2006 Locus SF – ACCELERANDO by Charles Stross

Am I really supposed to take this singularity thing seriously?  Really?  Advanced AIs and a proposal to Von Neumann factory the moon out of existence, set in the 2010s? Like theology, the sort of techno-optimism that proponents of singularity back is fun to talk about, but it can quickly and effortlessly segue into the ridiculous. Stross’s saving grace is that he doesn’t seem to take the singularity seriously either. I get the impression that he is a believer, but this novel is about 30% serious speculation and 70% running wild with speculative concepts. I do like that Accelerando embraces the ridiculous. I just wish it had embraced plot and character with equal fervor.

This is especially true in the first part, where we have at least some contemporary reference points to ground us. The novel begins with Manfred Macx, a man filled to the brim with tech ideas, but, due to a general dislike of wealth, he usually gives them away to make other people rich. He also has a lot of conflicts with his dominatrix/wife Pamela. He helps to kick off the rapid push towards singularity by sending software copies of lobster brains that have collectively achieved intelligence into space. From there, we get this accelerating technology developing through singularity. Stross occasionally interjects with a summation of the latest changes; by the 2030s, the solar system and the human lifecycle begin to become unrecognizable. From there we get a generational epic. Manfred’s daughter Amber explores an alien wormhole network, his grandson Sirhan works with other family members to try to find an independent niche in the new solar system, copies of the original generation pop up, and the family robocat, Aineko, has a fairly big role to play in everything.

Where does all this wacky speculation leave character and plot? Nowhere to be found, really, as might be fairly obvious from that vain stab at summarizing them. Manfred has some presence (though even he’s straight out of a Warren Ellis comic). Everyone is either so dull, on the one hand, or so wild unpredictable, on the other, that I couldn’t really tell you anything about them. The fact that there’s no plot is underlined by the fact that there’s no end. Maybe the sequel Glasshouse carries things to a more satisfying conclusion, but this novel just peters out.

Also, going back to our old accessibility discussion, this book . . . no. Not at all. Stross throws out concepts at a dizzying speed, and he rarely stops to explain them. Do you know what a Von Neumann machine is? A Matrioshka brain? I did, but I barely kept up. I don’t really see the reason to not define terms like these. One of the great things about sf is the “sense of wonder,” and I guess that’s what Stross is shooting for with this assault of Big Ideas. However, Big Ideas have dimishing returns, as far as I’m concerned, and the Idea-per-page highwire act in this book got boring for me by the mid-point. When the characters spend all of their time discussing how much computing power there is in the solar system and how very impressive that is, it’s hard to care about anything.

A whole lot of writers in this decade, and, from what I’ve seen, Stross may be the worst offender, are working to make science fiction a more insular conversation. If you don’t have a solid grounding in foundational texts and you don’t follow the right science news sites, don’t bother showing up. And people wonder why readers are turning to fantasy and steampunk?

So, if you are the type of reader who’s up-to-date on sf terms and concepts, especially relating to the singularity, and you’re more interested in Big Ideas and being amused than plot and character, I think you’ll have a great time with this book. Obviously, lots of readers have. Otherwise, go nowhere near it.

Grade: C+

2001 BSFA – CHASM CITY by Alastair Reynolds

As I said back in my review for Hyperion, I have a soft spot for space opera. There’s something about vistas on different worlds, big lumbering spaceships, and people running around with blasters or ray-guns that lowers my reader defenses. I’ve readily admitted that I’m unduly hard on high fantasy; well, it’s the opposite for me and space opera. I’m not trying to jump into the “fantasy sucks” arguments that flare up now and then from sf fandom; it’s purely a personal preference thing. The ‘80s were a second golden age for the sub-genre, with several post-Star Wars winners culminating in the inspiring originality of Hyperion. Things fell off a bit in the ‘90s, but Vinge and Bujold kept things going.  Since then, though…well, A Deepness in the Sky was the last space opera to win the Hugo, and even digging into the other awards, this will be one of the last space opera novels I cover. That said, Reynolds is representative of a group of authors, mostly British, carrying the genre forward in the twenty-first century.

This is my first Reynolds novel, so I can’t say a whole lot about the Revelation Space setting in which it, and the majority of his work, takes place. Humans have spread to other planets, they’ve run into signs of other intelligences, but not many living representatives, nano-machines and all sorts of transhuman augmentation exists, but faster-than-light travel doesn’t seem to. It seems that the mood is what most sets Reynolds apart though. Space isn’t a pleasant place, and human beings aren’t particularly pleasant either. Betrayal, violence, war, and societal collapse seem to overshadow humanity among the stars.

