Science Fiction: The 101 Best Novels 1985-2010 (30 page)

54

Wil McCarthy

The problem with action/adventure fiction is that most of it is dumb as rocks. The problem with literary fiction is that for all its beauty and depth, there’s usually not much going on. In between these two extremes lies what is generally known as “genre” fiction, i.e., the romance, SF, horror, mystery and suspense stories that most of us actually read.

Bloom
was his fifth published novel, released when he was 32, and certified his arrival as an sf master. A further sequence of four novels, known collectively as
The Queendom of Sol
, was launched two years later with the astonishing
The Collapsium,
about a man who uses nanorobots to build his own small planet in the Kuiper belt after first assembling thousands of miniature black holes, devises fax teleportation for the Solar System, and then in a fit of urgency invents the principles behind an inertialess space drive, and flies off to rescue the Sun from imminent destruction. And that’s just the start. The series is a four course meal, stuffed with nutritious alternative physics that might even turn out to be true.
Bloom,
by contrast, is a bracing energy drink and a brisk workout that leaves you muscle-burned but satisfied.

John Strasheim, a cobbler on austere Ganymede in 2106 who makes shoes weighted down with gold, that now-abundant metal, is a part-time journalist whose book on the destruction of Earth and the rest of the inner solar system is a minor classic. The moons of Jupiter, and other small habitats of the outer solar system, remain free of the dreadful Mycora nanoplague infestation that emerged in New Guinea and almost instantly sporulated across the world, turning flesh, buildings and rock into seething versions of itself. These technogenic lifeform spores poured out into space, eating energy from sunlight, infecting and absorbing everything out as far as the asteroids, when the cold began to hamper their spread. But only the most vigorous and devoted efforts by the Immunity—the cultures of the outer system—can fend them off.

Now Strasheim is recruited to join a select crew to probe this swarming infestation, flying inward toward the Sun in the
Louis Pasteur
, now coated with a mimetic fractal surface that its designer hopes will deter the mycora gray goo from snacking on it. It seems that the Mycosystem is learning to adapt, speeding its breach of the immunity protections:

The air vent and the wall it was part of began to boil, their substance turning fluid, turning into rainbow-threaded vapors as the tiny, tiny mycora disassembled them molecule by molecule…. How vivid the colors, how crisp the lines and edges!... class-one threaded bloom in early germination phase, about two minutes before fruiting began. Some structure already visible in the expanding fog, crystalline picks growing like needles from the drydock wall.

Not everyone is happy about this expedition, not least the cultish Temples of Transcendent Evolution, which regard the vast swarm as a sort of deity, an immense mind that has evolved or perhaps been designed to replace humankind as the noösphere of the solar system. Cast as the superstitious foe of Ganymede’s more reasonable citizens, the Temples prove seductively plausible, not surprisingly since they echo the transcendental yearnings of many of sf’s best and most influential writers: Sturgeon with his hunger after gestalt minds, Heinlein and his Pantheistic Multiperson Solipsism, Goonan’s surreal nanopunk (see Entry 90). Also not surprisingly, therefore, except to the main characters, the payoff turns out to approximate this scientistic transcendence, putting a crimp in the covert motives of the expedition.

Pursued by ships of the Temples, Strasheim and his fellow astronauts pause for supplies at the Floral asteroids, and get their staid minds blown by the arboreal low-gravity antics of Saint Helier settlers, with their hypogravitic osteo deformities. It’s a classic sf confrontation of cultures radiated from everything we find familiar, the zee-spec wearing Ganymedeans (whose clunky specs provide them with wearable computation, augmented reality overlays, etc) and the neurally-wired, AI-assisted, touchy-feely asteroid humans and their delightful creole, that has to be translated by instantly uploaded zee-spec code:

“Heyyo,” the man said brightly. “Ahn behalfde gavnoffice, aloha wekkome the San Heelyer. Ma nom wa Chris Dibrin. Kai I am lok to assist you.”

