RESOLUTION
by John Meaney

Pyr,
$25.00
ISBN:1591024374

Ever since I began writing these columns, good Lord, over two decades ago, I have been railing against trilogies, or even worse, open-ended novel series, on literary grounds. I’ve now got to admit that it’s become a lost cause. Not on literary grounds, as we will get into later at great length, if not as great length as the material to be covered, but for reason of bottom-line commercial diktat.

As previously noted with no little outrage in these pages, the powers that be in the publishing business, namely the major book store chains, have now decreed that, except for exceptional exceptions, no hardcover novel with a cover price of over twenty-five dollars shall grace their racks. Meaning, calculating backward as the publishers have been forced to do, that no novel whose unit cost cannot put it in the black at that cover price shall be published, no matter its literary merit. Meaning that except for those exceptional exceptions, they won’t, or rather can’t, publish a novel longer than about one hundred and fifty thousand words, or so at least they claim.

The exceptional exceptions are almost all for behemoths written by authors whose previous BookScan numbers come up best-sellers. The chains will order novels by best-selling authors in best-selling amounts, meaning that publishers can order large first printings, meaning that the unit cost to produce each copy goes down proportionally, meaning that given a large enough printing they can put that twenty-five dollar cover price on an otherwise outsized novel and make a profit.

Otherwise forget it.

Well, maybe not quite. We will be considering three novels that seem to have somehow gotten around this rule. River of Gods by Ian McDonald runs about six hundred pages but sells for twenty-five dollars and is a literary masterpiece. Pandora’s Star by Peter F. Hamilton, which I’ve read in a $7.98 paperback (which seems to be the paperback magic number equivalent of the hardcover twenty-five dollars) and runs 988 pages, is one of the most exasperating novels that I have ever read. Its hardcover sequel Judas Unchained, which tweaks the edge of the pricing envelope at $26.95, runs 827 pages. I doubt I will ever manfully attempt to read it, even though Pandora’s Star is masterfully written.

We will get to these exceptions to the commercial rule of exceptional exceptions later. But literarily speaking and generally speaking, writers who have stories to tell that need more than one hundred fifty thousand words to tell properly in literary terms have a big problem. They are strongly constrained to do it as at least a trilogy, since a “duology” is as awkward a form to get published as two books as thirty-five thousand words is to get published as a novella in a magazine.

This not only presents the writer with a literary problem, it produces a paradox that is inherently impossible to resolve fully. To wit, do you presume that the only readership for books two and three are people who have already read book one—and worse, that the only readership for book three is those who have read the first two volumes? Or do you attempt to make each book a novel that anyone can pick up and read cold?

An excellent example is the Nulapeiron Sequence by John Meaney. This consists of Paradox and Context, which I have already reviewed in these pages, and now the appropriately titled Resolution, after months of the usual coitus interruptus.

I’ve never done this before, but now I find myself constrained to quote from a previous review, with merciful ellipses, since as a critic I find myself on the horns of the same dilemma as the writer, unable to move forward without as it were somehow summarizing the back story. And so resorting to this now seems both ironically appropriate and exemplary.

. . . Paradox and Context . . . [are] exemplary of what I’m talking about here. . . . Nulapeiron is a large planet out there somewhere colonized by humans centuries ago. It would seem to have a toxic (to humans) atmosphere, for the humans inhabit not the surface but vast and deep interconnected caves, caverns, corridors, and warrens whose breathable atmosphere must be provided by a fungus genetically engineered to do so.

Humans have also been on Nulapeiron long enough to have evolved, or devolved, an elaborate and elaborately stifling neo-feudal culture. The planet is divided up into “domains,” feudal fiefs, each fief consists of multiple levels of stratified caverns, and the physical stratification mirrors and determines a rigid class structure. Only a Brit could or would create a dystopian class system like this.

The protagonist of the series is one Tom Corcorigan, who starts at the near bottom of his fief’s levels and class structure, rises slowly and stepwise to the top as “Lord Corcorigan,” becomes a secret rebel against the system, then a not-so-secret rebel leader, then a fugitive, rises again, falls, flees, rises once more. . . .

