Review of A Bridge of Years, by Robert Charles Wilson

There's a lot to be said for doing something consistently well. Robert Charles Wilson may not have developed the stylistic innovation that it takes to be a Notable Writer (which is a little unfair when you consider the innovations he takes in the background and the setting, but that's why science fiction is a ghetto), but he routinely pulls off three feats that are too rarely encountered, and he makes them look easy: he keeps his characters interesting, his ideas consistent, and best of all, he can juxtapose human nature against the vastness of a weird universe, and find the beauty in that. Gets me every time. (I should probably stop buying his books used and make sure he gets a buck.)

In the novel, these bridges of years are navigable (but not controllable) passages through time, probably engineered by some far-future beings, and utilized by other beings, historians from some less-far-future societies, for the study of "early" civilizations. These archaeologists quietly and carefully recruit contemporaries for maintenance of the passages and to supply them with present-day data. Nervous about paradox, they don't interfere much, and aren't much involved in the actual novel. The characters are from several timelines, not too distant in years. They have some different personal technology though, and Wilson also plays around with a couple fictional generations of cybernetic enhancements, from a digital watch to highly integrated (but still removable) performance-enhancing battlefield armor, to a complete menagerie of beneficial insect- and germ-like life-supporting machinery, to something hardly glimpsed, for which any remaining organic component at all is unclear. He has a lot of fun exploring the details of these augmentations (probably because it's easier to make believable), but even if my description sounds questionable, and despite what you might guess from the cover, he's not whacking off over some imaginary technical doohickies. What I really like about Robert Charles Wilson is that he's all about using these clever ideas and gadgets to tell a good story.

That story entwines major characters from four nearby timelines: a protagonist (Tom Winter) from 1989 who stumbles onto the passage; a woman (Joyce) from about thirty years before, whom he meets at the other end; a military deserter (Billy) from about 75 years ahead; and the man (Ben) from a century and a half out, who's supposed to be keeping an eye on things, but has been incapacitated by the fleeing soldier. Wilson does a good job with developing each one's credulity, and keeping their actions in line with their character, even if it chokes off a lot of bizarre what-if speculations about monkeying with causality. They have believable mixes of fear and curiosity, and you can buy the character of someone who'd want to go back and stay. Tom is at a low personal point, has had fears of an ecological future drilled into him by his wife (who left him), and a quiet cabin is only his first escape. The soldier is hiding in the past too, a monster, a scary one. His armor manipulates his biochemistry past the point of sociopathy, and if he's sort of simple and needy without it, he's also got some stubborn quirk of character that makes him resist it in the first place. It's modeled straightforwardly on a drug addiction, and it's not too noble a fight, but here's the inner struggle that's missing in Lucius Shepard's soldier from last time around, some believable inner workings that make him act the way he does, under and through the artificial stimuli. Billy, of all the characters, earns a touching moment of grace in the epilogue.

The sixties sequences were entertaining. It was fun watching a science fiction author play around with what are (by now) period archetypes of Greenwich Village bohemians. Tom's status as an outsider (more than his future knowledge) lets the author poke at these people a little, and reduce them to human scale about as fast as Tom inevitably has to do. The character didn't expect to find love in that time (didn't quite expect real people) but it happened, and the the inescabable existence of their fates--and his own fate, however unknown--depress many of the characters who think about it. The consequences of Tom and Joyce's cross-decades relationship are ultimately unsatisfying, but they still have the literary conceit of being the right ones.

Time travel stories are older than people realize: the rules are very much like the old tales when prophecy was inviolable. You get to play some of the same clever and satisfying tricks, and I've read a lot more good time travel stories than bad ones. If an author uses time machines to play with cause and effect, he's got only a few choices: (1) that the shape of time is fixed, and anything you do on your jaunt to the past has already factored into your future (call this the Bill and Ted version), or (2) the future is changeable from whatever point of view of the time traveler (Back to the Future version). In between, you can still find some working room. A good compromise, informed, sort of, by chaos theory, is that even though a lot of local effects can be changed, the basic structure of history is still circumscribed by some known pattern, and the time traveler can mess around a little without dismantling the fabric of the universe. Another compromise, taking a mighty handwave toward quantum mechanics, suggests that many possible worlds simultaneously exist, and, perhaps, the others don't even disappear when one is examined. (In fact the general shape of observed space-time may be some optimum probabilistic condition where the universe remains unraveled.) From a storytelling perspective, I don't know if it's better to take a stand on this or not: people need the illusion of time for the story to unfold, and its hard to avoid the passage of subjective time (although some fine nonlinear plots are out there). I don't think that Wilson avoided the consequences, but he didn't waste the story on them. A good, solid effort.

