As the sea levels rose, every street became a canal. Every skyscraper an island. For the residents of one apartment building in Madison Square, however, New York in the year 2140 is far from a drowned city.
There is the market trader, who finds opportunities where others find trouble. There is the detective, whose work will never disappear—along with the lawyers, of course.
There is the internet star, beloved by millions for her airship adventures, and the building's manager, quietly respected for his attention to detail. Then there are two boys who don't live there, but have no other home-- and who are more important to its future than anyone might imagine.
Lastly there are the coders, temporary residents on the roof, whose disappearance triggers a sequence of events that threatens the existence of all—and even the long-hidden foundations on which the city rests.
***
Not for the first time, and not, I can only hope, for the last, Kim Stanley Robinson takes aim at climate change in New York 2140, an immensely necessary novel as absorbing as it is sprawling about how that city among cities, so close to so many hearts, moves forward following floods that raise the seas fifty feet.
The Big Apple has been blighted. Uptown, being uptown both figuratively and literally, came through the crises brought on by humanity's hard-to-kick carbon habit relatively well, but downtown, everything is different. Submerged, the streets between buildings are cast now as canals. Nobody has a car anymore, but boats are mainstays on the waterways. Pedestrians must make do with jetties, or walk the dizzying bridges between those skyscrapers that haven't already collapsed after losing the ongoing fight to stay watertight.
Needless to say, New York as we know it is no more. But New Yorkers? Why, for good or for ill, they're New Yorkers still!
There is a certain stubbornness in a New Yorker, cliche though it is to say so, and actually many of them had been living in such shitholes before the floods that being immersed in the drink mattered little. Not a few experienced an upgrade in both material circumstances and quality of life. For sure rents went down, often to zero. So a lot of people stayed.
Squatters. The dispossessed. The water rats. Denizens of the deep, citizens of the shallows. And a lot of them were interested in trying something different, including which authorities they gave their consent to be governed by. Hegemony had drowned, so in the years after the flooding there was a proliferation of cooperatives, neighbourhood associations, communes, squats [and such]. (p.209)
Robinson's novel is arranged around a fitting for instance of this. The old Met Life tower on the drowned remains of Madison Square is home, now, to several thousand souls: a collective of individuals who all contribute to their cooperative's pot—be it financially or by bartering man-hours or goods for common use.
Among the many are Ralph Muttchopf and Jeff Rosen, a couple of old coders, or quants, who live in "a hotello on the open-walled farm floor [...] from which vantage point lower Manhattan lies flooded below them like a super-Venice, majestic, watery, superb. Their town." (p.6) But there are elements of their town that they deeply dislike, particularly the financial sector that has started gambling on what's become known as "the intertidal zone," (p.118) and down-on-their-luck as they are, with as little left to lose as you like, Mutt and Jeff do something they shouldn't: they hack the stock market.
With the scope of Dune and the commercial action of Independence Day, the near-future Three-Body Trilogy is the first chance for English-speaking readers to experience a multiple-award-winning phenomenon from China's most beloved science fiction author.
The first book in the trilogy, The Three-Body Problem, begins against the backdrop of China's Cultural Revolution, when a secret military project sends signals into space to establish contact with aliens. An alien civilization on the brink of destruction captures the signal and begins planning their introduction to Earth.
Over the next few decades, they establish first contact via very unlikely means: an unusual online video game steeped in philosophy and history. As the aliens begin to win earthbound players of the game over to their side, different schools of thought start forming, planning to either welcome the superior beings and help them take over a world seen as corrupt or to fight against the invasion. The result is a science fiction masterpiece of enormous scope and vision.
***
What would you do to save the world?
That is, the planet as opposed to the people—we're the problem, after all—so better, perhaps, to ask: what would you do for a solution? Would you kill your own comrades, if it came to it? Would you sacrifice yourself? Your sons and daughters? Would you betray the whole of humanity today for a better tomorrow?
These are some of the provocative questions posed by The Three Body Problem, the opening salvo of Galaxy Award-winner Cixin Liu's fascinating science fiction trilogy, which takes in physics, philosophy, farming and, finally, first contact.
But it all begins in Beijing in the 1960s, when Ye Wenjie watches in horror as an unrepentant professor is beaten into oblivion by four fourteen-year-olds "fighting for faith" (p.19) at "a public rally intended to humiliate and break down the enemies of the revolution through verbal and physical abuse until they confessed to their crimes before the crowd." (p.11) The subject of this so-called "struggle session" is Ye's father, in fact, and his is a death she'll never forget:
It was impossible to expect a moral awakening from humankind itself, just like it was impossible to expect humans to lift off the earth by pulling up on their own hair. To achieve moral awakening required a force outside the human race. [...] This thought determined the entire direction of Ye's life. (p.28)
In the Arctic Ocean, the US Coast Guard icebreaker Terra Nova batters its way through the pack ice. There shouldn't be anyone near them for hundreds of miles. But then a lone skier, half-dead with cold, emerges out of the snow.