There is a great deal of what at first may seem like cavalier space opera pseudo-science—prescient seers, living vehicles of every sort, creatures seemingly concocted at the author’s whim, and so forth—but Meaney does make a serious attempt at giving it all at least science fictional credibility. Genetic engineering seems to be the dominant technology—why engineer transportation vehicles, atmosphere generating systems, and so forth, when you can breed them?—and since Nulapeiron could not have been colonized without the genetically engineered fungus, this cultural technological dominance is credible. There is also a plausibly worked out futuristic mutation of the web and the internet and other hardware, as opposed to meatware, technologies, so in toto the technosphere of the planet is quite three-dimensionally credible.

There is also a lot of very advanced futuristic physics underpinning the science, technology, prescience, and even the plot, underpinned in turn by mathematics too recondite for me to quite tell where the real cutting edge stuff grades into the necessary vaporware and bullshit, which, after all, is exactly where what I have elsewhere called “rubber science” is supposed to leave the reader within a piece of true science fiction, “post-modern” or otherwise.

Further, early on in the first novel, young Tom comes into possession of an artifact that tells him tales from his deep past, which is to say our own relatively near future, which Meaney uses to intercut another story, namely that of how the far future set-up of Nulapeiron came to be, the two timelines seeming to slowly converge so that, I suspect, they will finally come together in Resolution.

Tom is given the thing by what Nulapeiron folk assume is a mythical creature, a Pilot; one of the humans cyborged to the FTL ships that colonized the planet long ago before some mysterious event somehow rendered such space travel impossible and Pilots supposedly extinct.

And the story that Meaney intercuts with the main narrative, at least in the first two novels, is that of the events that caused such isolation, the physics and metaphysics behind it, told from the points of view of two generations of Pilots, mother and daughter, and, in contradistinction to the doings on far-future Nulapeiron, with science rather less rubbery, and in a time and in places at least initially not that distant from our own.

Thus Meaney is attempting, and as far as I have read thus far succeeding, in doing what space opera by any meaningful definition never attempts. He seeks, at least in terms of literary effect, to seamlessly connect the reality of his far future with that of the readers. . . .

Further, and this is something space opera can do but seldom does—at least as presented in the first two novels—Tom Corcorigan is a flawed hero.

One arm has been chopped off as punishment by the powers that be, making him a physically flawed hero, which is rendered more psychologically and practically significant because a central part of his heroic powers is that he is a crackerjack martial artist despite, or possibly because of, this, and martial art combat of any number of schools forms a large part of Meaney’s action, a bit too much for my taste, becoming obsessional not only on the part of his character but on the part of the author.

More importantly, Tom is a psychologically flawed hero. In the white heat of combat he does kill without hesitation and under extremes of torture degenerates into a subhuman killing machine, but he is agonized by his own acts and mistakes, rather than being a simple good-guy with an authorial license to consciencelessly kill, to the point where he spends quite a bit of time as a drunken derelict.

Thus what we . . . have here is two novels of a three novel sequence that attempts to be both literarily and thematically quite sophisticated and mimetic, unlike space opera, without being anything more or less than science fiction period, and for my money succeeds.

Whew! Okay, that’s done, and I’ve gotten the back story out of the way with one big awkward expository lump. Which, with your kind indulgence, maybe I can get away with as a critic reviewing the concluding novel, Resolution, but which the writer of that novel, or any other third volume of a trilogy, can never expect to get away with.

When my novel The Children of Hamlin was published in thirty-two installments in a weekly newspaper, I had no choice—the only thing for it was to write thirty-one capsule summaries of what had gone before Nor could I simply add on each week, which would have made the summary longer than the installment about fifteen weeks in. I had to cut and compress to keep them the same length thirty fucking times, the most nightmarish writing task I have ever faced.

It would be a lot easier to throw up one’s hands and do likewise for a mere two installments of a trilogy—a merciful favor for those who have read the first two novels months or even years ago, but something of an outrage to a reader of the third who hasn’t.

As far as I know, no author of a trilogy has taken this way out, and Meaney doesn’t either. He does as good and clever a job of bringing the reader who missed the first two up to date without turning off the reader who hasn’t as perhaps can be done. But those readers still find themselves plowing through a certain amount of back story insertions, well done and artfully disguised to be sure, but still inevitably annoying, still slowing the novel down and making that reader wish he would get on with the current thread of the story.

And speaking of getting on with the thread of the story, perhaps in part because of the need for all the back story insertions, but also probably because it is time-honored practice, Meaney falls into a narrative strategy which, though admittedly common, is one that really annoys me as a reader, and one which I therefore try my best to avoid when writing fiction myself.

