard the moletrain
Medes,
captained by Ms. Abacat Nephi, obsessively pursuing the Great White Mole Mocker-Jack that bit off her arm.

Does this sound like a take on
Moby Dick?

Don't call Sham Ishmael, but boy, is it!

And what a take it is!

And China Miéville makes no bones about it.

On the surface, up to a point, what we have is forthrightly the surface plot of
Moby Dick,
a sea-faring whale hunt by an obsessively vengeful Captain Ahab pursuing his Great White Whale, transparently transmogrified into a train-faring mole hunt by an obsessively vengeful Captain Nephi pursuing her Great White Mole.

Miéville is such a masterful writer that in the reading of the novel this is not at all as silly as a summary of it has to sound, though when Sham and Miéville go off the tracks toward the last part of the book, the dénouement turns out to be not only quite silly indeed but a naked set-up for the next novel in a series. However, with China Miéville, and especially in this one, it may be some kind of sly literary put-down joke of just that sort of thing.

Captain Nephi, it turns out, is not the only moletrain Captain obsessively chasing a particular giant mole, nor is she the only one with an arm or leg bitten off. If indeed it was bitten off, because if your "philosophy" hasn't really taken an appendage, a captain might fake it.

Because moletrain captains of any serious standing must indeed have a philosophy, even as Captain Ahab, even as the author of
Moby Dick
himself, concretized in the singular Giant Mole, the single Giant Metaphorical Symbol, the pursuit of which is their existential raison d'etre.

This is a Young Adult novel?

Well, Herman Melville wasn't focusing on a Young Adult readership when he wrote
Moby Dick,
now was he? But I was a Young Adult when I first read it with somewhat critical enjoyment. Given that the plot was an exciting whale-hunting tale that China Miéville has deliberately followed as the plotline of most of
Railsea,
I doubt that I was the only one enticed into reading it as a kid, and able to enjoy it, if not as fully as I did decades later.

So maybe the distance between publishers' marketing concept of a Young Adult reader and what a real Young Adult with a taste for reading fiction at
all is capable of reading with full comprehension has narrowed. Which is maybe why so-called "Young Adult novels" like
Planesrunner
and
Railsea
can fully engage literarily sophisticated so-called "Adult Readers," and only the mandated age of the protagonists matching the age of the targeted readership is what makes them Young Adult novels.

Which is to say that in the twenty-first century publishers and the culture at large may have gotten it through their heads that teenagers really are
young adults
and not older children.

But this is not to say that a novel like
Cowboy Angels
can really be enjoyed by anyone, adult or young adult, without considerable historical knowledge on their meter and a jaundiced and cynical taste for jaundiced and cynical realpolitik. And even my dad, who had both, probably wouldn't have gone to the Adult section of the library to get this one for twelve-year-old me unless I had adamantly insisted.

Cowboy Angels
is a hard-core novel with a hard-core viewpoint character doing hard-core killing for politically hard-core reasons, and retaining the reader's sympathy while doing it. And if you think that's personally impossible, maybe you shouldn't dare to read this book.

It is also hard-core in relation to the theoretical cosmological physics of the multiverse, or anyway probably as hard-core as you can get and still be able to write a coherent novel. Here what is called a Heisenberg Gate in
Planesrunner
is called a Turing Gate, because it was developed in 1963 thanks to pioneering work by Alan Turing. But it is exactly the same technology based on exactly the same multiverse physics.

But of course in
our
"plane," which McAuley calls a "sheaf," no such technology has been developed thus far, let alone in 1963. The protagonist and viewpoint character, Adam Stone (he can hardly be called a hero), is a native of the sheaf where it was, not ours—a sheaf pleased to call itself the Real.

Well, actually it is specifically the United States of America of this sheaf that calls it the Real, and which has built many Turing Gates to many sheaves including our own. And it is that U.S. which intervenes in the Americas thereof via clandestine commando operatives like Stone, the Cowboy Angels of the title, or straightforward military force, in order to build a kind of trans-sheaf multiuniversal Pax Americana dominated by itself.

Well, actually this really doesn't deserve to be called a
Pax
Americana, since the "Real" United States of America considers itself the elder brother of this trans-sheaf clade of alternate Americas, or in blunter terms, the Hegemon of these client states. And eagerly willing to extend the sway of its version of truth, justice, and the American way over more and more alternate Americas by whatever means necessary and available to it.

Until the Jimmy Carter of the Real is elected President of the United States. Carter is determined to put an end to this armed and clandestine democratic imperialism, and more or less sets out to put a stop to it.

This does not sit well with the Real's version of the CIA, and less still with its inner elite Cowboy Angels whose mission is to do the dirtiest of its history-altering trans-sheaf dirty work. Still less with a maverick element within it that loathes Carter with a purple passion and is willing to go to drastic means, up to and including fomenting multiuniversal nuclear wars in order to overturn his weak-kneed pacific policies and return the America of the Real and its vassal Americas to the status quo ante.

Stone is a former Cowboy Angel who has had more than his bellyfull of this dirty business and returned to a tranquil sheaf where homo sapiens never evolved and Manhattan is a bucolic paradise. He is dragooned back down into this cesspit of political assassinations, coups, counter-coups, derring-dirty-do, and casual discorporations of even the innocent when tactically necessary when his old buddy Tom Waverly, long since disappeared into his own clandestine retirement,
resurfaces as a trans-sheaf serial killer of the multiple incarnations or "doppels" of the same scientist.

What makes
Cowboy Angels
a masterful novel, and not just an angry political screed, is that even while Stone keeps racking up his body count, McAuley keeps successfully rendering him as a sympathetic character. Not only on a personal psychological level, but even on a moral level, a soldierly moral level, doing what he does for coldly tactical reasons, convinced most of the time that he is committing
necessary
evils in the service of higher good, and maybe even being right.

Nor does the end of the novel read anything like a set-up for a sequel, multiverse or not, nor a tranquil justly earned reward or transformative pacification of Adam Stone.

And if you think I'm exaggerating the passionately ireful tone of this novel to express my own political opinions, you are dead wrong. Paul McAuley has written this novel in even harsher terms, if anything. Think a clear-eyed brew of John Le Carre, Mickey Spillane, and Julian Assange.