Darwinia by Robert Charles Wilson

Robert Charles Wilson’s 1998 novel Darwinia has been hard-to-find for a while, but is now available in this new (September 2007) edition. Strangely, I just mis-typed the author of this book as Charles Darwin. Charles Wilson is making a career habit of giving his books slightly misleading titles, and this is no exception. Although the “new continent” that appears in place of Old Europe in this novel is ironically named Darwinia by some elements of the press, it’s actually (in terms of landmass and geology) more or less the same as Europe, only with all signs of civilisation (and native flora and fauna) removed.

That’s the premise of this novel: an extraordinary event sees Europe disappear before most of the cataclysmic events of that terrible century, the 20th, have taken place, and the resulting land mass appears to be free for exploration and exploitation by the only world superpower, the USA.

That’s how it’s set up, at least, but of course events intervene and things are not quite what they seem. There are familiar RC Wilson themes here: the technological sublime, religionism, politics, oppression, and the willingness of individuals to make enormous sacrifices for a greater good that they barely understand.

I didn’t enjoy this as much as other RCW books. He’s clearly nagging away here, as in other novels, at similar ideas. (In The Chronoliths, giant monuments to a despotic leader appear from nowhere (apparently from the future); in Spin, an enormous, imposed, technological artefact cuts the Earth off from the rest of the universe; in Darwinia, a whole continent is replaced with another.) What it all adds up to is hard to say, except that individuals are insignificant in the larger scheme of things, which is always a depressing thought (even if it’s all-too-true), and that human nature is, on the whole, pretty shoddy. It is a big downer when you realise, in Darwinia, that having been presented with a whole new continent to play with, human beings immediately set about ripping it apart and stinking the place up.

Still, this is another novel of big ideas, written in RCW’s usual literary style, and like everything else of his, recommended.

Axis by Robert Charles Wilson

They moved in silence through the Hypothetical forest, though it was not entirely a silent place. No wind reached them at street level, but there must have been a wind blowing, Turk guessed, because the iridescent globes that crowned the tubular trunks occasionally bumped against each other and made a gentle sound that suggested a rubber mallet on a wooden xylophone.

Axis is the sequel to Robert Charles Wilson’s superb 2005 novel, Spin, which I reviewed earlier in the year. I’m torn about the necessity for a sequel. On the one hand, sequelitis afflicts the SF market, overloading bookshop and library shelves with the over-rated and over-familiar, or me-too attempts to strike gold with a copycat franchise. On the other hand, Spin was so extremely good that you wanted more of the same, and as soon as it could be provided.

If the title Spin was a slight misnomer (see my earlier review), then I’m afraid this title, Axis, strays even further from the core idea of the book, which is that the universe has been colonised (billions of years before we came along) by an infinitely connected, infinitely self-replicating nanomachine, one that can commit extraordinary god-like acts of engineering, creating an effect that can only be described as the nanotechnological sublime.

This sequel begins approximately 30 years after the events in the previous novel. If Spin ended on a note of optimism, as some humans were able to escape the oppressive conditions of the late late capitalist Earth through an arch constructed by the Hypotheticals (so-called because their existence is surmised by the humans who experience their effects), then Axis begins by dashing that optimism. It becomes clear that the oppressive and fearful regulatory authorities have passed through the Arch themselves, to the New World, the planet linked to Earth through the Arch. Worse than that, human nature being what it is, people have started exploiting the New World like Robber Barons, taking advantage of its frontier nature and trashing the new environment in exactly the same way as they trashed the old.

The New World, in fact, seems to be a bit of a disappointment (a bit like Australia, perhaps). People cling to coastal communities and the interior seems to be dry and inhospitable. Life is hard, a living is hard to make. This is not the new Eden we hoped for at the end of Spin. Still, every summer the skies light up with a spectacular meteor shower.