When narrating a story via multiple viewpoint characters, one must choose where to change viewpoints; the more viewpoints you have, the more changes you must make, and here, where you have two time-lines as well, it has to be done even more often.

Personally, and I admit this is a matter of taste, I try to end each viewpoint section with some sort of minor climax or epiphany or even just bon mot dialog to leave the reader a little satisfied before the next viewpoint shift. But all too often, writers do exactly the opposite, as Meaney does far too many times here; ending viewpoint sections with cliff-hangers to keep the reader in suspense. Okay, this works in terms of building narrative tension, but by my lights it’s a cheap trick, something like a teasing lover bringing the partner to the point of orgasm but then drawing back, over and over again. It builds tension all right, and to a point this can be pleasurable, but tension by its very nature hovers on the brink of annoyance, and when the clever reader or lover sees through the technique, it goes over the edge.

For me at least, this technique also weakens the long series of battle sequences that are told in Resolution from multiple viewpoints in just this manner. Without experiencing the tactical climaxes at the end of their build-ups, I at least, found myself plowing through the battles and skirmishes not really enjoying them for their own sake, but primarily to finally get to the, uh, resolution, at the end.

Still, it takes a certain courage to call the final novel of a trilogy Resolution. Aside from this most technical of cavils, structurally at least Meaney covers his bet and delivers, bringing the two intercut timelines—that of Tom Corcorigan’s story on Nulapeiron and that of the Pilots’ a millennium earlier via his access to the device that tells that story to him and to the reader—closer and closer together until they finally converge at the plot climax and thematic and characterological closure of the whole Nulapeiron sequence at the very end of Resolution.

JUDAS UNCHAINED
by Peter F. Hamilton

Del Rey,
$26.95
ISBN:0345461665

Bravo for that! It is no easy task to hold a real novelistic structure together at all over a three-novel sequence, and to end each of the first two books with secondary endings that at least don’t leave the reader hanging in mid-air prior to throwing the book across the room—as Hamilton does in Pandora’s Star, which we will get to later. Meaney really understands novelistic structure, and it would be very interesting to see what he could do in a free-standing novel, even a huge one like River of Gods.

He even pulls it off thematically, if in a forced, perfunctory manner. Tom, risen from the lumpenproletariat to Lordship, and more than once, has his moral struggle with the rigid and unjust class system, detailed and both loathed and sucked up to as only a British writer could so ambiguously render, finally reluctantly, or so we are meant to believe, achieving the pinnacle even beyond kingship as “Warlord” of the entire planet; obeyed, saluted, honored, and all but worshipped in a manner that would have der Fuhrer creaming in his tight black leather jeans. At which point, he uses his dictatorial power to destroy the class system which gave it to him in the first place.

Bravo to that too! Frank Herbert once promised me that he would do just that at the end of the Dune sequence, but the series went on and on, taken over by lesser writers when he died, and he never lived to do it. Nor has anyone else but Meaney done it with this sort of pseudo-medievalist and currently all-too-British sort of thing. Power to the People! Power to those who would surrender the Divine Right of the Emperor of Everything to the People and thus become the ultimate true hero thereof.

However, Meaney does it on the last two pages. You know that it’s coming, and that’s part of the problem; there’s no sense of real struggle within Tom, though this scenario has been well built up over three novels, and it could have been the true and most resonant thematic resolution of the whole sequence, a characterological resolution, a political resolution, a mighty aesthetic resolution.

Also, it occurs after the plot climax, which is a sort of victory over the Dark Force of the Anomaly, which comes after an entirely overlong war story—which is really no story at all, but a series of battle sequences ending with a deus ex machina victory thanks to the Pilots, who appear from more or less literally nowhere with a great fleet to save the day.

There is a sense of battle fatigue about this novel. Meaney writes well here, as he has in the first two books. He preserves and resolves the structure of the whole thing, but the science fictional technological, metaphysical, and mathematical extrapo- lation that worked so well in the first two novels has a tendency to descend into space opera blah-blah-blah here, ending perilously close to “they built a blaster out of bailing wire and chewing gum” at the end.

Then, too, the “love story” between Tom and his fellow-warrior wife is groaningly unconvincing and unfelt, as if Meaney decided he had to insert this sort of thing pro-forma to satisfy pop fic convention.

