Cosmopoetica

Matter, the latest novel in Iain M. Banks’s speculative fiction series (loosely defined) set in the far-future, inter-galactic world of the “Culture” is a glorious mess.

On the glorious side are all the things I’ve liked—and sometimes loved—about the other two Culture novels I’ve read: amazing, grand ideas of technology and culture set in a far future in which civilizations—human and machine–at various levels of advancement, from the primitive to the “sublimed” who essentially exist in pure information space, interact (control, manipulate, monitor, ignore)… sometimes within different levels of the same world.

On the messy side I would include: the too-leisurely pacing of the first half of the book, an on-going issue with characters who become cliches in their own stories (in this case, the central “bad guy” (Tyl Lausp) is as thin as they come), and an irritating manner of giving practically every character an irritating name. While Banks is a step above many sci-fi authors when it comes to creating fully-realized characters, it’s curious to me that his AI characters are often more entertaining than the “living” people and aliens that play such prominent roles in the story…

If you’re looking for Dostoevsky or Faulkner, the messiness might be a significant problem. But not for me. If you like speculative fiction rife with big ideas and a sprawling, complex conception of future worlds, a detailed outline of this novel would probably be more satisfying than a dozen of the run-of-the-mill sci-fi novels you’ll find browsing the shelves at your nearest bookstore.

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Bloom is a tale of nanotech gone wild. Seemingly insatiable nanotech spores of unknown and accidental origin– the Mycora– have taken over Earth and the inner solar system, consuming most of humanity and creating what the humans eking out an existence on Jupiter’s moons and in the asteroid belt call the Mycorum. A few million human beings have survived by fleeing to the outer planets. The central story in the novel is that of an exploratory mission to penetrate the Mycorum and see what’s become of the Earth and Mars, simultaneously investigate the Mycora and testing a new hull material that might resist their appetite.

The obvious comparison for this kind of take is Greg Bear’s Blood Music and Bloom acquits itself quite well. McCarthy, like Bear, isn’t just an "idea" writer, but one who explores those ideas through realistic characters. And there are plenty of interesting technological ideas introduced as the crew pursues its odyssey to Earth, encountering various form of nanotechnology and trying to work out the implications in parallel with heir own work using simulations to create virtual world models based on a much more complex version of Conway’s game of life.

In addition, McCarthy explores the cultural angles rather adeptly. We meet those who see the Mycora as a militaristic enemy and those who worship it as a new kind of god. We see how two different groups of refugees from Earth have evolved: the Immunity, which has taken residence on a few of Jupiter’s moons and embraced a rigid culture living with a pervasive fear of technology, and the Gladholders, who reside in the asteroid belt and espouse a kind of Hippy 60s lifestyle with an exuberance that contrasts sharply with the sober members of the Immunity. And the narrator of the story is a pro-am journalist in a media culture that is very clearly derived from our current world of citizen journalists, blogs, and social networks, giving McCarthy plenty of room to speculate in the areas of news, entertainment and communication.

It’s in this area of delving into the culture of the tale that much scifi falls flat, and while I definitely recommend Bloom to anyone interested in contemporary "hard" scifi and/or nanotechnology– and it’s a cut above many scifi novels in this area– it’s a solid step or two below something like Neal Stephenson’s Diamond Age. But so are most novels.

My only truly significant disappointment in Bloom is that the most important element of the denouement is obvious– and for most readers will likely have been obvious for a hundred pages or more, well before the ship and crew enter the Mycorum. There’s plenty left here to support a follow-up novel (or three)! And for all I know, McCarthy has… Bloom was written in 1998 and I’d never heard of McCarthy until I stumbled across this book.

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Picked this Japanese sci-fi novel up on a whim, inspired by the front-cover blurb that included the words and phrases: “poetic first contact,” “alien peril,” and “think Arthur C. Clarke meets Haruki Murakami.” Clarke’s Rendezvous with Rama is one of my favorite sci-fi books… and Murakami intrigues me. Sadly, Usurper of the Sun comes nowhere close to fulfilling the promise of the blurb. All of the elements are there, including a relatively original story of first contact and nanotechnology, but the writing is atrocious. Granted, the translation could be a serious factor (the novel did win the 2003 Seiun Award, a high honor), but the prose is pale and robotic.

I can forgive the poor prose for great ideas, but when the time comes to actually meet the alien beings, Nojiri let me down. The novel was on track to be one that might actually fulfill some of the promise of an encounter with truly alien beings—I was particularly intrigued with the idea that the contact might mean nothing to the aliens, who might just pass through our system and/or snuff us out without a hint of communication, but Nojiri seems to want to have it both ways, telling us how alien this life is but letting his story show us something else.

So much potential; so disappointing.

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Perhaps because I don’t follow the genre(s) involved closely, though I do read quite a bit in them, I had never paid attention to the term “Slipstream” until now. Via Bryan Alexander come two great links that inform me I’ve been reading quite a lot of Slipstream titles without even knowing it. First, a slipstream reading list. Then, if you are interested, info on the coinage (by Bruce Sterling).

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This is how much I like Vernor Vinge’s writing: I purchased Rainbows End (there really is no apostrophe in the title) the first time I saw it, in hardback at full cover price, without looking at the price, the blurbs, or the jacket summary. It isn’t the classic space opera I was expecting based on Vinge’s previous novels, but I wasn’t disappointed!

Rainbows End is a study of the potential sociological effects of a variety of currently hot technologies– ubiquitous computing, social networking, the Internet of Things, wearable devices, silent messaging that is nearly telepathy– extrapolated into a stunning vision of the near future. (more…)

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Two collections of stories from the 50s-70s are collected in this volume, edited with intro and introductory story notes by Isaac Asimov and Martin Greenberg. The first volume, The Future in Question, is composed completely of stories whose titles are in the form of a question (except the last story, by Asimov, aptly titled “The Last Question”).

All of these stories are classic, golden age pieces, most of them published in the big sci-fi periodicals of the time. I wish I’d been around when you could find a variety of magazines with stories like these at the newsstand! Outstanding entries include “What Have I Done?” by Mark Clifton, Arthur C. Clarke’s ephemeral “Who’s There?” and James Tiptree Jr.’s “Houston, Do You Read?” Not to mention great stories by Sturgeon, Bester, John W. Campbell Jr., etc. All the usual suspects. The Asimov story, like Clarke’s story, is no masterpiece of the genre, though it is eminently fitting as the end of this particular volume of tales.

The second volume, Space Mail, is a collection of stories told in the form of letters, journals, and diaries. This conceit makes for a much more uneven selection including classics such as Daniel Keyes’ “Flowers for Algernon” and Howard Fast’s “The Trap” to a host of less familiar titles by often familiar names (H. Beam Piper, Murray Leinster). Many of the stories in this volume suffer from being outright “trick” stories– or at least attempting to be too clever by half– but they are all fun.

In short: a perfect summer sci-fi reading that includes a few stories even fans might not have heard of.

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