Now Strasheim is recruited to join a select crew to probe this swarming infestation, flying inward toward the Sun in the Louis Pasteur, now coated with a mimetic fractal surface that its designer hopes will deter the mycora gray goo from snacking on it. It seems that the Mycosystem is learning to adapt, speeding its breach of the immunity protections:
The air vent and the wall it was part of began to boil, their substance turning fluid, turning into rainbow-threaded vapors as the tiny, tiny mycora disassembled them molecule by molecule…. How vivid the colors, how crisp the lines and edges!... class-one threaded bloom in early germination phase, about two minutes before fruiting began. Some structure already visible in the expanding fog, crystalline picks growing like needles from the drydock wall.
Not everyone is happy about this expedition, not least the cultish Temples of Transcendent Evolution, which regard the vast swarm as a sort of deity, an immense mind that has evolved or perhaps been designed to replace humankind as the noösphere of the solar system. Cast as the superstitious foe of Ganymede’s more reasonable citizens, the Temples prove seductively plausible, not surprisingly since they echo the transcendental yearnings of many of sf’s best and most influential writers: Sturgeon with his hunger after gestalt minds, Heinlein and his Pantheistic Multiperson Solipsism, Goonan’s surreal nanopunk (see Entry 90). Also not surprisingly, therefore, except to the main characters, the payoff turns out to approximate this scientistic transcendence, putting a crimp in the covert motives of the expedition.
Pursued by ships of the Temples, Strasheim and his fellow astronauts pause for supplies at the Floral asteroids, and get their staid minds blown by the arboreal low-gravity antics of Saint Helier settlers, with their hypogravitic osteo deformities. It’s a classic sf confrontation of cultures radiated from everything we find familiar, the zee-spec wearing Ganymedeans (whose clunky specs provide them with wearable computation, augmented reality overlays, etc) and the neurally-wired, AI-assisted, touchy-feely asteroid humans and their delightful creole, that has to be translated by instantly uploaded zee-spec code:
“Heyyo,” the man said brightly. “Ahn behalfde gavnoffice, aloha wekkome the San Heelyer. Ma nom wa Chris Dibrin. Kai I am lok to assist you.”
Ostensibly, the Pasteur’s task is to drop monitors on the inner planets, but the Temples, and their embedded agents, are convinced that these devices are meant to destroy the Mycora. That’s not impossible, given “ladderdown” nuclear technology, one of McCarthy’s zanier inventions: a process in which elements are encouraged to transmute into states lower on the periodic chart, releasing immense amounts of energy. Abused, this power source might set off vast solar flares, driven by “cascade fusion,” that will boil away the entire Mycosystem. McCarthy handles this risky melodrama with skill, frightening and awing us with the scale of the threat and its possible solution, but retaining a vulnerable human voice as his narrator.
Let’s hope McCarthy finds time to return to fiction after he’s solved some of the more urgent problems of the real world.
[1] Downloadable from http://www.wilmccarthy.com/HackingMatterMultimediaEdition.pdf
55
Linda Nagata
Vast (1998)
FEMALE WRITERS of Hard Sf, widescreen baroque or otherwise—those hypothetical gender-swapped equivalents of, for instance, the “Three Gregs,” Benford, Bear and Egan—are sparse on the shelves. Julie Czerneda and Joan Slonczewski (Entry 9), come to mind, but don’t quite peg into the exact same narrative niches as the males cited. Lois McMaster Bujold (Entry 19) tends more toward Patrick O’Brian. And Catherine Asaro slants more towards interstellar romances. Linda Nagata, however, matches the males precisely at a game they previously imagined was their own domain.
Her first two novels popped up at either end of 1995 as paperback originals. First to surface was The Bohr Maker. Shifting amidst a variety of sweat-redolent, lived-in, high-tech venues, with an emphasis on far-out nanotech extrapolations, this book called up shades of Michael Swanwick’s Vacuum Flowers, boasting believable characters who were truly citizens of the future, in both attitudes and capabilities.
Playing fluidly with concepts of identity and reality (simulated versions of various characters and their surroundings compete with baseline originals), Nagata wove a thrilling tale of the deadly hunt for the device of the title, a unique colony of nanomachines capable of turning any human host nearly godlike. Employing characters from the lower classes (the street urchins Phousita and Arif) as well as the upper (space-dwelling Nikko and his nemesis and lover, Kirstin), Nagata was able to sketch an entire world in her fluent, hardedged prose, a tool as sharp as that possessed by many a longtime writer.
