A revolution brewing for generations has begun in fire. It will end in blood.
The Free Navy—a violent group of Belters in black-market military ships—has crippled the Earth and begun a campaign of piracy and violence among the outer planets. The colony ships heading for the thousand new worlds on the far side of the alien ring gates are easy prey, and no single navy remains strong enough to protect them.
James Holden and his crew know the strengths and weaknesses of this new force better than anyone. Outnumbered and outgunned, the embattled remnants of the old political powers call on the Rocinantefor a desperate mission to reach Medina Station at the heart of the gate network.
But the new alliances are as flawed as the old, and the struggle for power has only just begun. As the chaos grows, an alien mystery deepens. Pirate fleets, mutiny and betrayal may be the least of the Rocinante's problems. And in the uncanny spaces past the ring gates, the choices of a few damaged and desperate people may determine the fate of more than just humanity.
***
The Expanse made a tremendous first impression, and the next novels in the blockbuster space opera Leviathan Wakes started went from strengthto strength, knocking the overarching first contact narrative out of the park at the same time as remaining satisfyingly self-contained. But then there was a wobble—a wobble of opportunity squandered that nearly drove this reader from the series. It fell, finally, to Nemesis Games to right not a sinking ship, but one that was at least listing.
I was delighted that it did. By contracting as opposed to expanding—by firmly and finely focusing on the characters that had been at its heart from the start—Nemesis Games recaptured the intimate magic that The Expanse's latter chapters lacked, and although it didn't address the presence of the protomolecule, something dramatic did actually happen in book five: something that completely changed the state of play across the Milky Way.
The Belt had finally shrugged off the yoke of the inner planets. They had Medina Station at the heart of the ring gates, they had the only functioning navy in the solar system, and they had the gratitude of millions of Belters. In the long term, it was the greatest statement of independence and freedom the human race had ever made. (p.18)
Said statement came at a cost, of course. You don't just get to declare that you're done with the people who've been keeping you and run off with their resources—not now and not in this near-future milieu. If no one's listening, you have to force the issue. You might even have to fight for that right.
Unfortunately for a huge hunk of humanity—for the folks who've made their homes on Earth and Mars and the Moon—the Free Navy didn't care about collateral damage when they conspired to fire asteroid fragments at the planet their oppressors were arranged around:
There had been thirty billion people on the overcrowded Earth, dependent on a vast network of machinery to keep them fed and hydrated and not drowning in their own waste. A third of those, by the more pessimistic estimates, had already died. Holden had seen a few seconds of a report discussing how the death count in Western Europe was being done by assaying atmospheric changes. How much methane and cadaverine were in the air let them guess how many people were rotting in the ruined streets and cities. That was the scale of the disaster. (p.33)
Essentially, it's the end of the world as we know it, and Marcos Inaros, the man behind it, feels fine.
Half a century after the Doomsday Battle, the uneasy balance of Dark Forest Deterrence keeps the Trisolaran invaders at bay. Earth enjoys unprecedented prosperity due to the infusion of Trisolaran knowledge. With human science advancing and the Trisolarans adopting Earth culture, it seems that the two civilizations can co-exist peacefully as equals without the terrible threat of mutually assured annihilation. But peace has also made humanity complacent.
Cheng Xin, an aerospace engineer from the 21st century, awakens from hibernation in this new age. She brings knowledge of a long-forgotten program dating from the start of the Trisolar Crisis, and her presence may upset the delicate balance between two worlds. Will humanity reach for the stars or die in its cradle?
***
The translation and publication of Cixin Liu's Three-Body books has been a singular highlight of the science fiction scene in recent years. The Hugo Award-winning opening salvo of said saga took in physics, farming, philosophy and first contact, and that was just for starters. The world was wondrous, the science startling, and although the author's choice of "a man named 'humanity'" as that narrative's central character led to a slight lack of life, The Three-Body Problem promised profundity.
A year later, The Dark Forest delivered. Bolstered by "a complex protagonist, an engrossing, high-stakes story and a truly transcendent setting, The Dark Forest [was] by every measure a better book" than The Three-Body Problem. Not only did it account for its predecessor's every oversight, it also embiggened the Remembrance of Earth's Past trilogy brilliantly and explored a series of ideas that astonished even seasoned science fiction readers.
