CENTURY RAIN
by Alastair Reynolds
Ace,
$24.95 (hc)
ISBN: 0441012906

lastair Reynolds has been one of the most visible writers of the new brand of space opera coming out of Britain. (He now makes his home in the Netherlands, after twelve years working for the European Space Agency.) His “Revelation Space” trilogy combined the galaxy-wide scope of the Doc Smith era with cutting-edge science (e.g., brane theory) and a tough modern sensibility. With Century Rain, he tries his hand at work on a more intimate scale—although only by comparison with his previous work.

Century Rain is set in a future where Earth has been destroyed—or, more precisely, been made inhospitable for life. A few survivors—descendents of those who’d already moved to homes in orbit or on other worlds—now carry on a long-drawn-out struggle to define the future of humanity in their own terms. One of the two competing factions has decided to abandon Earth entirely. The other sends archaeological expeditions to try to recover artifacts of the vanished civilization from the still-hostile planet. Verity Auger, one of the archaeologists, loses a VIP guest during a recovery expedition, and finds herself in hot water. Her superiors offer her an even more dangerous assignment as a way to save herself.

A second plot strand takes place in what looks at first much like Paris of the early 1950s, where an American expat named Floyd moonlights as a private eye when he’s not following his primary calling as a jazz musician. It quickly becomes clear, though, that this is the Paris of some alternate history, in which an oppressive right-wing nationalist regime holds power. Neither Americans nor their music carry the cachet they did in France in our own history.

Floyd’s troubles start when he agrees to investigate the death of a young woman, whom we eventually learn is an agent from Auger’s world, sent to collect artifacts from his world because of its close similarity to the “real” past. Unsurprisingly, Auger’s mission turns out to be a visit to Floyd’s world to find out why the other agent died and to recover any remaining artifacts. The plot kicks into high gear when the two of them learn that the catastrophe that overtook Auger’s Earth is in store for Floyd’s world.

Page-turning tension, good world-building, and a scope that suddenly opens up to a much wider perspective than the reader at first realizes. This one solidifies Reynolds’ position as one of the most readable new writers in the field.

 

ALANYA TO ALANYA
by L. Timmel Duchamp
Aqueduct Press,
$19.00 (tp)
ISBN: 0974655961

L. Timmel Duchamp’s short fiction has frequently appeared in this magazine as well as in various anthologies. Now we have her first novel, which begins a five-book series, the “Marq’ssan Cycle,” dealing with a feminist revolt against an oppressive future society, a sort of corporate dictatorship. Written some twenty years ago and set aside, the series seems even more striking in light of political events of the intervening years.

The precipitating event of the plot is the arrival on Earth of aliens, who announce their presence by shutting down the world’s power grid. Having thus gained the notice of the world’s governments, the Marq’ssan issue their demand: a team of negotiators, comprised entirely of women, is to be sent to them. The main protagonist, Kay Zeldin, is a college professor chosen for the US negotiating team because of her former ties to the US Security Chief, Robert Sedgewick. Sedgewick makes it clear to Zeldin that he expects her to act as a spy for the US regime.

Zeldin is already ambivalent about advancing the interests of the government, having left government service to pursue marriage and a career. But Sedgewick and his fellow “executives” look on mere “professionals” like her as a sort of lower species, driven by hormones. And in spite of strong evidence, they dismiss the Marq’ssan as impostors, more likely human terrorists than real aliens. Even after the Marq’ssan show their power by destroying government buildings and property, the executives are unwilling to negotiate openly. Instead, they respond with force—calling out the Army to enforce order, and demonstrating their power by raping women who overstep their submissive roles.

The Marq’ssan appear to the negotiators as human women, although several scenes suggest that their real appearance is quite different. They carry on with apparently endless discusssion and negotiation, trying to give Earth’s women the perspective to acquire power on their own terms. But those are not their only weapons; as in their initial demonstration, they destroy buildings, armaments, and other assets of the oppressive governments of Earth. A group of them begin to side with the more activist groups among Earth’s women, and take direct steps such as releasing prisoners and destroying buildings that are sites for the abuse of power.

The plot builds slowly, although some of the scenes between Zeldin and the insufferably arrogant Sedge-wick are almost unbearably tense. By the end of this volume, Zeldin has all but broken free of Sedge-wick’s hold on her. Sedgewick, however, has determined to escalate the struggle against the Marq’ssan. And the Marq’ssan appear to have realized that the liberation of Earth is going to be a more difficult task than they were ready for.

