Asimov's SF, April-May 2007

by Dell Magazine Authors

  And Siri Keeton, a man half of whose brain has been removed and replaced by circuitry for medical reasons, who is the novel's first person narrator, and whose role in the mission is to be just that for the leadership back on Earth—a supposedly neutral and detached observer sending back straight reportage of a strange kind, a kind of scientific interpreter who supposedly doesn't exactly have to understand what he's interpreting.

  That's the set-up, and the rest of the novel consists of this team's confrontation with the alien object they find and its creators and denizens. A classic first contact novel. And certainly meant as hard science fiction by the author, since Watts, at least by his own lights, and quite convincingly by mine, has worked all this out with such scientific rigor, or at least speculative scientific rigor, that he appends seventeen pages of “notes and references” to the novel almost as if it were being submitted to a scientific journal. It can't get much more hard science fiction than that.

  Siri Keeton's voice, which Watts adopts for his narration—which is to say this narrator's consciousness—is sophisticated, ironic, and interestingly alien in and of itself. The backstory of a failed love affair that he tells is illuminating, the interactions of this strange crew with its enigmatic vampire captain are fraught with tension, its other group dynamics are well-rendered, and there's plenty of physical action when they reach the alien artifact.

  But the dramatic core of Blindsight, the plot-engine, remains a series of scientific questions, speculations, and discoveries. First concerning the physical nature of the huge habitat they discover, then the problem of penetrating it, followed by their encounters and conflicts with the lifeforms within it, the explication of their truly weird biology, and finally the revelation of just how alien these creatures and their “civilization” really are on a level more profound than that of any other fictional aliens I, at least, have ever encountered.

  Since this revelation is the thematic and dramatic climax of the novel, I will try not to reveal too much here, except to say that it delves very deeply indeed into the differences among intelligence, sentience, and consciousness, which of them is evolutionarily necessary for the arising of what, and that Watts’ science fictional answers are so fascinatingly counter-intuitive that he seeks to justify them in “notes and references” as a scientist even though he does a fine job of it as a fiction writer in the body of the novel.

  Clearly, then, Peter Watts’ all-but declared literary ambition is to be a first class hard science fiction writer on the sophisticated literary level of Gregory Benford or Arthur C. Clarke. And with Starfish, Maelstrom, Behemoth, and now Blindsight, he demonstrates that he can achieve it.

  But whether he or anyone else can build a commercially viable career on novels in which, however well-written and characterologically interesting, the speculative science is not only front and center, but provides the dramatic and thematic capper, is more questionable.

  I consider myself a fairly scientifically sophisticated reader, and I found Blindsight challenging on that level. Challenging, but, in the end, fascinating and rewarding. The question is whether there are enough readers left out there who find that sort of experience actually enjoyable to continue to keep such fiction commercially publishable.

  On the other hand, there do seem to be two species of hard science fiction arising that are actually trendy—that is, if you consider nanotechnology and the virtual realities created in the cybersphere actual science. I've said that I prefer an inclusive definition of hard science fiction, so I suppose that I do, but with caveats.

  My definition of hard SF requires that it not violate the known laws of mass and energy, and there I have some problems with some of the literary uses to which the concept of “nanotechnology” has been put.

  Sure, you can create tiny little machines, but when you get them down to the molecular level, with their manipulators on the atomic level, how do they manipulate individual atoms without running afoul of quantum effects? And how can you possibly coordinate zillions of them to produce the sort of magic goo that can turn shit into shinola and dirt into spaceships? Where can there be sufficient data storage in the individual molecular-scale units to store the instructions to coordinate them?

  I don't think it's even theoretically possible. I think this sort of nanotech is the literary equivalent of a magic wand. Literarily acceptable and quite useful, but hard science it ain't.

  But when it comes to virtual realities, one cannot argue that they have even the potential for violating the laws of mass and energy, since their existence is by definition virtual—that is, outside the “real world,” the physical universe in which such laws apply. And the fictional technology that creates them is already almost here in primitive form, lacking only the development of means of inputting full artificial sensory data—smell, feel, taste, kinesthetics, as well as sight and sound—directly into the relevant brain centers. And, indeed, this sort of thing has already been demonstrated on an experimental level.

  However, there's something a little fishy about the way virtual realities are so often used on a literary level. Writing about them, about their effects on consciousness and culture, is one thing, and can even be the material for hard science fiction. But setting a story entirely or almost entirely within virtual reality without dealing in a consequential way with the dichotomy between virtual existence and corporeal existence is really just using it as a frame for fantasy, a doorway into anything.

  Not that there's anything literarily wrong with fantasy or surrealism, far from it. But what's the point in tarting it up as “science fiction,” let alone “hard science fiction"?

  David Louis Edelman's Infoquake is certainly science fiction by any remotely rational definition. It is certainly trendy, combining nanotechnology and sophisticated molecular level biology to create “bio/logics,” a technology that not only cures and prevents diseases but allows one to program mood and mental state more or less at will. This in a future where corporeal and virtual realities are totally intertwined in quotidian day-to-day existence, and something called MultiReal is apparently going to allow people to choose what happens in base reality itself in the sequels.

