Book Review | Something Coming Through by Paul McAuley

The Jackaroo have given humanity 15 worlds and the means to reach them. They're a chance to start over, but they're also littered with ruins and artifacts left by the Jackaroo's previous clients. Miracles that could reverse the damage caused by war, climate change, and rising sea levels. Nightmares that could forever alter humanity—or even destroy it.

Chloe Millar works in London, mapping changes caused by imported scraps of alien technology. When she stumbles across a pair of orphaned kids possessed by an ancient ghost, she must decide whether to help them or to hand them over to the authorities. Authorities who believe that their visions point towards a new kind of danger.

And on one of the Jackaroo's gift-worlds, the murder of a man who has just arrived from Earth leads policeman Vic Gayle to a war between rival gangs over possession of a remote excavation site.

Something is coming through. Something linked to the visions of Chloe's orphans, and Vic Gayle's murder investigation. Something that will challenge the limits of the Jackaroo's benevolence...

***

Spinning off a series of experimental short stories, Something Coming Through marks the actual factual start of what's been called "an extraordinary new project" by Paul McAuley, the award-winning author of The Quiet War novels. As a beginning, it's inordinately promising, largely because the world is so wide and relevant and well-developed, and though the characters are a little lacking, Something Coming Through satisfies as a standalone story too.

Allow me to introduce you to the Jackaroo, an advanced race of aliens whose near-as-dammit divine intervention in human history may well have saved us—from ourselves:

Just before the Jackaroo had made contact [...] every country in the world had been caught up in riots, revolutions and counter-revolutions, civil wars, border wars, water wars, net wars, and plain old-fashioned conflicts, mixed up with climate change and various degrees of financial collapse. All this craziness culminating in a limited nuclear missile exchange and a string of low-yield tactical nukes exploding in capital cities. The Spasm.

The Spasm has a special place in Chloe Millar's heart:

The Trafalgar Square bomb had [...] obliterated a square kilometre of central London, igniting enormous fires and injuring over ten thousand people and killing four thousand. Including Chloe's mother, who had been working at the archives of the National Portrait Gallery—research for a book on Victorian photography—and had vanished in an instant of light brighter and hotter than the surface of the sun. 

Chloe had been twelve when the bomb had exploded her world, had just turned thirteen when the Jackaroo revealed themselves and told everyone in the world that they wanted to help.

The aliens arrived in the nick of time, natch, and their assistance really did make a difference. There are still tensions, yes, and crimes continue to be committed—more on those in a moment—but given free reign over fifteen so-called "gift-worlds" and the technology to travel to them, albeit under strict supervision, people have room to breathe again; space to expand independently; and time to consider a lot of things—not least the lilies.

But why did the Jackaroo come to Earth in the first? What intergalactic game are they playing, and what cost their kindness?

Book Review: The Quiet War by Paul McAuley

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Twenty-third century Earth, ravaged by climate change, looks backwards to the holy ideal of a pre-industrial Eden. Political power has been grabbed by a few powerful families and their green saints. Millions of people are imprisoned in teeming cities; millions more labour on Pharaonic projects to rebuild ruined ecosystems. On the moons of Jupiter and Saturn, the Outers, descendants of refugees from Earth's repressive regimes, have constructed a wild variety of self-sufficient cities and settlements: scientific utopias crammed with exuberant creations of the genetic arts; the last outposts of every kind of democratic tradition. The fragile detente between the Outer cities and the dynasties of Earth is threatened by the ambitions of the rising generation of Outers, who want to break free of their cosy, inward-looking pocket paradises, colonise the rest of the Solar System, and drive human evolution in a hundred new directions. On Earth, many demand pre-emptive action against the Outers before it's too late; others want to exploit the talents of their scientists and gene wizards. Amid campaigns for peace and reconciliation, political machinations, crude displays of military might, and espionage by cunningly wrought agents, the two branches of humanity edge towards war...

***

Let me tell you a story.

In the far-flung future, humanity has spread across the stars. Earth has very probably gone the way of the dodo: if it exists at all, it's a smoldering mess of a planet, barren, stricken, utterly bereft of life or the prospect thereof. We past generations have had our wicked, heathen way with the world, leaving our by-all-accounts more evolved descendants no choice but to venture further afield in order to survive. People have colonised distant planets, moons, built interstellar cruisers, fleets of space-liners. They have gone on.

