Larry Niven - Ringworld

Sky and earth were to flat plates, infinitely wide, pressed together; and men were microbes crawling between the plates… (p. 149)

Coming to Larry Niven’s 1970 Science Fiction classic, Ringworld, with no prior exposure to the man or his works, I felt much like the novel’s protagonist, Louis Wu. As we begin, Louis is a world-weary two hundred year old man, and his – as he sums it up – “xenophilia and restlessness and curiosity” (p. 9) make him agree to join a mysterious Puppeteer alien’s crew in exploring a vast and distant object, the Ringworld. The kind of sublime wonder that Louis seeks is much of what draws me to Science Fiction and other nearby genres, and, though I have not lived two hundred years, I certainly have read (rather more than) two hundred books and can feel somewhat jaded as a result. Also like Louis, I had a rather hard time getting my bearings as the crew – Louis, his lover and the crew’s purported good luck charm Teela Brown, a catlike and warlike Kzin, and the Puppeteer – are assembled and off to their destination. Then the sheer awe wrought by the Ringworld itself blew any doubts away.

The Ringworld combines technological and geographical scales. It has “three million times the surface area of Earth” (p. 145) and must have required almost unimaginable powers and technologies in its creation. After crash landing onto it, our heroes explore the Ringworld to find any means at all of escaping it. Through them, Niven presents an account of its vastness that is half scientific and cultural speculation and half adventure.

It’s easy to unthinkingly dismiss Hard Science Fiction as mere scientific play, devoid of literary or philosophical value, but doing so ignores how envisioning man- or alienmade changes to the universe on this scale requires the writer to explore the universe itself and man’s position in it. The moment when Niven’s engagement with larger, philosophical questions becomes clearest may be his allusion to Dante’s Divine Comedy:

“Oddly, Louis found himself thinking of Dante’s Divine Comedy. Dante’s universe had been a complex artifact, with the souls of men and angels show as precisely machined parts of the vast structure. The Ringworld was obtrusively an artifact, a made thing. You couldn’t forget it, not for an instant; for the handle rose overhead, huge and blue and checkered from beyond the edge of infinity” (p. 143).

Niven writes from deep within Science Fiction’s most central and hardened bunkers, and a kind of modesty keeps him from fully stating the impact of his allusion. But, by outlining Dante’s understanding of the cosmos and then moving to the Ringworld, he makes his implication clear: Ringworld (and many other books of its ilk) posits a modern, scientifically-based view of the universe and of man to answer the faith-based perspective that has dominated for centuries. Most of this is done, like the allusion quoted above, by implication; Niven dwells on the science itself or the cultural ramifications of it and leaves the reader to glean broader ideas from that. One obvious idea, appearing in the above as well as many other places in the novel, is his use of terms like infinity in his discussion of the Ringworld. Obviously, they serve a literal descriptive purpose, but infinity’s connotations transcend the horizons Niven describes. Words like that play on the same thematic register as his addressing of Dante does.

The most striking example of science and religion’s convergence may be the Eye Storm that the characters discover on Ringworld’s surface: it is a massive, powerful wind pattern in the shape of a human eye. Their first thoughts, of course, are of supernatural manifestations, and those thoughts bring terror. Before long, they have come up with a well-reasoned theory of how a meteor strike could create this kind of weather pattern, a theory that proves correct – but a material cause does not rule out wider resonances. Just because there is no designated God in Niven’s universe, and just because the laws of physics are followed, does not mean that the events do not take on a significance greater than the simply physical realm.

The universe that Niven explores is immense and amoral. Louis is, at best, agnostic. He knows that there is no force in the universe out to help man: “The universe is against me,” said Louis Wu. “The universe hates me. […] I am two hundred years old and still healthy. But not because the universe loves me” (p. 136). Progress is possible, but it is made by dedication and scientific advancement alone, and it is made in spite of everything life can throw at it. Still, men (and aliens) can work on a grand scale. They can escape the explosion of the galactic core, deal with the seemingly insurmountable problems of overpopulation and dwindling resources. They can create Ringworlds.

But progress is not a straight line, and it is never simply benevolent. Again and again, the characters return to the blurred line between powerful tools and powerful weapons, something likely best summed up in what the human race has come to call the Kzinti Lesson: A reaction drive is a weapon, powerful in direct ratio to its efficiency (p. 92). Any advancement is a double-edged sword, as usable for destruction as salvation, as likely to send man crashing back to barbarism through its firepower as it is to elevate him through its speed. And even the best advances cannot safeguard us or any other beings forever. As Louis realizes when studying the fallen men of the Ringworld: cycles of culture and barbarism were man’s natural lot (p. 274).

