Fascination Place

• House of Suns
  • by Alastair Reynolds
  • HC, Gollancz, © 2008, 473 pp, ISBN 978-0-575-07717-1

House of Suns

Another year, another novel from Alastair Reynolds - which would be a blithe comment without also mentioning that whenever he publishes a new book, I buy the UK hardcover and drop whatever else I’m reading to read it. Yes, he’s that good: Even his weakest novels are packed with evocative settings and cool ideas. House of Suns is one of his better novels.

A framing sequence (of sorts) set hundreds of years in the future sets the backdrop, in which some rich and inquisitive humans cloned themselves a thousand times and set up family “lines” by sending each clone (”shatterling”) out on their own starship, in advance of the rest of humanity reaching the stars. The bulk of the novel takes place millions of years in the future: There’s no faster-than-light travel, but ships can near lightspeed, which combined with life-extension and hibernation technologies means that the members of the lines have lived for centuries (maybe millennia) of personal time, stretched to those millions of years via their travels.

The protagonists of the story are two members of the Gentian Line, Campion and Purslane, who have violated their line’s conventions by travelling together and becoming romantically involved (heterosexual - the clones are not exact). Campion is impulsive while Purslane is more measured and thoughtful. The Gentian Line travels the galaxy gathering information, and meets once every galactic cycle (!) to exchange that data. In between they accumulate wealth by constructing “stardams” - manipulating ringworlds left by the Priors - an extinct earlier civilization - to enclose dangerous objects - like exploding suns - for the protection of others. The backdrop also includes the Vigilance - a computer swarm observing the galaxy on its own - and the Absence - a black spot where the Andromeda Galaxy used to be.

Campion and Purslane are late to the line’s next gathering, which is good for them since someone else decided to come in and obliterate the Gentian Line. The survivors retreat to a world called Neume. Campion and Purslane had taken on a robot companion named Hesperus who had helped them during the disaster, but who was badly damaged. Two other robots, Cadence and Cascade, are also present as guests of the Line, and are doubtful he can be repaired, but Hesperus had left a final request to be given to the Spirit of the Air, a powerful machine entity which lives on Neume.

Their personal considerations aside, Campion and Purslane also get caught up in the Line’s family politics, which have become especially messy in the wake of the disaster, especially with prisoners to interrogate. Their only clues are the name “House of Suns”, a reference to a Line no one’s ever heard of, and the indication that Campion is somehow the catalyst of the attack, though no one can understand how.

As you can see, House of Suns starts out big and just gets bigger from there, with massive technology at the hands of the heroes, but even more massive technology out there to be discovered. Little of this tech is particularly new to a science fiction reader, but Reynolds deploys it in new combinations and in interesting ways; the wonder in the novel is much more about scale than about kind, and a reminder that sheer scale can still be amazing even after all the SF that’s been written before. (Of course, this does beg the question: After using ringworlds as merely materials in a larger project, and making galaxies disappear, can Reynolds come up with an encore in the theme of scale? It might be wiser if he doesn’t try.)

The “framing sequence” which opens each of the book’s parts is eerie but somewhat disappointing. It provides some insight into how the Gentian Line got started, and is also an allegory of sorts for the main story, but I found the connection between the two to be too tenuous to be really satisfying. I’d hoped for something more concrete linking the two stories.

But that sequence is a small part of the whole book, and the main story is much more rewarding. The focus is on political machinations and the mystery and suspense of the attack on the Line rather than on depth of character, but I also felt there was enough characterization to feel realistic. In particular, the loyalty of Campion and Purslane to Hesperus was at times touching, and Campion’s friction with the other shatterlings feels realistic. Although the narration alternates between the two, Campion always feels like the more interesting of the pair, probably because he has more foibles in his personality. The book might have had additional depth had it been written as a rite of passage or growth for Campion’s character, although that would have left out many excellent scenes which are seen only by Purslane.