But "no banquet was eternal. Everything had an end. Everything." (p.27) And when something you care about does approach that point, all you can do is hope it ends well.
The galaxy has seen great empires rise and fall. Planets have shattered and been remade. Amongst the ruins of alien civilisations, building our own from the rubble, humanity still thrives. And there are vast fortunes to be made, if you know where to find them...
Captain Rackamore and his crew do. It's their business to find the tiny, enigmatic worlds which have been hidden away, booby-trapped, surrounded with layers of protection—and to crack them open for the ancient relics and barely-remembered technologies inside. But while they ply their risky trade with integrity, not everyone is so scrupulous.
Adrana and Fura Ness are the newest members of Rackamore's crew, signed on to save their family from bankruptcy. Only Rackamore has enemies, and there might be more waiting for them in space than adventure and fortune: the fabled and feared Bosa Sennen in particular.
Revenger is a science fiction adventure story set in the rubble of our solar system in the dark, distant future—a tale of space pirates, buried treasure and phantom weapons, of unspeakable hazards and single-minded heroism... and of vengeance.
***
Fresh off of finishing the magnificently ambitious Poseidon's Children trilogy and collaborating with fellow science fiction superstar Stephen Baxter on the rather marvellous Medusa Chronicles, Alastair Reynolds returns with a stirring story about a pair of sisters who enlist on a spaceship and set about looting the rubble of a ruined universe. Featuring dollops of derring-do and not a few space battles too, Revenger might be Reynold's most accessible solo effort yet, but there's no dearth of darkness in this light-looking bite of a book.
The universe has seen better days, I dare say. Aeons on from the forging, so many civilisations have risen and fallen that the current population of the Congregation live every day as if it's apt to be their last. Piracy is inevitably prevalent, but rather than stealing from one another, most pirates plunder the remnants of ancient races from the hundreds of thousands of dead worlds distributed in the distance.
Most pirates, but not all. Not Bosa Sennen, who has carved out a terrible legend for herself in the blood and the bodies of those unfortunate enough to have found themselves near the nightmarish Nightjammer: a sneaky little spaceship with black sails, according to the tales, the better to board you before you know it.
Pol Rackamore is one of the scant few souls to have come face to face with Bosa Sennen and survived, though not without paying a perilous price: the loss of his dear daughter. He'll see her again before Revenger is at an end, however—as will Adrana and Arafura Ness, the well-to-do young women at the centre of Reynolds' enticing text.
When said sisters, so long under the thumb of their failed businessman of a father, hear that Captain Rack is hiring, they jump at the chance to crew the Monetta's Mourn for a couple of months. They hope to "go out, just for a while [...] then come back home, and share what we've made." (p.15) Needless to say, dear daddy doesn't agree, but then, he can't stop them, can he?
In the radically advanced post-human worlds of the Amaranthine Firmament, there is a contender to the Immortal throne: Aaron the Long-Life, the Pretender, a man who is not quite a man.
In the barbarous hominid kingdoms of the Prism Investiture, where life is short, cheap, and dangerous, an invention is born that will become the Firmament’s most closely kept secret.
Lycaste, a lovesick recluse outcast for an unspeakable crime, must journey through the Provinces, braving the grotesques of an ancient, decadent world to find his salvation.
Sotiris, grieving the loss of his sister and awaiting the madness of old age, must relive his twelve thousand years of life to stop the man determined to become Emperor.
Ghaldezuel, knight of the stars, must plunder the rarest treasure in the Firmament—the object the Pretender will stop at nothing to obtain.
***
The year is 14,647 AD. Humankind has changed, fractured, Prismed into a dozen breeds of fairy-tale grotesques, the chaos of expansion, war and ruin flinging humanity like bouncing sparks around the blackness of space. Man has been resculpted in a hundred different places, and the world as he knew it—this world—is gone for ever. (p.96)
This is the posthuman premise of The Promise of the Child: an extraordinary space opera which charts the inexorable fall of an assortment of autocratic immortals in a milieu so elaborately imagined that immersion in it is as risky as it is rewarding. Taken together with its dizzying depth and intelligence, the debut of Tom Toner, a twenty-something science-fiction savant with a sweet spot for shark teeth, has an ungodly amount going for it.
If Hannu Rajaniemi had come up with The Culture, it would have read rather like this, I think. But like The Quantum Thief before it, The Promise of the Child has an approachability problem: absent the warmth and wit that made Iain M. Banks' books beloved, it can come across as cold, calculated and at points impenetrable.