The absence of a God does not mean that the denizens of Niven’s universe live in a state of total freedom. Rather, it is a universe in which Louis has to admit by the end of the novel that We’ve all been playing god on various levels (p. 318). When dealing with the barbaric Ringworld natives, the protagonists use their technology to play Gods to get the natives’ cooperation, a fascinating gambit that precedes K.J. Parker’s use of it in her Scavenger trilogy  and that has varied but gripping results for our heroes. But the manipulations don’t end when the natives are left in the dust. It becomes clear that each of the civilizations encountered is doing its best to guide and alter the course of its neighbors to suit itself, with the more technologically advanced Puppeteers doing a rather better job at, well, puppeting than anybody else. The dynamic reaches down to an interpersonal level. The Puppeteer in the group has a tasp, a device capable of inflicting pleasure or pain on any sentient creature that allows the Puppeteer to “condition” (p. 294) anyone he meets it as he will, a device that Prill, a woman they encounter, says “made him god” (p. 314).

Alas, Prill herself is the one notable flaw in Niven’s amoral system of manipulations. When we encounter her, she seems quite interesting. She is a woman in a position of great power, commanding an abandoned but still functioning and powerful police station that floats over the Ringworld and can commandeer any vehicle it comes across. Then we learn that she got that power entirely through sex, and Niven goes so far as to say: She knew a terribly ancient secret: that every woman is born with a tasp, and that its power is without limit if she can learn to use it (p. 293). Viewing all kinds of pleasure and pain as forms of control could be interesting, but limiting that discussion to women bearing godlike and manipulative powers of seduction is not only morally questionable but also just silly. Do women not feel sexual pleasure, and is sex the only form of pleasure that can influence one’s actions?

Besides overt manipulations, one of the key influencing factors on Niven’s universe is actually luck. We are not, however, simply talking about garden-variety luck. No, this luck is genetically enhanced, for man has been organizing breeding in Niven’s universe through lotteries for centuries. The result is people like Teela Brown, who was chosen for the mission precisely because of that luck. All of this frequently feels like it is pulling in precisely the opposite direction as the rest of Niven’s Hard Science Fiction creation. At times – such as when Louis reasons that, if she needed to come here without knowing it, she’d come here anyway (p. 241) – the luck starts to seem simply divine, or at the bare minimum conscious. Still, some of the places that Niven goes with it are interesting. Cocooned since birth by her luck, Teela has never felt pain and so has no empathy and no fear. Always led by that luck, it’s questionable whether she has free will. And, sheltered by both that luck and technology, it’s hard to imagine how she could ever die…

Moving from a general contemplation of the book’s themes and content to an evaluation of its strengths faults, as I suppose I as a reviewer should likely do at some point, I do have to bring attention to Niven’s coinages. Some work fine, but others seem to entirely miss the tone he was going for. Exclaiming finagle (p. 301) just seems silly. Though generally capable of both precise and evocative prose, Niven does also occasionally get overexcited:

But he had to have a belt!

And Teela handed him her scarf! (p. 308)

More seriously, Niven’s questionable gender politics don’t end with the equivalency of vaginas and tasps that I discussed earlier. The female Puppeteers are “nonsentient” and “property” (p. 85), and Louis has the habit of referring to Teela as “my woman” (p. 150), but it’s not till the last section of the novel that the matter goes inexplicably rampant. That’s when we meet Seeker, whom Teela falls in love with: He was a hero. You could tell [… from] the courteous way he talked to Prill, apparently without realizing that she was of the opposite sex. Because she was another man’s woman? (p. 297) A hero indeed. Not much longer, we hear that Teela stood behind [Seeker], safe for the moment in the ring of fighting, looking worried, like a good heroine (p. 307). By the novel’s end, she has finished her descent from character to stock love interest/object by quite literally selling herself as a sex slave to Seeker, because he believes in “slavery for women” (p. 299), and she loves him. Our only other female character, Prill of the Tasp-like genitalia, is a ship’s whore (p. 315) that makes sure Louis isn’t too sex deprived after Teela leaves and decides to escape the Ringworld and return to Louis’ civilization because: “I can help your world, Louis. Your people know little about sex.” (p. 317)

The strangest part about Niven’s treatment of gender is how distant it is from the book’s core. This is a novel about the vastness of space, the powers of technology, and the way that men manipulate each other, three themes that either intersect barely or not at all with the problems of the above paragraph. Though I can’t say that Ringworld is without faults, it is a powerful and classic example of what Science Fiction can do, presenting an uncompromising, gripping, and awe-inspiring view of the universe that is a genuine thrill to explore.

