Science Fiction: The 101 Best Novels 1985-2010 (20 page)

35

Mary Rosenblum

Circumstances send Jewel back to the thorny bosom of her dysfunctional family in Seattle—shiftless sister Linda, paralyzed druggie husband Carl, street-smart, VR-savvy niece Susana. The earthquake-stricken city and its surrounding “’burbs” are depicted evocatively in classic grim ’n’ gritty cyberpunk fashion.

Jewel looked through the gang-signed permaglass, sweating because the air-conditioning was down again. Below the grimy concrete span of the rail, small houses lined up in orderly rows, separated by tan strips of weedy dust. They were old, with roofs of crumbling shingles. Ancient cars, broken bits of furniture, piles of cardboard and plastic trash cluttered the old yards. A lot of the houses had burned to blackened shells in this neighborhood.

Hello, Detroit 2011. The crumbling infrastructure of Rosenblum’s future, as well as the permanent sullen underclass and greedy, heedless elite, retain their contemporary relevance—sadly and to America’s shame.

David Chen and his male lover Flander are on the scene as well, physically or as avatars, and the accidental bonds first fostered amongst the trio in Antarctica ramify, with Jewel even saving David’s life. Threats by unknown antagonists send Chen, Jewel and Susana into the deserts of the American West and into the arms of Serafina, tough old broad and mysterious VR “guardian angel.” Ultimate confrontation with Alcourt looms.

Rosenblum’s brand of cyberpunk bears a distinct and welcome flavor of the domestic novel and the romance novel, a hybrid leavening of the subgenre’s standard macho posturing. The romantic triangle between Chen, Jewel and Flander, sometimes implicit, sometimes explicit, resonates with the work of Catherine Asaro in her
Skolian
books, the first of which would appear not long after
Chimera
, as if obeying some zeitgeist imperative.

But Jewel’s embedding in the blood ties of family, a motif that receives much narrative attention, is an even stronger flavor. Likewise, David Chen’s conflicts with his patriarchal clan, and Serafina’s backstory. Try to imagine Case of
Neuromancer
taking his niece on his adventures, however Ono-Sendai deck-capable such a hypothetical character might have been, and you’ll see the drastically different vision Rosenblum’s brand of cyberpunk imparts.

Although overlooked by most critics when compiling the history of cyberpunk,
Chimera
is definitely an epochal second-generation instance of that mode, much in the manner of the work of Simon Ings (Entry 57) and others. That its author was a woman is also historically notable, given the paucity of female cyberpunks. But these incidental milestones cannot compare to the accomplished story-telling and world-building that constitute the book’s essential core.

36

Gene Wolfe

The Book of the Long Sun
at first seems to belong to the straightforward camp. The tale of a generational starship shaped like a standard O’Neill tin can (hence the titular rodlike axial sun) coming to the end of its voyage was stylistically and thematically informed on every page by the Jesus-like character of its protagonist, Patera Silk, a humble, honest, ultimately influential priest of the ship’s AI gods. What a surprise, then, at the very close of the fourth volume, to learn that the whole long narrative was not the product of some omniscient objective author viewing the wild flurry of events from some nebulous godlike vantage, but rather a historic memoir, a recreation, written by two of the subsidiary characters, a husband and wife named Horn and Nettle.

Throughout Silk’s story, these two characters hid behind third person (in retrospect, Horn was present from page one of the opening volume, naturally enough). But finally stepping out into first-person voice, Horn disclosed his authorship and portrayed himself living with Nettle and children on the world Blue, the ultimate destination of the starship. Of Silk, they knew nothing more, the priest having remained behind

But it was only with
Exodus from the Long Sun
, the fourth volume in the middle part of a gigantic saga that began with
The Shadow of the Torturer—The Book of the New Sun, The Urth of the New Sun, The Book of the Long Sun, The Book of the Short Sun—
that readers could finally begin to say some semicogent things about the central quartet.

First, readers could note that the
Long Sun
quartet was in reality one seamless narrative, a market-dictated publishing freak, 1200-plus pages that should, in a more perfect world, have been enclosed between two cloth-covered boards only. Prior to the appearance of the final volume, only partial truths could have been uttered about Wolfe’s novel(s).

Those who might doubt the unity of the book should consider the publishing breakpoints and resumptions. While somewhat dramatically satisfying and terminal, the former are no more than traditional chapter closures, bridges broken in midair, not rainbow pots of gold.

