Integral Trees Book Cover

When I review hard SF, I often loathe to give away juicy details about the setting, because discovering them is part of the joy of reading such books. I don’t really have such reservations with Integral Trees because Niven front-loads most of the hard science into a gigantic expository dump in the first few dozen pages. Everything you need to know about the setting is condensed at the beginning of the book, accompanied by helpful diagrams that help you understand it. So I don’t really feel bad for spoiling it here.

Imagine a binary solar system composed of a neutron star and a regular main phase yellow star. The neutron star has a single captured satellite, which happens to be a gas giant in an unusually low orbit just beyond it’s Roche limit. Because of the tidal forces acting on the planet in such a low orbit most of the lighter gasses from it’s atmosphere have been siphoned out into a vast gas torus surrounding the neutron star. The torus is about a million kilometers thick, and it’s dense core (known as the “Smoke Ring”) is composed almost entirely from nitrogen, oxygen and hydrogen forming a breathable atmosphere. The companion yellow star provides ample sunlight allowing life to flourish and evolve within the narrow gas ring.

The Smoke Ring is essentially a world of endless sky. There is no solid ground anywhere within the ring, but water is plentiful. Of course since everything is in free-fall, it does not form lakes or rivers but rather coalesces into spherical floating globules. Most of plants and animals that inhabit the ring are free fall adapted, capable of limited flight and possess trilateral symmetry allowing them to see in all directions without repositioning. Plants, on average are fragile, spindly and tend to form dense clumps, using foliage and web-like branches for both photosynthesis and capturing and sieving up organic matter from the air, as it floats by.

Picture of the spherical plant life clumps within the smoke ring.

The one exception to this rule are the titular integral trees, which are absolutely massive. The largest of the trees grow up to about a hundred kilometers in length, and are tidally locked with respect to the neutron star. Their center of mass is located at the mid point of the trunk, and both ends terminate in a tuft of foliage. The tuft ends are typically subject to gale force winds which causes them to bend in opposite directions, giving the plants the characteristic, integral-sign shape after which they were named.

The tufts collect water and floating debris to and provide natural shelter for all kinds of smaller animals, and parasitic plants. The tidal forces create a gravity like effect, that pulls nearby objects toward the trunk. Any water that collects on the trunk is pushed towards the tufts, creating little streams and rivulets across the bark. As a result each tree is it’s own, tiny, self contained ecosystem.

This is probably why they were chosen by human colonists who discovered the torus roughly five hundred years before the events described in the books. The original settlers were mutineers who have rebelled against the oppressive totalitarian state, and escaped into the the smoke ring, and established a new civilization there. Most build communities within the tree tufts, or in the radial jungles. Because resources required to build industry (such as heavy metals) are scarce in the Smoke Ring they live simple rural lives, holding on to the few old technological gadgets they were able to preserve and keep in working condition. In most communities the post of a “Scientist” is akin to that of a shaman: a community healer and spiritual leader, who consults ancient records to get insights into the true nature of things.

The picture from the expanded cover, featuring the bending trunk of an Integral Tree.

This is a fantastic, and incredibly imaginative setting. But once you read through the first chapter, you basically know all there is to know about it, at which point you might as well just close the book and do something else. The rest of the book is just boring people, having boring adventures. The few revelations about the setting that have not been jam-packed into the introduction, are delivered in the laziest way possible. In most cases the characters simply read a paragraph of notes left behind the original settlers, and then complain that they don’t understand what it means. It is obvious that these exposition dumps are intended for the readers, since not even the tribal “Scientists” remember enough of the old science to decipher them fully.

Bland characters and less than stellar conflict and resolution are not uncommon problems in the realm of hard SF. Writers who can deliver compelling science lectures wrapped inside space adventure novels often struggle to portray believable, characters that readers can relate to. The undisputed masters of the genre however tend to be aware of this, and route around the problem. Gregg Egan for example is really good at centering his novels around some novel scientific quagmire or mystery that the characters seek to solve. Even though some of his characters may be only broad personality sketches, they become relocatable due to sharing a common goal with the readers: the need to solve and unravel the same scientific puzzle. Egan also tends to make his protagonists somewhat odd, alien or somehow exceptional and unique: they are genderless artificial intelligences, disembodied post-humans and etc.. This often tricks the readers to latch that much harder onto the few human qualities they do display.

Niven’s approach is the direct opposite of this. His characters are bland every-men, who neatly fit into a few standard archetypes they never seem to outgrow. All the interesting information in front loaded, or delivered in exposition globs, meaning he can’t trickle small revelations about the nature of the smoke ring throughout the novel. His book is constructed to rely on the strength of his characters. Unfortunately, none of them are likeable enough for one to care about their struggles.