Joan Sclonczewski - A Door into Ocean

Last semester, I took Professor Slonczewski’s “Biology in Science Fiction” class at Kenyon College. It’s a course she’s well qualified to teach. When not a professor and microbiologist, Slonczewski pens novels, and I’m sure a fair few here have encountered her name numerous times before and without the “professor” bit before it. Her second novel, A Door into Ocean, not only introduced her Elysium setting but also won her the John. W. Campbell award for best novel. With a scientist’s rigor and a writer’s imaginative flair, Slonczewski brings us to the ocean world of Shora. Other humans aren’t far behind us. Shora’s inhabitants, the Sharers, are about to be challenged by the military might of the Valans.

The contrast between Valans and Sharers, however, is more than environmental, and theirs is not simply a power struggle – it is, rather, a question of the very uses and expressions of power, of the structure of society, and of what is necessary for civilization to function. Of, even, what it is to be human. This is Science Fiction, after all, and the human race has long since learned how to destroy.

Mankind lives a life of strict control. The wonders that the Valans and their offworld overlords command are bare shadows of what they once were. Once, the human race was nearly wiped out, and now they live lives shaped so as to forget such a catastrophe’s recurrence. Theirs is a world carefully structured to exclude forbidden sciences (p. 33) and all learning that is not permissible (ibid). Their structure is strictly hierarchical, and it is a well armed hierarchy. Each level does all in its power to keep the entire structure intact by keeping the level below too weak to destroy it, a mechanism well illustrated when a city is annihilated for its flirtation with illicit nuclear power. Towards the novel’s end, a ruler of many worlds, a man well used to ordering genocides, gives his justifications: “How little keeps our world intact, safe from the law of the jungle. Always, in every age, a few strong men bear the burden of civilization.” (p. 393)

The Sharers, on the other hand, live a life of limitless technological and political potential. Their society is egalitarian and leaderless. Their decisions are made in gatherings. Where the Valans restrict every citizen to the point where he cannot harm himself or others, the Sharers give each and every one of themselves, each self-namer, limitless power. As Spinel characterizes it: Without any nobles and commoners, everyone got to be a High Protector (p. 61). This is joined by the Sharers’ immense technological strength. It is the Valans who come with guns, but we soon realize that each and every Valan can only live on Shora at the sufferance of the Sharers. The Sharers’ mastery of biotechnology is such that they, with ease, defeat any measure of the Valans that they find too intrusive, such that they could, with no trouble at all, devise a virus to end the threat.

This strength of the Sharers is kept cloistered by their personal restraint and strength of character, by what might even be called their wisdom. Despite their strength, violence is anathema to them. What it means to be a self-namer is to recognize oneself in the mirror of the water and in others, to understand the humanity that exists outside yourself, and to grasp a picture of life far vaster than your own concerns. That grasp, the ability to become a self-namer, is the defining feature of sentience to the Sharers, the defining feature of even humanity. As is said: There is more to a human than physiology (p. 77). It is not, either, a grasp that you can reach and then disregard. For, to truly understand life and humanity as it exists outside of yourself, is to step forever outside your own boundaries and to never again end your considerations with your own flesh and physical needs: Conscious beings were meant to control pain, to say yes or no to their physical selves, else how could their souls be freed? (p. 289). (It may be interesting to note, while we are on the subject, that the idea of humanity defined by transcending pain is one of many places ((another of which is the environment of her novel)) in which Slonzcewski is responding to Frank Herbert’s Dune.)

Of course, if we are defining humanity more by philosophy and behavior than by physiology, it’s suddenly rather questionable if the Valans fit the Sharer definition. And that’s a question that’s rather more than academic. If the Valans aren’t humans but just some particularly ferocious breed of beasts, than the Sharer viruses can be unloosed upon them without a backwards thought.