His name is Tom Anderson, and he is the only survivor of a disaster at Zodiac Station, a scientific research base deep in the Arctic Circle. He tells an incredible story of scientists and spies, of lust and greed, of jealousy, mayhem and murder. But his tale simply doesn't add up. Whose blood is smeared across his clothes? Why is there a bullet hole through the jacket he's wearing, and why is that jacket labelled with someone else's name?
It's clear that more was going on at Zodiac Station than Anderson is telling. And someone else may have survived the disaster, as well... someone who has killed before, and who is willing to kill again.
***
An uncanny account of the circumstances surrounding the murder of the members of a remote outpost near the North Pole, Tom Harper's taut new novel—a conspiracy-ridden riff on The Thing—is thrilling and quite literally chilling.
I suppose you know about Utgard. It's the last place in the world, the most northerly scrap of land on the planet. Easy to miss—so easy, in fact, that no one realised it was there until the twentieth century. Most of it's covered in ice, so much that the weight has actually pushed the land below sea level. Not that there's much sea, either: for ten months of the year it's frozen solid. The only notable population is polar bears, and a couple of dozen scientists at Zodiac Station. I wouldn't like to say who's hairier. (p.16)
Zodiac Station's story unfolds in several stages. In the framing tale we have Carl Franklin, Captain of the US Coast Guard cutter Terra Nova: "an ice-reinforced vessel capable of making a steady three knots through four-foot ice, of smashing her way to the North Pole if need be. She'd already been there twice in her short working life." (p.1) For now, the ship simply sits, as the cutter's complement of clever-clogs set about sciencing the pristine scenery.
Lucky for the geeks that they're guarded by men with weapons, as they aren't as alone as they think.
Lester Ferris, sergeant of the British Army, is a good man in need of a rest. He's spent a lot of his life being shot at, and Afghanistan was the last stop on his road to exhaustion. He has no family, he's nearly forty and burned out and about to be retired.
The island of Mancreu is the ideal place for Lester to serve out his time. It's a former British colony in legal limbo, soon to be destroyed because of its very special version of toxic pollution—a down-at-heel, mildly larcenous backwater. Of course, that also makes Mancreu perfect for shady business, hence the Black Fleet of illicit ships lurking in the bay: listening stations, offshore hospitals, money laundering operations, drug factories and deniable torture centres. None of which should be a problem, because Lester's brief is to sit tight and turn a blind eye.
But Lester Ferris has made a friend: a brilliant, internet-addled street kid with a comicbook fixation who will need a home when the island dies—who might, Lester hopes, become an adopted son. Now, as Mancreu's small society tumbles into violence, the boy needs Lester to be more than just an observer.
In the name of paternal love, Lester Ferris will do almost anything. And he's a soldier with a knack for bad places: "almost anything" could be a very great deal—even becoming some sort of hero. But this is Mancreu, and everything here is upside down. Just exactly what sort of hero will the boy need?
***
I don't doubt that it's difficult to be different, but Nick Harkaway makes it look obscenely easy. In just two books, he's made such a mark on the landscape of imagination that his legions of readers will come to Tigerman bearing certain expectations: of an endlessly energetic narrative that streaks about like something stung, complete with a cacophony of lively characters and replete with ideas which bleed bananas.
This isn't exactly that... but it is undeniably of the award-winning author's oeuvre.
Whereas The Gone-Away World and Angelmaker were noisy novels, with ninjas and ass-kicking grannies, mad monks and clockwork killers, Tigerman, by comparison, is quiet. Being the origin story of a superhero and his sidekick, it's not silent, not entirely, but it is... stealthy, yes. Sneaky, even. All in all a much softer, sweeter and more surprising something than I had imagined.
Like every child in Is-Land, Astra Ordott is looking forward to her Security Shot so she can one day do her IMBOD Service and help defend her Gaian homeland from Non-Lander infiltrators. Then one of Astra's Shelter mothers, the formidable Dr Hokma Blesser, warns her that the shot will limit her chances of being a famous scientist—or helping raise the mysterious data-messenger Owleons that Hokma breeds—and Astra reluctantly agrees to deceive the Is-Land authorities and all her family and friends in Or.
Astra grows up increasingly conscious of the differences between her and the other Or-kids—then Lil, an orphaned wild child of the forest, appears in Or and at least she has someone exciting to play with. But Lil's father has taught her some alarming ideas about the world, and Astra is about to learn some devastating truths about Is-Land, Non-Land, the Owleons, and the complex web of adult relationships that surrounds her.
***
They may be few and far between in the grander scheme, but in the world today there are plenty of places where people live in harmony with the environment, raising families and farming the land without ravaging the planet in the process.