Not an easy or comfortable book, but one that rewards a thoughtful reader who is willing to give up simple action plots for a close consideration of political and social ideas. In fact, the closest comparison one might give is to some of LeGuin’s later work—no small recommendation. Worth looking for.

 

WOKEN FURIES
by Richard Morgan
Del Rey,
$24.95 (hc)
ISBN: 0345479718

Morgan’s stylish adventure fiction combines tropes of military SF and cyberpunk, with tough, cynical protagonists carrying on sharp struggles against long odds. Here he continues his Takeshi Kovacs series with a look into some of the deeper roots of the culture his tough-guy protagonist comes out of.

The story begins with Kovacs on Harlan’s World, his original home planet, wearing a synthetic body. (This future involves downloading of a person’s mind into a nearly indestructible cortical stack, which can be implanted into another body—a “sleeve”—either by choice or after the death of the original body. This has the consequences you’d expect—plus a few more.)

Waiting in a bar while a bunch of local gangsters fulfill their end of a shady deal, he sees a young woman attacked by a pack of religious fanatics. He kills the attackers and escapes with the woman, Sylvie, who takes him to crash with a group of her friends until morning, when he can close his deal with the yakuza and get offworld. But Kovacs’s luck has turned sour, and after another violent confrontation, he has no choice but to follow Sylvie’s gang on an expedition into the outback, where they hunt down military robots, the relics of an advanced civilization.

Meanwhile, unknown to Kovacs, an assassin has been set on his trail —not just any assassin, but a version of himself at an earlier age. At the same time, Kovacs (after acquiring a new “sleeve”—an organic one, this time) finds out that Sylvie has a much more complex history than her youthful appearance suggests. In fact, she may be some kind of incarnation of Quelcrist Falconer—a charismatic revolutionary whose disciples Kovacs warred against in his previous life as an Envoy. Much of the latter part of the book consists of attempts to confirm Sylvie’s identity, while dodging assassination attempts by Kovacs’s younger self.

As in the earlier books of the series, Morgan generates a strong action plot, with a large element of violence. But he also uses the device of interchangeable bodies—something available to every character above poverty level—to throw the focus on questions of identity and self. Being stalked by his younger self, on his home planet, and meeting very old friends who nonetheless inhabit hard young bodies, throw the question of just who Kovacs is into sharp relief. As different as it is from Duchamp’s dystopian vision, Morgan’s book puts equal emphasis on close examination of our society’s central premises, and hinting at some of the alternatives.

Recommended for those who enjoy hard-hitting thrillers that don’t require them to disengage the brain before reading.

 

THE VAMPYRICON:
THE PRIEST OF BLOOD
by Douglas Clegg
Ace,
$19.95 (hc)
ISBN 0441013279

Here’s a historical fantasy (or historical horror, if you prefer; depends on how you pigeonhole vampires) where the protagonist starts off at the bottom of the feudal pyramid, and no sooner drags himself up a couple of steps than he is kicked right back down.

The setting is Brittany, in the time of the Crusades. The narrator is one of several mixed-race children of a local prostitute, his father reportedly a Saxon merchant, long absent. Growing up on the fringes of society, young Aleric is tutored by his grandfather, a poacher, in the ways of the forest birds. This skill gains him a place in the baron’s entourage as a falconer—a job title that replaces his name.

Life in the castle is a huge step up in the world, and allows Falconer to give some measure of support to his mother and her many children. Two events bring him down: first, an affair with the baron’s daughter; then his mother’s arrest for practicing the old religion—now defined as witchcraft by the newly ascendant church. Attempting to enlist his lover’s aid to clear his mother, Falconer oversteps and is sold into slavery. He winds up as a foot soldier in the crusades. Deserting after many hard battles, he enters a ruined city inhabited by a vampire, and becomes one of the undead, at which point the main action of the novel begins.

Clegg’s vampires are the remnants of an ancient society, with a long mythological history. And once he awakens to what his new status means, Falconer finds himself thrust into a role he could not have anticipated, as the messiah figure of the vampire kind. He and a group of companions embark on a long, and vividly drawn, quest in fulfillment of the prophecies. But while he achieves his immediate goal, the reader learns that forces are brewing against him —including a highly unexpected one back in his native Brittany. The book ends with the promise of further conflict to come.

With its baroque mythologizing and its bottom-up look at the feudal class system, this one has the potential to strike an audience well beyond the normal readership for vampire tales. Not for those who dislike gore, though.