A Door into Ocean is a book about conflict, but that conflict is primarily philosophical. The Sharers have the ability to wipe out the Valans; if they choose not to exercise it, the Valans can more than certainly gun down their unresisting gatherings. As neither a one-stroke victory nor a protracted slaughter have all that much in the way of dramatic tension about them, our plot is less concerned with mechanics than it is with persuasion. Well the factions exercise the powers that they have? That question gives us the novel’s two arcs. The Sharer judgment on humanity is not only contingent upon their watching of the Valan hordes. Spinel, a Valan youth, was brought to the Sharer world just before the conflict’s height for just such a judgment, and we see his attempts to integrate into their (alien, entirely female, and landless) society. On the other side, we have the Valan resolve tested by Sharer pacifism and nonviolent resistance.

Both arcs are interesting ideas well conceived and explored that are dampened but not destroyed by their transformative moments being overstated and often rather cheesy. Slonczewski, I think it is safe to hazard, is rather more comfortable writing ecosystems and societies than single people or close friendships. This isn’t to say that she is a bad writer of character, necessarily. Her skill at conceiving and, then, depicting the interactions between people and the environment and society lead to moments of insight into people as well as into fish. Spinel’s youthful perspective and voice comes across authentically and leads to moments of juvenile but insightful commentary like that about high protectors quoted some paragraphs above.

In moments where the character has to come to the fore, however, moments of high and uncontrollable emotion, Slonczewski often falters, and characters begin to act out in the most dramatic and abrupt manners, leaving the reader’s emotions a good distance behind them in the dust. One characters sudden decision to enjoy some nice terrorism would likely be the prime contender for this, but she isn’t alone. For Spinel, crises are chiefly met with temper tantrums. This could be, to some extent, a function of his age, but it is no less exasperating for it, and, when hundreds of pages and huge personal growth later, Spinel reacts to an event with yet another fit of toddler-appropriate wrath, the reader can’t help but stare uncomfortably at how little he's come.

The dramatic power of nonresistance, meanwhile, is weakened by the inevitability of its victory. This is most obvious when Spinel brings its lessons to his hometown, where the police grumble for about five minutes before going home and giving way, but it sadly doesn’t vanish when the Sharers face the full might of the Valan military. The philosophical conflict at the novel’s heart is one with a very clearly favored side.

The Valans are a bunch of sadistic murderers. The second in command has a plan: “Line up those little ones and snuff them out before their mothers’ eyes. That would get results.” (p. 292) The overseer does too: “You shall activate the satellites to burn out the entire native population of the Ocean Moon. To the last mother and child – do I make myself clear?” (p. 391The main guy himself is no better. He is, after all, convinced that: In warfare there were no innocents (p. 206), and, knowing that, it was galling to have to protect natives along with his troops, and he hoped it would not be interpreted as a weakness (p. 284).

Is this a crowd that has gained your sympathies yet? No? Thought not. When one side is cackling while it devours babies, the reader knows who’s going to win long before the decision’s made, and so the Sharer’s victory becomes a matter not of if but of how, a persuasion that is essentially fated to occur. Besides which, the dissonance of having Valans intellectually capable of grasping the Sharer argument and yet subscribing so long to their kill and burn nonsense is rather hard to reconcile when the moment of epiphany comes knocking.

One last note on the Valan military: its leader, Raelgar, is the fiancé of one of the humans living with the Sharers. She soon realizes how much of a bastard he is, but that betrayal is not so stunning for the reader. It’s a situation nearly identical to that shown in Vernor Vinge’s disappointing The Children of the Sky. In both, a protagonist’s fiancé turns out to be the embodiment of darkness, and we are expected to feel the betrayal of it. But neither shows us the loving relationship that must precede such a betrayal, an omission that just leaves us wondering how the sane one could ever love the beast. Why do Science Fiction authors seem to think that our sympathies are immediately secured by the mere mention of an engagement?

Such issues, though, are not wholly damning. A Door into Ocean is a novel that is absolutely fantastic in its ideas and good even if not great in its execution. It brings a strange world to light, plays out a grand and excellently conceived conflict in its pages, and raises innumerable interesting questions (its treatment of gender, for instance, is an absolutely fascinating issue that I must admit I find myself unqualified to dig deeply into).

Vernor Vinge - A Deepness Upon the Sky

So high, so low, so many things to know. (p. 775)

A Deepness in the Sky is the prequel to his fantastic, Hugo winning novel A Fire Upon the Deep. But unlike most prequels, A Deepness in the Sky doesn't blandly putter about the backdrop or spend its time retconning with sledgehammer subtlety. Though we are exploring Pham Nuwen's history, we're doing so in a fashion far enough removed from the earlier (/chronologically later) novel that A Deepness in the Sky has space to become its own story. In fact, the closest connection between the two is thematic, with A Deepness in the Sky presenting a claustrophobic counterpoint to the mind-boggling expanses of its predecessor.