Review: Vortex, by Robert Charles Wilson

[Probably contains some spoilers.]

Vortex is another loosely-tied sequel to the big-sweeping science fiction novels Spin and Axis by Robert Charles Wilson, and much like before, I picked this one up while pretty desperate for a read, and Wilson is a reliable satisfaction. You can follow back to those other reviews, but the short version is that I'd found Spin to strike a near-perfect balance of big, cool sci-fi mystery and sensitive, humanist storytelling, while Axis, although well-conceived, somehow managed to lose a lot of urgency. With Vortex, I'm on the train again, and I made the uncharacteristic move or reading the whole damn thing over the space of a day or two. The novels can't be called a series but they're connected. Although they share a broad plot arc of a deepening puzzle on a celestial scale, each one resolves neatly enough on its own terms. (The titles themselves don't signify a heck of a lot.) It's more as though Wilson writes each one in the same universe, more or less, and enough time passes in between both the events and the publication that the remembered details fuzz up. I think there might be some subtle contradictions in the descriptions of the connected worlds and their makers among the books, even if the general idea remains the same.

And the general idea, I will reiterate, is really well put together for a science fiction conceit. Human society has been visited by some unknown and gigantic technological presence, one that (in Spin) isolates the planet, holding it in a temporal bubble as the universe ages around it. Wilson wisely leaves the how as perplexing as the why. At the end of the first novel, earth finds itself linked to other livable worlds through huge archways, and with Axis, we learn that the makers have some use in sampling and preserving (and swapping at long intervals in time through another series of arches) the information that these oddly fostered societies tend to generate. The "hypotheticals" themselves are an enormous and slow-growing network of tiny self-replicating machines, the sort of devices that short-lived biological civilizations tend to generate at some point in their development, and the von Neumann devices of hundreds or thousands of such worlds have, over impossible eons, grown, merged, and evolved into a system that is symbiotic with the more frenetic societies that rise and create and fall. What's really brilliant about this, and I mentioned it before, is how Wilson imparts on them the function an impersonal and mighty god (and related subplots ensue, not unsympathetically). He gives us a watchmaker that's real, and it's as insensate as an ecology, and we are left to learn, again, what it is to be alone(-ish) and also to be Chosen in a universe that's more complex and wonderful and humane than anyone would have ever guessed. Vortex eventually sees life, the universe, and everything right through to the end, shows us an earth scoured, inadvertantly, by humanity's own efforts, to the stars winking out, to expansion and cooling of space right on through to its impending heat death. And he still gives us to care about the people in it. It's why I love his writing.

Vortex tells two stories simultaneously. One is a mystery set amid interesting times in 21st century Texas, where a state psychiatrist and a cop try to understand why a strange boy is writing unsettling journals well above his intelligence level, narratives that are loaded with information that, despite the gonzo setting, contain elements that relate to contemporary crime activity. It's a frame that is just compelling enough to keep the story moving and the tension up, characters just compelling enough to give a damn about, and which lets things get revealed at just the right pace.

The other half is contained in the journals themselves. It begins on the other side of the temporal gate that erupted at the end of Axis, that also absorbed Turk Findley (among others), who wakes up ten thousand years later to a world that's unrecognizable. Wilson leaves the other holdover character, Isaac Dvali, the child prodigy who's been loaded up with human attempts to interact with the hypotheticals off until near the end. Turk is one of two cobbled-together ambassadors to the reader, and they're both of them compelling ones. (And if Turk is not quite the same Turk in the last novel, and if maybe the problem with the character all along was that he couldn't be any more random, then Wilson gives himself a fine excuse for all of this.) They are relateable person in a new community that's integrated beyond current capabilities, and literally adrift in the next-door world (that's dying), floating on its way to the arch to get to earth (which is dead). Our almost-mundanes are in a good position to observe how all the bizarre new technology doesn't prevent human pettiness, zealotry, visciousness, love or decency. The 31st century technology does eventually offer the characters some tools to confront, and, since there is really nothing there to talk to, finally start to use the hypotheticals as a medium to bring all the threads together.

