Science Fiction: The 101 Best Novels 1985-2010

by Damien Broderick

  Like most great Chandler- or Hammettesque noir fiction, Headlong is narrated stylishly in the first person. The poetically melancholy Chris Yale was an architect assigned to help colonize the Moon. Given brain implants that confer godlike sensory abilities by his employer, the enigmatic Apolloco, Yale and his wife Joanne, along with the other Lunarians, became something other than mortal. However, economic collapse on Earth dragged them back “downwell,” where they were stripped of their new senses. Now, like the doomed starpilots in Delany’s “Aye, and Gomorrah…” the exiled Lunarians form a caste of crippled freaks, subject to a disease called Epistemic Appetite Imbalance.

  Bad as his lot is, Yale is about to experience worse. His ailing wife turns up murdered, and his search for the reasons behind her strange death propel the swiftly moving, indeed headlong plot.

  Ings’s book is stuffed with classic noir tropes: treacherous friends, helpful enemies, driven cops, sexual confusion, drugs, riddles, assignations with strangers in seedy dives. But Ings infuses each trope with the requisite sf energy, and the union of genres is seamless. Ings manages also to balance the fate of individuals with the fate of his whole world, giving each its proper weight. Here is Ings via Chris Yale musing on the paradoxical search for truth:

  The detective looks for a single cause. The detective hunts through the spreading World, dismissing the irrelevant, the ambiguous, the accidental, and searches instead for one Answer.

  The World, on the other hand, has no focus. From a single cause, it extemporizes a complex creation, a live and changing mass, an endless spew of things. The World doesn’t care for answers, only questions.

  The detective’s truth and the World’s truth are different. Find one, you lose the other.

  There is nothing extraneous in Ings’s writing, and much that is marvelous. Blink between sentences, and you might miss something. His Ballardian touches explore real emotional and psychic depths, and chart some dangerous shoals in the murky waters ahead of us.

  Toward the end of Hotwire, Ings says, “My world...had left its languages lagging so far behind…” But by writing his books, Ings has rendered that trap inert.

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  George Zebrowski

  Cave of Stars (1999)

  DURING MORE than 40 years as a writer—his first story appeared in 1970—George Zebrowski has gained praise and recognition as one of the philosopher-poets of science fiction. The long novel Macrolife (1979) carried humankind in swarming space habitats from a dying Earth to the final transcendental Omega Point collapse of the cosmos. The usual adjective applied to Macrolife is Stapledonian (for the British author of Last and First Men and The Star Maker), but its companion Cave of Stars pays more attention than Stapledon did to the people involved in his own immense future history.

  Zebrowski now has a large body of short work, young adult and other novels, some in collaboration. He has edited anthologies, published Star Trek franchise books of more than usual reach, and in 1999 won the prestigious Campbell Memorial jury award for Brute Orbits, an uncompromisingly bleak exploration of future penal theory and practice. Even so, in today’s epoch where sci-fi has become the debased but wildly lucrative common currency of mass entertainment, he struggles to make a living from his much-praised writing.

  One clue to his lack of broad commercial success is a feature found repeatedly in his formally quite diverse fictions: a reviewer called them “outrageously didactic,” and they are often that—although rarely only that. Nor is this an accident, a failure to master the basic pleasing narrative arts. Zebrowski has adamantly chosen this path, convinced that only in such an austere program will he find the purity of intention and construction suited to his designs as philosopher-poet. No starship battles blaze in the opening pages of Cave of Stars. Rather, we track the bleak inward meditations and muted exchanges of figures high or fallen in the politics of “the fourth planet of Tau Ceti, in the third century after the death of Earth.” New Earth was settled by adherents of the Roman Catholic church, and in 2331 Josephus Bely—its aged head of theocratic government, his Holiness Peter III—and the pontiff’s prime minister Paul Anselle, plus the Pope’s unacknowledged daughter Josepha and her exiled lover Ondro are among those tormented by the conflicting demands of faith, doubt, and an arrested technological status quo maintained ruthlessly lest humankind sink again into “life’s disorder and dismay.”