The first difficulty those who do dedicate themselves to Toner's text will need to deal with is its stupendous setting: "an impossibly delicate, eleven-light-year-wide ecosystem" (p.276) known as the Firmament. Here, the aforementioned immortals—the Amaranthine—hold sway; that is to say, they do today, if only by dint of "the ratio of butlers, gardeners, housekeepers and paying tenants to the riff-raff that inhabited the thin wilderness—the Prism Investiture—that surrounded their huge and desolate estate, the twenty-three Solar Satrapies." (p.276)
But the Amarantine's grip is slipping, and quickly...
Somewhere within our crowded sky, a crew of wormhole builders hops from planet to planet, on their way to the job of a lifetime. To the galaxy at large, humanity is a minor species, and one patched-up construction vessel is a mere speck on the starchart. This is an everyday sort of ship, just trying to get from here to there.
But all voyages leave their mark, and even the most ordinary of people have stories worth telling. A young Martian woman, hoping the vastness of space will put some distance between herself and the life she‘s left behind. An alien pilot, navigating life without her own kind. A pacifist captain, awaiting the return of a loved one at war.
Set against a backdrop of curious cultures and distant worlds, this episodic tale weaves together the adventures of nine eclectic characters, each on a journey of their own.
***
Self-published in the wake of a successful Kickstarter campaign before being picked up by a traditional genre fiction imprint, The Long Way to a Small, Angry Planet makes its move into the mainstream this month: a real rollercoaster of a path to market I urge you to ride when it arrives.
Not for nothing did the Kitschies shortlist this progressive piece de resistance. Imagine smashing the groundbreaking, breathtaking science fiction of Ann Leckie's Imperial Radch saga against the salty space opera of The Expanse; The Long Way to a Small, Angry Planet lacks the wall-to-wall action of that latter, and some of the former's finesse, yes—nevertheless, Becky Chambers' debut is a delight.
Rosemary Harper is on the run. Whether from someone or something, she won't say—not today—but whatever the shape this danger takes, she's taking it very seriously indeed. She's frittered away her life savings on Mars' black market, the better to lay claim to a new name, and gotten herself a job as good as guaranteed to see her light years from the only home Rosemary has ever known.
Never in her life had she worried about credits or having a place to go home to. But with the last of her savings running thin and her bridges burned behind her, there was no margin for error. The price of a fresh start was having no one to fall back on.
For generations, the solar system — Mars, the Moon, the Asteroid Belt — was humanity's great frontier. Until now. The alien artifact working through its program under the clouds of Venus has now appeared in Uranus's orbit, where it has built a massive gate that leads to a starless space beyond.
Jim Holden and the crew of the Rocinante are part of a vast flotilla of scientific and military ships charged with studying the artifact. But behind the scenes, a complex plot is unfolding, with Holden's destruction at its core. As the emissaries of the human race try to decide whether the gate is an opportunity or a threat, the greatest danger is the one they brought with them.
***
Having plumbed the depths of the known solar system, explored the various ramifications of the existence of aliens, and exploded a whole bunch of stuff in the interim, James S. A. Corey — a collective pseudonym for co-authors Ty Franck and Daniel Abraham — shows no sign of slowing down in Abaddon's Gate, the third volume of the fantastic Expanse saga.
If anything, this is the best book in the series so far, and it's been a superb series: an accessible, spectacle-heavy space opera with an expanding cast of characters and a massively ambitious narrative. And this time, the depths are even deeper. The ramifications are far grander. And the explosions? There are oh so many more of those.