It takes Isaac to do this, to connect it all, and while he have been strange enough to leave out of most of the story, it's his simple and strong motivations that give us, the readers, the story at all, revised, just a bit, to allow a moment or two of grace.

[Sorry about the continued sparse posting, by the way. It's been a sinister combination of time and motivation. I have some other stuff I want to get to at some point or other.]

Jesus Is Just All Right With Me

[For Archaeopteryx or anyone else it may be "new" to. This was written in 2004, embarrassingly vintage swill here, and not edited all that much. Also, here's why I like Robert Charles Wilson. --K]

Animal consciousness...is a rare event in the Universe. Cherished for it's rarity...When primates learned the trick of consciousness, of neurons talking to neurons the way planets talk to planets, making consciousness out of quantum events, there was nothing to get in the way of our evolution...

"Why do people worship gods, Tam?"

Because we're descended from them, Zoe thought. We're their crippled mute offspring, in all our millions.

--Robert Charles Wilson, Bios

A man said to the universe: "Sir, I exist!" "However," replied the universe, "The fact has not created in me a sense of obligation

--Stephen Crane

The question 'what makes us special?' has been around so long as we have been special enough to ask it. Indeed, as more is learned about animal sapience, many of the sacred demarcations of humanity vanish or blur, from tool use to symbolic communication and even speech. The only thing that seems to separate mankind definitively from animals is that at some point in our development, we have been reflective enough to ask what's it all about, and that introspection somehow stuck. We peep over the cusp of consciousness: a handful fewer neurons and the human race is back to monosyllabic grunting and hurling feces at our simian brothers. We do not know what the highest level of sentience in the universe may be, but it's safe to say that we people represent the bare minimum.

And we have every reason to be bitter about it. On one end of the belief spectrum, we are unlucky enough to be have evolved sufficient intelligence to imagine and fear (and collectively, create) our demise while sufficiently primitive to prevent rising above this knowledge and fear. The more faithful believe we have been created by some loving deity, but if this is so, we have evidently been left to our own devices, for surely no god speaks to us directly today. It's tough to forgive a creator who holds us responsible for the nature he placed in us. If God has an ineffible plan, it involves some pretty tough love. Should a superintelligence exist, it's much more likely that we are, ant-like, simply beneath its notice, and we read its will with all the comprehension of human behavior that the ant gathers from a foot suddenly placed in its path. (It is even possible that we are unknowing components of a larger consciousness. Why the fuck not.)

I've called the Judeo-Christian tradition, "as good as any," but in truth, it's better than some. I like, for one thing, the basic Christian code (regardless of actual practice) of humility, charity, forgiveness, and meditatively seeking the kingdom of God. I'll happily interpret it as a highly individualist faith too. I do have a tough time digesting the proscriptions and prescriptions of the overzealous faithful interpreting 2000 year-old politics through more constrained (and often lesser) minds than my own. Even if the bible was inspired by god, it has still been channeled by the corrupt, inefficient minds of men, and they don't make grains of salt big enough.

Blind faith is for suckers, and it seems violate the central lesson of Christianity at that. Buying for now into the Eden myth, it is a desire to be like God (that is, the "sin" of thinking) that makes us so miserable, but this sentience has a reward too, that we may become more than beasts, and perhaps more than that. (But probably not.) Unquestioning acceptance puts us right back on par with the animals, and although this may be return to Eden, it forsakes our responsibility and capacity as marginally better beings. It is like seeking to be intellectually unborn, and you know, fuck that.

The metaphor at the center of Christianity that I still find appealing is this: Jesus, it's said, came down as an incarnation of god, basically to live life as one of us poor benighted bastards for a time. The uncomprehended universe--call it god--may have little regard for humans in general, but it's very comforting to think, maybe without even believing it, that cold infinite nature once gave a damn about us. In perhaps my favorite throwaway apology for Christianity,

Some say he was not a human being at all...but the thought, tangible to us, of some vast intelligence to whom our actuality is no more real than the paper theaters of the toy sellers...[H]e had the power to reconcile the universe with humanity, and humanity with the universe, ending the old breach.

--Gene Wolfe, The Claw of the Conciliator

Is it bullshit? Maybe. Probably. But I get the appeal.