  And yes, there will be sequels. The cover forthrightly proclaims that Infoquake is “Volume I of the Jump 225 Trilogy.” Whatever that is going to turn out to be, it will probably continue the story of Natch. Natch is the main protagonist, if not what one could call the hero, of Infoquake; a driven, unprincipled yet somehow charming rogue, a corporate climber, and entrepreneur of a company that both creates and markets trendy bio/logics in a media and advertising shark pond speeded up like a combination of the Internet, TV, the Niel-sens, and the stock market on methedrene.

  Perhaps his main minions, assistants, flunkies—Jara the marketer and Horvil the geeky wizard bio/logics programmer—will tag along through the next two volumes as well in this high-speed, high-spirited tale of high-powered and low-minded capitalist skullduggery, corporate and media warfare, and virtual reality manipulation. It's the sort of thing that would make a perfect serial for Wired magazine, given the nature of its ad base, if it ever decided to publish fiction.

  Infoquake is certainly proceeding along several trendy vectors, not only in the microcosm of science fiction but in the macrocosm of the culture at large, which the former might follow in order to survive in the latter.

  Literarily and commercially, the question of whether or not such a novel could be considered “hard science fiction of the post-modern kind” is ridiculously irrelevant. But to what extent this sort of technological extrapolation can be considered “science” at all seems centrally germane to the more important question of whether science fiction that fulfills the restrictive and perhaps even prescriptive definitions of hard science fiction can survive in a culture that does consider it science by mutating along the virtual reality vector.

  This question might be moot if Edelman himself were just blowing rubber science smoke and mirrors. Instead, he is actually trying to make bio/
logics and MultiReal seem scientifically credible in the manner of a hard science fiction writer and doing a pretty good job of it, at least when it comes to bio/logics.

  Edelman seems to have convincing and convincingly detailed knowledge of the physiology and biochemistry of the human nervous system down to the molecular level. And cares about making his fictional combination of molecular biology and nanotech credible to the point where the hard science credibility of the former makes the questionable nature of the latter seem more credible even to a nanotech skeptic like me. And after all, let's not kid ourselves too far, that's really the nature of the hard science fiction game; otherwise it wouldn't be hard science fiction.

  “MultiReal,” on the other hand, is something else again. And what it really is, or rather apparently is going to become in the sequels, is not that clear in Infoquake, where its mass marketing as a vague concept and subsequent launch as a rather vague product is the climax of the novel.

  As near as I can make out, the idea is that if one has a means of running virtual reality simulations of all possible variations of a situation or action before it takes place—say, trying to throw a football downfield into the hands of a receiver, for example—one could then feed in all possible variations of all interacting elements of the starting conditions. This would enable one to know which combination would produce the exact desired result before you threw the football and have your throwing arm programmed accordingly by your bio/ logics. And voilá, the football lands in the receiver's hands perfectly.

  Edelman produces some reasonably cogent mathematical explication to make this seem to go down smoothly, while declaring that it somehow will put an end to the tyranny of causality. But how this is really going to work out is something even Natch, who is marketing it, doesn't really fathom at the end of Infoquake. This is an amusing point, but it is also somehow disturbing.

  Infoquake is billed as the first novel in the “Jump 225” trilogy. But after you finish it you have no idea at all of what that is going to mean, any more than of what MultiReal is going to mean in literary terms. I suspect that it may turn out to be a “doorway into anything"—superpowers conjured up at will out of the bits and bytes, infinite replay of actions in order to come up with the desired result—in other words, magic.

  I have no quarrel at all with the use of magic as a literary device in fantasy or surrealist fiction, where it has produced masterpieces. Magic masquerading as science and/or technology is another matter, and a graver one. And the better the masquerade, the more successful on a literary level, the more disturbing the transliterary consequences.

  Case in point: Spears of God by Howard V. Hendrix. The publisher bills this novel as a near-future thriller. And that is indeed what it is, and an exceedingly complex one, so complex that on a spy-versus-spy level it is almost impossible to summarize, which is not necessarily a flaw in this sort of thing.

  But thriller or not, it is also unequivocally a science fiction novel, with a scientific discipline and conundrum being the central McGuffin of the whole complex story. The science here is meteoritics. This is a branch not of astronomy but of geology—the study not quite that of meteors, but of meteorites, the rocks themselves after they have fallen to Earth. And science can't get any harder than that.

  Right?

  Well, in Spears of God, yes and no.

  Hendrix goes to literally enormous length and almost literally exhaustive detail to, uh, ground this novel in the mineralogy of meteorites. Readers of this novel will learn more about the physical nature of the variations of meteorites not only than they wanted to know but—in my case, at least—than they thought was to be known. It's complete, it's impressive, and it seems obsessive to the point of becoming mind-numbing.

  But while Spears of God is about meteorites, the mineralogy of meteorites, though it may take up thousands of words, is not at all what the novel is really about.

  In this near-future world—and the action takes place in the United States, Arabia, South America—various agencies are collecting meteorites, and not always by legal or moral means. Why? That is the mystery that runs the plot engine of at least the first half of the book.