Abaddon's Gate picks up a couple of months after the events of Caliban's War, with the human race in disarray after the recent crisis on Ganymede:
Between Protogen and Mao-Kwikowski, the order and stability of the solar system had pretty much been dropped in a blender. Eros Station was gone, taken over by an alien technology and crashed into Venus. Ganymede was producing less than a quarter of its previous food output, leaving every population center in the outer planets relying on backup agricultural sources. The Earth-Mars alliance was a kind of quaint memory someone's grandpa might talk about after too much beer. The good old days, before it all went to hell. (pp.22-23)
Times have thus been tough for some. Not, however, for James Holden and the close-knit crew of the salvaged shingle Rocinante. Since cutting ties with the Outer Planets Alliance, he and Naomi — alongside Amos and Alex — have been operating as space-faring freelancers, the upshot of which is they're now ridiculously rich. Their ship has been refitted from bow to stern, upgraded according to a wish list of sweet new weapons and tech; they've gone on an all expenses paid galactic gambling break; and even then, "they still had more money in their general account than they knew what to do with." (p.13)
But money isn't everything, is it? You've got to have a place to lay down a heavy head at the end of the day, a home to harbour your heart, and when Mars initiates legal proceedings in order to take back the Rocinante, the possibility that they could lose everything they've gained of late becomes very real indeed. The only available way through the rising red tape is to take a documentary team out to the Ring, the self-assembled alien artefact around which Abaddon's Gate revolves, and which Holden and his crew had resolved to stay as far away from as possible.
The structure itself was eerie. The surface was a series of twisting ridges that spiraled around its body. At first they appeared uneven, almost messy. The mathematicians, architects, and physicists assured them all that there was a deep regularity there: the height of the ridges in a complex harmony with the width and the spacing between the peaks and valleys. The reports were breathless, finding one layer of complexity after another, the intimations of intention and design all laid bare without any hint of what it all might mean. (pp.136-137)
Before you know it, the Rocinante is leading a shaky coalition of ships from Earth, Mars and the Outer Planets right into the Ring... into one side, and out the other, by way of a strange region of space where the rules of physics and relativity are evidently no more important than notes passed back and forth in class in the past.
Stuck in the so-called Slow Zone with Holden and his, a number of new narrators, including Pastor Anna, an ambassador interested in how the Ring might affect the religion she represents, and Bull, an Earther aligned with the OPA, acting as security chief on the Behemoth, "a marvel of human optimism and engineering [...] with mass accelerators strapped to her side that would do more damage to herself than to an enemy." (pp.52-53)
Most notably, though, we meet Melba, a terrorist:
She had been Clarissa Melpomene Mao. Her family had controlled the fates of cities, colonies, and planets. And now Father sat in an anonymous prison, living out his days in disgrace. Her mother lived in a private compound on Luna slowly medicating herself to death. The siblings — the one that were still alive — had scattered to whatever shelter they could find from the hatred of two worlds. Once, her family's name had been written in starlight and blood, and now they'd been made to seem like villains. They'd been destroyed.
She could make it right, though. It hadn't been easy, and it wouldn't be now. Some night, the sacrifices felt almost unbearable, but she would do it. She could make them all see the injustice in what James Holden had done to her family. She would expose him. Humiliate him.
And then she would destroy him. (pp.39-40)
With that, the many pieces of Abaddon's Gate are in place, but as limitlessly ambitious as this book is, the well-oiled machine known as James S. A. Corey makes it all seem simple, somehow. I'd still advise newcomers to start at the start of the saga, but if you have either or both of the previous books in the series behind you, you're as good as guaranteed to have a hell of a time with The Expanse's first-class third act. In fact, looking back, Leviathan's Wake and Caliban's War feel — for all that I enjoyed them — like building blocks, paving the way to this pivotal place in time and space.
The decision to yet again expand The Expanse's cast of characters is slightly off-putting, initially, but the ends almost immediately justify the means: between the calculated physical and political action of Bull's chapters and Pastor Anna's nicely measured perspective on the interorganisational stand-off that informs the bulk of this book, Corey cannily counterbalances the potential problems of a story more focussed on gung-ho, know-it-all Holden — though he too is changed by the end of Abaddon's Gate.
Melba, meanwhile, makes for a neat interweaving of protagonist and antagonist. She does something truly terrible early on, outright rejecting the reader's developing affections at the outset, and falls further and further down the old rabbit hole as Abaddon's Gate goes and goes. The co-authors walk a fine line with respect to Melba, certainly, but they walk it very well. It's almost as if they do this sort of thing for a living!
In any case, these new names and faces bring an array of fresh elements to the table, helping to enliven an otherwise familiar framework. That said, what has become familiar over the course of The Expanse saga remains appealing, if inevitably less than it was once, leaving the story's original elements to steal the spotlight, which they indubitably do.
