Science Fiction: The 101 Best Novels 1985-2010 (38 page)

70

Christopher Priest

The frame tale of the narrative opens in 1999, with a writer of popular histories named Stuart Gratton. At a book-signing, Gratton receives a handwritten memoir of WWII from a woman named Angela. The memoir is by one J. L. Sawyer. This first-person account occupies the next couple of hundred pages of
The Separation
. We follow the doings of Jack (the memorist) and Joe Sawyer, twin brothers, both bearing the initials “JL.” Jack, an RAF pilot, seems to be Angela’s illegitimate father, despite Joe having been married to Angela’s mother, Birgit. (Joe, Jack tells us, died in 1940 when a bomb destroyed his London ambulance.)

With meticulous period detail, Jack describes his own wartime endeavors, focusing on an odd mission where he met not only Churchill’s double, but also Rudolf Hess’s doppelganger. Throughout the narrative, much is made of Joe and Jack’s exceptional physical and mental affinity that was shattered by their falling out over Birgit, their fateful “separation.” Priest conveys this in a number of subtle ways, such as having Jack enjoy the film
The Lady Eve
, with Barbara Stanwyck, where Stanwyck plays a dual role: one woman with two identities. The autobiography concludes with Jack a grateful old man.

Mid-novel, at memoir’s end, we return to historian Gratton in 1999, and learn that his timeline is not ours. (Adalai Stevenson a USA President, followed in office by Nixon?) And Jack Sawyer’s memoir seems to have strayed across dimensions, since Angela, its courier, does not exist anywhere Gratton can find her. Next up is an account by Stan Levy, one of Jack’s wartime comrades, which seems to confirm this continuum-jumping: Levy maintains that Jack died in 1941 in a plane crash we earlier saw him survive. So it’s on to investigate Joe’s life as a conscientious objector, by objective documents and Joe’s own words. We see Joe father Angela, attend peace negotiations with the Nazis, and watch him undergo odd “lucid imaginings” about Jack, that culminate in spectral superpositions, collapsed into a final solid timeline, Schrodinger-style, by Joe’s sentience.

Priest’s novel is obviously a sobering meditation on war and peace, centering on the 20th-century’s greatest bellicose cataclysm. In the end, it’s an equivocal examination. The pros and cons, benefits and costs of Jack’s familiar war timeline are well known to us, but rendered stingingly fresh by Priest’s handling. It’s Joe’s pacifistic timeline that’s more problematical, leading to a half century of global stagnation. Would such a stasis-ridden, albeit Communist-free future be acceptable, if it meant no Dresden firestorm, no Hiroshima? Readers are left to decide for themselves.

But it’s as a portrait of the uncanny workings of the haunted house multiverse, along the lines recently expounded by such physicists as Brian Greene, that
The Separation
really excels. The seepage and fluctuations between Jack and Joe speak to us of clashing branes, of Borges’s “The Garden of Forking Paths,” of Nabokovian doubles such as Humbert Humbert and Quilty. What is the nature of consciousness across the multiverse? Do Jack and Joe share a single mind? (Echoes of Brian Aldiss’s hilariously horrific “Let’s Be Frank” intrude.) Priest ingeniously depicts such conundrums and leaves the unpacking to us.

In Philip K. Dick’s seminal
The Man in the High Castle
, the Nazi timeline of the main narrative is solid as pain, with only brief glimpses of “better” alternate histories afforded to those trapped characters. In
The Separation
, every timeline (critic Paul Kincaid identifies at least four) seems equally fungible, equally privileged, equally threatened, a whole sheaf of “insubstantial castles fading.” Arguably, this indeterminate multipolar universe offers more “freedom” than Dick’s locked-down scenario. But it’s a freedom, Priest cautions us, that takes formidable strength of being to survive.

71

John C. Wright

A. E. Van Vogt formed my childhood picture of what a hero was. Van Vogt portrayed a man who was more sane, more rational, than his foes, was able to overcome them. No other writer’s works fill me with the sense of awe and wonder as does Van Vogt.

Jack Vance and Gene Wolfe are masters of style, and I filch from them without a twinge of remorse.
[1]

The clearest influence on Wright’s voice, and a welcome one, is Jack Vance. Here is Wright in typically Vancian mocking dialogue:

“Now we have heard him speak; and our open-mindedness is rewarded; for we now learn that [he] believes that what he does is to benefit mankind, and to spread our civilization, which he claims to love. A fine discovery! The conflict here can be resolved without further ado.”