Book Review Index

Since I bother to rate my enthusiasm for the books I review, it will be helpful to both of my readers to get a feel of my tastes. Here's the index since 2004, when I started keeping it. I omitted books that I either couldn't remember well enough or reviewed too poorly to re-grade. I also omitted most of anthologized shorts, and all of the world-events and opinion stuff I read when I am supposed to be working (and of course the technical stuff I read when I actually am working).

The grades reflect my subjective enjoyment more than any objective evaluation. (How else to explain how Conrad did so poorly? Tuan Jim just didn't have the snappy move-along plot I needed at the beach that summer.) The grades may seem to be on a curve, but I think that's less due to inflation and more to my care in choosing reading material.

Anderson, Poul Operation Chaos (B)

Bellairs, John, The Face in the Frost (B+)

Benford, Gregory Cosm (A)

Blake, Katharine The Interior Life (B)

Blish, James A Case of Conscience (A)

Bourdain, Anthony, Kitchen Confidential (B)

Brown, Dan Angels and Demons (C+)

Bujold, Lois McMaster Diplomatic Immunity (A-)

Carroll, Jonathon After Silence (A)

Carroll, Jonathon Sleeping in Flame (B+)

Chabon, Michael The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier and Clay (A+)

Clarke, Arthur C. Childhood's End (B)

Clarke, Arthur C. Rendezvous with Rama (B)

Coatzee, J. M., Elizabeth Costello (A)

Conrad, Joseph Lord Jim (B)

Dahl, Roald The Roald Dahl Omnibus (B-)

Davies, Robertson, The Rebel Angels (A)

Daniel, Tony Superluminal (B+)

Dean, Pamela The Secret Country (B+)

Dean, Pamela The Hidden Land (B)

Dean, Pamela The Whim of the Dragon (B+)

DeLillo, Don Underworld (B+)

Eco, Umberto Baudolino (C)

Friesner, Esther Wishing Season (C+)

Gaiman, Neil Anansi Boys (A)

Gibson, William Idoru (B+)

Gibson, William Pattern Recognition (B+)

Gibson, William Neuromancer (B)

Goldman, Willian, The Princess Bride

Greene, Brian The Elegant Universe (B)

Greene, Graham The Power and the Glory (A)

Harris, Bob Prisoner of Trebekistan (B+)

Helprin, Mark Winter's Tale (A-)

Holman, Sheri The Dress Lodger (A-)

Juster, Norton The Phantom Tollbooth (A+)

Kay, Guy Gavriel The Last Light of the Sun (A+)

King, Stephen Wolves of the Calla (A-)

King, Stephen Song of Susannah (B+)

King, Stephen The Dark Tower (B+)

Kushner, Ellen Swordspoint (B+)

LeGuin, Ursula K. The Dispossessed (A)

LeGuin, Ursula K. The Left Hand of Darkness (A)

LeGuin, Ursula K. The Telling (A-)

Levitt, Steven and Stephen Dubner Freakonomics (B+)

Lieber, Fritz The Big Time (B+)

McCarthy, Cormac The Road (A)

McEwan, Ian Saturday (B)

Mirrlees, Hope Lud in the Mist (A-)

Morrow, JamesTowing Jehovah (B+)

Nafisi, Azar Reading Lolita in Tehran (A-)

Noon, Jeff Vurt (B+)

O'Connor, Edwin The Last Hurrah (A)

Park, Paul Celestis (B+)

Park, Paul Soldiers of Paradise (A)

Patterson, James and Andrew Gross The Jester (C)

Powers, Richard, The Echo Maker (A-)

Powers, Tim The Drawing of the Dark (B)

Powers, Tim Declare (A)

Powers, Tim Last Call (A+)

Pratchett, Terry Maskerade (B)

Pratchett, Terry Soul Music (B-)

Pratchett, Terry The Wee Free Men

Pressfield, Steven, Gates of Fire (B)

Priest, Christopher The Separation (A)

Robbins, Tom Jitterbug Perfume (B+)

Roberts, Keith Pavane (B+)

Ryman, Geoff Air (A)

Saberhagen, Fred The Berserker Throne (B)

Stephenson, Neal Zodiac (A-)

Stephenson, Neal Snow Crash (A)

Stephenson, Neal Cryptonomicon (A)

Stephenson, Neal The Diamond Age (A-)

Stewart, Jon Naked Pictures of Famous People (B)

Stewart, Sean The Night Watch (B+)