  To New Vatican comes an emissary of a 100 kilometer-long macrolife mobile world, its inner shells (astonishingly) as roomy as a planet’s surface, with malcontent settlers and space for dissidents. Voss Rhazes (named for a 9th century anti-superstitious Arab surgeon and alchemist) is Linked to a sort of super-Internet. His flyer commands inertia with gravitic technology; to Anselle, secretly a doubter of the Catholic creed he represents, “it sang of angels, of intellects that looked beyond limits.” When Anselle conveys to the Pope that the people of the mobile worlds are effectively deathless, save for catastrophic accidents, Bely is appalled. “A traveling hell has come to us…. We carry too much darkness within ourselves for a corporeal paradise to be possible for our kind.” But the aged, ill pontiff is tempted by the lure of endless life. With it, he might “secure the years he needed” to finish the work of redemption for his flock.

  Such cases of conscience and conflicts between faith and reason are surprisingly common in the notable sf of the last half century or so. Pamela Sargent’s ambiguous feminist utopia in The Shore of Women (Entry 8) controls men by imposing a fake matriarchal goddess. If Atwood’s Gilead, in The Handmaid’s Tale (Entry 1) adopts aspects of Islamic sharia law, it bears the trappings of a high Protestantism near to the traditions of Rome. And while Mary Doria Russell is a convert to Judaism, The Sparrow and The Children of God (Entry 46) are centrally enacted by Jesuits. It is perhaps inevitable, then, that Zebrowski works out his epochal contrasts by invoking ecclesiastical bullying familiar to Western culture from the persecution of Bruno and Galileo to heavy-handed (and high handed) anathemas from Rome in the last century. So a confrontation staged in New Vatican, “the City of God,” has a fated inevitability reminiscent of non-sf bestsellers by Father Andrew Greeley and Morris West.

  Cave of Stars confronts not only faith versus reality, but also reality versus augmented dream. “We have the temptation of final happiness,” laments First Councilman Wolt Blackfriar (an ironically priestly name). “In dream worlds an individual can loosen all limits and be a god…. Many do not wish to return once they have tasted direct wish fulfillment.” How can such a transcendental lure be resisted—the power to be a god, if only in virtual reality? “By not trying it.” Still, mightn’t our empirical world itself be no more than a simulation? Some philosophers, Blackfriar notes, “insist on searching for experimental proof of the falseness of our universe.” Like Pope Peter III, the mobile habitat’s transhumans can find a secure footing only through faith—in their case, that the universe of experience is not false. That it is truly real gains credence in a powerfully wrought mass killing twice the magnitude of Stalin’s genocide, and its bitter aftermath.

  It would be inappropriate to detail the plot turns of this thoughtful novel. Action and reflection pursue each other through a tragic, poignant, finally hopeful trajectory. But this is just one tale in Zebrowski’s history of the mobile worlds carrying macrolife toward the closure of the universe and rebirth into a further cycle of the wheel, life finally reshaped by its tumultuous vast history. Perhaps, he suggests, efforts to clamber into a redeemed posthuman condition are not necessarily thwarted just because “sainthood could not be inherited”—that is, imported into the genome. Abolition of death might forestall that stamped-in sentence “common to all shortlived creatures who yearned uselessly to step out from the abyss of themselves.”

  For at the end, “death without dying became an art, a dance of deletions and additions that slowly brought forth new personalities… set to seek beyond the past’s horizons, determined to awake into ever greater dreams.”

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nbsp; Poul Anderson

  Genesis (2000)

  ONE OF THE LATE Poul Anderson’s final novels confronts the basic and almost insurmountable fact about the far future: that technological time will be neither an arrow nor a cycle (in Stephen Jay Gould’s phrase), but a series of upwardly accelerating logistical S-curves, each supplanting the one before it as it flattens out. Unless self-inflicted disaster inevitably reduces intelligence to ruin and global death—explaining the Fermi paradox of the absence of detectable extraterrestrial civilizations—history seems fated to pass through a Vingean Singularity, as we see in a number of other novels here,[1] into a realm beyond our present imaginative capacity.