The cultures of the Smoke Ring are also extremely rudimentary and boring. One would think that since travel is difficult, and inhabitants for different trees rarely come into contact with each other, their cultures would vary. One would think that inhabitants of a free floating spherical jungle would live a drastically different than people who inhabit the trees. But the differences between all these people are mostly superficial. They use different governing systems (some more oppressive, other more democratic) but that’s about it.

People of the Smoke Ring have no religions, no legends and no superstition. Their lives seem impossibly boring, shallow and petty. Even the one mildly interesting plot hook is completely wasted. The ancient ramjet used by the original colonists is still orbiting the gas torus. It is controlled by an AI which is still loyal to the state, and has spent the last five centuries plotting how to re-integrate the free people of the Smoke Ring back into the State. The ship and the diabolically intelligent entity that controls it are a constant threat, which never fully pays off.

The book as a whole is disappointing. A fantastic setting ruined by poor execution, bland characters and uninteresting conflict.

About a year ago I wrote a gigantic 3 part review of Jacek Dukaj’s mega-anthology King of Pain. It was a huge, encyclopedic size collection of short stories and novellas, chief among which was The King of Pain and the Grasshopper. I wrote about it in part 2 of my review and while it was not my favorite story in the set, I genuinely enjoyed it. I’m bringing it up because at the core it is had the same basic premise and Budz’s novel: it also depicted a world in which a cutting edge biotechnology allowed our species to self-segregate into distinct, non-compatible biological clades hyper-adopted to artificial environments. Dukaj took this idea and kept winding it up until he produced a story about a sort of bio-warfare waste accidentally jump-starting a brand new, fast evolving, hyper adaptive alien life and eventually a kind of biological singularity. Budz on the other hand is more interested in writing a Bio-punk techno-thriller.

Clade: book cover

Both authors however start with the same idea: a chain of man made eco-disasters makes the planet near inhabitable forcing humanity to use aggressive bio-engineering to create brand new versions crops and livestock that can survive on a planet ravished by pollution, corporate chemical warfare, and fast mutating rogue commercial retro-viruses. Come to think of it, Paolo Bacigalupi also started with this premise in his Windup Girl but he allowed the civilization to fall, and then wrote about the survivors. Dukaj and Budz both assume human ingenuity can not as much save the planet, but re-make the nature to the point where it can be reigned in and controlled narrowly avoiding apocalypse. The former, explored a setting in which the exponential progress curve is not tapered by the ecological near-apocalypse and new disruptive technologies keep pushing the environment towards another collapse. In Clade the ecological collapse is a wakeup call which results in heavy regulation and tight corporate control yielding a return to stable ecology at the cost of social upheaval.

Dukaj is a bit old school in that he believes that the only entities with enough resources to survive global biosphere collapse are heavily industrialized first world nations. The major superpowers seal themselves against the outside world and employ a kind of genomic frequency hopping to protect themselves from rampant, inexpensive bio-terrorism. Budz, much like Bacigalupi does not believe that the traditional nation state notion can survive in a post-ecology world. He sees old power structures fold and the factual power rests on the corporate backbone that underpinned and financed them. It is corporations that re-shape and re-make their environment, and it is human greed (rather than fear, nationalism and xenophobia as in King of Pain) that shapes the new social landscape.

Your clade is determined not by citizenship, but by your class. You are claded for the job you do, and the neighborhood you live in. Unlike Dukaj’s post-apocalyptic vision of sequence-hopping biospheres, Budz’s Earth is still a global village. As long as you have the money you can travel and go as you please. If you are a blue collar worker, or an unemployed slum dweller however, the “nice neighborhoods” are off limits to you – your body is simply won’t survive there. Don’t even think about stepping into a high end Gucci or Armani boutique unless you want to be coughing and pissing blood for the next few months (provided security guards can drag you out before you go into anaphylactic shock). In fact, even loitering outside the store will probably give you a bad rash. Need to go to a rich neighborhood for work? Don’t worry, they’ll temporarily re-clad you. Just remember not to kiss your wife because she might have a bad reaction and die. As visions of future go, this one is pretty grim, but not hopeless.

Out of the three post-ecology I mentioned, Burdz’s is possibly the most optimistic one. The environment, though far from healthy is stable. The economy is booming. The protagonist is a low wage latino bio-tech support worker cum gardener whose task is to take care of special vegetation genegineered to be used by orbital mining and research colonies. This job was his big break, and he hopes to use it to escape the slums where he grew up. He is an ordinary guy with big dreams and a lot of ambition, and eagerness to impress his supervisors which makes him a perfect pawn in a game of corporate espionage and sabotage.