Considering the fossil fuel problem and encroaching crises like overpopulation and climate change, these caring, carbon neutral communities should stand as examples—as promises of what's possible—but more often than not they serve solely as sources of small-minded mockery:
At best, people saw Gaians as cranks, living in a precious little world of our own, sewing our own clothes, home-schooling our children, milking goats. Most people didn't understand the urgent necessity of our way of life. Most people were racing headlong into the Dark Time, their vision of life on earth smeared blind by oil. (p.130)
Naomi Foyle's second novel is set some decades on from an environmental catastrophe which left the surface of the Earth largely "barren [and] volcanic," (p.131) and much as I'd like to say everything changed in the aftermath of the Great Collapse, many people remain set in their ways, however unsustainable. Is-Land, on the other hand—a cooperative country formed by the Council of the New Continents after this terrible tragedy—has seen its membership multiply.
But that's made it a target, hasn't it? And of rather more than ridicule, because there are those nearby nations who want what Is-Land's got, including "crops that will grow and thrive in the unpredictable ecologies of the Regeneration Era [...] cacti bursting with biofortified milk for desert nomads to sow" (p.58) and so on.
Even the lowest-ranking IMBOD officer knew that the safety of Is-Land's greatest treasure could never be taken for granted. Somewhere beyond the faint blue horizon was the Boundary, and pressed up behind it the squalid Southern Belt. There, despite decades of efforts to evict them, hundreds of thousands of Non-Landers still festered, scheming to overrun Is-Land and murder any Gaian who stood in their way. Nowhere was safe. (p.6)
For the foreseeable a period of peace is in place, but come what may, there will be war, and this time, Is-Land intends to be ready to fight for its rights. To that end its finest scientists have developed the Security Serum: a cocktail of hand-crafted Code meant to render its recipients the best soldiers they could conceivably be.
There is Thorn, a shaman himself. He lives to pass down his wisdom and his stories -- to teach those who would follow in his footsteps.
There is Heather, the healer who, in many ways, holds the clan together.
There is Elga, an outsider and the bringer of change.
And then there is Loon, the next shaman, who is determined to find his own path. But in a world so treacherous, that journey is never simple — and where it may lead is never certain.
Shaman is a powerful, thrilling and heart-breaking story of one young man's journey into adulthood — and an awe-inspiring vision of how we lived thirty thousand years ago.
***
What a difference a moment makes.
I speak, albeit obliquely, of a single, solitary sequence at the very outset of Kim Stanley Robinson's last novel; a prologue so powerful, a passage so painstakingly picturesque, that I would have recommended 2312 right there and then, solely on the basis of its first few pages.
Some months later, I named 2312 my favourite reading experience of the year because there was, fortuitously, much more to it than a brilliant beginning. But even if the rest of the book had been utter rubbish... even if its characters had left me cold and its narrative had meandered meaninglessly... even if its themes and ideas had been realised with a heavy hand... even then, the lonely, lovely — no, glorious moment with which it opens would have lent the remainder incredible resonance.
Though they are few and far between, I fear, it's moments like these — moments that take us out of ourselves and deposit us elsewhere and elsewhen, in startling worlds and circumstances none among us can hope to know in our natural lives — it's moments like these that remind me why I fell under the spell of speculative fiction in the first place.
Kim Stanley Robinson's new novel comes complete with several such set-pieces, so complete and pristine that they inspire a sense of wonder similar to that suggested by very best SF... yet Shaman it isn't science fiction in any sense. It takes place many millennia ago rather than many millennia hence, in the last years of the Pleistocene period — during what's commonly called the ice age — when Neanderthal man shared the slippery surface of the unblemished earth with our own ancient ancestors: a setting as affecting and astonishing in its way as the dizzying desolation of deep space.
The blue of the sky throbbed with different blues, each more blue than the next. The clouds in the blue were scalloped and articulated like driftwood, and crawled around in themselves like otters at play. [Loon] could see everything at once. His spirit kept tugging at the top of his head, lifting him so that he had to concentrate to keep his balance. The problem made him laugh. The world was so great, so beautiful. Something like a lion: it would kill you if it could, but in the meantime it was so very, very beautiful. He would have cried at how beautiful it was, but he was laughing too much, he was too happy at being there walking in it. (p.50)
So muses Loon, Shaman's central character, during the wander Robinson's breathtaking new book begins with: a walkabout of sorts which paves the way for one of the moments I mentioned earlier. But this time, our sense of wonder does not come courtesy a suicidal sunwalker's decision to live as the killing light of said star spills across Mercury's ancient face, as in 2312. This time, a horse is all Robinson requires to make the magic happen.
That said, the sequences share a sunrise:
The god animal was lit by the sun almost from below. Long black head, so etched and fine. The land's witness to the end of his wander, pawing once, then nodding and lifting. Throwing his great head side to side, his black eyes observing Loon across the gulf of air between them. Black mane short and upright, black body rounded and strong.
