Locus Looks at Books: Gary K. Wolfe
The Quiet War, Paul McAuley (Gollancz 978057507-9328, £18.99, 320pp, hc; -9335, £12.99, tp) October 2008. The Gone-Away World, Nick Harkaway (Heinemann 978-0-434-01842-0, £17.99, 544pp, hc) June 2008. (Knopf 978-0-307-26886-0, $24.95, 502pp, hc) September 2008. Memoirs of a Master Forger, William Heaney (Gollancz 978-057508-2977, £9.99, 338pp, hc) October 2008. As How to Make Friends with Demons, Graham Joyce (Night Shade 9781597801423, $24.95, 256 pages, hc) November 2008. Sometimes it’s worth restating the obvious, or what one hopes would be obvious, so here goes: science fiction can make itself new in basically two ways. It can startle us with grand ideas or ingenious scenarios we haven’t seen before, shifting the whole conversation onto new ground (what in the last few years we might term the Greg Egan effect, though a couple of decades ago it was the William Gibson effect), or it can simply get better in terms of the traditional disciplines of fiction writing – character, complexity, subtlety, or the grace of its prose (which a couple of decades ago was the Gene Wolfe effect, and still is). Sometimes it can do both, and all the writers mentioned above have managed this trick, but usually when you hear someone recommending a new SF novel to friends, the recommendation tends to emphasize one or the other: conceptual mindblowing at the one end, or subtle brilliance at the other. Paul McAuley’s The Quiet War, which is likely to end up as one of the best SF novels in this year of very good SF novels, seems to me to belong in the latter camp. We’ve seen wars between Earth and its solar system colonies plenty of times (it’s provided backgrounds for classics such as The Stars My Destination as well as for more recent novels such as Tony Daniel’s Metaplanetary), we’ve seen clone warriors (even George Lucas has heard of them), we’ve seen hostility between the gene-modders and the technologists (think of Sterling’s Schismatrix), we’ve seen Earth trying to recover from environmental collapse (fill in your own examples), we’ve seen bioengineering projects to enhance survival in radically hostile environments (going all the way back to Simak’s City
or Blish’s The Seedling Stars). In some conceptual ways, then, there’s nothing much new in The Quiet War – though like any good hard SF writer McAuley updates the science – but it reads like one of the newest novels of the year, even though McAuley has already published a number of ‘‘Quiet War’’ stories set in more or less the same future. McAuley, who like Greg Bear earlier this year has returned to the SF hotel after spending some afternoons in the thrillerland theme park, introduces us to a 23rd century in which a recovering Earth is dominated by a few repressive power blocs – Greater Brazil, the European Union, the Pacific Community – who hold the colonists of the outer planets in contempt (‘‘dangerous fanatics who are creating monsters out of their children’’) while coveting their science and technology, particularly that of their ‘‘gene wizards.’’ While these Earth powers, especially Greater Brazil, initially hope to achieve their goals through subterfuge, economic manipulation, and espionage – the ‘‘quiet war’’ of the title – the result is inevitably a shooting war, and much of the first half of the novel details how failures of diplomacy, power struggles on Earth, and the hair-trigger responses of some of the colonists lead down that narrowing path. McAuley unfolds this using four main viewpoint characters: Sri Hong-Owen, a genetic engineer whose personal goal is to meet and rival the work of the legendary gene wizard Avernus; a clone warrior named Dave #8 (who later on an espionage assignment becomes known as Ken Shintaro); high-tech pilot Cash Baker who volunteers to become wired into the controls of his spacecraft (the weakest and most familiar of the four main viewpoint characters); and Macy Minnot, an eco-engineer working to quicken a biome on Callisto, and who eventually seeks asylum among the rebels of the Outer System after being framed for a murder. Those responsible for framing her, the military goon Speller Twain and the weaselly diplomat Loc Ifrahim, become the main avatars of a corrupt and corruptible system, and when Twain himself is killed, Ifrahim emerges as one of McAuley’s most convincingly slimy villains to date (and McAuley does cherish his villains). The other secondary characters, from the divided, power-hungry Peixoto family in Brazil to the reclusive and eccentric scientist Simonov on Europa, are drawn with compelling
clarity, making this one of the most humanly fascinating novels McAuley has written since Fairyland. In fact, clarity may be the single most salient strength of The Quiet War. McAuley’s settings, which range from Brasilia to Antarctica to Ganymede and Callisto, are described in precision and detail that at once an object lesson in evoking the classic sense of wonder and a poetic translation of the most recent NASA probes; in the best sense, this is pure hard SF. Even McAuley’s inevitable infodumps and sidebar technical explanations take on some of the excitement of good science writing; something as mundane as the creation of mud becomes an adventure for Macy, who sees it as transforming ‘‘material left over from the creation of the Solar System’’ into ‘‘a self-organising bioreactor that structured itself into microdomains within upper aerobic layers and lower anoxic layers and could consume just about every kind of organic material and reprocess inorganic nutrients and return it all to the cycle of life.’’ That may sound like an environmental bioengineer’s version of the Disney chestnut ‘‘Circle of Life’’, but it reminds us that in the midst of the intrigues and spectacles of interplanetary war, there are real scientists doing real science in this book, and although the war itself (surprisingly restrained and brief, despite a couple of gorgeous set-piece attack scenes) offers some of the classic thrills of space opera, it’s that science which finally moves everything forward. There may be a bit of quixotic wish-fulfillment in McAuley’s depiction of a world in which the most precious and valued citizens are practicing biologists, but it’s easily his finest novel in years, and a welcome return to the kind of intellectually solid and humanly engaging SF he does best. Not quite halfway into Nick Harkaway’s The Gone-Away World, the sort of book THIS MONTH IN HISTORY October 29, 2064. Meet the beetles. Responding to a plea from Mayor Trump herself, the NYC Department of Health approves Crunch Crazy, the nation’s first fast-food fried insect restaurant, just in time for a Halloween opening. The tiny tasties prove especially popular with Times Square tourists.
LOCUS October 2008 / 19