Book Review | Waking Gods by Sylvian Neuvel

As a child, Rose Franklin made an astonishing discovery: a giant metallic hand, buried deep within the earth. As an adult, she’s dedicated her brilliant scientific career to solving the mystery that began that fateful day: why was a titanic robot of unknown origin buried in pieces around the world? Years of investigation have produced intriguing answers—and even more perplexing questions. But the truth is closer than ever before when a second robot, more massive than the first, materializes and lashes out with deadly force.

Now humankind faces a nightmare invasion scenario made real, as more colossal machines touch down across the globe. But Rose and her team at the Earth Defense Corps refuse to surrender. They can turn the tide if they can unlock the last secrets of an advanced alien technology. The greatest weapon humanity wields is knowledge in a do-or-die battle to inherit the Earth... and maybe even the stars.

***

When she was a girl, Rose Franklin fell on a giant hand made of a metal mined, in the main, from meteorites. Determined to glean what it might mean, the government covered her discovery up and ordered its best and brightest minds to study this unlikely find. Where had the hand come from, how long had it been underground, and could you hit things with it? These were the interests of the military in particular, but decades later, they still couldn't say—not until Rose, now a leading figure in her field, headed up a second investigation.

In short order, she found that the hand was but a bit of a monolithic machine—a mech, I mean—the body parts of which had been buried around the world. After several international incidents, the rest of the robot was recovered, leaving Rose and her team to assemble Themis. Before long a pair of pilots were walking in it, astonishing the population of the planet in the process. But... well, why? What was it all for?

If Sleeping Gods left with you questions, know that there are answers to be had in the surprising second installment of The Themis Files. They come thick and fast, in fact.

In a sense, Sylvain Neuvel's entertaining debut related humanity's coming of age, and now that we're all grown up—now that we know we're not alone in the universe—Waking Gods wants to see how we'll behave in the face of an alien danger.

Thomas Henry Huxley [...] was a scientist in the early days of modern biology. He said: "The known is finite, the unknown infinite; intellectually we stand on an islet in the midst of an illimitable ocean of inexplicability. Our business in every generation is to recover a little more land." Almost a decade ago, when Themis was revealed to the world, we realised that ocean was a lot bigger than we thought, and what happened this morning in London has made our islet of certainty feel so small that we may wonder if we even have enough room to stand on. (pp.15-16)

What happened this morning in London was the mysterious appearance of a giant metal man, larger even than Rose's robot, that the media comes to call Kronos. Evidently, this isn't the alien invasion of our nightmares—indeed, Kronos doesn't say or do anything for days—and yet, after squabbling over how to react to the mech's admittedly threatening presence, the British Prime Minister bows to public pressure by ordering the army to impose a perimeter around Regent's Park. With tanks.

This may have been a mistake.

Book Review | The Three-Body Problem by Cixin Liu

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)

Book Review | The Book of Strange New Things by Michel Faber

It begins with Peter, a devoted man of faith, as he is called to the mission of a lifetime, one that takes him galaxies away from his wife, Bea. Peter becomes immersed in the mysteries of an astonishing new environment, overseen by an enigmatic corporation known only as USIC. His work introduces him to a seemingly friendly native population struggling with a dangerous illness and hungry for Peter’s teachings—his Bible is their “book of strange new things.” But Peter is rattled when Bea’s letters from home become increasingly desperate: typhoons and earthquakes are devastating whole countries, and governments are crumbling. Bea’s faith, once the guiding light of their lives, begins to falter. 

Suddenly, a separation measured by an otherworldly distance, and defined both by one newly discovered world and another in a state of collapse, is threatened by an ever-widening gulf that is much less quantifiable. While Peter is reconciling the needs of his congregation with the desires of his strange employer, Bea is struggling for survival. Their trials lay bare a profound meditation on faith, love tested beyond endurance, and our responsibility to those closest to us.