Swanwick, Michael Bones of the Earth (B)

Tolstoy, Leo War and Peace (A)

Twain, Mark Letters from the Earth (B)

Varley, John The Golden Globe (A+)

Varley, John Millenium (B-)

Vinge, Vernor Across Realtime (A-)

Vinge, Vernor Rainbows End (B+)

Vinge, Vernor Tatja Grimm's World (C+)

Vonnegut, Kurt Cat's Cradle (A-)

Vonnegut, Kurt Jailbird (A-)

Westlake, Donald E. Bad News (B+)

Westlake, Donald E. Drowned Hopes (B)

Williams, Walter Jon City on Fire (B+)

Wilson, Robert Charles Blind Lake (A)

Wilson, Robert Charles The Harvest (B+)

Wilson, Robert Charles Spin (A+)

Wolfe, Gene The Knight (A-)

Wolfe, Gene The Wizard (A)

Wolfe, Gene Nightside of the Long Sun (A)

Wolfe, Gene Lake of the Long Sun (A)

Wolfe, Gene Calde of the Long Sun (B+)

Wolfe, Gene Exodus from the Long Sun (A)

Wolfe, Gene On Blue's Waters (A)

Wolfe, Gene In Green's Jungles (B)

Wolfe, Gene Return to the Whorl (A)

Wolfe, Gene Soldier of Sidon (A)

Zelazney, Roger Changeling (D)

Zelazney, Roger Damnation Alley (C-)

Book Reviews: M. Helprin; K. Roberts; V. Vinge; C. Priest; R. C. Wilson

Note: As promised, here they are. Let the solipsism commence.

These are reviews that I've written in the last two months or so. I've been keeping a book log for a couple of years, but have little desire to go back and edit my earliest screed, so May/June seems a good enough place to start. The letter grade, if you were wondering, refers more to my enjoyment and less to any objective level of quality.

Spoilers abound, and I don't care.

Mark Helprin, Winter's Tale (A-)

Winter's Tale is is a tall tale, and an intimate one, dense with hyperbolic prose, as though Helprin has an abundance of color (blues, whites and grays, mostly), stuffing about four hundred pounds worth of it into what's essentially a fifty pound story. All that fanciful description is nice though, and Helprin is evidently one of those guys that can just turn the crank and spew out the magic. Read it and let those words just keep washing over you.

But the book is long enough so that some language patterns get annoyingly reused. And it's not much in the way of plot either, and the millenialist latter two-thirds of it seems like an unnecessary appendage. He introduces whole new characters and a whole new perspective and a whole new historical setting, all after the good part wraps up the nineteenth century Peter Lake. The worst failing of the story, however, is that for a story that's about New York, it's not much like any New York I've visited. It sneaks by on the stuff that's hard to fact-check--I've never noticed the maritime geography much (and I doubt even the residents do) and I don't have a time machine to 1880--but the vitality and scenery and streets and cars and the rest all seem off. The existence and life of some characters never is quite explained or never quite makes sense (and Jackson Meade, Cecil Wooley, Mootfowl are a lot worse for the effort at explanation). The upstate mysticism increases over the course of the novel.

Still, Helprin is so effortless with the language almost every fault or faux pas can be forgiven.

Though Winter's Tale is in many ways inimitable, it still draws comparisons with other inimitable works. Foremost, it draws one with Mervyn Peake's Gormenghast, which is also about a city. One much more bizarre and disfunctional than the other, and altogether quirkier. Helprin's probably the better talent (by a nose), but Peake's imagination and visual sense really rule that contest. (And Peake nailed a few paragraphs that are just plain untouchable.) Another comparison is with John Crowley's Little, Big what with the end of the world and all, and the return of innocence (Tolkein in reverse--the recovery of the Wild Wood and not it's loss), as well as other, lesser (and more, uh, imitable) gentle EOTWAWKI fantasy fiction (Stephen King's Dark Tower maybe).

Vernor Vinge, Rainbows End (B+)

I feel a little guilty about plugging this guy's "(growing) writing chops." He's still a wonderful idea man, the best in the business maybe, but, well, he's not like Mark Helprin, who made the magic seem cheap. The characters grow and stuff, but not really in an organic manner. I like where he's trying to take them, but they just kind of drift there instead of develop. It's not that they're badly drawn, really, they just don't arc very well. A worse sin, he's got men who are poets, and well, he's got no poetry written into the story. (That would take real literary balls mind you, but the absence is conspicuous. One or two couplets would have done it.)

