Science Fiction: The 101 Best Novels 1985-2010

by Damien Broderick

  Card’s tale is remarkably proleptic in several areas, including the use of child soldiers, virtual reality, tablet computing, internet communications, and social networking sock-puppetry, as well as foretelling the collapse of the Soviet empire.

  Besides the controversies outlined above, Card manages to rub other raw areas. There’s a nebulous sense of incest among the Wiggin kids—Valentine exiles herself to a colony world with beloved Ender; Peter plainly wants to dominate his sister in every physical sense. “Girls” don’t do well in Battle School since evolution is against them, and the Bugger warriors are all females under a Queen, yet also paradoxically evoke male homosexuality by their racial nickname. But perhaps most provocative of all is the assertion in Chapter 14 that love and compassion are the essential underpinnings for slaughter. This yoking of two realms generally perceived as polar opposites recalls some of the deliberate contrarian “Martian” thinking of Michael Valentine (a coincidental naming by Card?) Smith in Heinlein’s Stranger in a Strange Land.

  In three sequels—Speaker for the Dead (arguably a better novel), Xenocide and Children of the Mind—Ender would inhabit the post-genocidal, human supremacist universe he and his siblings had helped to create, following an expiational hegira through large tracts of time and space. But those sequels, and subsequent parallel retellings, could never deliver the raw jolt of Ender’s original cannon-propelled arc and shellburst lighting up of the heavens.

  [1] See Prof. John Kessel’s astringent analysis of the novel at:

  http://www4.ncsu.edu/~tenshi/Killer_000.htm

  3

  Philip K. Dick

  Radio Free Albemuth (1985)

  THE DEATH OF PHILIP K. DICK in 1982 deprived readers of one of the seminal figures of twentieth-century sf, and of possible major works left unborn. Yet his impact on the field during the period of our survey, and on the wider culture, continued to grow and resonate immensely, with numerous film adaptations of his stories, canonization of several of his novels in the Library of America series, multiple editions and distillations of his Collected Short Stories, the adaptation of his themes and tropes as metaphorical touchstones for essayists and commentators, and the posthumous publication of several works.

  The majority of the Dick books that appeared post-1982 constituted his trunk-consigned mainstream works, from his stymied early career as a mimetic writer—insofar as he could ever masquerade as such. Yet one book, the first to see print after Dick’s death, was pure science fiction, and forms a very respectable initial contribution to his active afterlife in the field.

  Radio Free Albemuth, as we know it, is a reworked version of a novel that Dick wrote to make sense of his famed mystical experiences circa 1974. When the original text was rejected by publishers, he streamlined the book to the form we know, and left a copy of the manuscript with his friend, the writer Tim Powers, who preserved it for eventual publication. But the intimate and important material would not lie fallow, and Dick rejiggered it all much more extensively to form VALIS, his late period masterpiece that was published during his lifetime. So in some complicated sense, Albemuth was the trial run for VALIS.

  PKD partisan and packager Jonathan Lethem maintains in an interview with Library of America that VALIS is the more sophisticated, mature, esthetically pleasing and intellectually dense statement of Dick’s “pink light” epiphany, and in this Lethem represents the irrefutable majority opinion. But he also acknowledges that some readers prefer Albemuth and find it to be the superior incarnation, and it’s easy to see why. It’s for the same reason that pencil sketches by a master painter are often more alluring than finished canvases by the same creator. Cleaner lines, less fussing, spontaneous emotions. Albemuth holds the core concepts and plot of Dick’s puzzling brush with divine or alien intelligence without extra literary incrustations.

  The central thesis of the novel is easy to encapsulate: “An extraterrestrial intelligence from another star system had put one of their vehicles into orbit around our planet and was beaming covert information down to us.” But as our hero notes, to state the case in this fashion “reduced something limitless to a finite reality.” Radio Free Albemuth is all about exfoliating the possibilities of this simple thesis rather than pruning them, thereby affirming the supreme ineffability of creation, which remains ultimately unbesmirchable by humanity’s stupidity and vices.