One wonders what Meaney would have written if he had been free to write the whole thing as one grand free-standing novel. I suspect that the book would have been shorter by a quarter or even a third, shorn of the need to fill in back story twice, shorn perhaps even of the endless sequences of martial arts practice in the first two books, and with the greatly overlong sequences of battles that end the sequence compressed into no more than what’s really required to tell the story.

Then too—and this is only writerly supposition, having written more than one free-standing novel at current enforced trilogy length myself—perhaps if Meaney had written this whole “sequence” as a single novel, the flow might have carried him through with the same energy as the first two novels, which seems somewhat attenuated in Resolution, as if the writer had manfully pressed on as promised without quite the same passion.

Peter F. Hamilton’s Pandora’s Star tips the scales at 988 pages in paperback, and the last page printed ends with an announcement that “The Commonwealth Saga will be continued [not concluded?] in Judas Rising.”

The former sells for the current paperback standard price of $7.99, and the latter is an 827 page hardcover priced at a tad over the standard at $26.95; meaning, one must suppose, that the publisher expects big sales figures or has been guaranteed big chain buys, in order to bring the unit cost down below the profit point.

Moreover, this is not fantasy, which has a proven track record of being able to hit best-seller numbers at the high end, but straightforward science fiction of a very traditional kind, which does not. Ordinarily I would quail at starting to read a “duology” or “sequence” of almost two thousand pages—enough for a tetralogy at the very least, and god knows how long to reach the conclusion, if ever, if there turns out to be more beyond Judas Rising. But my curiosity was piqued to the point of leafing through Pandora’s Star, and I found myself hooked.

Why?

I certainly didn’t intend to be. The publisher sent the paperback of Pandora’s Star with hardcover galleys for Judas Rising. The blurbs and marketing material made it all too clear that no sense could likely be made of the latter without first reading the former, meaning a commitment to reading 1815 pages to be able to review the more current Judas Rising in any coherent fashion. This is the sort of thing I usually avoid like the plague—wouldn’t you?

However, the publisher in question, Del Rey, has more or less publicly admitted that they, like most of the other “SF lines,” have been publishing very little actual science fiction like this, let alone an 827 page $26.95 hardcover of same—near what the chains will accept pricewise, but at that length and price, meaning a unit cost that would require a large printing to make any economic sense.

On the one hand, as a novelist, this piqued my curiosity. On the other, as a critic who has bemoaned the de-emphasis of true science fiction in the “SF genre lines,” I felt a certain moral obligation not to toss aside these books without at least perusing Pandora’s Star.

So I did, which was enough to reveal Hamilton as a fully rounded, extremely accomplished out-and-out science fiction writer completely committed to the real deal.

The novel starts with a ten page Prologue. In the near future, NASA astronaut Wilson Kime is making the first landing on Mars. This is written with a hard technological realism but also a psychological connection between the astronaut and what he is doing, reminiscent of Ben Bova at his very best.

Kime makes the first Mars landing on p. 7, or thinks he has, but on p. 9, it turns out that two geeks have invented a wormhole generator more or less in their garage and gotten there first. End of Prologue.

Chapter One then begins: “The star vanished from the center of the telescope’s image in less time than a single human heartbeat.”

And we are immediately zapped into what is going to be the mystery McGuffin of Pandora’s Star, and centuries into the future that the wormhole generation technology has made. The astronomer who is looking through the telescope is doing so on a more or less backwater planet in another solar system, in the so-called “Commonwealth,” an interstellar human civilization of something like three hundred planets and still growing.

A few alien species have been encountered, but not many, and all of them are uniquely strange. People have indefinite lifespans, since their memory recordings are updated regularly, there are multiple back-ups, and they can be dumped into clones. They have “e-butlers” which act like implanted highly sophisticated PDAs-cum-mobile phones.

Interstellar travel and commerce is accomplished by railway trains. Yes, trains. The wormhole gates are set up in vast train stations. You ride a train from wherever you are on the planet of origin to the nearest interstellar railway station. Maybe you have to change trains, maybe not. In either case you take a train through the appropriate wormhole gate, and instantly the train is on the destination planet, where you may or may not have to change to a local.