This exciting debut showed an author who had fully digested the work of writers from Bear to Egan, McAuley to Calder, Varley to Ryman, and fashioned her own bright chimeric beast on which to ride and join the parade.
With her second book, Tech-Heaven, Nagata did many things differently, while retaining the virtues of the first book—always a promising strategy. And she appeared to add two more writers to her list of influences: Norman Spinrad and James Tiptree.
Unlike Bohr, Tech-Heaven opened in a world not too far removed from ours. Biotech research is slightly further along, as are several societal trends of a Luddite, Balkanizing nature. Otherwise, a gritty familiarity obtains. The character whose shoulders we ride exclusively (with one small exception) is the young woman named Katie Kishida, wife to Tom, mother to two daughters. This tighter focus, compared to the viewpoint shifts in Bohr, allowed a rich depth of character development. Over the jam-packed course of this novel, we see Katie believably age into her early sixties, accumulating scars and layers of memory that evoke the painfully earned wisdom exhibited by many of Tiptree’s older female characters.
When her husband has what seems to be an inescapably fatal accident, Katie faces the task of seeing him placed into risky cryonic suspension. (The details of cryonic shutdown and, later, revival are highly convincing and realistic, and are typical of Nagata’s scrupulous attention to the nuts-and-bolts of her future.) This act diverts Katie’s whole life onto an unexpected course. Taken up by the media and by competing pro-cryo and anti-cryo factions, Katie becomes first a spokesperson for the movement, then an actual high-stakes player in the whole biotech industry.
It’s in the details of the political infighting and media manipulation that Nagata shows a flair reminiscent of Spinrad’s. Much of the book is devoted to Machiavellian maneuvers that, gradually, lead us to the very future of The Bohr Maker. Along the way, mankind’s immersion in the technosphere, the quest for the utopian “tech-heaven” is forcefully debated, with not all of the points accruing to Katie’s side either. (Short intermittent chapters focus on the Bardo-like hallucinations of the frozen Tom Kishida, whose brain retains a certain level of functioning, providing a spiritual angle to the materialistic debate.)
Nagata’s next book, Deception Well, would elaborate—after skipping a big interval of fictional time in her future history—the developments seen in the first two volumes.
In the period of Deception Well, three millennia hence, a small portion of our galaxy has been settled by sublight ships carrying frozen human passengers. Some suns have become Hallowed Vasties, surrounded by millions of artificial habitats in a kind of pointillistic Dyson sphere. The nanotech known as “makers” allows for many other biological and material wonders as well. But all human civilization is under threat from the berserker fleet known as the Chenzeme, who have ravaged the galaxy for millions of years. Besides their predatory ships, the Chenzeme have infected mankind with a cult virus that breeds charismatic leaders obscurely allied to the Chenzeme cause, as well as hordes of obedient followers.
One such hybrid Savonarola is a young man named Lot. We encounter him as a child, and follow his adventures on the world known as Deception Well, a Solaris-type living planet that offers a possible solution to mankind’s problems. After such mind-expanding incidents as rappelling down t
wo hundred miles of orbital beanstalk and being ingested by the Well, lot ends up forced to flee his home with several friends, in further search of his destiny.
Vast opens some 200 years after this departure. The semi-living ship Null Boundary, shadowed by Chenzeme pursuers, carries Lot and his comrades toward an unknown fate. Adding tension, the humans (including the ship’s captain, an ancient digitized personality called Nikko) are at odds about their best options and leery of Lot’s powers. When the Chenzeme ship catches up to Null Boundary, a strange mating between the two crafts opens up new avenues for possibly subverting the whole Chenzeme fleet. Whether Lot will achieve his personal goals remains in doubt up till the final pages.
Nagata is highly inventive in her language, conjuring up such terms as “philosopher cells” and “sensory tears” to brilliantly match her closely reasoned speculations. Although the density of her conceptualization never reaches Eganesque levels, she provides more than enough wonders—including an entire vacuum ecosystem—to entrance the reader.