The plot turns the pages though, and the people are interesting enough to sell the ideas. The ideas really are great though. Better than anyone, Vinge can put together not just an idea, but a complete universe of ideas, and make it fit together with all the ramifications and all that subtext. We're dumped into a world of highly integrated wearable computing. Vision is enhanced with information. Touch interfaces are catching up. Present-day culture has adjusted believably. It's pre-Vingean singularity but things are moving fast. The characters repeat "it's hard to keep up." Kids are smarter than their parents, and mastery of the video game-like manipulation of technology is much more important than any mastery of the physics (a neat, but frightening angle, which Vinge credibly explored). Information is everywhere, and it is king. The distributed computing is similar to that in Neal Stephenson's in The Diamond Age, and no doubt elsewhere, borne out by ubiquitous and invisible network nodes.

(As is often the case in books like this, I wonder first, where the power comes from, and second, what do the rest of the 5.9999 billion inhabitants of the earth fill their time with.)

I really can't state enough that no one weaves a technological society better than Vinge does,
even if he's a so-so literary writer. Oh well.

Keith Roberts, Pavane (B+)
6/25/06

Pavane is an introspective alternate history hinged on the untimely assassination of Elizabeth I and the 400 extra years of middle ages which occurred as a consequence. I'm okay with the downer mood, but I can see why new writers are often advised to move things along with dialogue and to go easy on the adjectives (especially for shorts, several of which this novel is composed). Roberts does a lot of telling, less showing. He's a tolerable writer for all that, though, and I do like his name. You don't necessarily have to rely on those snappy plots when you're good enough, and Roberts almost is.

Pavane as a whole is better than some of its parts. Occasional stumbles in pacing and too-much narration persist, but the story improves drastically when, the greater arc finally becomes apparent (about the fourth segment in, which is too long to wait), and by the novel's end, things are fitting together fairly nicely. There's a sweeping theme that's revealed as well, a theory of alternate histories, wheels of time, and fairies that holds together better than I would have guessed, had I read a synopsis of it. (A pavane is a court dance, with a formal pattern. So's history, Roberts would say here.) It's a long way to get there, however, and the early cues are pretty subtle.

(Pavane was brought to you by the word "skirled")


Christopher Priest, The Separation (A)

Starry-eyed review: Whoa!
Cynical review: I liked it better when it was called The Prestige

But hey, you see that grade? I've got little cynicism in store for this one. It's just that it's difficult to miss Priest's general fascination with twins, and almost impossible not to compare his different twin stories. (He's got twin children of his own, according to the book jacket, and I've gotta wonder how comfortable they are with it.) The Separation is the superior of the two. It's all that, plus a nice bag of alternate history.

The Prestige was a great story in it's own right--playing with doubles and twins and with the intriguing secrecy (and disappointing reality) of professional magicians--but it was regrettably scuttled by a really stupid science fictional premise (Nikolai Tesla had built and endowed a teleporter that left behind plastic corpses). Priest gets out of this one by avoiding revealing the premise altogether. It's twinning in the verb sense, splitting of a single entity, here about a historical turning point.

The main characters are twins too, formerly close but now estranged, and they pull a switcheroo of sorts into alternate realities. We're introduced to the pair via a war historian, in whose reality the second world war ended in 1941 with an accepted German peace proposal. The story is told in fragments, including notes of (imagined) history texts, letters, and, prominently, the diaries of each twin. It's hard to do justice to how well Priest weaves these all together.

The first twin is a pilot, and while passing the German peace delegation (twice) over the English channel, somehow enters another reality in which his brother dies, and, we slowly realize, it's the reader's (i.e., our) universe. The second twin survives in his version, but has realistic sidebars in several other alternate realities, each increasing in length, and each going kablooey with a sudden and dream-like fraternal confrontation. There is evidence for at least two of these being "real" under the premises of the story, however (our historian and the deliverer of the notebooks are real people in different timelines), but I suppose it's best to assume that the most real is the one in which the reunion was indefinitely forestalled.

A final note: the historian is the only part (and it's the dullest part) told in a third-person omniscient viewpoint. Some definitive closing this voice was very much in order, but it's infuriatingly neglected. I'm sure Priest did it on purpose. I don't know if I approved.