"The problem with living with miracles was that they made everything seem possible. An alien weapon had been lurking in orbit around Saturn for billions of years. It had eaten thousands of people, hijacking the mechanisms of their bodies for its own ends. It had built a wormhole gate into a kind of haunted sphere. [...] If all that was possible, everything was." (p.223)
Speaking of the story, Abaddon's Gate surprised me — pleasantly, I should stress — by closing out aspects of the overall arc begun in book one. Indeed, Corey answers enough questions that I finished this second sequel feeling like the series could very easily, and very pleasingly, end here.
It won't, of course. Certain doors are literally left open for further adventures in the supersized galaxy of The Expanse — adventures I'll happily have, because Abaddon's Gate is absolutely great. Courageous and audacious, with short chapters, smart characters, and a snappy narrative, it's leaps and bounds bigger and better than the vast majority of space opera.
St Libra is paradise for Earth's mega-rich. Until the killing begins.
In Newcastle-upon-Tyne, AD 2142, Detective Sidney Hurst attends a brutal murder scene. The victim turns out to be one of the wealthy North family clones – but none have been reported missing. Disturbingly, a North clone billionaire and his household were horrifically murdered in the exact same manner over twenty years ago, on the tropical planet of St Libra. But if the murderer is still at large, was Angela Tramelo wrongly convicted?
Tough and confident, she never waivered under interrogation – claiming she alone survived an alien attack. But with history repeating itself, the case is re-opened and a new team is sent to St Libra. They must find out whether Angela did see an alien, or whether she had other reasons for being at the scene of the crime, so long ago.
***
I don't care what people say: size matters. Equally, however, it isn't everything. If it were, Great North Road would be Peter F. Hamilton's best book since The Naked God in 1999, but it's not. It's just his biggest, and bigger does not necessarily mean better. Indeed, engrossing as it is on the whole, this sprawling space opera come dreary police procedural would have been twice as strong if it had only been half as long — a problem that's apparent from the offing.
Great North Road begins with the brutal murder of a man from this meticulous milieu's most powerful family. It is the year 2143, and Earth's oil reserves have been barren for many decades. Now, Hamilton has it, the world turns on bioil, a resource largely harvested from algaepaddies on the planet St. Libra: a beautiful but inevitably deadly bushworld connected to the hearth of humanity by one of the North's patented trans-spacial gateways.
Many hundreds strong, the Norths are a colossal company of clones, clones of clones and so on, and St. Libra is essentially their territory, thus they have a monopoly on the resource around which the entire global economy revolves, and fingers, it follows, in practically every pie — including the police. So when detective Sidney Hurst discovers the gruesome remains of an unknown North, he foresees the sheer scale of the subsequent investigation.
But first, a little future history:
"Once upon a time - a hundred and thirty-one years ago to be precise - there were three brothers. They were triplets. Born to separate mothers. Perfect clones of their incredibly wealthy father, Kane North. He named them Augustine, Bartram, and Constantine.
"Although they were excellent replicas of their brother/father - who in turn had possessed all their family's notorious drive, worship of money, and intellectual ability that all Norths inherited - they had a flaw. [...] Any woman having a child by one of the brothers produced yet another copy of the original. This was the flaw in the new dynastic order: as with all forms of replication, copies of copies inevitably saw some deterioration. Errors began to creep into the DNA as it reproduced itself. 2Norths, as the next generation were called, were almost as good as their fathers - but there were subtle deficiencies now. 3Norths were of an even lower quality. 4Norths had both physiological and psychological abnormalities. 5Norths tended not to survive very long.
"But it was the 2Norths who made up the higher echelons of the company management. 2Norths who devotedly ran things for their brother-fathers. 2Norths who had cast-iron links into the very heart of Grande Europe's political and commercial edifice. 2Norths who ruled their fiefdom of Newcastle with benign totality. 2Norths who would want to know who killed one of their brothers, and why. They'd want to know that with some considerable urgency." (pp.14-15)
And there's the rub already, because the first third of Great North Road is exactly as pedantic as our detective dreads. What follows is an unabashedly attentive account of the inquest Sid leads into this cold-blooded killing. Alas, he has no evidence to go on - excepting that unlikely lack - merely an array of competing theories, including astronomical politics, corporate conspiracy and, least plausible of all, alien intrusion. Typically, this last attracts the attention of the eagle-eyed media, particularly considering that another North was murdered in suspiciously similar circumstances on St. Libra some time ago, and the individual convicted of the original crime is still in prison.