That’s certainly true of the two settings in Chasm City. It starts with Tanner Mirabel on the war-torn planet of Journey’s End. He’s a mercenary/veteran who’s involved in some old grudges that lead him to survive a massive, space-elevator-destroying attack in an early action set-piece. Tanner then awakes with partial amnesia near the thriving planet of Yellowstone, still pursuing the old grudge. Tanner thought Yellowstone was thriving, but a machine-infecting virus has laid the planet low. The virus causes machines to go crazy, and it’s killed many people, interfered with the life-extending treatments of many more, destroyed an orbital district around Yellowstone, and turned the capital of Chasm City into an anarchic, dystopian disaster. This doesn’t put Tanner off of his plans to execute his old enemy though, and he continues to Chasm City and gets himself into all sorts of tricky situations, including a most dangerous “Game,” some high-risk surgery, long falls from damaged cable cars, and lots and lots of firefights.

All the while, Tanner has flashbacks to the life of the venerated founder of his faction from Journey’s End, named Sky Hausmann. As these memories pop up through the book, we learn about the planet’s colonization, the origins of its conflicts, the results of mistakes while working with anti-matter fuel, a few facts about alien life, and the truth about Sky Hausmann.

I really wanted to like this rare, award-winning space opera of the last decade, and I thought I very much would early in the book. Reynolds does some pretty solid world-building, quickly establishing his dark take on humanity in space and painting the ruined Chasm City itself with rich, moody details. The novel did lose me at some point in the second half though. It’s a little too long, and a little too obsessed with dramatic twists over solid storytelling. There are just so many odd turns in the end, and some rely on big contrivances (without spoiling things too much: Tanner runs into a galactic rarity TWICE in two very different places). I stopped caring the third time someone was NOT WHO WE THOUGHT THERE WERE, and there were two or three such BIG REVELATIONS left (is this why it’s called “revelation” space?). Reynolds’ love of the grim and gritty didn’t help either - almost all of the surprises reveal that characters are actually terrible. I don’t mind a little darkness; I just got bored with its relentlessness here. The biggest twists have to do with Tanner’s lost memories (you know when a character acquires amnesia that there are some surprises on the way), but I wasn’t particularly interested in them. I wasn’t involved in Tanner, and I didn’t care about his true story.

There’s some solid world-building and fun action here, but I was not impressed overall. More varied character work, less misdirection, and more streamlined storytelling might have kept me in Reynolds’ world a little longer. Also, as with A Deepness in the Sky, I don’t think an sf novice would stand a chance here, and that, in my opinion, goes a long way towards explaining space opera's fade.

Grade: B-

2011 Campbell Winner, Hugo Nominee: Novel - THE DERVISH HOUSE by Ian McDonald

Ian McDonald has made a splash in the past decade with a simple but effective formula: take a broad cast of characters, put them in a near-future setting of a developing nation, and add the ramifications of an important technological trend. River of Gods gave us AI in India, and Brasyl gave us quantum computing in, well, Brazil. Both of those novels did quite well in the awards circuit, and I’ll be covering both of them in the fall, but neither won the Hugo. Now, McDonald has his best chance yet with The Dervish House, which explores the effects of nanotechnology on the Turkey of the 2020s.

As I said, there is a formulaic element to these books, but it’s a really good formula. For instance, the big cast of characters with separate but interconnected stories allow McDonald to explore several different aspects of his near future, non-(semi?)-Western society. We get an ambitious young couple – the man is trying to make a fortune on oil from an irradiated Iran; the woman is trying to strike it rich finding an impossible-seeming artifact. We also have an even younger woman seeking to start a marketing career with a nanotech DNA-reprogramming start-up firm. And then there’s a delinquent who begins to believe he can see djinn after he survives an apparent suicide bombing and gets drawn into a group of Islamic fundamentalists. And then there are the typical (for McDonald) outsider characters, an elderly Greek scholar who fears ethnic cleansing in his beloved Istanbul, and an adventuresome boy with a life-threatening heart condition. McDonald weaves all of these stories together and moves them towards a thrilling climax that underlines the possibilities and dangers of nanotech.

I think this is the odds-on favorite to win, but I did find the book somewhat uneven. Most of the characters aren’t particularly likable, others aren’t all that interesting. The trader Adnan Sarioglu is neither, and yet he gets a great deal of the book’s space. The Greek Georgios Ferentinou is by far the most interesting character, and I wished that he’d get a little more of the novel's focus. Of course, the most important character is Istanbul. McDonald employs some of the best prose in science fiction today, and he uses it here to convey a rich sense of the history and geography of one of the world’s great cities. I’ve never been there, unfortunately, but my Turkophile father-in-law has been there often. He read the book, and said that McDonald captured the city perfectly.

There are actually a lot of similarities in setting and story with one of last year’s winners, Bacigalupi’s The Windup Girl, though McDonald is far more optimistic than Bacigalupi. I like that, but it does lead McDonald wrong at times. For instance, 2027 seems a bit early for most of the technological developments shown here, which is a consistent problem for McDonald (see last year’s novella). This and my lack of interest in some of the characters keep me from giving this my highest grade, but I did enjoy it quite a bit, especially the excellent writing, and it’s a strong frontrunner for me so far.

