Book Review | Ultima by Stephen Baxter

The hatches we discovered on Per Ardua were only the beginning. Bizarre gateways of alien design that allowed us to step across light years, they opened up the galaxy to us. They took us elsewhere and elsewhen, into a universe of futures and pasts that we could barely have imagined.

And we stumbled across a plan. A plan that stretched from the beginning of time to its end. A plan that needed us. Well, some of us. Now we have discovered just how small a part we play. It is time to change that.

***

Worlds and times collide in the concluding volume of the absorbing duology Proxima kicked off: "a story that encompasses everything that will be and everything that could have been," just as Ultima's flap copy claims, but fails, I'm afraid, to take in the little things—not least characters we care about—in much the same way as its intellectually thrilling yet emotionally ineffectual predecessor.

Ultima ultimately advances Stephen Baxter's ambitious origin-of-everything from the nearest star to Earth at the inception of existence to the end of time on the absolute farthest, but first, the fiction insists on exploring, at length, what the galaxy would look like in terms of technology if the Roman Empire hadn't fallen in the fifth century.

When we last accompanied Proxima's protagonist, Yuri Eden had just travelled through the portal he chanced upon at the pole of Per Ardua, which planet he and hundreds of other unfortunates had been given little choice but to colonise. The very fact of the Hatch changes everything, however; it is, after all, evidence of alien intelligence. But what do these beings want—whatever, wherever or whenever they may be?

Ultima opens on the other side of the Per Arduan portal with, rather than an answer, a deflection in a dead lanaguage—or, according to the ColU, "a lineal descendant of classical Latin anyhow." (p.21) The speaker of this strange tongue introduces himself as Quintus Fabius, centurion of the star vessel Malleus Jesu, and sets about doing what any good centurion would do: taking Yuri and his companion Stef Kalinski prisoner.

Book Review | Bête by Adam Roberts

It began when animal rights activists inserted AI chips in the brains of animals. The plan was to give animals speech. After all, if animals can talk we are bound to treat them more like us. A creature that can argue the case for its own intelligence, its own rights, is a much harder creature to use, to kill, surely.

But where does artificial intelligence end and the animal begin? With speech and self-awareness, have these canny animals also gained souls? Would we choose to believe them if they told us they had?

And would they forgive us?

***

Reading Adam Roberts is like participating in a literary lucky dip. It's a bit of a gamble, granted, but every one's a winner, and all of the prizes on offer are awesome.

Different sorts of awesome, I dare say. Always smart, and ever so sharp, but sometimes you get something scathing, and sometimes something sweet. Sometimes his stories are obscenely serious; sometimes they're ridiculously silly. Bête represents the best of both worlds—the coming together of all the aspects of Adam Roberts: the author, the professor and the satirist, alongside a number of others.

His fifteenth full-length fiction in fifteen years—including neither his punsome parodies nor his several collections—is a book about the rise of animals with intelligence to match man's, and it begins with a cutting conversation between a cattle farmer and the cow he had thought to slaughter.

"Won't you at least Turing-test me?" (p.11) it pleads as the bolt-gun is pressed against its head. One imagines many would, in that moment—indeed, making this beast into meat will be a matter of murder within weeks—but Graham Penhaligon is... somewhat set in his ways, shall we say. Also: a bit of a bastard. He pulls the trigger, a few pages later, in part because the cow—a farm animal made canny by activists with access to AI augmentations—makes the mistake of quoting a Morrissey song.

You dislike me for killing it. You're no vegetarian, though, hypocrite, reader, my image. My friend. You don't object to the killing as such. You object to my manner. When hunter-gatherers get angry it is hot and swift. When farmers get angry it is bone-deep and slow. (p.16)

And Graham, I'm afraid, has "spent decades perfecting anger as [his] being-in-the-world" (p.105)—so sayeth Cincinnatus the cat, a bête beloved by the cancer-ridden character our former farmer falls for in the novel's next section, which takes place fully five years after its provocative prologue. Brief and bleak as Graham's relationship with Anne is, it goes a long way toward humanising Roberts' immediately unappealing lead: a miserable man, as mean as he is maudlin, however he does, as it happens, have a heart.