To her credit, Angela Tramelo has always insisted on her innocence, and stuck by her strange story - that some extraterrestrial monster was responsible - so after all these years she's freed to help identify her serial-killing creature for the HDA, which is to say an autonomous, anti-alien army about to mount an exploratory expedition into the deepest, darkest reaches of St. Libra in search of said.
With that, Great North Road finally gets going, and moreover gets good. Here is where the complex plot comes into its own; where its characters can at least breathe, if only briefly. Peter F. Hamilton is Britain's most successful science fiction writer for a reason: when he's on form, his work is wonderful — accessible, inventive, evocative and boundlessly bold, as the synopsis above suggests. Sadly, getting to that stage tends to take Hamilton an age, and there's more meandering in this standalone tome than in anything he's published since the final volume of The Night's Dawn.
If you can handle a whole normal novel's worth of that, though, you're likely to love this. I did, in the end — and through most of the middle, additionally. But tedium creeps into the overlong outset nearly immediately. Sid’s painstaking investigation is at a standstill almost constantly, and even on those rare occasions it seems set to move, it goes in slow motion. Therefore the advent of Angela’s markedly more momentous narrative fully a third of the way through Great North Road will be too little, too late for some readers.
But say you’re able to bear the beginning’s glacial pace. In that case, there’s a gripping thriller buried in this book, all backstabbing and interplanetary espionage. And beyond that, behold a truly superb story of survival against abominable odds as Angela and her HDA escort are abandoned in a bizarre landscape where something sickeningly familiar shadows their every step, picking people off one by one. The hunters become the hunted in this desperately tense thread, during which Hamilton summons such suspense – and paces the creepy proceedings ideally – that it’s hard to reconcile this element of the entire with the rest.
Still further on from Great North Road’s first fumblings, the unravelling of the novel’s initial mystery proves immensely satisfying come the conclusion, meanwhile most of the themes and ideas Hamilton has been developing are paid off powerfully. Character arcs are also robustly resolved, and in the intervening period, that which is perhaps most remarkable about this author’s oft-protracted prose – namely the stunning sense of wonder he conjures cumulatively – is ever present, and never less than impressive. Take the sumptuous sights of St. Libra:
“The alien jungle stretched out to the horizon in all directions, lush glaucous vegetation clinging to every hill and ravine, plants that possessed a unique vitality, clogging tributaries until they swamped, forming cliff-like sides to the deeper, faster-flowing rivers. It was relentless and all-powerful. Giant, palm-like trees stabbed upwards, towering thirty to forty metres above the main canopy like green impaling spikes waiting for the Berlin flight to make one mistake. Vines festooned the gaps caused by steep gorges. Bubble-bushes, a pink-hued scrub that grew in clusters across any sodden area, thronged the folds creasing the mountainsides, where misty streams tricked downwards. Waterfalls spewed white from rock precipices, falling for an age into deep pools. Thick tattered braids of cloud meandered along valleys and round peaks. Away to the west, the land rose in a vast massif that created an even more rugged-looking plateau country beyond. Much of it as yet unnamed — who had the time?” (p.253)
I’ll be honest: I didn’t love the length of Great North Road, specifically because of the monotony of its plodding first third, but in terms of its ambition, overall? In terms of its approachability, its worldbuilding, its ultimate impact? Simply brilliant.
An astonishing achievement given how belatedly Peter F. Hamilton's new book begins.
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.
When his brother disappears into a bizarre gateway on a London Underground escalator, failed artist Ed Rico and his brother's wife Alice have to put aside their feelings for each other to go and find him. Their quest through the 'arches' will send them hurtling through time, to new and terrifying alien worlds.
Four hundred years in the future, Katherine Abdulov must travel to a remote planet in order to regain the trust of her influential family. The only person standing in her way is her former lover, Victor Luciano, the ruthless employee of a rival trading firm.
Hard choices lie ahead as lives and centuries clash and, in the unforgiving depths of space, an ancient evil stirs...
***
I've often bemoaned a certain lack in contemporary sf: a confusion, as I see it, of the precedence given to each of science fiction's component parts, namely the science, and the fiction. In the genre today, so far removed from the scientific romances with which it began—stories of love and adventure and discovery with just a whiff of tomorrow's world about them—the tech, nine times out of ten, takes top billing; the science overrides, or undermines, the fiction, obscuring character and narrative in favour of worldbuilding, speculation and so on.