The world building is excellent, as it usually is in a Reynolds novel: The sense of history and of a myriad of human cultures, and of their comings and goings as perceived by the Shatterlings is all very well portrayed. The Lines naturally feel a little superior to everyone else since they tend to outlive them, but are occasionally reminded that they’re not the only sharks in the sea, and they’re not perfect either. Though it takes a while for the mystery to draw out, there’s plenty of stuff happening and being revealed to keep the reader entertained; although the book is long, it’s rarely dull.

I found the ending to be a satisfying wrapping up of all the various threads, even if the final chapter did end rather abruptly. Reynolds also comes up with a satisfying rationale for the actions of some of the superhuman entities flying around, one which suggests that sometimes our fears are worse than the reality, but that we’re rarely willing to go out on a limb and risk finding out if that’s really true.

Although I didn’t find House of Suns to be quite as good as Chasm City, or its universe to be quite as richly textured as the Revelation Space universe, I still think it lands in the upper echelon of Reynolds’ novels. Although the sheer sense of wonder is its big selling point, it holds together as a story, too.

• The Prefect
  • by Alastair Reynolds
  • HC, © 2007, 412 pp, Gollancz (U.K.), ISBN 0-575-07716-6

The Prefect

I realized while reading this book something that sets Reynolds apart from his high-tech brethren in the SF field: Reynolds’ stories are essentially grim suspense/horror tales, and their basic pattern is one of setting up a milieu and hinting at a variety of outre people, places, events, or other horrors which populate it, and then setting the story in motion. Consequently, the reader spends much of his time waiting for another shoe to drop, and in true Charles Addams fashion, Reynolds’ stories are full of more shoes than you expect. And since he tends to “play fair” with the reader, not pulling out some unlikely surprise at the last minute for sheer shock value, you know that the characters have a chance of getting through the novel, but they’re probably going to have to walk through hell to get there.

The Prefect is a prequel to the Revelation Space cycle of stories, occurring decades (maybe a couple of centuries) before the events which turned the planet of Yellowstone into the peculiar hell it was in those novels. Here, the Glitter Band is a ring of ten thousand space habitats orbiting Yellowstone, and Panoply is its law-enforcement branch, primarily tasked with guarding it from external threats to its existence (due to its uneasy symbiosis with the starfaring Ultras), and internal threats to its stability (people trying to subvert its democratic electoral system).

Tom Dreyfus is Panoply’s top Field Prefect, an exacting but fair and honest man who works some of the toughest jobs in the system. Eleven years ago, an AI named the Clockmaker threatened the survival of the Glitter Band. It was defeated, but Dreyfus’ wife died in the encounter, and he’s now fully committed to his job. His two partners have similar obstacles: Thalia Ng is the daughter of a man who was convicted of treason, while Sparver is a genetically-engineered pig, and thus the subject of much discrimination.

The book opens with Dreyfus’ team locking down a station which had illegally exploited a hole in the polling software, which Thalia is assigned to fix. While she is working on the fix, space station Ruskin-Sartorius is destroyed, and Dreyfus’ investigation suggests that an Ultra ship is to blame. The Ultras provide little insight into what happened, and Dreyfus’ only witnesses are three simulations of three members of the family from the station. With a little legwork, they track down communications with Ruskin-Sartorius to a remote asteroid and Dreyfus and Sparver go to check it out while Thalia goes to test her software fix on a few of the older stations.

All of this is the initial dance leading up to a powerful entity making a bid to take over the Glitter Band, and this is where Reynolds really exercises his suspense skills: Thalia gives us a short tour of the diversity of the stations in the Glitter Band while Dreyfus and Sparver engage in some forensic investigation. There’s no question that something big is around the corner, but the story still keeps moving forward even as the tension builds. The story is a series of puzzles for Dreyfus and the other characters, as they need to figure out the goals and motivations of their adversary, as well as how to stop it as it makes its move on the stations in the Glitter Band.

The characters in The Prefect aren’t the strongest in Reynolds’ arsenal, and they definitely take a back seat to the plot. While Dreyfus and Thalia each have some painful history behind them, it’s only an influence on their behavior, not a strong underlying motivation. Dreyfus, as the title character, embodies the best of Panoply, its efficiency and compassion, and is forced to weather the storm of his less-incorruptible peers and superiors, but he never feels truly flawed, and so he fills the role of a fairly traditional detective. Still, the main characters are all entirely likeable and that helps make the book enjoyable.