(The word that Christopher Priest couldn't get out of his head: "obsessed")


Robert Charles Wilson, Spin (A+)

Robert Charles Wilson may well be my favorite author. He writes in a manner and on themes that appeal to me greatly on a personal level. I can't think of anyone who speculates more interestingly and more sensitively on the biggest questions of all. Why are we here? Are we alone? Is there a point to it all? Even when he answers no (or a plaintive I don't know), he makes it feel like there's a point in asking, even if it's only from the worm's perspective. Especially when it's from the worm's perspective. Yeah, there are better eyes for character and better stylists and tighter plotters even in science fiction (but you have to look hard for them in the ghetto: I'm more inclined to delve among the famous or canonical), but Wilson is unparalleled in defining just how small is the scope of humanity and in the face of that, just how much it's worth caring about. And as ideas go, they're always big and brave and smart (even when they're silly).

I can't say he's ever really disappointed me, but just the same, one leg of the stool or other was always a little weak. I've been waiting for some time for Wilson to crank one out of the park on every level. I've been waiting for something I could take to my wife and my friends, hold it up proudly, and say this is what science fiction can do. Spin just may be it.

Read it already.

(R. C. Wilson brings this to you with the word "regolith")

Review: Axis, by Robert Charles Wilson

Axis is the sequel to Spin, which I (much more succinctly than usual) enjoyed. A worthy followup I suppose, but I the enjoyment this time around was somewhat less. (Spin was well-received and won some awards, and maybe Wilson worked fast to sell a few books while his brand was hot.) I found the characters likeable, but not especially compelling. Or rather, I found that the intersting people were the ones who spent most of the novel offscreen while protagonist Lise Adams, in her effort to find out about the disappearance of her father, gets turned into too many expository circles for the purposes info-dumping. Wilson does a lot of telling of the background, stuff which, in other novels I remember, he was decent enough to get into a story of discovery or else just remain decently unanswered. It might be because this version has a substantial backstory that it needs to submit to the reader, in order to get to the questions of What's Really Happening down there with the deep magic.

He gave himself a lot of good stuff to work with. There's a sudden injection of the world into a universe a couple billion years older, and populated a bit more completely by a thin, slowly expanding skein of self-replicating hardware. There's the big puzzle of its baffling, disconnected attention to human society. There's humanity's brash attempts to understand it, a sort of self-exiled biochemical Manhattan project with human subjects. There's the boy Isaac (said subject) and Sulean Moi, an unwelcome observer in the compound getting on as outcasts' outcasts. There's competing ideas of human anthropological development in different circumstances. The polyglot colonial landscape that set the detective and chase scenes is well-conceived too, but, while not especially horrible, that particular plot was only just enough to keep the pages turning until the last quarter of the book, where the characters finally come to face the strangeness. I could have done with more Sulean and Isaac, more evidence of crazed obsession among the true believers. More internal conflict needed here please, and less 'splainin.

And while I liked the large questions that Wilson plays with, a little bit more philosophical meandering on the ideas wouldn't have upset me too much either. I mean, he's basically, and later explicitly, offered a plausible--on a science-fiction level--conception of what a powerful and indifferent god might actually look like. And it's just a damn cool idea: a universe that's full of designed machines that (very slowly, and with the aid of some fourth-dimensional physics without which they couldn't cover much volume (these don't even get a handwave, which is just as well)) reproduce and expand and communicate with each other among the cold vast reaches of space. Is it evolutionary and insensate, the characters ask, or is it thinking out there, mimicking meat heads on an impossible scale? Does it live and die too, is it finite? The manifestations of the big celestial mind, the behavior of its "cells", are pretty cool too, machine-like, life-like, weird, and pretty innovative when seen from the ground. It's use for civilization, we learn, is to grow itself. Biological societies at a certain state of development will eventually launch hardware into the void, and when they encounter evidence of that network, will want to swap collected information on that scale too. Maybe, like our jelly life, the cosmic mind is out to create pockets of information in eternal defiance of the second law.

It's likely that many of Wilson's novels (well, that I've read) could get retconned back into this same universe. The themes presented here are definitely his usual schtick, which I've always liked. The couple requisite moments of sentimentality are not forgotten, finding compassion in that weird juxtaposition of the cosmic against the human.