A Deepness in the Sky is a book of humanity constrained. By the time of its occurrence, humankind has grown far beyond what we can now imagine, but true greatness – the ends of misery and suffering, the permanence of civilization and justice – remain out of reach, nothing more than impossibilities and "Failed Dreams" (p. 323). We've learned much through all these thousands of future years, but mainly we've learned of limits (p. 770). Unable to go beyond the speed of light, no culture can survive between planets and systems, and so planetary civilizations rise and fall. At the height they're wonderful things, but there is so much darkness. (p. 770) No matter how great a civilization may grow, it cannot be eternal. A Fire Upon the Deep showed a path of potential and nigh endless ascension, of mobility and transcendence if only one could overcome the dangers. A Deepness in the Sky, taking place entirely within what that other novel would call the Slow Zone, has the rises and falls without the possibility of growth or apotheosis. It shows humanity endlessly struggling against the "wheel of time" (323) and humanity being endlessly broken upon it. 

It is this inevitability that the outsider, planet-born Pham Nuwen strives against. He dreams of a single Humankind, where justice would not be occasional flickering light, but a steady glow across all of Human Space. He dreamed of a civilization where continents never burned. (pp. 556-7) Motivated by that dream, Nuwen approaches the disparate Qeng Ho trading culture and tries to meld them into a unifying force. But his dreams prove impossible. Mere organization is not enough; humankind is fundamentally outmatched by time and space.

Outmatched within its own boundaries, that is, for the novel's main action takes place far past the establishment of this cycle of rises and falls, takes place as humankind reaches something utterly alien: the On/Off star (which emits no heat at all for 215 of every 250 years) and, on the one planet that orbits it, the Spiders, a nonhuman technological race. Then there's the fact that the Qeng Ho expedition to this star is not the only one. The Emergents have also arrived, a disparate human civilization that possesses its own dark secrets and strengths. 

After their so ominous introduction, it's not that surprising when the Emergents prove villainous and betray the Qeng Ho they'd pretended to coexist with. The Qeng Ho expedition must not only struggle to survive under the Emergent's tyranny but also, in Pham Nuwen's case, struggle to find a way to finally overcome the necessity of these endless and unwinnable life and death struggles. Nuwen, though, is not the only one striving.

Nuwen's counterpart in the space borne part of the story is Tomas Nau, the Emergent's leader, who has reached his own solution with the aid of Focus, an Emergent science that allows once-free individuals to be turned into hyper efficient slaves. This transcendence through cruelty is efficient, allowing not only short term miracles but also the long term coordination and stability that would be needed to truly enact the kind of justice and greatness throughout space that Nuwen envisions. But, though he's initially drawn to use of the Focused, Nuwen eventually realizes that the cost is too high and that any utopia created with such inhumanity at its center is not worthy of its own immortality.

The far opposite of Nau's practicality only approach might be Sherkaner Underhill's. Sherkaner's one of the sentient spider-like creatures that the whole story revolves around, but his role isn't that of a prize passively sitting by while his betters fight over him. No, Sherkaner's busy with his mad ideas, playing the role of the resident and eccentric mad genius, spouting out a thousand flights of brilliancy and fancy a second and then moving on before they're all the way out of his mouth, a tireless flirting around what might just be possible without ever letting the difficulties of reality in, a job that falls those around him to face in order to make use of his mind.

It is, eventually, something like Sherkaner's method that triumphs. No matter how well meaning or ruthless we are, Vinge shows us that we alone are not enough to triumph over time, fate, and inevitability. No, for that we need technology and an endless search for what is possible. In the end, the On/Off star doesn't give Pham Nuwen the answers, but it does show him that answers are not impossible, and, as readers of A Fire Upon the Deep know, that is eventually enough to get him (and all of us?) the rest of the way. As Nuwen himself puts it, "We've finally found something from outside all our limits. It's a tiny glimpse, shreds and drags of brightest glory." (p. 770)