Then without warning the horse tossed his long head up at the sky, off toward the sun, and this movement popped in Loon's eye and bulged out across the space between them, scoring his eyes such that he could close them and see it again; Loon's eyes spilled over, the tears ran down his face, his throat clamped down and his chest went tight and quivered. (pp.61-62)
A beautiful thing, truly, and a testament to the sensory strengths of Robinson's particular prose and mode of storytelling. What would be unremarkable in the hands of most other authors is instilled instead with a sweep of soaring emotion. There's no more to this here horse than meets the eye, yet to Loon — and indeed to readers who have hardly begun to grasp the hardships ahead of him — it represents a beginning, and an end as well. After all, he is "walking into a new world, a new kind of existence," where he will have to "face something, learn something, accomplish something. Change into something else: a sorcerer, a man in the world." (p.20) Thus this moment — and marked so marvellously! — means everything to him, and to be sure, it touches us too.
Loon's inaugural wander is one of the most memorable sections of Shaman, certainly, but there's plenty of Robinson's new novel left to recommend yet. What follows is an affectionate account of Loon's life as part of the Wolf pack, and though it goes on a little long without incident — they hunt, they gather, they starve; they live, they dance, they die — beyond this there is a breathtaking trip into the wintry wilderness, a festival during which Loon learns about love, and a rite of passage into the bare flesh of Mother Earth herself which culminates in a last gasp of absolute darkness.
On the whole, I suppose the story's on the slight side, but what narrative drive Shaman perhaps lacks, at least in part, the author more than makes up for with his masterful handling of its central character, whose coming of age from boy to man and from man to shaman the novel cumulatively chronicles. This is in addition to Robinson's carefully layered characterisation of the others Loon looks to, like Heather and Elga and Click, whom I loved. To a one, they are wonderfully done.
If Shaman is about any single thing, it's about legacies lost and left. Of particular significance, then, is Thorn, the long-suffering so-and-so in charge of painting the caves and preserving the memories of the tribe he tends. When the time is right, he plans to pass the proverbial torch to Loon. But Loon has a lot left to learn, and precious little interest in Thorn's wisdom, be it worldly or otherwise, so as that latter tries to make an impression on his indifferent apprentice, he can seem a bit of a mad old man.
We had a bad shaman.
This is what Thorn would say whenever he was doing something bad himself. Object to whatever it was and he would pull up his long gray braids to show the mangled red nubbings surrounding his earholes. His shaman had stuck bone needles through the flesh of his boys' ears and then ripped them out sideways, to help them remember things. Thorn when he wanted the same result would flick Loon hard on the ear and then point at the side of his own head, with a titled look that said, You think you have it bad? (p.3)
As vindictive as Thorn sometimes seems, it is through him, I think, and his budding relationship with Loon, that we arrive, at the last, at the heart of the matter, for it is he who asks the question Shaman answers: what do we leave behind, and why?
Though rather more modest in its scope and conventional in its concepts than Kim Stanley Robinson's staggering space operas, Shaman tells an ambitious, absorbing and satisfyingly self-contained tale on its own terms. At once delightful and devastating, it transports us to a moment in time, reverently preserved and impeccably portrayed... and if that moment is off in the other direction than this author tends to take us, then know that he is as adept a guide to the distant past as he has ever been the far-flung future.
A marooned outpost of humanity struggles to survive on a startlingly alien world: science fiction as it ought to be from British science fiction's great white hope.
You live in Eden. You are a member of the Family, one of 532 descendants of Angela and Tommy. You shelter beneath the light and warmth of the Forest's lantern trees, hunting woollybuck and harvesting tree candy. Beyond the forest lie the treeless mountains of the Snowy Dark and a cold so bitter and a night so profound that no man has ever crossed it. The Oldest among you recount legends of a world where light came from the sky, where men and women made boats that could cross between worlds. One day, the Oldest say, they will come back for you.
You live in Eden. You are a member of the Family, one of 532 descendants of two marooned explorers. You huddle, slowly starving, beneath the light and warmth of geothermal trees, confined to one barely habitable valley of a startlingly alien, sunless world. After 163 years and six generations of incestuous inbreeding, the Family is riddled with deformity and feeblemindedness. Your culture is a infantile stew of half-remembered fact and devolved ritual that stifles innovation and punishes independent thought.
You are John Redlantern. You will break the laws of Eden, shatter the Family and change history. You will be the first to abandon hope, the first to abandon the old ways, the first to kill another, the first to venture in to the Dark, and the first to discover the truth about Eden.
***
A long time ago, in a galaxy far, far away, the ill-fated explorers Tommy and Angela put down on the planet Eden to wait for Earth to send help. With their stolen sky-boat Defiant in no shape to make the long voyage home, Tommy and Angela made the best of the bad lot on offer on this sunless sphere: they built shelters, and began a family. So the story goes.