 

THE SINGULARITY IS NEAR
When Humans Transcend
Biology
by Ray Kurzweil
Viking,
$29.95 (hc)
ISBN: 0670003847

The Singularity—broadly, the historical watershed at which unaided human intelligence is surpassed by computers—is probably the single biggest idea in current SF. Here’s a non-fiction look at what it all means, from one of the major gurus of Artificial Intelligence research.

Kurzweil makes clear his firm belief in the inexorable laws of technological growth, in particular what he calls the law of accelerating returns: not only is the power of technology to change the world increasing, it is accelerating at exponential rates. The future portends a radical breakthrough.

The real meaning of this power increase lies in the predicted growth of nanotechnology. Robots the size of red blood cells inserted into the body will make possible, within two decades, says Kurzweil, complete scanning of the human brain. Moreover, by then computer hardware will be able to run accurate software models of human intelligence. Within twenty-five years, he argues, artificial intelligence will pass the Turing test.

That alone would be impressive, but Kurzweil feels that the real breakthrough will be in a synthesis of the strengths of organic and machine intelligence. Our human strengths—pattern recognition, inference—will be even more powerful when aided by the instant recall of large bodies of data of which machines are capable. Nanotechnology will come to play on both sides of the human/machine divide; not only will machines far exceed the mental power of human brains, but humans will seize the opportunity to augment their own intelligence with nanotechnological implants.

Kurzweil goes on to predict that non-biological elements will eventually make up the majority of human intelligence, and that much of the experience of future humans will take place in virtual reality. Eventually, this hybrid human/machine intelligence will expand to use all the resources of our solar system, and eventually to fill the universe.

Readers of Charles Stross’s work undoubtedly recognize the broad outlines of this picture. Kurzweil offers his vision as sober technological forecast. Whether he has allowed enough room for Murphy’s Law is a question that only time will answer. But if even the tamest of his forecasts come true, we are in for some interesting times.

 

THE LIFEBOX,
THE SEASHELL, AND
THE SOUL
by Rudy Rucker
Thunder’s Mouth,
$35 (hc)
ISBN: 1560257229

Kurzweil preaches the Singularity as a true believer. Rudy Rucker, who has academic chops in computer science on top of his street cred as a founding cyberpunk, is a good bit more skeptical about transcending biology. Witness his latest nonfiction entry, an attempt to find the interface between the material and nonmaterial worlds.

The book is in one key sense a meditation on the ideas of Stephen Wolfram, in particular the formulation: “It is possible to view every process that occurs in nature or elsewhere as a form of computation.” Rucker admits from the outset that he isn’t entirely sure whether he agrees with this premise, noting the “counterintuitive fact” that many apparently simple processes can yield unpredictable results. He is particularly taken by what he calls “gnarly computation,” the apparently straight-ahead process that produces unexpectedly complex output.

The book develops by means of a dialectic among three elements: a lifebox, which is an imaginary gizmo in which one records one’s life experiences; the soul, the essence of one’s personality, which most of us would claim is too ethereal to be captured in any technological device; and the seashell, an organic creation that is nonetheless generated by the most mechanistic of laws. The seashell is one of Rucker’s key examples of the gnarly; geometrical without being sterile.

Wolfram builds many of his insights on cellular automata, such as the fascinating computer game, “Life,” in which seemingly simple rules lead to remarkable complexity. (You can download versions of the game at several points on the web.) What is most fascinating about the game is how an extremely small set of initial conditions produces results that seem uncannily lifelike—to choose a possibly apt metaphor.

For Wolfram, the obvious implication is that all the laws of physics (to take one example) could turn out to be embodied in a sufficiently sophisticated computation. (And in fact, many physicists would agree, as the ongoing search for a “Theory of Everything”—combining quantum physics with general relativity—makes clear.) And in the central section of this book, “Enjoying Your Mind,” Rucker sketches a possible path from the physiology of the brain to a theory of consciousness.

But unlike Kurzweil’s dead-serious portrayal of the march of progress, Rucker’s book displays the playfulness that has always marked his fiction. Each of the book’s larger sections is preceded by a short story suggesting some of its principal insights. There are innumerable illustrations, ranging from family photos to rough computer schematics and illustrations of natural processes that resemble the output of a cellular automaton. He also refers regularly to his personal experiences, and provides links to his own (and others’) web pages for those interested in exploring the subject further. And in the final chapter, he offers a set of rules for a happier life—including “Turn off the machine.”

Rucker’s book is a good-humored and thoroughly engaging exercise in grappling with the big questions about computers, consciousness, and the structure of reality. If you’ve enjoyed Rucker’s fiction, this nonfiction book is likely to be just your speed.