***

Michel Faber's first novel since The Fire Gospel—a sterling send-up of The Da Vinci Code and its ilk—is a characteristically compelling exploration of faith which takes place "in a foreign solar system, trillions of miles from home," (p.47) on a wasteland planet populated by hooded beings with foetuses for faces.

So far, so science fiction. Factor in first contact, a spot of space travel, and an awful lot of apocalypse, and The Book of Strange New Things seems damn near destined to be speculative. Unfortunately for fans of the form, as the author warns early on, "there was nothing here to do justice to [that] fact." (p.47) Or, if not nothing, then very little aside the superficial.

Even in addition to the aforementioned trappings, honeydewed drinking water and a dizzying day/night cycle do not add up to much more than an unlikely lens through which to look at love: in the first between mere mortals, but above and beyond that, the love—and the love lost—between man and maker.

The Book of Strange New Things is beautiful, albeit brutal. Despairing to a degree, but also bullish about the future. Hope, however, is a fragile thing, as Faber's protagonist preaches at a point:

As fragile as a flower. Its fragility makes it easy to sneer at, by people who see life as a dark and difficult ordeal, people who get angry when something they can't believe in themselves gives comfort to others. They prefer to crush the flower underfoot, as if to say: See how weak this thing is, see how easily it can be destroyed. But, in truth, hope is one of the strongest things in the universe. Empires fall, civilisations vanish into dust, but hope always comes back, pushing up through the ashes, growing from seeds that are invisible and invincible. (p.315)

Indeed, Peter Leigh means to be one of these seeds; to share his hope—the faith that saved him from a life of drug abuse and destitution—with the natives of Oasis. He still struggles to believe the Powers That Be at USIC picked him of all people—him but not his wonderful wife Bea, who did deliver Peter from his dark past—to be an apostle upon another planet; to spread the Good News about God to the "indigenous inhabitants" (p.71) of this unknowable new world.

Book Review | Lagoon by Nnedi Okorafor

Three strangers, each isolated by his or her own problems: Adaora, the marine biologist. Anthony, the rapper famous throughout Africa. Agu, the troubled soldier. Wandering Bar Beach in Lagos, Nigeria's legendary mega-city, they're more alone than they've ever been before.

But when something like a meteorite plunges into the ocean and a tidal wave overcomes them, these three people will find themselves bound together in ways they could never imagine. Together with Ayodele, a visitor from beyond the stars, they must race through Lagos and against time itself in order to save the city, the world... and themselves.

"There was no time to flee. No time to turn. No time to shriek. And there was no pain. It was like being thrown into the stars."

***

At the outset of Nnedi Okorafor's new novel, three strangers meet on Bar Beach, "a place of mixing" which provides "a perfect sample of Nigerian society." (p.7) But this evening the sea is uneasy, for from the Gulf of Guinea comes a booming sound so deep that it rattles the teeth of the few who hear it.

Agu is a military man who's been attacked by his ahoa after refusing to stand silently by while his superior officer sexually assaulted a civilian. He's come to the beach to take stock of his situation—as has Adaora, a marine biologist and mother of two whose "loving perfect husband of ten years had hit her. Slapped her really hard. All because of a hip-hop concert and a priest. At first, she'd stood there stunned and hurt, cupping her cheek, praying the children hadn't heard. Then she'd brought her hand up and slapped him right back." (p.8)

The third of our three is the renowned rapper Anthony Dey Craze, who's apparently popped "out for a post-concert stroll." (p.9) He and Adaora and Agu have been drawn, inexorably, to the same spot, where they spend a few seconds exchanging pleasantries before being sucked into the sea... and summarily spat out. But the roiling waters have disgorged something far stranger than they—namely an alien.

You have named me Ayodele. You people will call me an alien because I am from space, your outer heavens, beyond. I am what you all call and ambassador, the first to come and communicate with you people. I was sent. We landed in your waters and have been communicating with other people there and they've been good to us. Now we want your help. (p.37)

Adaora doesn't take much convincing, but she knows the world will, so she transports Ayodele to her lab and studies a skin sample which confirms her feelings. Enter her husband, Chris: a born again born again who insists Ayodele is a witch and runs screaming to his preacher when Adaora tells him to take a hike.