This Is Why We Can't Have Nice Things

Like many a cartoon American male (actual photo!), I've been drawn (heh), more or less against my will, into watching Downton Abbey. Of course, I don't like to think my initial aversion is so comical as all that: the show basically encourages the viewer to empathize with the idle lives of a bunch of repressed, inbred, aristocratic motherfuckers. Yes, there are real struggles with class and status presented on the show, sometimes with a shred of cleverness and sometimes more as a scrubbed and kind-hearted anachronism, but on the whole, these mostly are just props to steer the characters, highborn and low, toward soap-operatic plots. (God help me, I think Maureen Dowd has just the right take on it, which has got to happen about as often as a hit shows airs on PBS. Downton Abbey as Gone with the Wind? Yowch!) My own opinion of the show is that when the omnipresent reality of ruin is better presented--in the war or in the workhouses, say--then it is more compelling than when it's just a drama of manners of these surprisingly egalitarian-minded overlords. [And sure, I agree the individual characters are well-enough conceived so that I care what happens to them, and that the costume is great, and that most of the (gulp) casting and acting is a whole lot better than the actual writing deserves.] But the ultimate case for Downton Abbey is the one that the show itself makes again and again. It is, well, Downton Abbey itself. The message is that even though change happens, nice things are worth having because they are nice things.

Granted, this is an insufferably English view of nice things (and it's one that I've seen often enough in British novels to pick right up on), but it's a hell of a step up from the "glory and conquest" view of nationalism (er, not to say the self-styled empire lacked that either). The motif of Downton is preservation, and the principle conflict in the show is one of sustainability. It's made of idealized rustic green estates that are topped off with a comfortable grandeur, one which imagines that all of its elaborate gimcracks and mannered conventions--livery, variegated flatware, gravelled walking paths, riding and hunting, all the forelock-tuggings and "m'lords"--hell, the nobility and the smiling peasants themselves--all are explicitly useful, that there's a good reason the chairs are a set distance from the table and you that you should pull up the right claret from the cellars, just like there's a good reason to rotate crops and to pass on the right. Downton Abbey imagines that the land and its customary adornments are things worth holding on to, that they are essential parts in a long-ago optimized machine which needs to produce nothing but itself. Of all the apologia for aristocracy, conservation of nice things is the only one that I have found not to be laughable on its face. The family is allowed to inhabit the manor because the estate is worth having, not because the family is.

Downton Abbey, in other words, is a community that is valued as such. The community needs to be complicit in the concentration of its wealth, to support the estate. It's an enabling fiction of a community, and I don't forgive that. It's built on the backs of those kindly-seeming laborers, on net ancestral plunder, and on a system that allows one entitled and unproductive class to drain its resources from others. The antebellum American south copied the model consciously, and it was a horrorshow. (Meanwhile, the somewhat more communitarian settlement of the colonies to the north set up some of our nation's enduring conflicts.) The recent pretense to democratize American greenspace only got us the suburbs, a boring, shoddy clapboard fiction built on consumption instead of conservation. The people's revolutions of last century--though you have to appreciate the generations of effort it took to get outside the thought box--often earned central parties and widespread repression. It's a real conflict of the human animal, and it sucks that we can't seem to have nice things without massive inequality railing along with it. Authoritarianism, stifling of individual expression, and a devolution to oligarchy seems to be part and parcel with any of them.

One novel I recall very fondly is Gypsies by Robert Charles Wilson. This author uses science fiction constructs to flesh out and deliver some sock-you-in-the-eye humanist themes. In this one, a family of young people possesses the power to step between alternate realities--some are better than others--but only, as the painfully delivered climax reveals, worlds which they are capable to conceive. We are limited, he says, all of society is limited by our collective imaginations. It's Candide with a quantum-mechanical kludge, that only keeps 99% of the cynicism. It's a nice empirical shortcut to allow a writer: some societies do evolve to be more sustainable, beautiful, and happy, and it would be nice if we could somehow sample for them with better tools than history, theory, and propaganda. The problem is that I wouldn't believe anybody who told you that any one of them is as good as it can be, or that this is the way it must be. Anyone who spews that is romanticizing some nonexistent ideal (as they do on DA), or else is using you. I've been a technical guy all my life, and I place a great value on evidence, consistent thinking, and proper weighting, which certainly applies to something as grand and important as culture. As I get older, however, I understand that we need to cultivate imagination every bit as much. If we don't let ourselves dream better, then we also fail.