  The first half of the novel is told from the first-person viewpoint of a hack sf writer named Philip K. Dick, who is watching his close friend, Nicholas Brady, undergo the baffling communications from a Vast Active Living Intelligence System. Dick and Brady live in what was already, at the time of Dick’s composition (1976), an alternate timeline. In this continuum, the USA is a dictatorship run by President Ferris F. Fremont—a mélange of Richard Nixon and Ronald Reagan—who strives to protect the country from a fictional enemy dubbed Aramcheck. Beside the usual government agencies, Fremont employ the Friends of the American People as spies and vigilantes, and a young woman member of FAP seeks to entrap Phil.

  Meanwhile, VALIS, or Radio Free Albemuth (Albemuth being the name of the star system where VALIS originates), is revealing much useful information to Nick, such as how to cure his son’s illness and that time really stopped at AD 70, resulting in “Black Iron Prison” status for a duped planet. At the midpoint of the text, the first-person voice switches seamlessly to Nick’s (thereby cementing the identity of Brady and PKD). The two men, along with a similarly touched woman named Sadassa Silvia, strive to utilize VALIS’s help to set things right. A small, sad coda reverts to Dick’s point of view.

  Dick’s patented blend of paranoia, anti-authoritarianism and droll self-deprecation, his roller-coastering between optimism and despair, and his continuous and continuously frustrated attempts to balance saintliness with the demands of the flesh, achieve a fine expression and balance here. The book is lacking in a heavy-duty plot, without many dramatic set-pieces. It’s a minimalist version of VALIS’s recomplications, more like the kind of proto-sf “novel of ideas” such as we find in More’s Utopia or Bellamy’s Looking Backward: 2000-1887. But that sketchiness just gives more room to the extravagant existential delvings. As the fictional PKD gleefully says, having just discarded willy-nilly another one of his own myriad explanations, “Theories are like planes at LA International: a new one along every minute.”

  But the human dimensions of the quandary—the confusion, oppression and excruciation of Nick Brady/PKD; the damaged, spoiled potential of Fremont; the patient supportiveness of Nick’s wife Rachel; the defiant resilience of Sadassa Silvia—also shine forth beyond the philosophical bloviation, as would be expected from an author who once declared that the entire universe was contained in a dead dog by the side of the road.

  Prophetic of much of our post-911 landscape, Radio Free Albemuth, to employ Wells’s phrase, shows with economy and brilliance what happens to a “mind at the end of its tether,” when the leash snaps and the unchained being goes scarily free for the first time in history.

  4

  Ursula K. Le Guin

  Always Coming Home (1985)

  IN THE 1950S and ’60s—arguably the true “Golden Age of Science Fiction,” when the genre matured as a form—the finest sf novels were sleek, small, supercharged engines designed to snap readers instantly into the fast lane and get them to the astounding end of the freeway, preferably with a bang at the end. As fashions changed, and popular fiction grew more hefty, pace and astonishment gave way to detail, ornamentation, complex characterization. One-off novels sprouted into trilogies and sagas. Perhaps the most famous was Frank Herbert’s Dune sequence, continued after his death by less artful writers. The most successful was Gene Wolfe’s science fantasy The Book of the New Sun, in four parts with an extra volume to wrap the saga, which then continued anyway with a tetralogy and a trilogy (see Entry 36).

  Ursula Le Guin’s Always Coming Home uses neither of these models. It is self-contained, but contains multitudes. Le Guin defined this sort of appr
oach in an essay, “The Carrier Bag Theory of Fiction” (1986):

  the natural, proper, fitting shape of the novel might be that of a sack, a bag. A book holds words…. Science fiction properly conceived, like all serious fiction… is a way of trying to describe what is in fact going on, what people actually do and feel, how people relate to everything else in this vast sack, this belly of the universe, this womb of things to be and tomb of things that were, this unending story…. Still there are seeds to be gathered, and room in the bag of stars.[1]

  Like her famous The Dispossessed, this novel is an “ambiguous utopia.” A Taoist matrilineal culture of Kesh villages in a far future linked by unobtrusive AIs is bordered by the grasping patriarchy of the Condor. The three-part central story by Stone Telling is, however, only a fifth of this bag-like book. The rest is a collage of Kesh poems, fables, life stories, romantic tales, recipes, reflections by Pandora (an imagined “archeologist of the future”), a glossary, drawings by artist Margaret Chodos and songs composed by Todd Barton.

