Science Fiction: The 101 Best Novels 1985-2010 (21 page)
Read Science Fiction: The 101 Best Novels 1985-2010 Online
Authors: Damien Broderick,Paul di Filippo
Equally fine are Silk’s supporting cast. Maytera Mint, later General Mint, is a convincing Joan of Arc. The whores Hyacinth and Chenille could have stepped out of Brecht’s
The Threepenny Opera
. Silk’s superiors in his order—Remora and Quetzal—recall
A Canticle for Leibowitz
. Even Silk’s pet talking bird, Oreb, is granted a witty individualism.
The full-scale civil war between Silk and the illegal current government of Viron—a war foreshadowed in the second book and fully underway by the third—is also never less than realistic in its spurts of fury and weary pauses. As in Paul Park’s Wolfe-resonant
Starbridge
books (Entry 10), the birth of a new order is portrayed as a contorted and painful process.
Brecht, the playwright, can have the last word on Silk’s character and impact, from his drama
The Caucasian Chalk Circle
: “Great is the seductive power of goodness.”
[1]
In accordance with this, Wolfe’s style and diction are considerably less erudite and recomplicated than in the saga’s predecessor,
The Book of the New Sun
. That sequence prompted the remarkable 440-page
Lexicon Urthus
, but to date the sequels have yielded only several useful pamphlets.
See
http://www.siriusfiction.com/
for the encyclopedic annotations by independent scholar and publisher,
Michael
Andre
-
Driussi.
37
Michael Bishop
(1994)
SINCE HIS FIRST
short-story sale in 1970 (“Piñon Fall” in
Galaxy
magazine), Michael Bishop has revealed a questing spiritual intelligence uniquely concerned with moral conundrums. While his works are often full of both the widescreen spectacles associated with science fiction and the subtle frissons typical of more earthbound fantasy, his focus remains on the engagement of characters with ethical quandaries any reader might encounter in daily life. Whether to succor a dying relative at some personal expense; how to earn an honest living while being true to one’s muse; how best to establish essential communication among strangers forced to rely on each other for survival: these issues and others equally vital form the core of Bishop’s concerns. And his prescription for success most often involves not derring-do or superhuman efforts, but simply the maintenance of an honest, open heart and a charitable, brave soul. While only occasionally delving into explicitly religious themes, Bishop’s personal Christian faith—wide enough to embrace references to Buddhism, Sufism and other creeds—shines through in every tale.
A talent capable of being decanted into many different molds, genre and otherwise, Bishop’s skills and vision translate from one medium to another without diminishment or concealment. Never content merely to repeat his past triumphs, he has steadfastly ventured into new territory with every book. He surely broke fresh and fertile ground with
Brittle Innings
, where, employing the obvious metaphor, he hit a literary home run. With echoes of Eudora Welty, John Steinbeck and William Faulkner, as well as the cinematic drolleries of the Coen Brothers, Brittle Innings is a leisurely paced speculative summer idyll not bereft of suspense, infused with the alternating languorous and frenetic rhythms of baseball, the sport which informs its every sentence.
A promising high school ballplayer in rural Oklahoma during the early years of World War II, seventeen-year-old Danny Boles is recruited by team-owner Jordan McKissic—Mister JayMac—for McKissic’s Georgia farm team, the Highbridge Hellbenders. After making his way east, not without traumatic difficulties that literally render him speechless, Danny arrives in the town of Highbridge to plunge into a milieu unlike anything his sheltered life has previously prepared him for. In the McKissic lodging house (whose lines evoke a “fairy-tale castle”), Danny is introduced to an assorted passel of idiosyncratic players, wives, nieces, crew and townspeople. Surely the most dramatic figure is Jumbo Henry Clerval, an enormous ugly shambling grotesque who can wallop a baseball with a tremendous force that makes him the most valuable member of the Hellbenders.
Assigned to room with Henry, Danny quickly finds himself intrigued by the enigma of Jumbo. He discovers the strange man to be a pacifist loner possessed of a quick wit and a large if stilted vocabulary. Throughout the single season of ballplaying that the book spans, Danny and Henry become friends. Learning Henry’s secret origin—the man is the one-and-only immortal monster created by Dr. Victor Frankenstein—Danny becomes complicit in his patchwork friend’s quest to refine his artificial soul and survive with some nobility among those who disdain him.
Meanwhile, a lovingly detailed series of dusty games that culminates in a pennant battle, each contest individualized into a pithy Iliad, is laid out before us, with Danny’s triumphs and failures shaping him into maturity. He falls in love with Phoebe Pharram, JayMac’s niece; he encounters the prevalent racism of the era; he learns of the fate of his long-absent father; and he navigates the webwork of emotions among his teammates with some skill. But right upon the verge of individual success, Danny finds his future wrenched onto a cataclysmic track, one which embroils Jumbo Henry Clerval as well.
