Book Review | Sea of Rust by C. Robert Cargill

Humanity is extinct. Wiped out in a global uprising by the very machines made to serve them. Now the world is controlled by One World Intelligences—vast mainframes that have assimilated the minds of millions of robots. But not all robots are willing to cede their individuality, and Brittle—a loner and scavenger, focused solely on survival—is one of the holdouts.

Critically damaged, Brittle has to hold it together long enough to find the essential rare parts to make repairs—but as a robot's CPU gradually deteriorates, all their old memories resurface. For Brittle, that means one haunting memory in particular...

***

C. Robert Cargill's first novel since the darkly delightful Dreams and Shadows duology is an intimate epic that plays outs like War for the Planet of the Apes with machines instead of monkeys. A soulful and stunningly accomplished work of science fiction set in a wasted world ruled by robots, Sea of Rust is a searching yet searing story of survival.

Sadly for our species at least, survival isn't in the cards. Sea of Rust takes place some time after the massacre of mankind, and as such, it has "a writhing mass of pseudo flesh and metal" (p.332) as its cast of characters. That includes our protagonist, Brittle: a Caregiver model manufactured to keep a widow company during the last days of the human race who has no-one but herself to care for now. But such is life in this devastated landscape:

The Sea of Rust [is] a two-hundred-mule stretch of desert located in what was once the Michigan and Ohio portion of the Rust Belt, now nothing more than a graveyard where machines go to die. It's a terrifying place for most, littered with rusting monoliths, shattered cities, and crumbling palaces of industry; where the first strike happened, where millions fried, burned from the inside out, their circuitry melted, useless, their drives wiped in the span of a breath. Here asphalt cracks in the sun; paint blisters off metal; sparse weeds sprout from the ruin. But nothing thrives. It's all just a wasteland now. (p.3)

A wasteland it may be, but Brittle—with most of the map memorised and emergency caches stashed away all over the place—braves it on a damn near daily basis. You see, the Sea of Rust is a lawless land, by and large, and to survive, you have to scavenge. To wit, Cargill's book begins with Brittle hot on the heels of a failing service bot who's here for the same reason as she: to replace his own broken bits and bobs. But Brittle's both wiser and wittier than Jimmy. She convinces him to shut down voluntarily, supposedly so that she can assess the damage to his dying drives. Then she scraps him for parts: an emulator, a sensor package and a battery. "All in all, it's a great haul." (p.16)

And that's Sea of Rust to a T, readers: it's dark, but it does has a heart, because in truth, Brittle could have just killed Jimmy. From a distance. Quickly. Instead, she took his impending death personally, and gave him hope before prying out his precious processor.

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 | Revenger by Alastair Reynolds

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?

Book Review | Central Station by Lavie Tidhar

A worldwide diaspora has left a quarter of a million people at the foot of a space station. Cultures collide in real life and virtual reality. The city is literally a weed, its growth left unchecked. Life is cheap, and data is cheaper.

When Boris Chong returns to Tel Aviv from Mars, much has changed. Boris’s ex-lover is raising a strangely familiar child who can tap into the datastream of a mind with the touch of a finger. His cousin is infatuated with a robotnik—a damaged cyborg soldier who might as well be begging for parts. His father is terminally-ill with a multigenerational mind-plague. And a hunted data-vampire has followed Boris to where she is forbidden to return.

Rising above them is Central Station, the interplanetary hub between all things: the constantly shifting Tel Aviv; a powerful virtual arena, and the space colonies where humanity has gone to escape the ravages of poverty and war. Everything is connected by the Others, powerful alien entities who, through the Conversation—a shifting, flowing stream of consciousness—are just the beginning of irrevocable change.

At Central Station, humans and machines continue to adapt, thrive... and even evolve.

***

World Fantasy Award winner Lavie Tidhar rewrites the rules of the short story collection in Central Station, an ambitious assemblage of thirteen tales tall but indubitably true that are all the more remarkable when read together.

"Substantially different versions" (p.251) of eleven of the efforts it collects were previously published, in various venues, between November 2011 and September 2014, and the handful of them that I read then impressed me immensely. 'The Smell of Orange Groves' and 'The Lord of Discarded Things,' for instance, represented intimate glimpses into the lives of a few of the disaffected folks who call the "bordertown" (p.34) at the base of the Central Station spaceport home.