  If so, it is plausible that intelligent consciousness, once evolved, must proliferate on a galactic scale, mutating and extending its own capacities, perhaps replacing its very substrates. It might relocate itself, for example, from limited organic bodies to very much more adaptable synthetic forms. The Science Fiction Writers of America’s 1997 Grand Master, Poul Anderson (1926-2001), like Frederik Pohl and other sf writers steeped in the ever-revised history of the future, was familiar with extrapolations along these lines by roboticist Hans Moravec, and built them gracefully into his own saga of a galaxy a billion or more years farther off into deep time.

  An earlier version of Genesis, a 100-odd page novella, appeared in Gregory Benford’s anthology Far Futures (1995). Anderson’s tale was perhaps overshadowed at the time by Greg Egan’s extraordinary “Wang’s Carpets”: a post-Singularity story so uncompromising that it seeded Egan’s remarkable novel Diaspora (1997), probably the most rigorous posthuman sf work yet published. Anderson subsequently extended his own story of Gaia’s plans for ancestral Earth threatened, in the far future, by a swelling, terminal Sun.

  Gaia, the vast, immanent AI custodian and consciousness of the world, rather frighteningly wishes to allow the world to perish in final flame rather than disrupt the Sun’s “natural” astrophysical trajectory. Other mighty Minds throughout the galaxy, and to the “shores of the Andromeda,” find this plan perverse. One such godlike node, Alpha, hives off a sub-mind (still Olympian by our standards), and sends this Wayfarer to Earth to investigate and intervene. A still more diminished aspect or agent of this fragment is a reconstruction of the early upload engineer Christian Brannock. A merely human-scale genius, he visits the planet as his larger self communes and debates with Gaia. What he finds, inevitably, is baffling yet emotionally moving (in its constrained way), recalling those Norse sagas Anderson loved so well.

  And all of this impossibly remote story is told to us as myth, as repeatedly distanced construct. We are informed again and again that what we read is nothing like the vast reality. Of course, this must be so, given the premises of ruthlessly projected futurism. “All is myth and metaphor, beginning with this absurd nomenclature [Alpha, Wayfarer]. Beings like these had no names. They had identities, instantly recognizable by others of their kind. They did not speak together, they did not go through discussion or explanation of any sort, they were not yet ‘they.’ But imagine it.”

  And we do, for we have been here before. This is the grand proleptic mythology of Olaf Stapledon himself, of Roger Zelazny’s “For a Breath I Tarry” (1966)—in which Machine remakes Man, but then bows before Him (which is absurd and sadly farcical, however much that story was loved in the 1960s).

  In this revised version of his myth, Anderson eases our entry to allegory via several well-formed episodes from the comparatively near future: a boy’s epiphany beneath starry heaven, in our Earth; Christian’s empathy with his robotic telefactor extension on Mercury, prelude to his own status as an uploaded and finally multiply-copied personality; English bureaucrat Laurinda Ashcroft who plans the first millennial salvation of Earth from the brute assaults of a heedless cosmos; a small, neat parable of rigid, gorgeous clan rivalries held in check and paralysis, finally, by the emerging Mind of Gaia. These are Anderson’s antinomies again (and perhaps American science fiction’s): the sacred autonomy of the self, the craving for transcendence in something larger; personal responsibility, and its terrible limits in a world linked, defined, by billions of threads.

  Returned to Earth, Wayfarer’s Brannock and Gaia’s Laurinda tarry in faux-eighteenth-century civility, falling in love (of course), driven together and apart by a series of visitations to simulated histories as dense and real and tormented and doomed as the “real world.” Their own personalities are no less constructed, however rooted in some small early reality, and so the poignancy of their dilemma is the greater. But for us, knowing that we read a fiction, and snatched in a kind of postmodern gesture again and again by Poul Anderson from our comfortable readerly illusion, these figures and their worlds run the risk of all allegory: can we care?