Tying into all this is actually the question of classification. I've seen A Deepness in the Sky often called Hard Science Fiction. That's, well, rather bizarre. Let me remind you, oh venerable and impossible to pin down internet classifiers, that this is a novel that contains a star that turns itself off every once in a while and genuine antigravity, to name just the two most obvious case-breakers. My point here goes beyond simple quibbling with genres, though. A Deepness in the Sky is not a work grounded in the current trends of scientific thought, and one could go so far as to say that that's the entire point of it. This is not a novel about what we know, but rather about what we don't know, and Vinge is damn careful throughout to divorce it from the strict boundaries of 21^st century plausibility. As such, and making full use of Clarke's third law and all that goes with it, Vinge makes frequent references to the "magic" of such incomprehensible things things, be they the On/Off star (p. 197), the previous and inconceivably advanced prior dwellers on Arachna (p. 254), or even Focus technology (p. 294). There's even a mention of the Weird (which, though this is certainly not Horror in either its methods or its mindset, is a rather related field) in the form of a reference to your typical Cthulhonic horror (p. 297).

But, my thousand plus word reveling in Vinge's fascinating thematic arc now past, there's also a story here, and, though I've no doubt done my inadvertent best to convince you otherwise with all my blathering, it's not a pretentious one at all. At its best, it's fantastic. Vinge plots like a hunting hound given flight, free to go anywhere he can imagine and downright damned if he won't explore ever interesting nook, cranny, and consequence of what he's dreamed up. But there are flaws, too, and some are, alas, quite grievous. In my review of A Fire Upon the Deep, I said that "Vinge’s characters, and even his plots, are well overshadowed by his ideas" and that "once just about all’s explained and understood […] a bit of the excitement leaves the affair." In A Deepness in the Sky, we, alas, reach that point far sooner, a likely result of the novel being far more stationary, with much less stage space, and so running out of new and totally out there sights to throw at us far sooner. Once that point's reached, and with the exception of Pham Nuwen's flashbacks, things are up to the plotting and the characters. And things don't go nearly as well.

Once its fantastic opening is done, and once we've settled into its middle section, A Deepness in the Sky proceeds to trudge along for a truly incredible amount of time. There is a climax coming, of course, but we know roughly what shape it'll take from a quarter or a third of the way through, and the vast majority of the character's actions aren't so much bringing it about as they are talking about what they'll do when it hits them of its own volition. This idle and often almost eventless pacing is highlighted by the timescale. Years and years pass over the novel's course, which just seems to turn the character's profitless determination and motionless enthusiasm into, well, nothing at all. Then there's the bewildering way that so many of the novel's intermediate game changers happen entirely off screen and are only alluded to in passing. This is bad aboard the ships, where we spend the majority of our time, but is far worse on the Spiders' world of Arachna, where gaps and skips leave the villain developing somewhere totally out of view and inconsequential feeling and, because of it, undefined by anything but uninteresting blanket statements like Whatever was evil, Pedure was very good at it. (p. 583)

Characters in general prove, if not a problem, not exactly a strength. Like in A Fire Upon the Deep, they're wholly ruled by the forces around them, but here there are long periods where none of those forces are particularly evident and we're left with not much but the characters themselves sitting around. Vinge is decent at creating believable and realistic individuals, but, whether by design or by virtue of falling short, the reader never comes to grow close to any of them. This works for characters like Pham Nuwen and Sherkaner Underhill, both of which are too much larger than life and to scheming to serve as easy points of reader identification, but it does end up leaving the work without any real emotional center, with a bunch of characters that make certainly well realized minor characters but none that the reader ever truly lives through.

Despite these flaws, though, A Deepness in the Sky is a stunning and expansive read. It's not quite as breathtaking or simply excellent as its predecessor, but it still does show off Vinge's skill and imagination, still stretches out and smashes (delightful!) holes in your imagination. Though A Fire Upon the Deep and A Deepness in the Sky are separate enough to be read individually, their combined effect shows both the possibilities for greatness and for disaster in the author's vision of the future, and each is a daring and powerful work of Science Fiction. Put in order, the two show a probable arc for technology's progress. Most of this novel is a seemingly endless stagnation that follows that technology's brief arrival, but just because the answers are hard to find does not mean that they are not there, and Vinge seems sure that technology will eventually able us to succeed at our most fundamental goals.

Alastair Reynolds - Deep Navigation

Though I haven't had the opportunity to discuss his work as often as I'd like, I've never made a secret of my absolute love for Alastair Reynolds. As such, I rather unsurprisingly jumped at the chance to read this collection of fifteen of his stories (dating from all through his career, including his very first published piece) when it was rescued from its horrific price tag on the used market by a second edition.

