Science Fiction: The 101 Best Novels 1985-2010 (42 page)

Kathy’s best friend is the more outgoing Ruth, who first scorns Kathy’s interest in the bumbling, endlessly mocked Tommy, but ends by stealing him as her lover. As these seemingly privileged kids pass from the comforts of Hailsham to the far less pleasant Cottages, and finally to the hospitals where they suffer their predestined fate, their circumstances and small crises are observed with Ishiguro’s unrelenting eye. Their guardians, Miss Lucy, Mr. Frank, Nurse Trisha, Miss Geraldine of the art class, head guardian Miss Emily, the distant Madame who gathers their artwork for a supposed “Gallery,” are revealed through the children’s gaze. Madame, Ruth suggests, is scared of them, and they test this revulsion by intruding into her space. It is not fear, of course, as we can see, but a distancing mechanism any sensitive adult would have to adopt, faced with what amounts to Sophie’s Choice writ large.

These children, Kathy learns finally, were regarded by the world of naturals as “shadowy objects in test tubes without souls.” It is Ishiguro’s triumph to show exactly how wrong this estimate is, and must be, as we move in reality toward a future where such benighted attitudes might yet prevail alongside creationism, racism, and other absurd or malign myths.

78

Ian R. MacLeod

That precursor was
The Light Ages
(2003)
,
MacLeod’s first venture into an elaborately realized alternative history separated from our own in the 17th-century with the discovery of “aether,” a force or quintessence that powers a botched industrial revolution as dreadful as our own. It sustains cheap and shoddy workmanship, permits localized control of the weather, useful for a sea-going culture—and damages its luckless handlers as if it were a diabolical blend of radioactivity and chemical mutagens.

Aether is at once a science-fictional device and a ferocious figuration of the industrial process and its often inhuman side-consequences, its astonishing wealth, beauty, temptations, corrosive power. So this is not fantasy at all; while it’s not science, it’s assuredly science fiction.

In the earlier book, a poor Northern boy narrates his rise through a Dickensian world of squalor, horror and unbreakable hierarchy. A century later, this quasi-sequel tells the aching if rather too fairytale-like generational saga of the collapse of aether and the rise of electricity, the very force that in our world catalyzed versions of democracy and industrial totalitarianism alike, and the final triumph of mass consumerist culture.

So
The House of Storms
is not Dickensian, but perhaps Wellsian, not Victorian so much as Edwardian, with all the nasty poverty, pollution, bigotry, suppressed class hatred that would burn through into the First World War. Here it enacts in miniature a conflict between the great European powers, as a second English Civil War purportedly waged by the East against the West to end slavery in an underexploited Thule, our America. Inevitably, we read undertones of both the American War of Independence and its internecine War Between the States. A compressed allegorical weight is borne by the principal characters. Greatgrandmistress Alice Meynell is a beautiful wicked witch from the land of Grimms’ fairytales, a sort of Mrs. Coulter (from Philip Pullman’s
His Dark Materials
trilogy): conscienceless, ambitious, murderous, yet strangely devoted to her ailing son Ralph. Alice comes by ill fortune from the wrong side of the money mirror. Born Alice Bowdly-Smart to a wealthy couple, she is plunged after their perhaps accidental deaths into poverty, makes her way as a sort of upmarket whore to London, ruins a grandee of the powerful Guild of Electricians and marries another, connives, kills, steals; in short, she is a sort of Becky Sharp (Thackeray’s
Vanity Fair
) who never comes a cropper.

Her son Ralph is her weakness. She takes him west to the Guild’s seaside mansion Invercombe, not far from the Bristol seaport, close, as well, to Einfell, where changelings huddle, poor detritus smashed by the touch of aether. Alice herself is addicted to the stuff, using its corrupting power to retain an unearthly beauty. She learns to employ the aether-entangled telephone mirrors that link the nation like magical wormholes, providing access to a kind of cyberspace or psychic netherworld into which the spirit might be uploaded even as the body grows transparent as glass.

Is this, then, an essay in steampunk, a version of Gibson’s and Sterling’s remarkable
The Difference Engine?
(Punchcard “reckoning engines” are here, too.) Not quite. At almost every point in his narrative arc, or beautifully wrought longueur-filled meander, MacLeod looks somewhere else. He is deliberately avoiding the vulgarly obvious, but the price is considerable.