Ostensibly, the
Pasteur’s
task is to drop monitors on the inner planets, but the Temples, and their embedded agents, are convinced that these devices are meant to destroy the Mycora. That’s not impossible, given “ladderdown” nuclear technology, one of McCarthy’s zanier inventions: a process in which elements are encouraged to transmute into states lower on the periodic chart, releasing immense amounts of energy. Abused, this power source might set off vast solar flares, driven by “cascade fusion,” that will boil away the entire Mycosystem. McCarthy handles this risky melodrama with skill, frightening and awing us with the scale of the threat and its possible solution, but retaining a vulnerable human voice as his narrator.

Let’s hope McCarthy finds time to return to fiction after he’s solved some of the more urgent problems of the real world.

55

Linda Nagata

This exciting debut showed an author who had fully digested the work of writers from Bear to Egan, McAuley to Calder, Varley to Ryman, and fashioned her own bright chimeric beast on which to ride and join the parade.

With her second book,
Tech-Heaven
, Nagata did many things differently, while retaining the virtues of the first book—always a promising strategy. And she appeared to add two more writers to her list of influences: Norman Spinrad and James Tiptree.

Unlike
Bohr
,
Tech-Heaven
opened in a world not too far removed from ours. Biotech research is slightly further along, as are several societal trends of a Luddite, Balkanizing nature. Otherwise, a gritty familiarity obtains. The character whose shoulders we ride exclusively (with one small exception) is the young woman named Katie Kishida, wife to Tom, mother to two daughters. This tighter focus, compared to the viewpoint shifts in
Bohr
, allowed a rich depth of character development. Over the jam-packed course of this novel, we see Katie believably age into her early sixties, accumulating scars and layers of memory that evoke the painfully earned wisdom exhibited by many of Tiptree’s older female characters.

When her husband has what seems to be an inescapably fatal accident, Katie faces the task of seeing him placed into risky cryonic suspension. (The details of cryonic shutdown and, later, revival are highly convincing and realistic, and are typical of Nagata’s scrupulous attention to the nuts-and-bolts of her future.) This act diverts Katie’s whole life onto an unexpected course. Taken up by the media and by competing pro-cryo and anti-cryo factions, Katie becomes first a spokesperson for the movement, then an actual high-stakes player in the whole biotech industry.

It’s in the details of the political infighting and media manipulation that Nagata shows a flair reminiscent of Spinrad’s. Much of the book is devoted to Machiavellian maneuvers that, gradually, lead us to the very future of
The Bohr Maker
. Along the way, mankind’s immersion in the technosphere, the quest for the utopian “tech-heaven” is forcefully debated, with not all of the points accruing to Katie’s side either. (Short intermittent chapters focus on the Bardo-like hallucinations of the frozen Tom Kishida, whose brain retains a certain level of functioning, providing a spiritual angle to the materialistic debate.)

Nagata’s next book,
Deception Well
, would elaborate—after skipping a big interval of fictional time in her future history—the developments seen in the first two volumes.

In the period of
Deception Well
, three millennia hence, a small portion of our galaxy has been settled by sublight ships carrying frozen human passengers. Some suns have become Hallowed Vasties, surrounded by millions of artificial habitats in a kind of pointillistic Dyson sphere. The nanotech known as “makers” allows for many other biological and material wonders as well. But all human civilization is under threat from the berserker fleet known as the Chenzeme, who have ravaged the galaxy for millions of years. Besides their predatory ships, the Chenzeme have infected mankind with a cult virus that breeds charismatic leaders obscurely allied to the Chenzeme cause, as well as hordes of obedient followers.

One such hybrid Savonarola is a young man named Lot. We encounter him as a child, and follow his adventures on the world known as Deception Well, a Solaris-type living planet that offers a possible solution to mankind’s problems. After such mind-expanding incidents as rappelling down two hundred miles of orbital beanstalk and being ingested by the Well, lot ends up forced to flee his home with several friends, in further search of his destiny.