For those who have read Reynolds’ earlier books, there’s irony in that we know that Dreyfus’ efforts to save the Glitter Band will eventually be undone by the Melding Plague, but we still root for him to save this jewel of human civilization. The story comes to a surprisingly rapid - yet satisfying - conclusion, and I wouldn’t mind reading more about the era of the Glitter Band, but ultimately I think I enjoy the more downbeat era after the Melding Plague more. Perhaps there’s a story which can bridge the two periods.

The Prefect falls somewhere in the middle of quality among Reynolds’ books, being a solid detective story with a variety of interesting ideas backing it, but it doesn’t excel in either concepts or characters like Chasm City or Pushing Ice do. But if you’re just looking for an exciting high-tech tale, then look no further.

More about The Prefect:

• The Prefect at Wikipedia

Galactic North

• Galactic North
  • by Alastair Reynolds
  • HC, © 2006, 343 pp, Gollancz (UK), ISBN 0-575-07910-X

Alastair Reynolds’ other collection published this fall, Zima Blue and Other Stories, is a good collection, but Galactic North is the shit, man!

It collects Reynolds’ short stories set in the universe of his cycle of novels starting with Revelation Space. It’s almost a primer of how his future history developed, featuring several pivotal events mentioned in the novels, as well as a few characters who either appear or are alluded to there. The collection actually almost works as its own standalone story cycle, which is pretty neat since it wasn’t written that way.

Reynolds’ basic strengths are his ability to create and describe places that feel truly alien, or at least deeply disturbing, and his flair for suspense and horror. For instance, “Nightingale” features the hunt for a war criminal onto a dormant automated hospital ship, which is about as frightening an environment as one can imagine: What exactly do you think a hospital ship needs to be like in order to care for the injured during a war? And on top of that it’s dark and potentially airless, and was run by an artificial intelligence whose mental state is anyone’s guess. You keep waiting for the other shoe to drop, knowing that eventually it will. And then when it does, Reynolds twists the knife in an unexpected and hideous way. While essentially a haunted house story, it’s gripping stuff.

Reynolds also explores the nature of humans who have been modified into something unusual. The first story in the sequence, “The Great Wall of Mars”, concerns the Conjoiners - humans who have formed a technological group mind - and the opposition they face from the rest of humanity, who are afraid the Conjoiners will absorb everyone else into their fold. In contrast to the common thinking about posthuman experience - which is often portrayed as unknowable or at least weirdly alien and antithetical to the human experience - Reynolds explores the thoughts and motivations of these nascent posthumans, drawing them as all-too-human, a sort of enlightened cult. The story’s protagonist, Nevil Clavain, arrives among the Conjoiners as a negotiator and learns that they are playing a deeper game than anyone had suspected.

Similarly, “Weather” takes place in a damaged lighthugging starship, and provides some insight into the mysterious Conjoiner Engines of the novels, and another oblique glimpse into the lives of the Conjoiners themselves. It’s basically a short character drama, but it illuminates the backdrop considerably.

There are two other stories which provide a glimpse of the early days of Reynolds’ future history: “Glacial” is a mystery about a dead - and unexpected - human colony, and lets us visit with some friends from “Great Wall” again. “A Spy in Europa” is a rather brutal spoy story which descends into horror. It’s not as polished as “Nightingale”, but it sheds some light on another faction in the setting, the Demarchists, who walk a fine line between heaven and hell, but of course are as fallible as all the rest of us.

“Grafenwalder’s Bestiary” concerns the legacy of those early Demarchist days, and the dangers of obsession, as its titular figure is obsessed with collecting creatures from around the galaxy and showing them off to his peers, and is interested in acquiring one special creature in particular. It contains echoes of Reynolds’ novel Chasm City (my favorite of his novels), but has its own unique sense of foreboding and terror. It’s a “be careful what you wish for” sort of story.