But Tommy and Angela did not expect to live out the rest of their natural lives bathed in the cold light of the lanternflowers that adorn the trees in this geothermal forest. They could not have known that the children they had would have children of their own as the wombtimes wore on, with still no sign of the promised search party. Certainly they would not have thought that six generations on, Eden would still be going strong... that every year, on the Any Virsry of Tommy and Angela’s arrival, all 532 of their inbred descendants would gather around a circle of stones, arranged “to mark the outline of the Landing Veekle,” (p.76) to hear their hallowed tale told.
Incredibly, even now, many of Eden’s accidental inhabitants hold out hope that someone will come to rescue them. As Oldest intones, “we must stay here and be a good Family and wait patiently [...] so that they will be pleased with us and will want to take us all back home to Earth.” (p.77) Yet some free-thinking newhairs question the holy story. Foraging for food has been a hardship for as long as young John Redlantern remembers, and with Family’s numbers ever on the rise, he reasons that the commandment that they must all stay around Circle, never to venture father than the fringes of the forest – the better to be there when the sky-boat comes – the commandment must be broken if they are to survive, far less thrive.
Dark Eden is John’s story, first and foremost: a deceptively sinister chronicle of his not entirely noble attempts to save Family, and make a hero of himself in the process. He means to do this by leading a splinter group of similarly dissatisfied individuals through the unfathomable region they have come to call Snowy Dark, and into the bigger, better pastures he believes – but does not know for a fact – lie beyond. Before John can begin rebuilding, however, he must instigate a break with the old ways... by laying waste, in his infinite wisdom, to the sacred stone circle:
“It didn’t take me long. There was no more Circle in Circle Clearing. It was empty and blank. It was sort of... dead.
“And I felt dead too. Empty. I couldn’t find any feelings inside me about anything. I knew I must have destroyed Circle for a reason, but I could barely remember what that reason was. I knew that big big things would happen now as a result, but I couldn’t make myself care what they would be. It was like I’d turned to stone myself.” (p.146)
In destroying the last remaining remnant of Tommy and Angela’s time on Eden, John severs the most vital connection to Earth and the age-old stories Family has. In this moment, if not before, the reader of Dark Eden begins to understand that his quest, whatever good or ill may ultimately come of it, is only as essential as it is self-serving. Beckett underscores this uncertainty by shifting instantaneously away from John, who has carried the bulk of the narrative thus far, to a second first-person perspective... or rather a fourth or a fifth or a sixth, because every other chapter brings a new storyteller into the fold, though Tina Spiketree’s POV is the only one we return to half as often as John’s.
At the outset Tina seems a rather passive character; little more than a love interest for our main man, and for a time she is exactly that, until – against her will – John involves her in his single-minded sacrilege. Thereafter Family tar Tina with the same brush as he, simply because of her association with this determined rule-breaker, this careless myth-maker, and presently Tina too comes to question our would-be teenage hero’s ego. From the systematic demolition of Circle on out, John does not make another pivotal decision without her second-guessing his motives, and soon the reader learns to follow Tina’s lead, such that however sympathetic he may appear, one can no longer simply fall in line with his actions.
But what’s done is done, and no matter the consequences, John has cleaned away the slate of old stories in service of a new narrative: his own, of course. And perhaps the people and the planet would have been the better for it... for it in isolation, but lost in space and abruptly cut off from everything they have ever cared about, not even Family can continue to exist in a vacuum. Thus, as one thing invariably does, it leads to another, and another, and in no time at all the tale our underhand narrator has in the interim become intent on telling gets utterly out of hand. When a new faction of Family wages war on John – on John and all those who would walk in his profane footsteps – he and his camp of cast-offs must take desperate measures to protect themselves, and their mission to explore more of Eden.
“There are lots of different stories branching away all the time from every single thing that happens. As soon as a moment has gone, different versions of it start to be remembered and told about. And some of them carry on, and some die out, and you can’t know in advance which version will last and which won’t. It had never occurred to me before that the story of John Redlantern might end up as the story of a famous killer, the first one in Eden ever to do for another human being. But now that story suddenly took shape in my mind.” (p.370)
The mark has been made, and it cannot very well be unmade. The bloodshed has begun, and it may never again end.
Chris Beckett’s latest is of course a science-fictional take on the Christian myth of creation, of paradise, original sin and beatific innocence despoiled. Dark Eden proves a provocative but powerful retelling of that old story, set against a backdrop genre readers will find themselves almost intimately familiar with, because it also evokes a number of other comparable narratives besides the bible. In terms of its ecosystem of alien flora and fauna, Brian Aldiss’ classic Hothouse comes immediately to mind, meanwhile the lush landscape and the isolated society of Kaaron Warren’s Walking the Tree bear certain resemblance to their equivalents in Eden – though Beckett’s Family orient themselves around a circle of stones instead of Yggdrasil. In addition, Dark Eden’s stylistic and linguistic idiosyncrasies – which Beckett employs to symbolise the degradation of language in step with everything else in this incestuous civilisation – reminded this reader of Russell Hoban’s award-winning Riddley Walker, the early parts of Alan Moore’s Voice of the Fire, or, more recently, Room by Emma Donaghue.