At one point, Lot, nearly drowning inside a Null Boundary environment gone chaotic, experiences “a sense of wonder edged in faint, warm fear.” That’s the impact Nagata’s work offers to readers, too.
56
John Varley
The Golden Globe (1998)
A TERRIFYINGLY vivid life-and-death pursuit inward from the outer solar system, an hilarious and cluey Hollywood-in-Space and Off-Off-Broadway tell-all, a scam caper, a poignant psychobiography, The Golden Globe is the most fun you can have (as John Varley says of writing his sf) with your clothes on. Although there’s no obligation not to read it naked, as dedicated nudist Robert A. Heinlein, one of Varley’s acknowledged prototypes, might have done. After all, in this highly enjoyable romp, eight year old thespian Kenneth Catherine “Sparky” Valentine and his Gang perform for millions of viewers in vests but without pants, bare as Donald and Daisy Duck. They decide not to have sex on the show until sidekick Polly is 11 and has her “blood day,” just as her mother did.
And their show rates better than a competing kiddy program, What the Fuck?, which is failing because “the declining numbers of educational programming across the board in the past three years reflected a growing anti-intellectualism or merely a stagnation of fresh new ideas in the presentation of loftier kid-vid.” On his 100th birthday, in 2250, highly cyborged and ageless, switching from male to female form at the rather painful drop of a hat, Kenneth is denounced by another player as a “polymorphous, talentless, scenery-chewing, ass-kissing sorry excuse for a has-been actor!”
Little wonder that a recent interview with Varley for a conservative website issued this warning: Read at your own risk.[1]
Sparky’s dad is abusive, charismatic John Barrymore Valentine, famous as a stage actor in this era of vids and (according to Howdy Doody “The Trade Mag of Kid-vid”) for
what the police call the “long con.” That’s what he did time for, anyway, though I’ve been told his skills at the Pigeon Drop and the Spanish Lottery are considerable as well. He exhibits no shame about this, doesn’t mind discussing it with the press. It’s all part of some extremely wonky political worldview I will not bore you with.
This worldview might be consistent with libertarian Heinleinism, a formidable star-craving crank cult in Luna two centuries after the Invaders took over Earth and incidentally killed billions, exiling the remnant of humankind to the Eight Worlds, most of them moons.
Versions of that elaborate solar system have comprised Varley’s chief playground since the late 1970s, most buoyantly and complexly displayed in Steel Beach (1993), this quasi-sequel, and the promised finale, Irontown Blues.
Down on his luck in the cometary zone beyond Pluto—not to mention that little business with the governor’s daughter—centenarian Sparky gets his chance to play Lear. But only if he (and his Bichon Frise dog Toby) can reach the Golden Globe theater, King City, Luna farside. Even flying in a pirated spacecraft via a slingshot past the photosphere of the Sun, it seems a schedule impossible for a man without funds. And there’s a Mafia enforcer team after him from the former Plutonian hard-case prison moon Charon, demonic commandos of ruthless pursuit. This relentless chase, an all-stops-out blend of Hitchcock, Peckinpah, and Itchy & Scratchy, has Sparky braining (with a sousaphone and a violin case), dismembering, and setting fire to his vengeful hunter, who keeps coming back for more like one of the Furies:
With one hand almost off, one arm stuck to his side by the tanglenet, the other arm held by the ring of brass tubing, six inches shorter and fifty pounds lighter than me... even with all that about the only edge I had on him was the weight.... I wrestled him to the bed, all the time soaking up a punishing series of kicks to the shin and a jackhammering of his knees to my crotch…. His kicking lost some accuracy, but never let up. I hurled him face-first into the makeup mirror, pulled him away, and then did it again now that it was broken and jagged…. I searched for his eyes with my thumbs and felt something squish, but that gave him a chance to shrug the tuba up over his free shoulder and he began flailing at me. He used the arm as a club, getting in one ringing blow that almost broke my collarbone, then another to my side, before bringing his forearm down like a swung baseball bat on the edge of the makeup table. Face powder blossomed into the air, and both bones in his forearm snapped like dry spaghetti. I thought I heard him grunt a little from that, but it never slowed him. He kept swinging the arm, which now bent in three places, the mangled and blackened remains of his fist like a grisly mace at the end of a bloody rope.