At the end of the first volume,
Nightside the Long Sun
, our protagonist’s hand is upon a doorknob, mystery awaiting beyond. At the start of the second,
Lake of the Long Sun
, he opens that selfsame door. At the end of that volume, we leave our hero kneeling in the mud by a dying man. He reappears, aged only a few hours, admittedly not until Chapter Two of the third book,
Caldé of the Long Sun
, but that small delay is only because Wolfe has now decided to splinter the narrative among different viewpoints, and Chapter One of the third entry is devoted to other people. Book Three ends with our main character standing outdoors as friendly foreign troops prepare to enter his city in a victory parade. We find him a few pages into Chapter One of Book Four, hurriedly tackling personal chores before that very parade’s start.

Much more important is the tightly enclosing timeframe. The entire action of the quartet takes place over a mere ten or fourteen days. Events from the first book reverberate continuously throughout. Wounds sustained in the opening volume have not even healed by the climax of the last. And of course a rigorously consistent symbolism and thematic unity enfolds all four volumes.

Enough of generalities. Our story opens in
Nightside the Long Sun
, a book that is somewhat anomalous when compared with the later entries, since it represents the last days of the old order of affairs.

We are inside a multi-generation starship shaped like the traditional O’Neill space habitat: an immense spinning cylinder, inhabited lands on the curving interior wall, the eponymous source of heat and light a blaze that runs from endcap to endcap. The residents mostly know on some subliminal level that their world is artificial—especially as it is undercut by an immense tunnel network—but are too busy living their mundane, centuries-hallowed lives to bother themselves about destinations or cosmology. Especially since they are kept in line by very real AI gods who dwell in Mainframe and can possess their human servitors via an optical download. (This theocratic setup, by the way, echoes Harry Harrison’s underrated Captive Universe.)

Mediating between gods and mankind are the Pateras, the priests, and the Mayteras, or nuns. Patera Silk is our focus. This is his story, “The Book of Silk,” as it is called retrospectively by a hidden narrator. Even when he is offstage, Silk dominates the action, the dialogue, the feelings of his fellow citizens of Viron. If we understand Silk, we understand the whole series.

Basically, Silk is the Brave Little Tailor, a simple soul with a
high destiny.
[1]
From his opening epiphany Silk moves to eventual selfless dominance of his city, and insures the salvation of the whole Whorl of the Long Sun. This is the most obvious reading of his adventures.

And yet Silk simultaneously embodies several other archetypes. He is Don Quixote, delusionary romantic. Consider how he falls impossibly in love with a woman he barely knows, ultimately throwing away everything to pursue her. He is a thief, the Jack of Shadows, to borrow the title of Roger Zelazny’s 1971 novel, which was a tribute to Jack Vance, whom Wolfe also admires. He is—no sarcasm intended—also the canny urban or noir-ish priest best envisioned as played by Bing Crosby or Spencer Tracy, trying to save his parish. And as a true believer and hierophant, Silk also necessarily casts a shadow of Jesus, in everything from symbolic donkey rides to wounds received from soldiers to temptation in a High Place.

Most intriguingly, Silk is also Chesterton’s Father Brown. Echoes of that sleuthing priest become apparent every time Silk sits down his friends and retails his deductions, several times in each volume. If we need it made explicit, in
Exodus
Wolfe has Silk respond to a man who says he loves mysteries with: “I don’t. I try to clear them up when I can....” In all these roles, though, Silk is unswervably honorable and good, yet humanly fallible: a rare figure in sf. Worldly accomplishments mean little to him; only the saving of his soul and those of his flock hold sway over him. All the thieving, fighting and political chicanery he must perform are aimed at nothing but establishing a peaceful atmosphere in which to minister to the common people of his city.

This focus causes Wolfe deliberately to keep the action bottled up within the precincts of Silk’s beloved and thickly detailed city. Only the tiniest fraction of events occur in alternate settings. The clichéd “Hunt for the Control Room” scenario found in most generation-starship tales is almost nonexistent. This one-in-four book is, in fact, almost an anti-generationship tale. Oh, there are the momentary expected frissons—such as when Silk finally sees the stars for the first time—but the whole story could have been transplanted with minor changes to, say, Dynastic Egypt.

Not to say that Wolfe pulls rabbits out of his hat and calls them “smeerps.” A writer of his invention and subtlety is probably constitutionally incapable of such a sin. No, Wolfe’s Simakian robots are utterly believable. His digital gods and their intrusive Windows are a fine invention. The Crew of Flyers who guard the Cargo (i.e., Silk and all his fellows) are weirdly tribal possessors of regressed knowledge.