This may seem like a silly species of steampunk technology and Hamilton like some kind of railroad fanatic having a personal high old time at the expense of credibility, but it isn’t. Not only does Hamilton describe this in masterful detail, but he convinces you that it makes sense. Why travel by “spaceship” when you can take a local metro line to a big terminal station, switch trains, pop though a wormhole to another station on another planet, maybe take another local directly to your destination thereon? It’s like taking the Metro in Paris to the Gare du Nord, changing to the Eurostar through the Channel Tunnel to Victoria Station and catching the Tube to wherever you want to end up in London, only more or less instantaneously. Hamilton is British; this is a very European concept in practice, and believe me it’s better than screwing around with getting back and forth to at least two airports on any trip under, say, four hundred miles.

The economic and political system of the Commonwealth is directly based on the nineteenth century British Empire without royalty, on the cusp of becoming the so-called British Commonwealth of Nations without a monarch, and a multiplanetary corporate capitalism running slightly and realistically amok. The relationship between corporate power and political democracy is rendered as complex, ambiguous, and moderately corrupt as one would expect such a set-up to be and as the British Empire certainly was.

Kime himself and the two guys who invented the wormhole generator are still around and transformed into major economic and geopolitical players. The star that has disappeared, it turns out, has not really vanished, but some sort of mysterious shield has instantaneously appeared around it. The central plot-line involves the building of a space- ship capable of getting there without a wormhole gateway at the other end, commanded by Kime; what they encounter; and the interstellar war that then ensues.

Hamilton does a great job of getting you from your present to his beautifully and convincingly detailed future and into the mystery-generated narrative tension very quickly, which was why I at least was hooked. Two chapters in, there’s a subplot involving terrorists convinced a shadowy invisible alien is manipulating the Commonwealth government, a super detective who’s been on their trail for centuries, and quite a bit more, with interesting characters you care about.

However. . . .

However, Hamilton violates the hoary science fictional maxim that you don’t have to explain the workings of the internal combustion engine and the technical details of highway construction just because your character is driving from New York to Chicago.

Hamilton does this with his interstellar trains. He does it with the rejuvenation technology. With the building of the starship. With the e-butlers. With just about every bit of imaginary technology he introduces.

Up to a point, this is a strength, because he does it very well indeed. He also does it with the geography, ecology, economic base, architecture, and city planning or lack of it of every planet depicted in the book, and he does this equally well.

But maybe halfway in it started to become overdone, wearying, slowing the story to a crawl, and all the more so, because while the main story is going on, a very long subplot is interwoven with the main story, which ends up consisting of little more than an odyssey from interesting planet to interesting planet primarily for the purpose of admittedly interesting description and exposition for its own sake.

Hamilton does this world building as well as anyone ever has or could. He’s very, very good at it. Maybe too good for his own good. Maybe he knows how good he is at this all too well and has fallen a little too much in love with his own world-building talent.

One thing that Pandora’s Star desperately needed and apparently didn’t get was an editor sitting down with the author and line-editing the manuscript. It would have been a tedious but simple enough task to boil two hundred or even three hundred pages out of these 988 pages, to the novel’s literary benefit.

And who knows—if Judas Unchained suffers from the same degree of bloat, the two volumes could have gotten rid of five hundred or even six hundred unnecessary and literarily counterproductive pages by tough line editing and have been published, and more importantly structured, as one admittedly huge twelve hundred page novel.

It has been done, you know. War and Peace. Finnegans Wake. Okay, price-wise it may not be feasible any more by conventional means. But there is a way around it that has been used and that could be adopted —what my French publisher did with the mass market edition of Russian Spring and with other long novels as well. They broke it into two volumes without hiding that this was one continuous novel and published them simultaneously. You could buy volume one and read it before you decided whether you wanted to go on, and if you did, you could buy the second volume immediately, or you could buy both at one time, or, in the case of Russian Spring, the two volumes in a fancy boxed set.

These were paperbacks, but there’s no reason it couldn’t be done likewise with hardcovers at great and obvious advantage to the potential readers, but at even greater but less obvious advantage to the writer.

Peter Hamilton’s Pandora’s Star, and Judas Unchained, demonstrate the reason why. Pandora’s Star suffers from the bloat described above. I’ve opined that Judas Unchained might suffer from the same to the same degree, but when I finally finished reading Pandora’s Star, I was very loath to try to find out, for I realized that the bloat slowing down the story in Judas Unchained might be even worse.