These recurrent set-pieces are genuinely thrilling, and macabrely funny. Varley is shameless. In earlier and better days, to which many flashbacks return us, young Sparky had an accountant, “a handsome Latin-lover type who… looked like a lawyer, and who was proud of his Indian and Arab heritage, …named Yasser Dhatsma-Bhebey.” Only in a novel as drenched in stage and movie lore as this one could a lawyer be named, unblushingly, Yes sah! Dat’s ma baby. Is that Yasser’s gag, or Varley’s? It doesn’t matter; this is madcap noir.
Adding to the lunacy is Elwood P. Dowd, as played by Jimmy Stewart in Harvey, who shows up (visible only to Valentine Jr.) in moments of crisis to chide Sparky gently or give him handy advice. The legendary director of King Lear, toward whom he is rushing under deadline, is his childhood sidekick Polly, now a centenarian crone whose fundamentalist creed forbids her the benefit of antiaging treatments. And there’s the murder he (or perhaps Elwood Dowd) committed 70 years ago, which also has him on the run. When the hitman shows up in his dressing room halfway through a triumphant opening night, disabling his lethal Pantechnicon luggage and menacing beloved Toby the dog, it’s showdown time. Followed, inevitably, by a court trial—this one adjudicated by a computerized Judge, and interrupted by shocking revelations. What else would you hope for in such a fun gallimaufry? A faster than light starship in which to flee the Charonese? Luckily, there’s one of those, too, owned by the Heinleiners.
As Sparky, that ancient movie buff, says: “Keep watching the sky!”
[1]http://www.republibot.com/content/interview-john-varley?page=1
57
Simon Ings
Headlong (1999)
SCIENCE FICTION is always breeding up its own successors, the glorious mutants who will overthrow the reigning dinosaurs and inherit the marketplace. Thus it was with cyberpunk, that subgenre just breaking big circa 1985, at the start of our survey. These mirrorshade-wearing rebels came along, cunning mammals, and overthrew the old fogy dinosaurs. But fifteen years onward, a new generation of writers had taken the crude and primitive tools and tropes which the first-generation cyberpunks had established and expanded them immensely. The first-gen writers, born mid-twentieth-century or earlier, improvising their tools as they raced ahead into the mists of futurity, the lineaments of the fabulous beast they stalked as yet unclear, lurking at the waterholes Burroughs and Pynchon had charted, could only look behind now and see baroque mutants surpassing their progenitors in every w
ay!
Simon Ings is a fine example of this phenomenon. His second and third novels were a tight duology comprised of Hot Head and Hotwire. Ings—a cusp writer born in 1965—furiously limned a transhuman future where giant rogue AIs known as Massives plot a biologically ripe fate for the solar system incorporating jazzed-up humans weird enough to be their own aliens. Ings’s future can be synopsized thus: not long from now, Earth is a patchwork of poverty and wealth, shiny new cities and plaguey ruins, all as a result of a recent war fought with the Massives. No clear victory was won by either side, for the Massives still flourish, on Earth as intelligent networks and in space as mad habitats where exotic lifeforms are bred in tanks and on slabs of pain. Various factions—pro- and anti-Massive, as well as neutrals—pursue their diverse goals, utilizing exotic technics, creating nano- and bio-based miracles.
In language as dense as anything by McAuley (Entry 23) or Egan (Entry 38), Ings proved himself their conceptualizing equal, an outrider on humanity’s singularity-bound forced march into the future. These superb novels were the very model of postmodern, trans-cyberpunk fiction: laser-gazed logicbombs, simultaneously appalling and heartening, monitory and embracing. All the lessons and insights and techniques that the first generation of cyberpunks donned like sometimes ill-fitting garments, Ings fully internalized.
Ings culminated this series with Headlong, which, by virtue of a single shared character (the scientist Dr. Nouronihar), serves as a prequel to his duology. Yet in effect and tone, it’s vastly different from the prior two novels. More along the lines of M. John Harrison’s Signs of Life or Richard Kadrey’s Kamikaze L’Amour, Headlong is a love story and a tale of detection set much closer to our present time. (The similarity to Harrison’s work, at least, cannot be coincidental, for Ings has even collaborated with Harrison on a story or two.) Consequently, the milieu of Headlong, distorted as it might be with new drugs, new politics, and new technology, feels more homey than that in the duology, and so the bruising events hit even more forcefully.
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