Strange, then, given its many and various counterparts, and its arrangement of self-evident influences, that Dark Eden does not feel particularly derivative, or even cobbled together. To wit, it won’t win many points for novelty or innovativeness, but between Beckett’s pointed prose and his easy grasp of the craft, refined to near-perfection in Interzone and Asimov’s in the intervening years between his first short story sale in 1990 and now, the author is able to weave together the aspects of what must be his most ambitious narrative to date without leaving a single ugly seam in sight. Strange... but true.
Bleak, black, yet at times brilliant enough to blind, Dark Eden is a magnificent and readily accessible novel about the fictions of fate and faith and family by one of science-fiction’s most overlooked modern masters. Bolstered by balanced characterisation and a narrative every bit as intelligent as it is ultimately insidious, it has to be Beckett’s best yet, and considering the acclaim heaped upon The Holy Machine, that’s saying something.
The year is 2312. Scientific and technological advances have opened gateways to an extraordinary future. Earth is no longer humanity's only home; new habitats have been created throughout the solar system on moons, planets, and in between. But in this year, 2312, a sequence of events will force humanity to confront its past, its present, and its future.
The first event takes place on Mercury, on the city of Terminator, itself a miracle of engineering on an unprecedented scale. It is an unexpected death, but one that might have been foreseen. For Swan Er Hong, it is an event that will change her life. Swan was once a woman who designed worlds. Now she will be led into a plot to destroy them.
***
A long time ago in a galaxy far, far away - or so it feels, at least - I read Red Mars. I was at an age and a stage that demanded I discover those things that I'd love for the rest of my life: not the perfunctory pleasures I'd inherited from my parents, nor the playthings of my peers, but passions of my own devising. Thus, I invested in an alarming amount of classic sf and fantasy. Decades if not centuries of masterworks were mine in one fell swoop, and amongst them, the most celebrated of all Kim Stanley Robinson's novels.
I adored it, of course. Then as now. I'd never read such a meticulous and convincing future history, and Mars, though far-fetched yet, was not such an unknown quantity as to overstretch my limited imagination. By that same token, a lot of Red Mars went right over my head - not least the fact that it was book one of three - so it's been an occasional aspiration of mine to re-read it ever since, in quick succession with its acclaimed sequels, Blue Mars and Green Mars.
Alas, as is often the way with aspirations, it hasn't happened yet... though I have returned to Robinson's work in the succeeding years. Galileo's Dream was not for me, I fear, but I had a terrific time with the best of collection Night Shade Books put out in late 2010, such that I've been eagerly anticipating 2312 for, ahem, many a moon.
It does not disappoint.
"Really you have no idea. It's like nothing you've ever seen. You may think you are inured, that nothing outside the mind can really interest you anymore, as sophisticated and knowledgeable as you are. But you would be wrong. You are a creature of the sun. The beauty and terror of it seen from so close can empty any mind, thrust anyone into a trance. [...] The sight of it can strike thought clean out of your head. People seek it out precisely for that." (pp.3-4)
Three centuries on from the present day, everything has changed. Everything, that is, except Earth. Humanity has taken to the stars; spacers have radically overhauled the solar system; millions of people have been born and raised on Venus and Mars and Mercury, meanwhile countless thousands of terraformed asteroids - which is to say terraria - are now home to Earth's surviving flora and fauna. Longevity treatments have raised life expectancy amongst those who can afford the intervention into the high hundreds, and gender, in the future, is a thing of the past.
Advances along these lines are made every day - exponential progress is the name of the game - yet humanity's pitiable point of origin is in dire crisis, as ever.
"It was almost an ice-free planet now, with only Antarctica and Greenland holding on to much, and Greenland going fast. Sea level was therefore eleven meters higher than it had been before the changes. This inundation of the coastline was one of the main drivers of the human disaster on Earth. They had immensely powerful terraforming techniques off-planet, but here they usually couldn't be applied. No slamming comets into it, for instance." (p.90)
For obvious reasons.