Their housekeeper Philo can't keep a secret either. She shoots some footage on her phone and shows it to her boyfriend Moziz, a scam artist who sees in this situation an opportunity to turn a proper profit. He and his friends plan to capture and ransom Ayodele. But one of them is a member of the Black Nexus, a secretive LGBT body whose members imagine Ayodele—who can shapeshift from man to woman at will—will almost certainly accept them, spurring on the world to do so too.

In this way word gets out that there's an alien about, and soon, chaos reigns in Lagos...

Book Review | Proxima by Stephen Baxter

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The very far future: The Galaxy is a drifting wreck of black holes, neutron stars, chill white dwarfs. The age of star formation is long past. Yet there is life here, feeding off the energies of the stellar remnants, and there is mind, a tremendous Galaxy-spanning intelligence each of whose thoughts lasts a hundred thousand years. And this mind cradles memories of a long-gone age when a more compact universe was full of light...

The 27th century: Proxima Centauri, an undistinguished red dwarf star, is the nearest star to our sun — and (in this fiction), the nearest to host a world, Proxima IV, habitable by humans. But Proxima IV is unlike Earth in many ways. Huddling close to the warmth, orbiting in weeks, it keeps one face to its parent star at all times. The 'substellar point', with the star forever overhead, is a blasted desert, and the 'antistellar point' on the far side is under an ice cap in perpetual darkness. How would it be to live on such a world?

Needle ships fall from Proxima IV's sky. Yuri Jones, with 1000 others, is about to find out...

Proxima tells the amazing tale of how we colonise a harsh new eden, and the secret we find there that will change our role in the Universe for ever.

***

We have wondered how life began ever since we had the wherewithal to wonder, I warrant. Generation after generation, inquiring minds have asked exactly that: a question that has no absolute answer, so far. A question so complex that many expect we'll never figure it out, not for a fact.

Saying that, these days, we have a pretty decent theory. It's all conjecture, of course, but breakthrough after breakthrough made in recent years appear to agree that in all likelihood, life began by way of RNA, or ribonucleic acid: a self-replicating molecule composed of four building blocks of a sort, two of which scientists have already successfully synthesised using the same simple chemicals that existed on Earth at the time the first fabled spark was struck.

But what if somewhere far from here — fully four years at the speed of light from the solar system we call home — life began in a very different manner? What if the building blocks it was fashioned from were fundamentally different? Would life find a way anyway?

That's the question Stephen Baxter asks in his latest novel, Proxima, the first part of an absorbing and characteristically ambitious new duology about the colonisation of a vast exoplanet... and the answer? No less than a resounding yes.

Meet Yuri Eden: not our hero's real name, but it'll do. It'll have to.

Yuri had been born on Earth in the year 2067, nearly a hundred years ago, and, dozing in a cryo tank, had missed mankind's heroic expansion out into the solar system. It had been his fortune to wake up in a prison-like colony on what he had learned, gradually, was Mars. But now, after another compulsory sleep, this was different again. (p.9)

At the very outset of the text, Yuri assumes he's back on Earth. Does he have another thing coming! Unhappily, he's been awakened "aboard the prosaically named Ad Astra," (p.54) a prison ship of criminals in the process of being transported to an apparently habitable planet orbiting a far-distant star, the better to people it with UN citizens before China — this future's superpower — can do likewise.