Grade: B+

1998 Hugo and Nebula – FOREVER PEACE by Joe Haldeman

1977’s Forever War won both the Hugo and Nebula and is one of the most influential science fiction novels of all time. I wasn’t sure it lived up to the hype, but I did like it, and it’s stayed with me since I read it. This novel is not a sequel to that earlier book – it takes place in an entirely different world; in keeping with the times, it’s much less space opera and much more cyberpunk – but it’s at its best when it evokes the same sense of war and world weariness that seems to have come from Haldeman’s experiences in the Vietnam War.

It’s 2043 and nanotechnology provides everyone in developed countries with all of their basic needs…though not always particularly well. Another common technology is mental ”jacking” which allows people to link their minds to others’ or to machines. The novel’s narrator, Julian Class, is an African-American man who uses his jack to remotely control a “soldierboy” fighting robot, deployed in an intractable war with most of the southern hemisphere (Julian spends most of his time fighting in Central America and Colombia). A linked group of rebels under the banner of “Ngumi” provide the ubiquitous enemy there, and they have also managed a nuclear attack on Atlanta (though there are suggestions that elements within the US government have worked to continue the war). Between missions, Julian is able to fly back to his home in Texas and observe the media coverage of the war, which most Americans follow like a sport. You could say that the Ngumi War is a kind of “War on Terror,” and Forever Peace shows excellent foresight on this front.

Piloting a soliderboy, and fighting the Ngumi terrorists, causes a great deal of mental stress, and Julian is especially tormented by the experience. He’s often on the verge of suicide. The first half of the novel allows us to see Julian in military actions, effectively portrays his own unhappiness, and establishes a richly drawn future America. In the second half, his older girlfriend Amelia Harding takes on a larger role as her own scientific research raises the stakes of ongoing war. The titular “forever peace” refers to a sort of pacifist revolution that Julian joins, as well as the possibility of death or even the end of the world, which Amelia’s research shows to be a real possibility. I found this second half much weaker. Actually, it’s flat-out bad. There are a lot of contrivances in how the bigger threats and possible resistance emerge; Julian knows exactly the right people to move the plot along. And, as the plot gets bigger and crazier, it simultaneously becomes a by-the-numbers thriller with some rather generic villains (a sexy fundamentalist-Christian super-assassin, in particular, is very over-the-top, and she takes over the novel in the last hundred pages).

The novel does fall down because of these second-half problems. It’s certainly no Forever War. It is very well-written though, and there’s an interesting trick with the narration, which occasionally switches to third person-omniscient rather suddenly (though I did think this kind of gave away the ending). More importantly, just like Forever War, it’s a very wise cautionary tale that relates closely to the world of today. Haldeman knows war, and he knows how to convey its horrors. Throw in an excellent first half and a host of interesting ideas, and I would recommend this novel, despite its weaknesses. Maybe quit around page 150…

Grade: B-

1996 Hugo and Locus – THE DIAMOND AGE by Neal Stephenson

Neal Stephenson is one of my favorite authors. His 1992 novel Snow Crash, a hyperbolic, hyperactive cyberpunk novel set in a future where the state has crumbled, is probably his most famous work, but it didn’t win any of the awards I’m covering. This is probably for the best, since I don’t think it’s a great novel. It’s funny, exciting, fun, and interesting, but it’s also silly, ridiculous and swerves erratically between over-the-top action scenes and infodumps about Sumerian religion. Every novel since has won an award though (apparently, Locus readers adore Neal Stephenson), so I get to talk about him a lot.

The Diamond Age is Stephenson’s one Hugo win. The novel is an homage to Charles Dickens’ class-oriented Victorian fiction, but it takes place in a future world dominated by nanotechnology. Matter compilers can create just about anything a person could need or want, but it’s an expensive and potentially deadly technology – sentinels have to protect people from deadly nano-viruses and the majority of the world’s population still have to toil to afford their basic necessities. Meanwhile, a select few live with immense wealth, but to protect that wealth they congregate in “tribes” that enforce social order. The action in this novel takes place in Hong Kong where the Han tribe dominate, though there is also an enclave of Neo-Victorians. The Neo-Victorians have retreated to the strict social mores and class deference of 19^th century Britain to bring order to the modern world.

The leader of the Neo-Victorians, Lord Alexander Chung-Sik Finkle-McGraw, commissions an amazing educational text that combines nano-technology, sophisticated interactive software, and live remote actors to give his granddaughter a well-rounded understanding of the world, morality, and her own emotions. When its creator is mugged, the book accidentally ends up in the hands of a very young, abused working-class girl named Nell. The rest of the novel follows Nell’s education and mimics the style of enlightenment novels (which obsessed over the idea of education and what we would call “nature or nurture”). As always with Stephenson, there’s a variety of entertaining side stories, including my favorite involving a Neo-Confucian judge. There’s also a secret society of hackers trying to bring down the hierarchical social order that has evolved.

The ending is the one point where the novel seems to fall down a bit (a common problem for Stephenson), but this is a fantastic and original novel, especially the portions involving Nell or Judge Dee. Highly recommended.

Grade: A