  Two meteoriticists and sometime lovers in the process of searching for a special meteorite sacred to a perhaps legendary tribe atop an isolated mesa in South America find that it has been snatched by an act of genocide. They rescue four young survivors with arcane psychic powers linked to a fungus linked to the meteorite.

  A general running a project to create enhanced supersoldiers is after them, the meteorite, and the fungus. There's the ex-lover of the male member of the couple that found the children involved. A man crazed by the death of his daughter at the hands of terrorists in Israel. The head of the National Security Agency. A bewilderingly complex cast of characters.

  The plot is all over the place, or rather the multiple plot lines, meaning both the planet and the Byzantine machinations that take an overlong time to converge. It takes maybe three quarters of the book for it all to begin to coalesce into a climax that brings it all together in an attempt by one of the several conflicting sides to steal the black meteorite embedded in the Ka'aba in Mecca and another to destroy the Ka'aba in order to provoke a nuclear war....

  It takes almost as long for the speculative threads underlying the plot to weave together. This is not necessarily a bad thing in a post-modern hard science fiction novel whose additional “plus” is such a thriller plot and structure, if they interweave and finally come together in the manner of a musical fugue. Structurally, Hendrix more or less pulls it off here; you learn enough of what this is more or less all about to more or less keep your interest in the multiple storylines going until they come together. And the plot lines have enough internal interest to keep you plowing through the heavy doses of scientific explication.

  If that is what it really is.

  Hendrix clearly knows his meteorites on a technical scientific level, and inflicts overlarge and overabundant expository lumps on the reader to demonstrate it. At first this seems like simply a hard science fiction writer too in love with his own scientific erudition—and indeed, maybe it is that, too. Hendrix also seems to know a lot about brain chemistry, fungal botany, and psychopharmacology, and lays all that on with a bit too heavy-handed a trowel, too. I happen to be not entirely unversed in these subjects, and what he lays on there seems to be the real deal, too.

  However....

  In much the same mode and with much the same excess, Hendrix demonstrates, or seeks to demonstrate, that meteorites have been associated with mystical visions, the birth of religions, and so forth, all over the world since time immemorial. Okay, he seems to have done his homework here, too, and that such “stars fallen to the earth” would generate religious beliefs and mystical visions seems credible cultural anthropology. But for me at least this begins a slow slide down a slippery slope.

  For Hendrix also applies this exhaustive, and somewhat exhausting to read, “scientific” explication to psychic and paranormal powers associated with meteorites, generated by meteorites, generated by galactic trans-spermial material brought to Earth by meteorites to bring about some sort of evolutionary quantum leap into a transcendent apotheosis....

  And this apotheosis arrives not only as a deus ex machina at the climax of the convergent complex series of thriller plotlines. Not only is it what brings that climax about, but it is the climax of the action plot, and well...

  Well, revealing any more would be going too far.

  Now don't get me wrong. It would be the height of hypocrisy for the author of The Void Captain's Tale, Child of Fortune, and He Walked Among Us to piss and moan about Howard Hendrix or anyone else dragging transcendental or psychedelically visionary matters into a science fiction novel or even centering such a novel on them, even making them the thematic apotheosis of one. That's not what disturbs me about Spears of God.

  What disturbs me about Spears of God is that Hendrix therein not only expounds his expository lumps con
cerning telepathy, paranormal psychic powers, mystic psychedelic experiences, and so forth in the same prose style and “scientifically erudite” manner as the geology of meteorites, real psychopharmacology, fungal botany, cultural anthropology, and molecular brain biochemistry. And he also seems to be using this equivalency as a literary device to create the illusion that they all have the same scientific legitimacy, exist on the same reality level, and that none of it violates the known laws of mass and energy of the universe in which the readers find themselves.

  And it just isn't true.

  I know I'm going to catch hell for saying it. It's a dirty job, but someone has to do it, and better someone with no pretension to credentials as a rigorous hard science fiction writer who has certainly used such elements literarily in works he would not deny are truly science fiction than someone more easily put down as a fanatic defender of a lost cause.

  “Science fiction,” sure, why not? Faster-than-light spaceships, slans, warp-drives running on orgasm, time travel, gods from the machines, so why not telepathy, telekinesis, the triumph of the will over time and space, whatever, as long as it's written with sufficient literary skill and panache to suspend disbelief for the duration of a well-told and entertaining tale.

  For the duration of a well-told and entertaining tale.

  But as something wrapping itself in the literary cloak of hard science fiction, using the hoary and even clunky literary techniques of hard science fiction to further blur the distinction between true science and rubber science, between true scientific speculation and high-grade bullshit in the minds of readers in a culture where such distinctions are in danger enough of disappearing already does that culture a serious disservice.

  It could be argued, and it probably will be, perhaps even by Howard Hendrix himself, that it is precisely the loss of this distinction, the general ignorance of and indifference to what the laws of mass and energy in the real world really are, the sheer unpopularity of the scientific method as a means of testing imaginative hypothesis against the cold equations, that forces anyone who would write anything even in the general aesthetic mode of hard science fiction to resort to such means to reach a potential readership of a sufficient size for it to be commercially viable.