The only surviving character from Spin enters the narrative some way in, but the novel begins with Lise, a young woman in search of her 12-years-gone father, and Turk, a pilot/drifter she has met along the way. They soon encounter the (illegal) Fourth community (humans who have achieved a longer lifespan – or fourth age – using technology derived from the Hypotheticals), and become embroiled in their attempts to communicate with what they surmise is the intelligence behind the Hypotheticals and their effects. In other words, RCW continues here with his theme of dangerous religious extremists. In this case, the idea of god has been replaced by the Hypotheticals, but the fanatical attempts to know god continue, with the usual human consequences.

Meanwhile, the forces of conservatism are in pursuit of the Fourths, trying to control any alterations of the human genome, and using the kind of oppressive tactics that made sense in Spin, but make less sense here, because the ideas are just not developed enough. These authorities, who don’t allow morality to stall them, are too easy to evade.

Inevitably (and gratifyingly), encounters with the nanotechnological sublime leave the human characters helpless, and there’s a sense that (unlike with the previous novel) the human characters are just too small and insignificant to carry the weight of the ideas contained herein.

Like the New World itself, Axis is a bit of a disappointment. At around 300 pages, it’s short: and the design of the book itself is the only thing that ensures we even get to 300. There’s a lot of white space between chapters. Does this feel like the “holding pattern” novel in the middle of a trilogy? I don’t really know. We certainly learn a good deal more about the Hypotheticals than we knew before, but I don’t think we learn enough about the human characters in the story. We don’t spend enough time with any of them to care about them in the same way that we cared about Tyler Dupree and the twins in Spin. In the end, I wonder why Lise is there at all, unless she’s a central character in a hypothetical third novel.

I enjoyed reading it, but I’ve grown to expect much more from RCW. You’ll certainly not be able to resist reading this if you have read Spin, but there really isn’t a lot of point in recommending this to anyone who has not. Cautiously recommended then, with a reiteration of the strongest possible recommendation for Spin itself, which remains one of the best novels – in any genre – that I have ever read.

The Year’s Best Science Fiction – Twenty-Fourth Annual Collection edited by Gardner Dozois

Seems like only yesterday that I was reading the 23rd Annual Collection edited by Gardner Doizos, and here we are with the 24th. Actually, it was almost exactly a year ago – one day difference. In fact, I could have posted this review yesterday, having just finished the book, but decided to wait till today.

Now that’s consistent reading behaviour, I’m sure you’ll grant me, and this 24th Annual represents consistent, high-quality, book editing on the part of Gardner Dozois.

For your money ($21.95 is the US cover price; I paid £9.97 on Amazon UK), you get 652 pages of original, recent, science fiction, by some of the greatest names working in the field.

The opening tale, “I Row-Boat” by Cory Doctorow, apart from the cute SF pun of its title, is a sweet and interesting tale of what happens following the Singularity that sees human beings upload themselves as data, and artificial intelligences gain status as sentient beings. The rowing boat of the title is Robbie, who has chosen, in spite of his sentience, to continue to work as a boat, carrying passengers out from a larger boat on diving expeditions. But what happens when the coral reef the divers are visiting itself gains sentience? And who are these divers? People? Or downloaded intelligences occupying human shells?

Robert Charles Wilson’s “Julian: a Christmas Story,” describes a post-oil religious society which scavenges its past without ever quite believing in it. The narrator tells a story about Julian, who will become known as Julian the Agnostic or Julian Conqueror at some indeterminate point in the future. In this story he’s a kind of exiled prince, son of a deposed leader, and propagator of heretical ideas.

“Tin Marsh” by Michael Swanwick is a claustrophobic story of planetary prospecting, a Treasure of the Sierra Madre in space. The narrator is a prospector who torments her partner to breaking point and suffers the consequences when the statutory anti-violence chip in his brain malfunctions.

“The Djinn’s Wife” by Ian McDDonald, is one of his trademark tales of the Indian Subcontinent in the future, a place which mixes ancient religious ideas with bang up-to-date explorations of artificial intelligence.