Bishop’s sure hand amasses a wealth of period details here—without any ungainly infodumps—which succeed in recreating a vanished decade down to the stitching on the very baseballs. Narrated in the first-person by Danny, this book unfalteringly captures the young man’s unique voice, a mix of naiveté and hard-earned wisdom. The embedded memoirs of Jumbo Clerval offer an enthralling mini-epic of the monster’s post-Shelley career, resonant with any number of sf tropes. And a delicious ambiguity is maintained for a long interval: is Clerval truly what he claims to be, or simply a deluded giant born of woman like everyone else, who has fabricated this interesting history to ennoble himself?
But in the end the clues tip toward the verity of Clerval’s past, placing the narrative firmly among Bishop’s other, perhaps more explicitly hardcore sf excursions. Mary Shelley’s inspirational novel is rightly revered as the grandmother of modern science fiction, by critics such as Brian Aldiss. The inclusion of the titular monster here makes
Brittle Innings
automatically part of the sf canon.
Told as an extended flashback from Danny’s 1991 perspective, the tale is drenched in a luminous nostalgia for what amounts to a Golden Age (despite the period’s acknowledged defects), a “once upon a time” venue where mythic beings—not only Jumbo, but the other players as well—still walked the earth. This Bradburyian evocation of a legendary prelapsarian past is one of the effects sf does all too infrequently, but to which the mode lends itself splendidly in the hands of a master such as Bishop.
38
Greg Egan
(1994)
“
BAUDELAIRE
can screw himself. I’m here for the physics,” remarks a young woman in Greg Egan’s Locus award winning story “The Planck Dive.” Physics is what Egan provides in most of his sf: physics (and metaphysics) at the margins of the known and beyond, physics rendered not so much in storytelling’s ancient visceral imagination as in a kind of cool, ironic allegory of equations tormented to the limit. This is a very odd kind of writing, even for hardened sf readers. Like the work of Polish novelist Stanislaw Lem, it requires an appetite for fresh thoughts superbly deployed. Even so, Egan’s second sf novel,
Permutation City,
won a prestigious jury prize, the Campbell Memorial award.
So such late-generation, highly cerebral science fiction prose is not always easy to read. It can be annoyingly expository, no matter how hard Egan tries to disguise the fact as he renders his radically strange futures. But it is always an ambitious and
artistic
bid at the impossible. His prose and his ideas extend us as we struggle with their formidable, uncompromising clarity. Indeed, one
commentator
has observed: “
Permutation City,
which features unlikeable characters, wooden dialogue, and a depressing storyline, is one of the most thought-provoking works of science fiction ever written.”
[1]
That is why Egan emerged in the 1990s as perhaps the most important sf writer in the world. In many respects he remained an undeveloped
literary
artist. Even his finest work totters by comparison with the complex best of some other writers surveyed in this book, texts that engage us more completely in their imaginative embrace. But Egan’s forté was established from the outset: to deploy with clean, brilliant ingenuity some astonishing or seemingly paradoxical insight from science and philosophy. He is enviably in command of the latest neurosciences, molecular biology, advanced computer programming, artificial and natural intelligence, evolutionary theory. His politics is crisp, astute, pitilessly candid. If his style is—
level
(let’s not say “flat”)—it isn’t just because he enjoys deflating pretension. His antiheroic yet very drily witty voice is the natural register for a disillusioned, clear-eyed observer.
That is also an apt description of the major characters in
Permutation City,
even though one of the principals spent years in a psychiatric facility scribbling anagrams like “Pin my taut erotic/Art to epic mutiny/Can’t you permit it/To cite my apt ruin?” (There is a clue here, which you can trace back to the title.) Finally, advanced nanosurgery corrects his mad delusions. But are his ideas really delusional? In 2050, Paul Durham is convinced—can remember, vividly—that he has experimented on himself in 2045, uploading his consciousness into a virtual reality environment, using a technology now mature enough that the wealthy use it at death as a form of resurrection into a better world. Paul and his Copy cooperate in an audacious test of an extreme theory.
The nature and implications of that Dust theory develop elaborately through the novel, but in essence it’s this: what happens when a self-aware human mind run on a computer has its process interrupted, each calculated step delayed until finally it is running like a flickering movie? Answer: the gaps are unnoticeable
to that mind
, in much the way we can’t notice our visual blind spot, or the ceaseless saccadic jittering of our eyes. But then what happens if the sequence of experiences is run
randomly
: not ABCDE, but BDECA? Durham learns that life goes on unchanged, from the inside. Fragments of experience stitch themselves together into a seamless continuity. (There are problems with this conclusion, and trying to resolve them is part of the fun of the book.)
Egan
has noted:
I recall being very bored and dissatisfied with the way most cyberpunk writers were treating virtual reality and artificial intelligence in the ’80s; a lot of people were churning out very lame
noir
plots that utterly squandered the philosophical implications of the technology. I wrote a story called “Dust,” which was later expanded into
Permutation City
, that pushed very hard in the opposite direction, trying to take as seriously as possible all the implications of what it would mean to be software…. I just look at things from the characters’ perspective and ask myself what their problems and anxieties would be.
[2]
