Locus Looks at Books: Russell Letson
Line War, Neal Asher (Tor UK 978-1-40505501-7, £17.99, 503pp, hc) 2008. Cover by Steve Rawlings. The Steel Remains, Richard Morgan (Gollancz 978-0-575-07792-8, £12.99, 352pp, hc) August 2008. (Del Rey 978-0-345-49303-3, $26.00, 432pp, hc) January 2009. Juggler of Worlds, Larry Niven & Edward M. Lerner (Tor 978-0-7653-1826-8, $24.95, 347pp, hc) August 2008. This month’s books share a certain physical and narrative heft, the better to support large casts of characters whose actions spread across multiple, converging plotlines, all the while revealing backstories, uncovering concealed (if only from the reader) relationships, and establishing and resolving various setting-related puzzles. Two are large-scale starship-and-aliens adventures, while the third packages many similar features in a box labeled ‘‘fantasy’’ but whose contents suggest a science-fictional sensibility at work. Neal Asher has been elaborating both the foreground and deep background of a complicated story line about Earth Central Security special agent Ian Cormac and various of his colleagues and opponents across five fat novels of space operatics, mad science, alien invasion/ infection, and general mayhem. (This loose future history includes three other novels and a bunch of short works set in the same busy, violent Polity universe.) I’m not sure whether Line War is a genuine finale for the Cormac sequence (the forthcoming and melodramatically titled Shadow of the Scorpion seems to be a Cormac-the-early-years volume), but it certainly ties up a number of threads, settles various conflicts, and answers questions that have been teasing readers as far back as Gridlinked (2001; reviewed in August 2003): Where do Cormac’s more spectacular abilities and powers come from? Is he even human? What is the agenda of the planetoid-size entity called Dragon? What is the source and purpose of the seductive and destructive alien Jain technology that seems to subvert whomever employs it? How much of all this is understood by the artificial intelligences that govern the Polity? The book is a direct sequel to Polity Agent (reviewed in January 2007), which climaxed
with a not-quite-decisive battle against forces led by a Miltonically rebellious AI warship calling itself Erebus. Now Erebus is back, attacking Polity worlds in a rather unfocused way – the kind of sub-critical disturbances classified as a ‘‘line war’’ by the Polity AIs, as distinct from the all-out conflict against the vicious, crablike Prador that called for full (and transformative) mobilization of forces and resources. But a series of apparently unrelated incidents point to something bigger, and Cormac and various colleagues are sent in different directions to investigate and counter whatever plot Erebus is hatching. Among the reconfigured cast are Cormac, with his trusty, nearly sentient weapon Shuriken and stroppy war-drone sidekick Arach, aboard the misanthropic, former-rebel AI warship King of Hearts; the unstoppable, enigmatic, Dragon-rebuilt killer android Mr. Crane, now with its own sidekick, the bird-embodied AI called Vulture; alien-biotech expert Mika, traveling with and in a refitted and reconfigured Dragon; the moon-sized AI research vessel/ theater-commander Jerusalem, with the Golem soldier Azroc serving as a focus group/sounding board; scientist and fugitive criminal Orlandine, with her newly converted posse of grouchy old Prador-War-era battle drones, including the Mutt-and-Jeff team of Cutter and Bludgeon; and arch-enemy Erebus, many of whose sidekicks have been involuntarily integrated into its extended being, but whose personal data space is infested by copies of the personality of one of its human victims, the late Fiddler Randall. The stage is greatly expanded in this volume, with much of the action set beyond the borders of the Polity, out in the wild and lawless places where malcontent AI starships and old wardrones and fugitive scientists go to escape the safe-and-sane rule of Earth Central and its AI viceroys. This is where Orlandine has fled to set up a place to further work on her control of Jain tech, and it is the wilderness from which Erebus mounts its campaign against the Polity, a plan that looks chaotic but is actually a supersubtle chess-game that the Polity AIs may or may not be smart enough to see coming. One branch of the story follows the trail of Erebus’s attacks, featuring ingenious and everescalating modes of destruction, as Cormac and company look into those oddly assorted raids, hoping to find clues to Erebus’s plan. Mika gets a
stranger and ickier job, as Dragon takes her on a search for the source of the Jain technology that has allowed Erebus to become such a powerful threat. The revelations that follow from her voyage reach far back in galactic history and supply some of the book’s most unsettling passages – quite an accomplishment in a novel dominated by huge set-piece battles-to-the-death in space and on planetary surfaces. Meanwhile, a guilthaunted Orlandine (prompted and aided by the viral ghost of Fiddler Randall) decides to take a hand in opposing Erebus and mounts her own campaign with an unlikely combination of mothballed Prador-war-era Polity technology juiced up with Jain adaptations. Over the course of the series, Jain technology has become more important than the villains it empowers and eventually absorbs. It is consistently described in organic images and metaphors – Erebus’s fleet consists of ‘‘wormships’’; infested moons look like ‘‘apples destroyed by maggots’’; and everywhere there are images of bacilli, infection, yeast, and other squirmy entities and processes. We have come to understand that this ancient, vastly powerful, and quasi-living stuff was designed as a seduce-and-destroy weapon aimed at any technology-wielding species; that someone or something was spreading it around the Polity via ‘‘Legates’’; and that it might be possible to tame it, as the brilliant and cautious Orlandine has managed to do. Erebus has also apparently tamed Jain tech and uses it to control and eventually absorb its one-time allies and to transform itself into a fleet of shapeshifting death machines. Another of the series’ constants has been the proposition that only AIs are smart and disinterested enough to govern a complex, technologically sophisticated civilization such as the Polity. Now not only the competence but the moral trustworthiness of AI rule is in doubt, as signaled not only by the Polity’s apparent difficulties coping with Erebus’s campaign but by some commentary embedded in the Vancean chapter epigraphs. AIs are free to reconfigure their moral architectures and general person THIS MONTH IN HISTORY October 1, 2123. Mecca replaces Greenwich. Muslims around the world rejoice and mapmakers mourn as the new Prime Meridian is made official.
LOCUS October 2008 / 23