But resources have become dangerously scarce. Despite centuries of peace, humanity has fallen back on fears it had thought long forgotten. Tensions are at an all-time high; factions squabble with one another; politicians bicker pointlessly. And then someone, somewhere, starts a fight. Like a rash of pimples, war breaks out.

Stop me if you've heard this one before, why don't you!

Evidently, Arthur C. Clarke award-winning author Paul McAuley has. The Quiet War - part the first of a duology concluded in this year's Gardens of the Sun - is smart, self-aware sci-fi from an author who's learned his lesson. It's a novel which takes as its refreshing core tenet not another interminable iteration of the same old space battles we've been reading about for decades - dare I say centuries - but the build-up to boiling point. McAuley's business in The Quiet War is the slow burn which leads to the titular conflict rather than the fast thrash of so much science fiction.

In Professor Doctor Sri-Hong Owen and "the traitor" Macy Minnot, McAuley offers up a pair of narrative chaperones - one on either side of the ever-escalating crisis. Macy is a reclamation engineer come to the Outer reaches of the galaxy that she might assist with the construction of a biome: an ambitious self-sustaining tented environment on Callisto seen by some as a generous gift from friendly elements in the Pacific Community's government who hope to foster peace, and by others among both strands of humanity as a golden opportunity to deposit a spanner in the works.

Sri, meanwhile, is more highly placed in society than Macy. A gene wizard to rival Avernus, who in her youth - after the great Overturn - pioneered the very technologies which made life so far from home sustainable, the Professor Doctor answers directly to the heads of the ominous and powerful "families" who domineer over the people of Earth like Mafioso prime ministers. She too becomes entangled in the ill-fated construction of the Callisto biome, and when, inevitably, the last hope for peace between the Outers and the Pacific Community comes crashing down, preparations for war begin in earnest. Neither Sri nor Macy wants war, but war it will be, and they must each pick a side. Says Avernus:

"In the past hundred years we have built a plenitude of societies founded on principals of tolerance, mutualism, scientific rationalism, and attempts at true democracy. And on Earth, people have united in common cause to heal the great wounds inflicted by the Overturn, climate change and two centuries of unchecked capitalism. I hoped to see these two worthy and hopeful strands of human history unite and go forward together as equals rather than rivals, sharing unselfishly the best of each other's abilities and achievements. But instead we have war."

The Quiet War isn't about exhilarating space battles or explosive action planetside. Presumably to keep those readers who hunger for such in check, there's a sprinkling of each in McAuley's novel, but The Quiet War is more concerned with the micro than the macro of Hamilton and Heinlein. Accordingly, there's a great deal of maneuvering: relentless propagandising from representatives of both quarters of belief, press-ganging to which both Sri and Macy are subject whatever their respective stations in life. Even when the hammer finally falls, we spend only a little time in the proverbial trenches, for the true climax of The Quiet War is a spirited standoff between Sri and Avernus, the gene wizards of each "strand of human history" united at last - and yet crucially at odds with one another. It makes for a quiet finale, but a perfect one, and perfectly appropriate according to the terms McAuley has established.

On the basis of this novel you could feasibly call Paul McAuley the K. J. Parker of sci-fi, for The Quiet War is interested in the politics of war over the war itself. Perhaps some less patient readers will take issue with that; perhaps, if I'm to be blunt, they can get their fix elsewhere. Those who appreciate a measure of thought in their science fiction will find much about McAuley's novel to like, if not to love - not quite. Sri and Macy are fine characters, a little overpowered by the narrative burden they share; McAuley's prose is fluid and rich in vivid imagery, though his fondness for info-dumping too often halts the tale in its tracks; The Quiet War raises a handful of fascinating questions not often addressed in the genre and addresses them meticulously while leaving enough unanswered to make Gardens of the Sun required reading for anyone taken in by McAuley's intimate rebuttal of space opera as we know it.

***

The Quiet War

by Paul McAuley

UK Publication: September 2009, Gollancz
US Publication: September 2009, Pyr

Buy this book from

Amazon.co.uk / Amazon.com /

IndieBound / The Book Depository

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