Elsewhere, he recalls the impact of van Vogt’s sf on him, “the sense of wonder that the grand... tradition of space opera embraces. I am trying to write a space opera in his style, so I never have a super-starship ten kilometers long when a ship one hundred kilometers long will do; I never blow up a city when I can blow up a planet.” So Wright was the latest of the ambitious deep future New Space Opera boom—David Zindell, Stephen Baxter, Paul McAuley, Iain M. Banks, Peter Hamilton, Alastair Reynolds, Wil McCarthy (most of them with entries in this book). His Prologue, “Celebrations of the Immortals,” sketches in a mere 350 words a truly wondrous carnival of beings gathered for the Golden Oecumene’s millennial High Transcendence. All human and posthuman neuroforms are represented, fictional as well as real, high transhumans returned briefly to earthly estate from their calculational realms, projected future descendants, “languid-eyed lamia from morbid unrealized alternatives.” It is a beguiling pageant.

In this feverish, abundant, user-pays utopia, foppish Phaethon of Rhadamanthus House finds himself inexplicably ill at ease. Before the first volume is done, this flawed sun god will test the very nature of his identity and that of his beloved wife Daphne, and of his clone father Helion (another solar name, for an engineer who works literally in the bowels of the Sun), contest with artificial minds thousands of times more potent than his own, spar with human variants collective and modified, and test his nerve in a puzzling challenge that combines the curse of Orpheus with the temptation of Pandora.

Is this libertarian Golden Age truly one, with all its immense wealth, cruelty, absolute responsibility to and for self? A certain hard-luck case complains, to comic effect, “You are wealthy people. You can afford to have emotions. Some of us cannot afford the glands or midbrain complexes required.” Or might it be a Golden Cage, penned shut by the caution of immortals within a Solar System that can be reshaped (the Moon brought closer, Venus relocated farther from the Sun, the Sun’s chaos itself tamed) but not escaped.

There are no aliens in this future, no superluminal physics, no time machines, and apparently the single extrasolar expedition failed long ago. (Our suspicions on this score pay off in the second volume.) Who attacks Phaethon with such determination, guile and ferocity? Are there alien invaders after all? Or perhaps Sophotechs (AIs) gone to the bad, which is to say become as self-interested as their charges? Or is Phaethon, like many of sf’s amnesiac supermen, a terrifying rogue force about to reduce order to ruin if his self-inflicted shackles are opened, or carry all into some transcendence beyond the year’s festive High Transcendence?

The trilogy is on one level a travelogue, and Phaethon’s misadventures a pretext to display spectacular scenery. In this case, though, the spectacle is rarely as simple as a catalogue of advanced technology (although there is lots of that, and rather nice it is, too), or dazzling settlings. One poor man is obliged to trudge downstairs all the way from geosynchronous orbit, a 40,000 kilometer plod, compiling his food and drink from air and wastes as he descends a space elevator’s core—a ludicrous but enviably crazed plot move. No, the spectacle shares something with the posthuman cognitive explorations of Walter Jon Williams (Entry 31) and Greg Egan (Entry 38).

Tens of thousands of years hence, or perhaps millions, these people differ in mentality as much as in flesh or chip, or so we are told. If this is rarely enacted satisfactorily, perhaps it’s because that would exceed our capacity to grasp, and Wright’s to imagine. Still, it is enchanting to consider the segmented and spliced levels of Phaethon’s own consciousness, the ways in which his inward construction of the world can be tweaked, betrayed, filtered, manipulated, clarified, the profusion of people in the Golden Age: the Hundred-mind near the kindled star of Jupiter, the gelid frozen brains of Neptune with their envious designs for good or ill, the idealized computer eidolons of the Aeonite School, Warlock neuroforms with intuitive skills derived from non-standard neural links between brain modules, and Invariants with a unicameral brain immune to filtering and hence dwelling within an utterly stark
Weltbild
—hideously deprived, not unlike our own current condition yet perhaps saner.

On and on it goes, in a sort of extended commentary, from the right, on Olaf Stapledon’s classic, minatory, marxist
Last and First Men
. If all this sounds didactic, it is not, just. Wright has a quirky sense of humor, combined oddly with a rather ramrod young fogy sense of propriety (he deplores the louche way sf editors and writers freely address each other by their first names). And his characters are not wholly given to mighty projects, although Phaethon, it is true, unblushingly craves “deeds of renown without peer”; one AI likes to manifest in the collective virtual world as a penguin, fishy-breathed but able to fly so fast he leaves a vapor contrail. Wright’s ingenuity, density, wit, sly comedy are all very enjoyable.