One of the things that most struck me about Alastair Reynolds' work, reading him for the first time since Terminal World in early 2010, and after having spent much of that interim immersing myself in the Weird Fiction of Thomas Ligotti and others, is Reynolds' own connection with the weird. Of course, I'm hardly the first to raise such a connection. Reynolds himself discusses it in the now-famous initial internet discussion of the New Weird, archived here. He writes that The New Space Opera, as he calls it, can't ever be as weird as the NW [New Weird] unless it becomes the NW itself. This is because the New Space Opera will always exclude anything it can't rationalise.

Now, I'm always a bit hesitant to disagree with a great man like Reynolds, especially when it's about his own work, but I don't think that's accurate. It's true that The New Space Opera can never be as aesthetically or superficially weird, yeah. It can't ever directly visit hell. But, that's not to say that it can't be just as intellectually and thematically weird as anything written by China Miéville, Lovecraft, or any other; it just approaches it from the opposite direction. Instead of birthing nigh unimaginable strangeness through the fantastic, as is the standard approach, what Reynolds does (to tremendous effect, I might add) is follow the rational to its logical conclusion, or farthest extrapolation, and then show us the thousand fold variations and seeming impossibilities, the things that are simply too big or strange for us to ever understand. For an illustration of this, one need only turn to the ending of Reynolds' Pushing Ice and the sheer awe it inspires, the feeling of (as Lovecraft might put it) cosmic irrelevance it forces on us, the forced expansion of thought and perspective until our own lives and worlds are just a distant, nigh invisible glint in the night, and all of that without necessarily needing to violate rationality.

To turn to the stories in this collection, it's stunning how closely Reynolds' descriptions and writing can at times be to those supreme fantasists and horror writers already mentioned, no matter how opposed their methods of reaching those moments of collapsing reality are. In the Fixation, Reynolds explores the idea of multiple dimensions and a method to exploit that multiplicity. The consequences of this are, in all their vivid and disorienting glory, familiar in style to anyone familiar with tales like Ligotti's Nethescurial or Lovecraft's The Colour out of Space: The door has vanished, leaving only a sagging gap in the wall. The floor is made of stones, unevenly laid. Halfway to her bench the stones blend together not something like concrete, and then a little further the concrete gains the hard red sheen of the flooring she has come to expect. On the desk, her electric light flickers and fades. The laptops shut down with a whine, their screens darkening. The lines of change in the floor creeps closer to the desk, like an advancing tide. From somewhere in the darkness Rana hears the quiet, insistent dripping of water. (p. 65) The same kind of insidious change dominates Byrd Land Six, twisting and destroying the humans caught in its path: Cookie had become ice, literally merging with the landscape. His clothes and exposed flesh were glistening and colourless. He was sleek, lacking detail, barely recognizable. (p. 161)

Not every story, admittedly, is successful at establishing or utilizing these expansions of perspective and reality. The Receivers is an alternative history of a world war where faint music can be heard over the British sonic detection systems. But this never goes anywhere, never coheres into some thematic revelation or some practical event, and the pudgy story – which somehow manages to be genteely tensionless even as bombs fall – takes forever to even get that far. The Sledge-Maker's Daughter spends a fair part of its length showing us a fantasy setting before the main character learns the Science Fiction backdrop of her world and the epic war that's taking place around its edges. But nothing ever comes of it. The tale's opening may've given us some feel for the fantasy world, but the Science Fictional revelation comes entirely through a multi-page infodump utterly lacking in emotional punch, and then the piece ends before the interesting parts of the story can even get started. And then there's the bizarre case of Soirée, a tale whose absolutely superb twist is only spoiled by it being a complete rip off of another Alastair Reynolds story (Beyond the Aquila Rift from Zima Blue, to be precise).

All of that's not to suggest, however, that Reynolds' strengths lie solely in that effect. He's at his best when he not only utilizes the strangeness of the weird but melds it with his other great talent, his skill and penchant for large scale, high stakes plots. The Star Surgeon's Apprentice; Fury; Tiger, Burning; and the aforementioned Byrd Land Six all successfully combine out there and thought provoking ideas with gripping plots and well drawn characters. The Star Surgeon's Apprentice's twists are a tad predictable, but that does little to diminish the tale's strength. Tiger, Burning is one of the collection's strongest pieces, a far future detective tale with a Vingian backdrop and an excellent core. Fury, meanwhile, is a distance- and time-spanning tale that perfectly captures the grandeur and feel of the interstellar empire it depicts. It also contains of the collection's greatest images, that of the emperor morphing and growing with his territory, swelling as each new territory – be it a planet, system or entire glittering star cluster – was swallowed into his realm. (p. 76)