Budz borrows heavily from the old-school Cyber-punk tradition but makes it feel fresh by imbuing it with modern sensibilities, and replacing clunky and ostentatious plastic and chrome with subtle bio-tech and nano-machines. Instead of Gibsonian cyberspace he describes ubiquitous social networks, and idiosyncratic, self learning, personal assistant AI’s whose buggy programming has them grow neurotic and ever more capricious as they get closer to approximating human personalities.

Unlike Dukaj who chases after the big ideas big payoffs, Budz takes time to flesh out his characters, explore their world, and touch upon the social and racial tensions in a world where social mobility is biologically impossible and the clade system is used as a tool in class warfare. Highlighting these tensions is not his focus though. He is more interested in creating a high-stakes techno-thriller adventure in which the little guy sticks it to the man and gets rich at the end. And it’s a pity, because his version of post-eco-collapse world could have been used for some much deeper and heart-felt exploration of the contemporary social issues. If you’re looking for that, then Bacigalupi is your man. If you want high-concept unrestrained singularity-edge SF go with Dukaj. What Budz delivers is a fun, entertaining adventure with likable characters and couple of memorable set pieces.

Grass Cover

Grass is a planet, one of a dozen or so human colonies scattered throughout the galaxy. It is a rather backwards, provincial and mostly rural world with little to no industry. It’s only major city is clustered around the space port, which sees a good deal of off-world traffic because the planet is a convenient half-way point on some major trade routes. Outside the port and the commerce going on in the city, little else happens on Grass. The planet is ruled by a handful of aristocratic families who seem to be obsessed with fox hunts. Only the animals they hunt are only foxes in name. They are some indigenous alien life form, as are the hounds and the mounts ridden to the hunt. Little is known about the customs of these people, because they are reclusive and xenophobic and distrustful of foreigners.

For many generations the aristocrats of grass covered planet has been left to its own devices. Now however an incurable and deadly plague is sweeping all across the human colonies decimating their population. The authorities try to keep it secret to prevent panic, while frantically searching for a cure. The plague seems to be everywhere, except Grass. In fact there is some evidence that infected travelers who had a lay-over on Grass were mysteriously cured of the disease.

An ambassador is sent to the planet under some official pretext, with a secret mission to investigate the matter. He and his family are to infiltrate the aristocratic circles, find out what is known about the plague, and try to convince the leaders of the planet to allow a scientific investigation that could help develop a cure if one exists. Because the aristocrats of the Grass are known to be avid hunters, the Terran authorities pick a family of former Olympic equestrian athletes in the hopes they can find common ground with the locals in their shared love of horseback riding.

This proves to be a complete misunderstanding. The Grassian “mounts”, “hounds” and “foxes” turn out to be nothing like their counterparts from Earth. The hunt is more than mere entertainment, but rather a ritual experience that is fundamental to the Grassian culture, but at the same time deeply unsettling to Terrans. The relationship between the huntsmen and their hunting “animals” is strange and troubling to say the least. What is even more worrisome is the mystery that surrounds the creatures that are being hunted?

The Terran ambasados realize that Grass holds more than one secret… But perhaps these secrets are connected. For example, there are ruins of an advanced ancient alien civilization lost in the grasses. Those aliens died off long before first humans made planet fall. Similar ruins have been found on few other planets, but the ones on Grass are unique because they contained alien remains… All mangled, broken, dismembered and scattered throughout the city. Whatever killed them may now pose a threat to human colonists.

I must admit that I really love this type of stories with in which you the setting itself is a part of a big mystery. Tepper masterfully teases the reader with little details of the Grassian way of life without ever revealing too much until it is dramatically appropriate. It is one of those settings that is best approached with little to no prior knowledge. Unfortunately I might have already gave you a pretty good idea of what exactly is going on on Grass with my Monday post. So you should… You know… Retroactively, un-read it before picking up this book.

Actually no, that’s not accurate. What I might have let on in my last post is merely the first reveal in the book, and there are several layers to the mystery. So even if you have figured out the “mounts” are more than meets the eye, you are still only a little bit ahead of the game.

Besides, the book is worth reading just for the character alone. Majorie, the protagonist is wonderfully fleshed out, nuanced and flawed characters I have encountered lately. She is a passionate, strong, drive, ambitious and independent woman who desperately tries to keep her family together, even though her husband is unfaithful and abusive and her children are selfish and ungrateful. She plays the role of submissive, understanding wife and mother, but on the inside she is growing angry and resentful. Then regrets and feels guilty about that. She is this sort of wonderful boiling cauldron of conflicting emotions: love, anger, resentment, guilt, duty, religious devotion, etc.. Tepper just puts the lid on, cranks up the heat. You expect Majorie to explode under the pressure at any moment. But she never does. And when the shit hits the fan, she blossoms into an amazing leader who can make hard decisions under pressure, and lead by example by risking her own life for the greater good without a moment of hesitation.