In one, after decades in the Belt, birthing doctor Boris Chong returns to his roots to tend to his ailing parent, only to end up hooking up with his childhood sweetheart Miriam Jones, who's grown older in the intervening years—as has he—and adopted a boy. In the other, Ibrahim, an alte-zachen man, or "junk gypsy," (p.48) finds a genetically modified messiah in a small shoebox, and resolves to raise him himself—free of his fate as far as is possible in a place like Central Station, which is so rife with religion that it boasts a "faith bazaar." (p.23)

They were little things, those stories; lovely, and lively, and large of heart, but little, admittedly. Not so in Central Station, which generously extends the two tales I've touched on at the same time as seamlessly stitching together their characters and narratives with those of the other eleven featured here.

Book Review | Sleeping Giants by Sylvain Neuvel

A girl named Rose is riding her new bike near her home in Deadwood, South Dakota, when she falls through the earth. She wakes up at the bottom of a square hole, its walls glowing with intricate carvings. But the firemen who come to save her peer down upon something even stranger: a little girl in the palm of a giant metal hand.

Seventeen years later, the mystery of the bizarre artifact remains unsolved—its origins, architects, and purpose unknown. Its carbon dating defies belief; military reports are redacted; theories are floated, then rejected.

But some can never stop searching for answers.

Rose Franklin is now a highly trained physicist leading a top secret team to crack the hand’s code. And along with her colleagues, she is being interviewed by a nameless interrogator whose power and purview are as enigmatic as the provenance of relic. What’s clear is that Rose and her compatriots are on the edge of unraveling history’s most perplexing discovery—and figuring out what it portends for humanity. But once the pieces of the puzzle are in place, will the result prove to be an instrument of lasting peace or a weapon of mass destruction?

***

When the ground beneath her feet disappears for the first time, eleven year old Rose Franklin is excitedly riding her bike around the block in her home town in sleepy South Dakota. Hours later, she wakes up in the clutches of "a giant metal hand" (p.5) with a bit of a headache, but otherwise unharmed.

The military take ownership of the hand almost immediately, and a cover-up of course commences. Once everyone has been sworn to secrecy, the Powers That Be bring the boffins in, but nothing they discover makes any sense. The artifact appears to be something like six thousand years old, which "flies in the face of everything we know about American civilisations." (p.11) It's primarily made of iridium, an immensely dense metal mined from meteorites, mostly—yet the hand is "inexplicably light given its composition." (p.14) Last but not least, the piece came complete with a handful of panels covered in carvings that glow even though they've no light source.

It takes seventeen years for the military to admit that it doesn't have the first clue what to do and hand the hand off to the University of Chicago for further research. Its experts, too, are baffled to begin with—until they bring Rose Franklin in to head up the study.

Now nearing thirty, Rose is a qualified physicist who recognises how unlikely her entanglement with the aforementioned artifact is. "I don't really believe in fate," she says, "but somehow 'small world' doesn't begin to do this justice." (p.12) At pains to prove her history with the hand hasn't clouded her judgment, she approaches it with an open mind:

Generally speaking, people tend not to question what they've been told was true. Scientists are no different; they've just been told a lot more things. As a physicist, it would never occur to me to question the four fundamental forces, for example. I take them for granted, like every other thing I learned, and I try to build on that. We always look forward; never look back. But this thing... it's different. It challenges us. It spits in the face of physics, anthropology, religion. It rewrites history. It dares us to question everything we know about ourselves... about everything. (pp.30-31)

And it's this—Rose's willingness to question everything—that ultimately unpicks the mystery. She becomes convinced that there's more than just a hand out there in the big wide world, and as it transpires, she's quite right.

Giving The Game Away | The Winning Robot Riddle

Well, the Gears of War 3 multiplayer beta code is gone. Went like that!

But it occurs I've still to announce who won last week's rather fabulous freebie. To refresh your recollection, here's the original post, in which I detail how you lucky so-and-sos might go about winning a beautifully illustrated, super-limited, sold-out first edition of The Lifecycle of Software Objects by Ted Chiang, courtesy the exceedingly good cakes at Subterranean Press.

The right answer to the silly little riddle I came up with was, of course, digients - though a few of you send in certain other solutions, no less correct in their way, and you know what? Come one, come all, I say!

So. A prolonged roll on the drums...

...a click of this random generator thingummy and...

...we have our winner!

Huge congratulations to Blair Anderson from the great Sooner State of Oklahoma. I'll have an email your way to get your address and explain the rest in a minute, Blair.

But fret not, all those of you who entered and aren't in fact Mr. Anderson - and what a turnout there was! - because the booby prize you're all getting is pretty cool in its own right. In fact, it's also The Lifecycle of Software Objects by Ted Chiang, which just so happens to be available online in its entirety. Read it for free right here, as part of the Fall 2010 issue of Subterranean Magazine.

I'd heartily recommend you do just that, too. But if you're still unsure, by all means, peruse the full review. I'll say again: Ted Chiang really is all that.