Fury's morality, though, is rather more questionable. The narrator is the emperor's bodyguard, but grows horrified when he learns that, at the empire's beginnings, the emperor killed his brother, and that he, the bodyguard, played a role in that killing. As our narrator says, Every glorious and noble act that [the emperor] had ever committed, every kind and honourable deed, was built upon the foundations of a crime. The empire's very existence hinged upon a single evil act. (p. 100) Understandable indignation and horror, but rather harder to understand when one takes in the early wars of conquest that the narrator fully acknowledges: There might once have been a time when [the emperor's]  expansionist ambitions were driven by something close to lust, but that was tens of thousands of years ago. (p. 77) Just in case you think the difference is one of time, that those wars are too far gone for him to be held accountable for, the narrator helpfully says in relation to this one murder: So what if it happened thirty two thousand years ago? Did that make it less of a crime than if it had happened ten thousand years ago, or last week? (p. 100) So galactic wars of conquest, no doubt killing untold millions, aren't a big deal, but when one guy you know bites it, why, that's "unspeakable"! (ibid) Glad to know.

Not every story in the collection, mind you, is of the same Weird-esque cut. Stroboscopic shows us the future of gaming. It's a story somewhat reminiscent, for not too surprising reasons, of Iain M. Banks' Player of Games, in that a seemingly innocent hobby takes on monumental importance, but here that emphasis is not only internal; we're shown a system covered in an icy, brittle peace, where antagonism's only vent short of war seems to be these barely ruled competitions. Not all of it's supremely plausible, but it is inventive and enjoyable. On the Oodnadatta feels a tale of two hearts, the one lightly comedic, the other a horrifying and even disgusting look at the future, at rights, and at exploitation. The disconnect hurts it, but the latter part's more than strong enough to overcome the former, leaving this a memorable and vivid piece.

Viper is a supremely cynical tale (The designers had recognized that a system not amenable to corruption was of no use to anyone. (p. 263)) that seems to be building up to a twist, even shows the twist as it might go, but then backs away. Still, it's a strong read and a thought provoking one as well. Monkey Suit, the collection's only slice of the Revelation Space universe, alas, doesn't fare so well, a simple tale that only gains impact by alluding to (without in any way furthering) elements of other works in the setting. Finally there's Nunivak Snowflakes, the author's very first story. Though filled with developments and clever parts, the Reynolds of its time lacked the skill and finesse to weld them together, leaving it more interesting (both in ideas and from a biographical perspective) than well done.

Much of what I love about Reynolds' writing can be traced back to its blending of art and science, of emotion and intellect, elements of beauty and the vastness of reality. Though often dealing with dense scientific elements (though, even to a non scientist such as myself, the groundedness of those elements varies wildly), the stories here never got bogged down with explanations or grow overly confusing.  Occasionally, though, Reynolds does go too far in the other direction, evidently determined to explain simple things to the most determinedly dull, inattentive reader, like when he clunks out: I looked like a man, but in fact I was a robot. (p. 80) Adding insult to injury, there, the following two sentences (My meat exterior was only a few centimeters thick. Beneath that living shell lay the hard armor of a sentient machine. (ibid)) not only get across the same facts, but do so with immeasurably more style.

The effects of all this go beyond just the prose, though. Art's a vital part of viewing the world in these stories, a means of understanding and interacting with the world, as exemplified by eighteen 'stanzas' of a much longer epic 'poem' written in commemoration of the collapse of part of the polar region of [a race's] Dyson sphere about 1.2 million years ago, an accident that resulted in the deaths of  ~5.6 X 10^12 sentient beings. (p. 69) More personal horrors, too, are rammed home by similar means, as when the murders of a serial killer are described as the formalized sculpture of living meat. (p. 252) Then there's Fresco, one of the collection's two flash pieces, a quietly but grandly beautiful and haunting tale of slowly-shifting art that charts the rise and fall of civilizations. As the caretaker knows: Art is long […] And life short. (p. 245)

All of Deep Navigation doesn't live up to Alastair Reynolds' best work, though it does have several extremely interesting and well executed pieces. Any fan of the man's work is sure to find much to love here, and much, like his first story, that gives interesting perspective on the rest of his oeuvre. For the newcomer, though, this is best saved until after an exposure to Zima Blue, the Revelation Space series, Terminal World, or one of the man's other masterpieces.