In short, "Earth was a mess, a sad place. And yet still the center of the story. It had to be dealt with, as Alex had always said, or nothing done in space was real." (ibid) Alex, incidentally, is the self-styled Lion of Mercury, a scientist and a significant political figure whose sudden death - supposedly from natural causes - sets off 2312. In the bravura prologue - a short but stunning sunwalk that serves to set the surreal scene ideally, as well as one's expectations - Robinson introduces us to Alex's daughter, Swan Er Hong, as she navigates her planet's scorched surface in an attempt to get to grips with the unbearable grief she feels. Some distance away from the relative safety of Terminator, Mercury's sole city - an awesome industrial colony that circles the world a scant step ahead of the world's own orbit, and thus the sun, which burns hot enough here that it might melt a person (indeed a place) - Swan considers suicide, for a second, or seems to.
Her impetuousness will be the death of her, one suspects. If not now then not long from. She's a spacer, born and raised, and though she's more than a century old, as often as not she behaves like an entitled child. Swan huffs and sulks, pouts and shouts. Not unrelatedly, she's an artist. An aesthetic activist in full-fledged rebellion against the abstract of the establishment. To which end she's eaten aliens, and had bird-brains installed in her head - as you do - as well as a snarky quantum computer called Pauline whom readers of Red Mars may well recognise.
In terms of her character arc through 2312, however, the single biggest obstacle opposite Swan - at least when we meet - is that she has no sense of purpose, or of place. But Alex's death gives her a glimpse of these things, tantalising if not yet terrifying: Alex's last request is that Swan personally ferry some encoded information to those who need to know it. Thus, our odd duck comes into contact with Alex's cultish cadre, who (as it happens) have been working to disrupt the dithering establishment on Earth themselves. Almost as if it were meant to be, Swan finds herself falling in with one of her dearly departed's closest confidantes: Fitz Wahram, out of Titan. He is "a very big man. Prognathous, callipygous, steatopygous, exophthalmos - toad, newt, frog - even the very words were ugly. [...] Once she had seen a toad in an amazonia, sitting at the edge of a pond, its warty wet skin all bronze and gold. She had liked the look of it." (p.15)
So it is that the scene is set for revolution, and perhaps a strange strain of romance.
"By the early twenty-fourth century there was too much going on to be either seen or understood. Assiduous attempts by contemporary historians to achieve an agreed-upon paradigm foundered, and we are no different now, looking back at them. It's hard even to assemble enough data to make a guess. There were thousands of city-states out there pinballing around, each with its presence in the data cloud or absence from same, and all of them adding up to—what? To the same mishmash history has been all along, but now elaborated, mathmaticized, effloresced—in the word of the time, balkanized." (p.78)
To paraphrase our occasional, omniscient narrator: to simplify history would be to distort Robinson's reality, and this award-winning author does not dilute. It is, therefore, a bold-type testament to his unflinching grasp of the narrative art that one understands as much of the plot, and indeed its byzantine backdrop, as one should, or is supposed to. Wisely, I think, Robinson draws a hard line between the involved scientific speculation readers have come to expect from his work and the actual unfolding of the tale he's here to tell; that of - at long last - the end of the world as we know it, if not the apocalypse proper.
To wit, Robinson builds his single sprawling setting, and gestures toward the million (give or take) meticulously researched ideas underpinning it, in excerpts, as in in the extract above. In extracts - of which there are eighteen - in addition to fifteen lengthy lists, a miscellany of individually titled segments, ten strong, on top of a prologue, an epilogue, and forty-odd actual chapters. 2312 is a big book punctuated, and so forth made manageable, by lots of itty bits. Asides, mostly: postcards from the far-distant future, or the diary entries of an unfathomable AI.
This tension in the structure of 2312, between the little and the large, reflects the relationship between the planet-cracking happenings and the seemingly insignificant events that Robinson is interested in for the bulk of the book. The reader is routinely shuttled between stunning set-pieces, like the sunwalk with which the whole thing begins, or the destruction of Terminator - Swan's sweet home if she has one - and quiet, composed, character-oriented moments, such as the prolonged underground walkabout our scattershot protagonist shares with Wahram, or the stop-overs she takes on various terraria.
You will come to look upon all these moments equally. In astonishment, in awe, at both the small, and the immense. Such is Robinson's success in terms of the sense-of-wonder 2312 evokes, like a sky full of stars exploding one after the other, over and over again.
Given all its ideas, not to speak of the myriad intricacies of each of these, I dare say 2312 is a substantially more accessible novel than it has any right to be. The author's decision to delineate his science from his fiction pays dividends in that respect, as it allows each scene to breathe, and more often than not to blossom. Furthermore, Robinson presents many of most complex concepts with a winning amount of whimsy. As recipes, among other things. For a successful revolution, for instance, Swan's qube would have us
"Take large masses of injustice, resentment, and frustration. Put them in a weak or failing hegemon. Stir in misery for a generation or two, until the heat rises. Throw in destabilizing circumstances to taste. A tiny pinch of event to catalyze the whole. Once the main goal of the revolution is achieved, cool instantly to institutionalize the new order." (p.334)
There's fun in 2312, then. Fun, and unbelievable wonder; love, profundity and a lot of legitimately gripping drama. Also some startling ideas. I had not dared to dream that Kim Stanley Robinson could even equal Red Mars, but in time, 2312 could take the cake. That and biscuit-based relativity aside, it's a magnificent sweet treat in its own right. Robinson is as intelligent and compelling as ever he has been - at least in my experience - but herein he has tempered his the science of his fiction smartly, if not sensitively. The result, simply put, is stunning.