Proxima, incidentally, is a real red dwarf, though Baxter admits in the afterword to having invented the other celestial bodies in its system for this fiction — including Per Ardua, the planet our protagonist and his fellow detainees are unceremoniously deposited on shortly. Initially, Yuri is "disoriented, bewildered — too mixed up [...] to be either fearful or excited about setting foot on this alien world. Maybe that would come later. Or not. After all, countless generations had dreamed of reaching Mars, and that had turned out to be a shithole." (p.59)

Cumulatively, the colonists number in the high hundreds, but they're soon separated into groups of no more than fourteen, and even these numbers are quickly whittled down. Abandoned incredible distances from one another without the slightest hint of supervision, the men amongst Yuri's makeshift community set about killing one another for "access" to the women. A foolproof plan, I'm sure...

Throughout this period of fear and upheaval, Yuri does his best to keep himself to himself — as does another press-ganged Per Arduan: Mardina, a crewmember of the Ad Astra who was cruelly thrown to the wolves, as it were, after a murder on the shuttle down to the surface left Yuri's group biologically unbalanced.

Years pass in this manner. Years in which it becomes clear that they really are on their own in an unchangeable alien landscape. Mardina won't wholly give up hope, but eventually, she and Yuri break away from the other incomers, and start thinking about the unthinkable... about putting down roots. Ahoy, existential crisis!

Inside his head, out of sight of any unseen cameras, unheard by any hidden microphones, there were days when Yuri felt overwhelmed by a kind of black depression. Maybe it was the static nature of this world, the sky, the landscape, the stubbornly unmoving sun. Nothing changed, unless you made it change. Sometimes he thought that all they were doing was no more meaningful than the marks he used to scribble on the walls of solitary-confinement cells in Eden. And when they died, he supposed, it would all just erode away, and there would be no trace they had ever existed, here on Per Ardua.

Ultimately, Yuri and Mardina do find reasons to keep on keeping on. I won't give them away, except to say that our protagonist becomes fascinated with the alien flora and fauna of Per Ardua:

Everything living was built out of stems here. Even the huge forest trees were stems grown large for the main trunk; even their leaves proved to be nothing but more stems, specialised, distorted in form, jointed together, supporting a kind of webbing. The stems themselves [...] were assembled from something like the cells that comprised terrestrial life. It was as if on Per Ardua complex life had developed by a subtly different route than on Earth. Rather than construct a complex organism direct from a multitude of cells, Arduan cells were first assembled into stems, and the life forms, from builders to trees to the big herbivores and carnivores of the plains and forest clearings, were all put together from the stems, as if fabricated from standard-issue components. (p.112)

A number of other narrative threads are in play in Proxima. We spend several tremendously memorable chapters in the company of Angelia 5941, "a disc spun of carbon sheets, a hundred metres across and just a hundredth of a millimetre thick. Yet she was fully aware, her consciousness sustained by currents and charge stores in the multilayered mesh of electrically conductive carbon of which she was composed." (p.65) Angelia put me in mind of 'Malak,' the Peter Watts short story in Engineering Infinity, and though Baxter doesn't go as far, his efforts to make this artificial perspective sympathetic are nevertheless effective.

Then there's Stephanie Kalinski, the daughter of the scientist who assembled Angelia, and her identical twin, Penny. Stephanie, however, doesn't believe in Penny. Before she ventured into an ancient Hatch discovered in the mantle of Mercury, she lived the life of an only child. Afterwards, it is as if her past has been rewired; as if history itself has shifted to fit around her inexplicable sister.

A fantastic concept, excellently executed, and it says a lot about Proxima that it's at best a secondary plot point. Its themes are perhaps heavy-handed — doors open, don't you know? — but Baxter's new novel is so gleefully full of ideas that it's easy, in the moment, to overlook its blunter beats. Said attitude extends to some awkward, and not entirely necessary infodumping, which the author inserts insouciantly into various conversations. I ever so wish he'd resisted this, though the more fantastical aspects of Proxima are mostly bolstered by their basis in scientific fact.

Narratively, the story of Yuri and Mardina journeying across this weird new world is very Dark Eden indeed, and as with Chris Beckett's Arthur C. Clarke Award-winning novel, the sense of wonder Baxter effects again and again in the course of exploring the unknown is emblematic of science fiction at its finest.