  So this is an sf novel, but not as we know it, Jim. It’s perhaps science fiction’s equivalent of Moby-Dick, or Ulysses, but more engagingly, lucidly written than either of those often unread masterpieces. Neither is it an entertainment in the vein of The Demolished Man or Ringworld; it is reflective, moving like the Pacific Coast river Na that flows through a post-Greenhouse, post-ecodoom Napa Valley. In this landscape Le Guin herself grew up, with anthropologist father Arthur and writer mother Theodora Kroeber. The novel is a tribute to both, and perhaps to Clifford Geertz’s model of anthropological “thick description”: immersion in another’s culture, even if, as here, it does not yet exist.

  Stone Telling is herself a halfling, born of a Kesh mother, Willow, and a True Condor father, Kills, or Terter Abhao, Commander of the Army of the South. Thus she’s “half-House,” mocked and teased by the other children, yearning for escape. Though she finds her way to the Condor, who are struggling to build a machine-technology empire in a world now exhausted of metals and easy supplies of power, she returns home disillusioned, regretful, ready to embrace a village life of natural cycles that is, admittedly, a little stifling. “As I speak of it,” she says of her father’s people, “this way sounds clownish. That is myself, my voice; I am the clown. I cannot help the reversals.” But reversals are built in to the daily life of these ambiguous utopians; the basic structure of a Kesh village is a double spiral, like a barred galaxy, like two hands met at the thumbs, or Hinge.

  The storyteller is born North Owl, in the little town of Sinshan, becomes Ayatyu in the City, then Woman Coming Home, and in her old age Stone Telling. By our conventions of empirical realism, some of what she tells seems bizarre and impossible (a wooden spoon passes through muscle and bone like the wash of a candle flame). Advanced science, magical realism or plain magic? “In the Valley the distinction [between fact and fiction] is gradual and messy.” This lends every tale an eerie, uncanny feel, while an unusual earthiness anchors even a child’s perception. North Owl, journeying from home for the first time, comes to “Granny’s Twat,” a town “between the spread legs of the Mountain.” Such frankness in a spiritually rich and sexually candid people is startling, and displays the Kesh with no need for editorializing, using with cool panache a familiar method from the sf toolkit that literary tourists (John Clute calls their slumming “charabanc sci-fi”) never quite master.

  The tale’s tragedy is that “What is seen with one eye has no depth. The sorrow of my parents’ life is that they could see with one eye only.” Willow and Kills are literally incomprehensible to each other. When their daughter follows her father, renamed by him Ayatyu, she is trapped in a society akin to crusader Christianity, or warrior Islam, or any other hierarchical monolith. Women are pets or dirt, in effect, and embrace their lot. The Condor call themselves Dayao, a blistering homonym of Tao. Ayatyu marries, bears a daughter. As the mad ambitions of the Dayao One spiral into self-destructive ruin, her father aids her escape. And in time, with age, she writes these beautiful, calming memories.

  Can the generous, communal way of life in the Valley speak to us? An Archival message cited by Stone Telling suggests it might:

  In leaving progress to the machines, in letting technology go forward on its own terms and selecting from it… is it possible that in thus opting not to move “forward” or not only “forward,” these people did in fact succeed in living in human history, with energy, liberty, and grace?

  [1] In Dancing at the Edge of the World, London: Gollancz, 1989, pp. 169-70.

  5

  James Morrow

  This Is the Way the World Ends (1985)

  PLANNING THERMONUCLEAR WAR and its aftermath, Mutually Assured Destruction, used to be called, euphemistically but chillingly, “thinking about the unthinkable.” Science fiction has often thought about the unthinkable, all too often with unthinkable relish. By contrast, This is the Way the World Ends is like a punch in the mouth by the Angel of Death in the garb of a stand-up comic. It was quickly compared to Jonathan Schell (The Fate of the Earth) out of Kurt Vonnegut, which was spot-on. It is likely, however, that the careful study by Schell, in the 1980s a prominent opponent of nuclear arms race strategy, is already forgotten, even as more nations than ever around the globe arm themselves with nuclear weapons, and plan resource-crisis wars.