In place of more conventional huggermugger, he gives us a diorama of Great Men and Women from the 19th and turn of the 20th Century. It is tempting to identify Ralph with a nascent Darwin, intent on finding in the Canaries (here, the Fortunate Isles) his own Galapagos. Together with the shoregirl Marion Price, with whom he falls radiantly in love, Ralph develops the theory of Habitual Adaptation. Their bastard child, Klade, raised by uncanny changelings, is a sort of Caliban whose name, in our world, suggests a group of organisms with a single ancestor, as well as a new Adam made from clay. While there are aspects of natural selection in the hypothesis, the term suggests more than a little of Lamarck. What is clear is that Ralph’s vile mother is the very embodiment of Social Darwinism, acting out a brutalized and simplified version of Darwin: nature red in tooth and claw.

MacLeod has a large future, and we’re lucky to have him here, on this side of Alice’s mirror.

79

David Marusek

Cut to forty years later. The world has grown even stranger. Legions of clones—identified generically by the first names of their original donors, such as jerrys, evangelines, russes and jeromes—do society’s scutwork, while the “affs” lord it over them. In the middle are the average joes and janes who must struggle to pay for their rejuves, while eating the plainest fare from their NanoJiffys. The Outrage has just been declared officially over, and the city of Chicago—where our story occurs—is ready to lower its shields.

Eleanor and Ellen Starke are still alive and in power. Until they are both assassinated. Eleanor dies permanently, but Ellen’s head is cryostatically preserved. Much of the plot revolves around attempts to get her reborn in the face of continued enemy action. But we also learn what happened to Sam Harger: he’s now known as Samson Kodiak, member of an extended “charter” family. We follow him through his dying days, as well as observing the twisty destinies of: young Bogdan Kodiak—a 29-year-old permanently stuck in adolescence; Fred and Mary, two clones; and Eleanor’s political ally, the ineffectual Merrill Meewee. Additionally, mentars such as Wee Hunk, Cabinet, Hubert, Concierge and Arrow play their parts, as one era closes and a new one opens.

This novel is a trippy, gleeful tour through a “milling menagerie of transhumanity,” and anyone who revels in the heady (sorry for the pun), gonzo, densely recomplicated sf of John Wright (Entry 71), Charles Stross (Entry 81), Rudy Rucker (Entry 91), Cory Doctorow (Entry 94) or Karl Schroeder (Entry 66) will find this novel by Marusek to be a sterling addition to their ranks. Marusek is unstintingly generous in his speculations, which are all entertainingly wild yet convincingly realistic. He builds characters who are far from the clichés of the field. (No brave female spaceship pilots, cowboy data-hackers, mirrorshaded ninjas, or other faded types.) And he balances his plot perfectly between mega-scale and micro-scale events.

With regard to his speculations, Marusek obviously focuses much of his intellectual weight on the repercussions of biological advancements. His future is one where bodies can be regenerated from nothing more than a preserved head and neck, leading to the truly Boschian image of a tiny embryonic form dependent from the terminus of an adult spinal cord. But of course he doesn’t ignore other developments in robotics and nanotech, integrating these areas beautifully. Likewise, he examines how culture and society remake themselves to accommodate new technologies. His portrait of the weird clone society is startling and novel. The big clone party—a magnificent literary set piece—that sprawls across the middle of the book will knock your socks off.

Marusek’s characters grab you because they are, underneath their transhumanity, so ordinary and pitiable. The up-and-down married relationship between clones Fred and Mary and how their characters strive to grow is truly affecting. Additionally, Marusek cranks up that Philip K. Dick vibe of mankind struggling to maintain the borders between what’s real and what’s artificial, human and android. When Samson has to argue with his life-support chair, for instance, one hears echoes of Dick, as we do in the struggle of the russ named Fred to assert his individuality.

Perhaps the major weapon in Marusek’s arsenal is his zesty language—reflecting a basically optimistic view of his future—and copious dead-on neologisms. These tools make the story shimmer and glow, hypnotizing the reader into true belief in the substantiality of his marvelous, alternately hilarious and melancholy new world.

John Campbell’s famous instruction to his writers was to deliver a story that read like the contemporary fiction of the year it was set in. And that’s exactly what Marusek has accomplished here.