  It is the great artistic problem for any form of art predicated upon utter disruption and dislocation. Religious art faced it long ago, and clad its transcendent message in parable, majestic song—and quietness, sacralized domesticity, anguish transformed at the graveside. These are territories Poul Anderson trod in all his work, more so, perhaps, than did any of his peers. Confronting the Singularity, reaching for these well-honed tools to give himself voice and range, perhaps he succeeded as well as anyone can manage—given that the task is impossible. If he did not truly succeed, this is hardly his fault. It takes an entire culture to sustain such mythos. Sf has begun to grow the mythos, but meanwhile the world’s culture turns technological runaway into jingles and plastic toys. It is compelling to watch how the genre, the mode, of sf is responding to this immense perspective, into the pitiless depths where Poul Anderson, not long before his death, made his brave foray.

  [1] E.g., Entries 30, 40, 54, 71, 81, 91.

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  J. G. Ballard

  Super-Cannes (2000)

  EXCEPT AT THE VERY beginning of his career, J. G. Ballard (who died in 2009) was always a hard sell outside his UK homeland. When he first began appearing in American science fiction magazines in the late fifties and early sixties, with his elegant, piercing surrealism and world-spanning cataclysms—consider 1962’s The Voices of Time and 1966’s The Crystal World—he was greeted with some warmth, as an heir to such British disaster writers as John Wyndham and John Christopher. But by the time of science fiction’s New Wave and Ballard’s increasing experimentalism, he became anathema to the fundamentalist technocratic wing of the field. This phase of his career surely climaxed in 1970 with Doubleday’s pre-release pulping of his already printed book of “condensed novels,” The Atrocity Exhibition, deemed obscene and libelous at the last minute by Mr. Doubleday himself.

  Undaunted, Ballard forged ahead with such seminal novels as Crash, Concrete Island and High Rise. But his profile remained stuck at a certain plateau until the publication in 1984 of The Empire of the Sun, and its subsequent Spielbergization in 1987. This autobiographical transfiguration of Ballard’s World War II childhood experiences in a Japanese internment camp in Shanghai brought him new attention and stature, in his native England at least, including annual shortlisting for various literary prizes.

  Even so, in America—a country Ballard was always been critically yet lovingly obsessed with—his reputation and sales never really soared. His novel just prior to Super-Cannes, the admirable Cocaine Nights, went two years after British publication without an American edition, and when it finally appeared it was issued by Counterpoint Press: a distinguished imprint, yet surely not one of the larger houses. The reason for this neglect and inattention undoubtedly lies not in any difficulty of language or narrative, for Ballard’s prose is seductive and pellucid and his stories compelling, but in the harsh truths he chooses to render. Consider that The Atrocity Exhibition was alternately titled Love and Napalm: Export USA, and you have Ballard’s themes and topics in a nutshell. Our entry here does not deviate, even as it accosts a global malaise.

  The plot of Super-Cannes is remarkably simple. A young doctor, Jane Sinclair, and her older husband, cashiered aviator Paul Sinclair, arrive
in the French planned residential-community-cum-business-park, Eden-Olympia, for an extended contractual assignment. Jane will assume the duties of the community’s physician, while Paul, our narrator, rests and recuperates from the smash-up of his small plane some months ago. But Eden-Olympia proves to be a whited sepulcher, rife with old-fashioned murder, infidelity and treachery, and also seething with postmodern neuroses and newfangled megalomania. These traits are fostered by the enigmatic staff psychiatrist Wilder Penrose (note a name blending those of a famous film director and a famous theorist of consciousness), who will eventually prove to be the worm at the heart of the hothouse rose.

  The crack in Penrose’s deadly game—a crack that Paul Sinclair will deliberately grip and pry apart—lies in the mass-murder that occurred a few months prior to their arrival, when the former physician, David Greenwood, began systematically slaughtering some of the highest placed executives of this Mediterranean utopia. Paul Sinclair’s growing identification with the dead Greenwood eventually culminates in a fusion not unforeseeable yet still totally potent.