Never mind the usual genre divisions: 2312 is easily one of the year's best books, period.
"On the airwaves, all the talk is of the new blue planet – pristine and habitable, like our own 65 million years ago, before we took it to the edge of destruction. And off the air, Billie and Spike are falling in love.
"What will happen when their story combines with the world's story, as they whirl towards Planet Blue, into the future? Will they – and we – ever find a safe landing place?"
***
Renowned for her comic narratives, and perhaps concealed by them, Jeanette Winterson’s last novel but one is a poetic lament, sung for a world in what the author supposes to be its last throes. Unquestionably passionate and at times dazzling in its invention, The Stone Gods is another of those science-fiction novels originated by the throng of unlikely writers who mean to transcend the boundaries of mere genre into high art.
Excusing for a moment the insulting presumption begged by such a trend, the net result has been an influx of predictably high-minded chaff, but from amongst the multitude several noteworthy new voices have sounded. From Margaret Atwood’s recent speculative dalliances through to The Road, the naturalistic grounding that has suffused sci-fi of late has imparted upon it a gratifying sense of literary importance, and considered readers will be glad to add Winterson to the ranks of writers drawn out of their comfort zones to grace a genre held very dear indeed.
The Stone Gods is a tale of three Billies: two women – one on the run in the far-flung future with which the book begins, and another escapee, an orphan from the not-too-distant, to close out the spitfire narrative – and, at the axis around which the novel revolves, a young explorer. He is an abandoned on Easter Island after the errant gunfire of Captain Cook’s landing party forces his companions to beat a quick retreat, and here at the heart of the story, amongst the natives and the titular stone statues that stagger to this day, the significance of Billy’s masculinity hardly needs the emphasis of the phallogocentric societies from which the women run.
But gender inequalities are not the great threat of Winterson’s novel; the menace of The Stone Gods is, inescapably, humanity itself. The great carvings that tower around Easter Island are a remarkable expression of our capabilities as a people – they are an awesome feat indeed, created from little but tireless endeavour and dedication, but what desolation the tribes that crafted them have wrought in their creation. In the end, the island is made barren; its resources are exhausted, taken for all they had and all they could have had. Centuries ago and in the vacuum of isolation that Easter Island represents, Winterson posits, humanity created Gods, and in so doing destroyed a world. And in a future slightly advanced from our own, Orbus – a planet not unlike Earth – is on the verge of a similar sort of ruin.
The two tales that bookend The Stone Gods do much to finesse the motif that emerges so figuratively from the tale of Easter Island. These Billies are much alike, in spirit and in situation. They each hearken back to simpler, more natural times – one makes her home on Orbus’ last remaining farm and the other lives for a mother she can never know – and both their worlds are dominated by MORE, a family of corporations whose business is without borders. MORE is the law, the doctor and the robotic home-help; MORE can deliver the present and assure the future. Each of the Billies is complicit in the excess that MORE symbolises. Cynical and miserable, their parallel lives are enlivened by opportunity as fate splinters them from the faceless industry. The cycle that repeats throughout The Stone Gods is broken at last: the seemingly inescapable momentum that Winterson builds with her fragmentary narrative is stopped – or slowed, at the least. There is a chance, then. For the Billies and, perhaps, for us as well.
However plausible the self-inflicted end of humankind might be, it does not prove so easy to suspend disbelief for all of The Stone Gods. Some of the tropes Winterson makes use of are outmoded already, and a few are startlingly unimaginative – a capital sci-fi crime indeed. Amongst such a wealth of more convincingly drawn concepts, however, only the bloody-minded are likely to focus on any single misstep for long. Relayed in addictive, bite-size instalments, the respective journeys of the three Billies whip along at light-speed. More jarring are Winterson’s frequent lapses into self-indulgence; her overlong lectures on future history stop an otherwise pacey narrative dead in its tracks. But surely the greatest flaw of The Stone Gods is its very nature: expect subtlety and nuance to take seats in the back of a whole other room when the prospect to make a polemic of the novel arises. The cover blurb even boasts of as much.
Certainly, then, The Stone Gods is imperfect. A little refinement – a clearer sense of its purpose, for a start – would have elevated its already considerable reach still higher. But Winterson is a wordsmith with few peers, and her first incursion into genre territory proves a resounding success otherwise. Funny and matter-of-fact, playful as it takes on the end of the world and beyond, The Stone Gods is an empowering tale for our times. Compulsive reading, if not quite compulsory.
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