Because it would almost have to be worse.

The last part of Pandora’s Star concerns an interstellar war between the Commonwealth and the aliens of the solar system in question, the terrorists-against-the hidden-alien-manipulator plot, and the multi-planet odyssey. But the book ends with none of these stories resolved, and with—I swear I am not making this up—a literal cliff-hanger, after 988 pages.

The reason I read Pandora’s Star first before considering Judas Unchained was because I thought Judas Unchained would be unreadable to anyone who hadn’t. But what if I was wrong? What if Hamilton felt compelled, and not unreasonably, to do the sort of thing that Meaney did in the third volume of the Nulapeiron cycle and bring the reader who had not read Pandora’s Star up to speed on 988 pages of back story?

Literarily speaking, damned if he did, and damned if he didn’t, and currently I’m most reluctant to read Judas Unchained to find out. Because if he did, Judas Unchained is likely to crawl like a snail for the reader who has read Pandora’s Star, and if he didn’t, the reader who hasn’t will be utterly lost.

But, assuming there isn’t going to be a third installment, if Pandora’s Star and Judas Unchained had been conceived, and more importantly written, as one long novel, not only would that inherently paradoxical problem have vanished, but another hundred or two hundred pages of back story stuff in Judas Unchained would never even have had to be written in draft. And with the line editing mentioned above, that one big Kahuna could be brought down to a thousand pages—again to its literary benefit, not at all for the sake of commercial compromise.

Each of the existing two separate novels are almost that long already, and yet somehow commercially viable—or so at least the publisher hopes—at that length. And even if the single thousand page version were not, the French solution not only solves the problem nicely, but ends up selling more copies overall.

Necessity is the mother of invention.

Those who adapt survive.

And in the case of Hamilton’s grand opus, a little evolutionary marketing thinking on the part of the publisher, probably in Britain where this work was originally published, and some tough editorial evolutionary pressure in setting a thousand page limit for the final version, would probably have turned unfortunate commercial constraint into literary virtue.

River of Gods by Ian McDonald is nowhere near as long as either of the Hamilton books, though it is a long novel by today’s commercial parameters, 597 pages. But Pyr, which somehow manages to keep doing this, has kept the hardcover price down to the magic twenty-five dollars.

It, too, was first published in Britain, in 2004, where it won the British Science Fiction Association Award for Best Novel, was nominated for the Arthur C. Clarke Award, and even the Worldcon’s Hugo—as well it should have been.

I don’t place that much credence in such awards or nominations, but River of Gods is a masterpiece, I can’t think of a better science fiction novel I’ve read in years. It should have won all of the above, as well as whatever other such bowling trophies were available.

Certainly it should have been eagerly and immediately gobbled up by any American publisher favored with a look at the manuscript or the British galleys. But it wasn’t. The so-called major American SF lines passed, and there was no US edition at all for two years until Pyr once more rescued a worthy British novel from Yankee oblivion.

Why?

I’ve written and complained and even tried to explain this sort of thing before, but when it comes to River of Gods I find it totally outrageous. This novel is a masterpiece of science fiction by any meaningful standard and even some that are not. No slur on Hamilton at all, but River of Gods is superior to Pandora’s Star or presumably Judas Unchained—the point being that it is therefore proven not to be commercially unviable because of length. Moreover, McDonald had already published several excellent science fiction novels in the United States, if perhaps nothing quite on this level. So commercial pricing and unit cost constraints don’t seem to be the reason why this novel had trouble finding an American publisher.

Why?

Literarily it certainly makes no sense, and given the in-group award and nominations it makes no sense either in terms of hitting the so-called “fan base.” If Del Rey could bring out Judas Unchained as an American hardcover, why wouldn’t a major established American publisher be eager to publish River of Gods, a literarily superior novel, a good deal shorter, a Hugo nominee off the British edition, and therefore with a potentially wider readership?

In the end, the only answer I can think of is political. British science fiction writers have been complaining of the difficulty of getting their work published in the United States for some time now, but that’s not what I mean by political; it can’t be, since both McDonald and Hamilton are in the same UK boat there.

But River of Gods is the great SF novel about India. It isn’t just set in a near future India, it is about a future India; deeply, completely, and on a multiplicity of levels, from high government and scientific circles, to show biz, to religious and mystical complexities, to the lowest sleazoid levels of the Indian underworld.