Sadly, one of the genre's weaker points comes through too, because all too often, Proxima is all head and no heart. It lacks, alas, an emotional core — though there's certainly room for one through Yuri. But Baxter has him play his cards so close to his chest that we never really feel like we know him. We may well come to care for him, but this is simply a by-product of spending so long in his company.

Be that as it may, the biggest problem with Proxima is dwarfed by the sheer impetus of its author's intellectual ambition, which extends to asking and answering pressing questions about humanity's past; up to and including the origin of the species, indeed. There's so very much going on, a veritable spree of ideas, and so many of these succeed beyond my wildest dreams — see the builders, the poles of Per Ardua, the kernels Stephanie studies, not to mention the gathering, Paul McAuley-esque conflict between the opposing forces of this future — that picking holes in this awesome novel seems particularly mean-spirited.

Make no mistake: Proxima is immensely entertaining and eminently accessible science fiction which builds towards a catastrophic, cold War of the Worlds conclusion that is both breathtaking and bone-chilling. For fans of the genre Stephen Baxter has brought so much to since the Xeelee Sequence, not reading it is not an option. Ultimately, Ultima can't come soon enough.

***

Proxima
by Stephen Baxter

UK & US Publication: September 2013, Gollancz

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Recommended and Related Reading

Guest Post | Eric Brown on Aliens and Optimism in Science Fiction

I wonder if I've written more often about any other author here on The Speculative Scotsman than Eric Brown.

If that's the case, as it may indeed be, there's got to be a reason, right? Well, he publishes more and more often than most authors... but that's not the thing, I think. After all, I care more for quality than I do quantity. Except when it comes to food. Eating is good.

The thing is, you can always count on Eric Brown to have a store of great ideas. These don't necessarily result in awesome novels, but they're food for thought, and I like that a lot. I like a narrative with an argument. I like a story that makes me question my preconceptions. And as I concluded yesterday, "The Serene Invasion is more than merely interesting. As a thought experiment it's unequivocally gripping, and Brown's got the follow-through down too."

Long story short, it gives me immense pleasure to host a few words from the very fellow today.

Without any further ado, here's the estimable author on aliens and optimism in science fiction...

***

First contact with an alien race fascinates writers and readers alike. It’s a fundamental trope of SF, there at the very beginning of the modern incarnation of the genre with Wells’ The War of the Worlds, and still going strong today. It’s almost a given, with few exceptions, that first contact will engender conflict, often martial conflict. It’s a great engine for story-telling, after all – a metaphor for the fears of the time and a way of objectifying the other in non-specific terms: the host of alien invasion films of the fifties were little more than America’s fear of the Soviet Union writ large on the silver screen. We’re still at it more than fifty years later, only this time the enemy – garbed in alien guise – is Islamic fundamentalism and terrorists in general. 

Which is all well and good if you like that kind of thing. It generates story dynamic, after all. All stories are powered by conflict – but it’s only one aspect of the consequence of first contact. To begin with, the idea that aliens will be per se hostile is a convenient assumption arrived at for the sake of penning a gung-ho war story... But the idea is based, lazily, I think, on the anthropocentric idea that all races out there will be motivated by the same imperatives that impel the human race: greed, the need of material gain, resources, territory... The likelihood is that when we do come across aliens they will be as unlike ourselves as it’s possible to be, creatures that have been shaped by the evolutionary dictates of an ecology and environment wholly unlike our own. They idea that they will want the same thing as we do is unlikely. 

I prefer to think – optimistically – that aliens might not come to Earth in order to pillage and annihilate, subjugate us and strip the planet of its resources. Call me naïve, but I think that a race that has existed long enough to develop FTL technology might, just might, have outgrown the baser motives of materialistic gain and the desire to do violence. Call me a hopeless bleeding-heart liberal if you like, but maybe aliens might come to Earth with the idea of making it a better place, of making humanity a better race... 