Kage Baker’s “Where The Golden Apples Grow”, like “Tin Marsh”, takes us to one of the traditional frontiers of classic science fiction. Whereas “Tin Marsh” is set on Venus, “Golden Apples” is set on a newly colonised Mars. The title’s homage to Ray Bradbury is a bit of a giveaway. So Mars is a bit like the wild west, or the Australian outback, and there are colonists and farmers and long distance truckers who ship ice from the poles to the settlements on the equator.

Alastair Reynolds has two stories in the collection. “Signal to Noise” is a superb tale of a scientist crossing between alternate realities as a stream of data – data that gradually degrades as the noise level increases. This is also a poignant story of grief and loss: what happens if the “you” in this life suddenly loses a loved one, but can temporarily visit an alternate universe and take the place of the “you” who has suffered no such loss? His other entry, “Nightingale” couldn’t be more different. Set in the same future as his other Conjoiner/Ultra novels (see review of Absolution Gap, below), it’s an atmospheric story of an incursion into an apparently deserted hospital ship in search of a war criminal.

Gregory Benford’s excellent “Bow Shock” is a brilliant story set in the very recognisable milieu of university scientific research, complete with office politics, professional jealousy, vicious backbiting, and the pressure to publish. In the end it’s another poignant story about a scientific discovery that is much more than it initially seems.

If Benford’s world is familiar enough to be happening today, right now, in a university near you, Robert Reed’s novella “Good Mountain” takes place in an environment so alien that it takes you pages to work out what’s going on. In this strange tale, what seem to be human beings mix with what seem to be genetically engineered sub-humans (“mockmen”) and travel to unfamiliar places on board what seem to be giant worms. On a world barely able to support intelligent life, they wrestle with forces beyond their control, seeing their society gradually disintegrate into fire and suffocating darkness.

If that wasn’t weird enough for you, David D. Levine’s story “I Hold My Father’s Paws” sees an estranged son and his father try to reconcile just before the father decides to become somewhat less (or more) than human.

If some of these stories are good old-fashioned modern space operas, others are most definitely post-Singularity humans-are-just-data stories of physical transformation and interface problems. Mary Rosenblum’s “Home Movies” explores the life of a person who records experiences on behalf of clients who cannot be physically present.

On the other hand, Daryl Gregory’s compelling “Damascus” explores the link between religious psychosis and some variant of CJD (or Mad Cow Disease, if you’re a cow).

Greg Egan’s “Riding the Crocodile” manages to be both post-singularity and a kind of space opera, as humans-who-are-data decide to explore an inaccessible part of the universe at the end of an impossibly long life.

“The Ile of Dogges” by Elizabeth Bear and Sarah Monette is set in the censor’s office in the time of Ben Jonson, and features a cameo from Jonson himself, who attempts to bribe the censor into not burning the only copy of his latest play. I’ll leave you to guess where the science fiction comes in.

Ken Macleod’s “The Highway Men” is another tale of the post-oil economy, featuring the kind of accidental hero you might expect to find in the highlands of Scotland.

Stephen Baxter’s “The Pacific Mystery” is an absolute corker of an alternate history, and the only story here I’d read before (In The Mammoth Book of Extreme SF). It’s set in a world in which World War 2 didn’t really happen, because the British appeasers held sway and for some reason the Japanese were unable to cross the Pacific to make war on the USA. But why…? is the great pleasure of this lovely and ultimately sad story.

There are many great stories here, but I’ll mention just one more. “Every Hole is Outlined” by John Barnes (not that John Barnes, surely?) is another space opera involving long-lived humans who are a breed apart. It’s also a kind of deep space ghost story, which leads me to conclude that this collection is imbued with sadness, a sense of missed opportunities and loss. If you read “Every Hole” and “The Pacific Mystery” and “Good Mountain” back to back you might find yourself weeping for the fate of humanity.

These sad stories probably reflect something at large in our culture that we’re barely aware of, and probably won’t recognise properly for some time to come.

As usual, unmissable and highly recommended.

A Hidden Place by Robert Charles Wilson

This reprint of Wilson’s 1985 novel A Hidden Place is a nice edition with a cover that gives very little clue as to its contents. Having just complained about the skimpiness of Michael Connelly’s The Overlook (see previous review), I have to admit that this, at 224 pages, is even skimpier. If not exactly a novella, it’s not much longer.