  George Paxton is a tomb cutter with an “adorable daughter” and a wife “who always looked as if she had just come from doing something dangerous and lewd.” He has been spared misery: “the coin of George Paxton’s life had happiness stamped on both sides—no despair for George. Individuals so fortunate were scarce in those days. You could have sold tickets” to his life. His neighbor sells scopas suits, for Self-Contained Post-Attack Survival, and Paxton buys one, signing a meaningless document admitting his complicity in any subsequent nuclear exchange.

  In the dreadful event, the suits do not work, any more than the schoolroom “duck and cover” drills of the 1950s would have done. Here is part of Chapter 5, “In Which the Limitations of Civil Defense Are Explicated in a Manner Some Readers May Find Distressing”:

  Townspeople marched down to the river... arms outstretched to lessen the weight of their burned hands. Many lacked hair and eyelashes... A white lava of melted eye tissue dripped from their heads; they appeared to be crying their own eyes.

  A seeing-eye dog, its scopas suit and fur seared away, licked the face of its dead master. “Somebody put the fur back on that dog!” George shouted.

  It is not sentimentality to be moved profoundly by these images of carnage and horror. Nor is it ghoulish to laugh with Morrow at the black, bleak post-holocaust progress of George Paxton, his good-hearted Candide. Twenty-five years on, long after the collapse of one wing of this appalling calculus of global death, the twenty-first century might not be the worst of times. But neither is it yet the best of times, for international terrorism, the forces underpinning its threat, and massive military responses to it, ensure that George’s world might yet ignite around us. Morrow’s splendid novel, only in unimportant ways superannuated by political shifts, lives on.

  Morrow’s conceit in this grimly satirical novel is that those complicit in the suicide of the human race might be held accountable in war trials conducted in Antarctica by the Unadmitted—those immense multitudes who are doomed to non-existence by this universal, self-inflicted cataclysm. It is a hazardous device for a moralist like Morrow, because it seems to open out into all kinds of other metaphysical trials, not least of all those involved in the use of contraception to limit family size, or of abortion. The distinction, though, is that Morrow’s apocalypse destroys existing persons—adults and children—as well as “potential” human beings.

  In this Tribunal of the Unadmitted, representatives of the final holocaust stand accused. They are politicians, arms merchants, apologists for war, a hypocrite meant to implement arms control “who never in his entire career denied the Pentagon a system it really wanted.” Among these patently gui
lty stands sweet-natured George Paxton, Morrow’s Everyman: “citizen, perhaps the most guilty of all. Every night, this man went to bed knowing that the human race was pointing nuclear weapons at itself. Every morning, he woke up knowing that the weapons were still there. And yet he never took a single step to relieve the threat.”

  Can George truly be found guilty, in this Swiftian drama? Isn’t the horrendous violence of the novel, foreseen with darkly comic irony by Morrow’s version of Nostradamus, just a side-effect of our evolutionary past? Thomas Aquinas, for the prosecution, will not allow this plea to go unchallenged:

  “Are we innately aggressive?” asked Aquinas. “Was the nuclear predicament symptomatic of a more profound depravity? Nobody knows. But if this is so—and I suspect that it is—then the responsibility for what we are pleased to call our inhumanity still rests squarely in our blood-soaked hands… And then, one cold Christmas season, death came to an admirable species—a species that wrote symphonies and sired Leonardo da Vinci and would have gone to the stars. It did not have to be this way. Three virtues only were needed—creative diplomacy, technical ingenuity, and moral outrage. But the greatest of these is moral outrage.”

  Morrow’s own moral outrage is evident, and powerfully expressed. Not all readers will agree. They are given their spokesmen: “Self-righteous slop, you needed that too,” replied one of the accused. But Morrow does not leave the verdict open. George, unlike the rest, avoids the counts of Crimes Against Peace, War Crimes, and Crimes Against Humanity. But the court finds him unequivocally guilty of Crimes Against the Future, and sentenced him to be hanged.