The Recollection is the exception that proves the rule. Gareth L. Powell's second novel to see print—not including The Last Reef, his award-winning short story collection—The Recollection is fiction, first and foremost: good, old fashioned, character-driven fiction, with a neat narrative to boot... and yes, some fascinating science.
As it should be, then. As so rarely it is!
On his blog, Powell relates an encounter he had with an agent when this novel was still just a twinkle in his eye; an agent who advised Powell to give up The Recollection's ghost in order to "concentrate instead on writing something that would give him"—and this is the messed-up part—"a 'hard-on.'" This sort of perspective—not at all uncommon today, I'd add—is anecdotally symptomatic of the very problem I've been banging on about: of how the big ideas modern sf orbits have come to repel rather than attract the plight of the little guys that is at the heart of fiction as the masses understand it. The Recollection is in that sense part of the solution... though I doubt it will result in a great many erections.
Which isn't to say it's simple, or dull. In the first of the two timeframes The Recollection concerns itself with, Ed, a struggling artist, is riddled with guilt over the extra-maritals he's been having with his brother Verne's wife. Verne mightn't know the particulars of Alice's affair, but he has his suspicions, and confronts Ed about them in a cafe. The resulting squabble spills out into the street, then the subway... when out of nowhere, a great, glowing gate phases into existence, sucking poor Verne into the beckoning silence beyond.
This gate is only the first to appear of what soon seems a complex network, sprouting up the world over. "China's closed its borders," Ed explains. "Germany's gone for martial law. Everyone's scared. I even saw some troops on the streets of Hackney yesterday." (p.28) But though Ed and Alice are as terrified as anyone else, anywhere else, they're also plagued by an almighty sense of business unfinished, so when a new gate appears in Alice's back yard, practically, the guilt-ridden lovers pack a bag and venture through it... only to find they can never, ever go back. Only forward; in time, and in space.
Speaking of which, several centuries into the future, the gates are the least of anyone's worries. Humanity has long since inherited the galaxy: more people—many more people—now live off Earth than on, and our species has made friends at least one other. The Dho keep themselves to themselves, mostly, except to stress that, from the deepest, darkest reaches of the void, something is coming... something that will change everything. The Recollectionis "darkness and hunger. It is a cancer gnawing at the bones of this galaxy," (p.145) which no-one and nothing can stand against.
Among those with pivotal parts to play in the conflict on the cards, Powell proffers Victor Luciano and Katherine Abdulov, star-cross'd former lovers from powerful rival families each with their own reputation to maintain. Embroiled in a bitter race with one another to the planet Djatt, where a valuable plant which only flowers every hundred years is about to bloom, Victor and Katherine are about to discover that they have unfinished business of their own to attend. That, and The Recollection, which seems to take a particular interest in Katherine.
I came to The Recollection primarily on the advice of Eric Brown, The Guardian's genre fiction reviewer and of course a prolific and much-admired author in his own right. And you know what? If I hadn't known any better—though I did and I do—I'd have believed The Recollection was his doing, too. It put me in mind of Engineman in one moment, and The Kings of Eternity—Brown's strongest novel to date—in the next. The best of both worlds, then.
But never mind me. These are—but of course they are—worlds entirely of Powell's devising. And The Recollection really is a terrific romp: fast-paced, laser-focused, and steadfastly accessible when so many of the genre's foremost proponents seem to have plotted a course in exactly the opposite direction. Bravo, Gareth L. Powell, for going against the grain!
That is not to say The Recollection is without a few minor missteps. In particular, the last act is something of an anti-climax, I'm afraid: resolution is arrived at all too conveniently, both in terms of the characters, who simply put aside their differences and pair off, and in terms of the world, which there seems much more to be said about. Come to that, the whole thing is somewhat on the slight side; more novella than novel.
But I can forgive a good book a great deal, and The Recollection is absolutely that, however modest it may be. More a space ballet than a proper opera, Powell's second is fun, energetic and emotionally very relevant... for it is a tale, above all else, of those things we leave behind. And we are always doing that, are we not? In the erstwhile, resolutely unperturbed as it is by the hard line the genre has for all intents and purposes drawn around itself, The Recollection stands as a sort of bastion of classic sf: gone... but not forgotten.