The volume wraps up with the title story, which follows its characters on a chase far into the future, while humanity is otherwise threatened by an implacable foe. I can see what Reynolds was aiming for here, with characters living for millennia through time dilation, focused (more or less) on their specific goals, but I had trouble connecting with the characters or believing in their motivations over such a long time frame. I found the nature of the foe to be a little hard to swallow, too. The story is okay, its grand scope making it an interesting curiosity, but it feels more like a writing exercise for dealing with lengthy timeframes, which comes into play in the novels. Still, I liked it more than the other story in the collection, “Dilation Sleep”, which is a pretty straightforward “things are not what they seem” yarn. To be fair, Reynolds’ afterward suggests that it was written earlier than the other stories in the book.

But very few short story collections hit home runs every time, and Galactic North does much better than most in that regard. There are stories here to delight, provoke, horrify, and wonder at. It’s outstanding, and it reminds me (once again) that Reynolds really is one of the very best writers of science fiction working today.

Zima Blue
and Other Stories

• Zima Blue and Other Stories
  • by Alastair Reynolds
  • HC, © 2006, 280 pp, Night Shade Books, ISBN 1-597-80058-9

Reviewing short story collections is hard, even when it’s a collection by one of my favorite SF authors. Reynolds in fact has two collections out this fall, of which this is the first.

Reynolds’ forte is telling atmospheric stories - often with strong philosophical underpinnings - which nonetheless qualify as hard science fiction. His stories therefore are usually pretty heavy stuff, but no less enjoyable for that. He works the edge of the “posthuman” milieu which has become popular these days, although he often write straight-up space opera.

My favorite story? Maybe “Beyond the Aquila Rift”, which takes place in a universe with wormhole travel among stars which humanity has taken advantage of. The wormholes seem to end at the edge of the Aquila Rift, but of course the universe doesn’t end there, so eventually someone ends up going beyond it, by accident. This story I think perfectly encapsulates the sense of otherness which is often present in Reynolds’ stories, and the sense of loss that seems to come with being immersed in the other.

Reynolds tends to write a lot of far-future space opera, and two stories in here occur in the same such universe: In “Hideaway”, a small remnant of humanity is on the run from the cyborg creatures which have taken over the species. Their backs to the wall, they end up in an unusual star system which tantalizingly contains the seeds of escape. It’s followed up with “Merlin’s Gun”, concerning the hunt for a weapon which might be used to defeat the enemy. Both tales leave some story elements hanging - deliberately - but it’s the setting and characters and their approach to their dilemmas which is what drives the stories: How far will you go in the pursuit of your goals, and what are you willing to pay to achieve them?

Reynolds provides illuminating afterwords to each story, and he observes that the future of reporter Carrie Clay is perhaps a rather nice one to live in. In “The Real Story”, she interviews the men (?) who first stepped on Mars, decades after they accomplished the feat. It’s a neat little tale of ambiguity and - again - sacrifice and loss. In “Zima Blue” she interviews the foremost artist of her age, and learns something about art, humanity and memory. Reynolds turns the neat trick of taking what seems (to me) like a trite central idea and dressing it up into a rather elegant story.

The story that perhaps best shows Reynolds’ penchant for grandiloquent explorations of the nature of the universe is - naturally enough - “Understanding Space and Time”. It begins as a “last man standing” tale of loneliness verging on madness, and ends on a too-large-for-mere-words scale of understanding reality. Both parts of the story are interesting, although not fully successful, to my mind. It’s quite a page-turner, however.

Of course, not all the stories grabbed me - not unusual for a science fiction collection. I think sometimes the atmosphere overwhelms the story, or maybe is the whole point of the story, and the piece doesn’t come together for me. I think this was the case in both “Enola” and “Angels of Ashes”, for instance. On the other hand, “Signal to Noise” is a straightforward character yarn about (just barely) parallel worlds, but I found it rather routine. None of these were bad, but they were a few notches below the stories above.

The limited edition contains one more story written specially for this collection, which is pretty annoying since I don’t have the limited edition. Hopefully “Digital to Analogue” will be collected in another volume sometime.

Zima Blue is a better-than-average short story collection, and if you enjoy Reynolds or like dark space opera, then it should be right up your alley.