That was the starting point of the ideas that would coalesce into my seventeenth novel, The Serene Invasion. 

I’d done something similar – though not so ambitious – in the series of linked stories that I fixed-up into the novel Kéthani. Aliens come to Earth, though they remain in the background throughout the book, and grant human beings the chance to become immortal. The choice is ours. We can forego the gift, if we like, and live ‘normal’ lives, dying and remaining dead... Or we can take up the offer of the Kéthani and become immortal – dying and being reborn – with the proviso that we work for them as ambassadors to the stars, bringing the message of the Kéthani to other races out there. There is much argument in the book about whether the gift of the aliens is beneficial, or not – a question that is never resolved. 

I wanted to be more definite in The Serene Invasion, and come down on the side of the aliens. 

In the novel, as in Kéthani, we never see the aliens. We see their representatives, beings called self-aware entities, biological androids if you like, that have been on Earth for more than a hundred years, smoothing the way for the ultimate ‘invasion’. The entities can take on human form, and do, melding into the fabric of society and working their subtle magic... They are the closest we get to the actual S’rene. Now the reason I didn’t want to show the aliens – the same reason I didn’t show them in Kéthani – is that I wanted to retain reader credibility, and I judged there would be a great danger of losing this if I described the aliens physically. One way of portraying the S’rene, and retaining some credibility, would be to show them as in some way humanoid. But I thought it better to maintain the mystery and mystique of these all-powerful beings if I refrained from showing them at all. 

And the gift that the S’rene – or the Serene as they soon become known – bring to Earth? 

They come to Earth and stop us committing violence upon ourselves and upon all life... 

To the majority of the human race, this is a welcome boon – but of course there will be those out there who have a vested interest in maintaining the status quo, the old ways of violence and conflict. Arms manufacturers an the gun lobby and hunters, and the multi-nationals whose profit depends on people killing each other... 

The novel is about how the world will change, thanks to the Serene. 

It’s SF – it’s also, I admit, wish-fulfilment fantasy written from a standpoint of increasing frustration and desperation with the human race, and our political systems... But it’s also optimistic, in that it shows that, with the right impetus and input, normal everyday people – the disempowered, if you like – can and do embrace the ways of peace. 

I am, if nothing else, a fundamentally optimistic writer. Looking back over all my novels and short stories, I realise that they present an overall positive view of the future, and of humanity. Okay, so in the New York books the world is almost ruined, but there is hope, and the characters portrayed are fundamentally good people, with dreams and aspirations, who win through in the end. The same with Helix; planet Earth might be dying, but there is hope thanks to the alien Builders and the refuge of the ten thousand worlds on the Helix. In the Bengal Station trilogy – Necropath, Xenopath and Cosmopath – I wanted to take a character who at the start of the books is a nihilist but who, though experiencing events through the three books, comes to some understanding of himself, and achieves eventual happiness. I wanted to show that nihilism is too easy a response to the human condition. We live short lives, riven by pain and suffering, physical and psychological, and then we die, face an eternity of oblivion, and we know this... But we are after all creatures with sensibilities limited by the dictates of our environment. We see only what we want to see, what we have been conditioned to see, and therefore – I like to think – we apprehend only a partial truth of the wonder of the universe. 

I can’t prove that, of course: all I can do is write my small, hopeful tales of the future... 

Because there is always hope, I like to think, and in The Serene Invasion I’ve tried to show that for some people – lucky enough to exist on the partial universe of my imagination, and of my readers’ – hope has become a reality.

***

Thank you kindly, Eric. For the thoughtful essay, and indeed, all the great ideas you've had over the years. It's absolutely marvellous to have you here on The Speculative Scotsman again.

The Serene Invasion is out now, and I hardly need note that Eric has another new novel coming soon. Picking up where The Devil's Nebula left off, Satan's Reach is the second book in Weird Space series, and it should be on shelves this August.

Maybe we'll talk again then! :)