Moreover, this is an extrapolated future in which what we now know as “India” has fractured into several independent states, two of which, thanks to the failure of the monsoon due to global warming, end up in a “water war.”

River of Gods is also a science fiction novel that delves deeply and cogently into the question of the evolution of Artificial Intelligences, moving toward Vernor Vinge’s “Singularity,” the asymptotic moment when their self-evolving advancement takes them so far beyond humanity that we can no longer even comprehend what they are and they become the gods of our puny reality and we become pets or go extinct.

McDonald not only demolishes this notion, but does so by turning it around emotionally and theologically, and does so from a Hindu perspective.

I will not attempt a plot summary of this wonderfully complex novel told from the viewpoints of several well-realized characters, except to say that all the plot threads—hard science, the Indian soap opera genre, the rise and fall and rise of two petty gangsters, the discovery of an artifact from the future at a La Grange point, Artificial Intelligence, Indian politics, Hinduism, future Indian police procedural—interweave in the manner of a Bach fugue, or indeed in the manner of the polytheistic complexities of Hinduism itself, entirely successfully in structural and thematic terms. And yes, it all does come together in a most satisfying apotheosis at the end.

When my novel Russian Spring was published in the then Soviet Union I went to Moscow for the launch, and several people there paid me the great compliment of telling me they couldn’t believe it wasn’t written by a Russian.

The Times of India is quoted on the cover of the Pyr hardcover of River of Gods saying “Not bad for a Firang (non-Indian) who has oodles of imagination and chutzpah.”

Not bad? When an Indian writer produces a novel with such a level of immersion in the extrapolated complexities of the future of his own culture, I will eat lamb shaag topped with chocolate ice cream.

McDonald takes the reader to a level of immersion in the fine detail, texture, consciousness, pop culture, very being, of an extrapolated non-western culture that is utterly awesome—and, for a novelist occasionally attempting to do something like the same sort of thing, daunting. The novel reads as if Ian McDonald spent a year or more wandering around India ripped on ganja and LSD with an American Express card and a mobile high speed internet connection.

It’s difficult to avoid believing that this very literary and cultural virtue is the source of the political reason that the major American SF lines let a novel of this caliber go unpublished in the United States for two years until Pyr rescued it. I have the awful feeling that the nationality of the writer had nothing to do with it, but rather it was the collective editorial judgment of the corporate publishing powers that be in the United States that an American readership would not be interested in such total immersion—not only in the reality of the future of a Third World entity like India, but in a future Indian culture no less advanced and complex than any near future imagined for their own.

RIVER OF GODS
by Ian McDonald

Pyr,
$25.00
ISBN:1591024366

If I am right about this, and they were right about the degree of pa-rochialism of the American readership, of the supposedly visionary science fiction reader at that, then it’s a lot more than the literary culture of the United States that’s now in deep dark doody.

The usual fulsome praise of one novelist to another in such circumstances is “I wish I had written that.” No way. Speaking as a novelist who has set fiction in an extrapolated Soviet Union, Gaul at war with Rome and Julius Caesar, Mexico at the time of Cortes’ conquest, presently the Hadj and a civil war in Nigeria, it’s not just “I wish I had written that,” but “how in hell did McDonald do it?”

But one thing I can say with confidence is that a work of fiction like River of Gods, even if it were twice as long—and as I approached the end of it I found myself sorry that it wasn’t—could never ever have been written as a trilogy or a duology or anything but a single novel, and for two reasons in a feedback relationship with each other.

It is the novelistic structure that not only holds such a long and even somewhat discursive novel like River of Gods together and allows it all to be brought together in a final epiphany—a structure that simply cannot be applied to a novel “cycle” or “sequence,” but allows such a literary work to read “faster” or “shorter” than the middle or concluding novel of even the best trilogy because there is no clogging of the flow by the introduction of necessary back story.

A trilogy or novel sequence simply cannot be structured like one big free-standing novel. By its very nature, such a novel sequence can only be a compromise between practical commercial and informative necessity and novelistic literary structure. Sometimes it can work rather well on its own terms, as with Meaney’s Nulapeiron Sequence, but compromise it must be or fail even on those terms.

And what a long well-structured novel like River of Gods, free-standing unto itself and literarily uncompromised by current market restraints on length can be, is what will be lost if works of such magnitude should become commercially unpublishable.