That said, though, this is far less formulaic than The Overlook, and wears its genre clothes awkwardly. It’s a depression-era mix: Of Mice and Men meets The X Files.

Wilson’s prose is superb, and this strange little tale of small town America unfolds gently, so that you do in fact feel inclined to take your time not to rush through the 224 pages and instead savour every word.

Travis is taken in by his Aunt and Uncle in Haute Montagne (terrible name) after his mother dies. He’s not a happy kid, and his Aunt’s house is not a happy home. They already have a lodger: an astonishingly beautiful woman who definitely does not belong in this place. Travis takes up with a local waitress, a slow scandal unfolds, and the brutality of the Depression is never far away.

Meanwhile, a confused and apparently simple-minded hobo, Bone, rides the rails around America with two other displaced persons, who take advantage of his memorable looks and size), as well as his apparent ability to take punishment that would kill anyone else. Bone is definitely out of the same literary tradition as Steinbeck’s Lennie, and of course we wait to find out what Bone’s connection with the mysterious scandal of Haute Montagne is all about.

One of the few books I’ve enjoyed this summer: and I’ve yet to read a bad Robert Charles Wilson novel, so: recommended.

Spin – by Robert Charles Wilson

It was one of those “out on a limb” books during the writing — the kind where you ask yourself, “Can I get away with this?” But they don’t pay you for timidity, I guess. Every time I’ve stuck my neck out, in the literary sense, I’ve been rewarded for it.

Robert Charles Wilson is fast becoming one of my favourite SF writers. I’ve already reviewed The Chronoliths and Blind Lake on this blog. Surprisingly, The Chronoliths didn’t immediately strike me on first reading, and it was only when I picked it up a second time that I really got into it. Probably I was stressed and/or thinking about something else the first time I read it. Blind Lake presented no such problems, and I enjoyed it a great deal.

Spin is Wilson’s most recent book, and it’s a corker. The breadth and depth of his imagination is incredible, but more than that, this is a beautifully-written book, too. Its style reminded me – throughout – of Douglas Coupland, and there’s almost no higher praise I can give. Imagine if Douglas Coupland sat down and wrote an extraordinary science fiction novel, and you’d – possibly – get something like Spin.

The Spin of the title is an acknowledged misnomer – as becomes clear as the plot develops. Simple human frailty is one of the key themes of this book, and it’s the all-too-human inability to encompass scientific vastness that causes “the Spin” to be misunderstood and misnamed. There’s also the background hum of political spin to consider, and that too is a theme of this great book. What happens to politics, what happens to society, when we are confronted with a technology so advanced and so powerful that it is clear that human politicians are irrelevant?

Like a Coupland novel, Spin revolves around three close friends, characters whose relationships are often strained but nevertheless enduring. The three are sitting out under the night sky one day in their youth, and the stars go out. The reason for this – and the consequences of it – are everlasting, and the three individuals come to cope with events in their own ways.

What is blocking out the stars turns out to be an advanced technology put in place by a hypothetical alien intelligence. The universe outside the apparent barrier is vastly accelerated relative to time on earth, which remains – subjectively – the same to those who still live there.

The idea that human brains can’t cope with vast scales – like geological time, like distances measured in light years – is not new. The climate change lobby has had to invent ever more urgent reasons for people to worry about so-called global warming, simply because it became clear that a vague threat over 100 years hence just wasn’t seen as “a clear and present danger” by most people. So instead we have this invented “sudden onset” climate change, and every weather anomaly is seen as a further sign of our doom.

In Spin, the time outside the Earth’s artificial bubble is moving so quickly that millennia pass in a matter of subjective months. And it’s Wilson’s creative play with this idea that forms the fascinating core of this book. What happens to our sun over millions of years? What happens to the rest of the solar system? How might we humans deal with or make use of the anomalous passing of time? Such vast themes might seem cold an impersonal but for the Coupland-style human relationships Wilson puts into his story.

Highly recommended.