In a way Grass reminds me of The Sparrow. It has the same slow cooking reveal, and similar focus on introspective character development. In fact both books feature characters who are devout Catholics undergoing a crisis of faith, though they deal with it in different ways and for different reasons. So if you liked Marry Doria Russels novel, chances are you will enjoy Grass very much. If you didn’t, this novel might still appeal to yo because it is sufficiently different both in tone as in topic matter. In either case, I highly recommend picking it up.

To put it bluntly, Tau Zero is no more and no less than “Ram Scoop: The Novel”. That’s what it is about, and that’s it’s claim to fame. It is basically a few hundred page long geek out session on the topic of Busard Engines. Without it, Niven would probably never write his Known Space novels, Vinge would never embark on his Zones of Thought trilogy, Reynolds would never write House of Suns, and etc.. This book can be directly credited for making the term “ramjet” a permanent mainstay of science fiction parlance.

Tau Zero Cover

The plot is astonishingly simple: it is near future and humanity is slowly colonizing the galaxy using ramjets to ferry explorers to distant habitable planets. The crews travel awake, relying on the time dilation that occurs at relativistic speeds to make the trip manageable. On one such long distant jaunt something goes terribly wrong, and the deceleration subsystem stops working. The ship is unable to slow down, misses its target destination and keeps on accelerating, hurling towards the unknown while decades and then centuries pass in the outside world.

If you are a bit shaky on general relativity and don’t really grok the whole time dilation concept, don’t worry. Anderson explains it in excruciating detail. By the time you reach the final page, you will know just about anything there is to know about the physics of near light speed travel. That and you will posses almost an intimate level of knowledge about the internal workings of Busard Ramjets. To be frank, those parts of the book were actually rather fascinating and enjoyable. He waxes romantic about the properties of the Tau coefficient, the special relativity. He beautifully describes his pet ship hurling through space and spends many paragraphs musing about the Doppler shifted star-scape the crew can see from the view ports. All of that is great. The problems start when that pesky crew decides to do or talk about things other than science of space flight. Unfortunately, they do a lot of that.

Artist rendition of Leonora Christine, the ramjet from the novel

The tricky part of the scenario Anderson came up with, is that the discussion of the human condition is almost unavoidable. The crew is trapped on a rogue spaceship that is unable to stop and is constantly accelerating and increasing the time dilation. They have to come to terms with the fact that even if they manage to somehow repair their engines, they may no longer have a planet to come back to because eons would have passed in the outside world. This, as you can imagine is a rather bitter pill to swallow for anyone. Anderson tries to describe the ways in which the space travelers may choose to cope with such a predicament.

Judging from the way Anderson describes interpersonal relationships and romantic engagements, one begins to suspect that he might have never actually observed real people interacting “in the wild”. His characters are violently uninteresting and insist on having abysmally boring, robotic conversations about their love lives whenever they are not busy telegraphing sadness and despair. You just know that Anderson’s heart is not in it though. He writes the human bits because he has to – there is a rule somewhere that your novel has to have human characters that readers need to be able to relate to. But it is painfully obvious that the one and only character he really cares about is Leonora Christine – the ship itself.

Its like: “Guys, guys, guys! Lenora just flew through a g-type main sequence star and annihilated an entire solar system, and the crew didn’t even notice. How awesome is tha… I mean, everyone was sad. And that one guy was upset because his girlfriend is cheering. And that other woman is depressed because like religion and stuff… Look, can we talk about how awesome it is that the ship just fucking punched through a star? Like seriously!”

I’m exaggerating, of course, but only a little bit. It’s not that his characters are boring because they talk about science. You can write really compelling characters that never talk about anything else. They are boring specifically because Anderson makes a herculean effort to have them talk about relationships, hopes, dreams and desires. But it never seems real or relocatable. Whenever he tries to wrap his words around a human emotion, he hits the uncanny valley big time.

Perhaps it is Anderson’s writing style. Is awkward, ponderous and hollow most of the time. His narrator’s voice is more suited to describing epic events in a detached, clinical manner than to conveying human feelings. The only brief flights of fancy happen when he talks about astronomy or science. That said, he is really good at explaining the physics and mathematics behind the ramjet function in very accessible and layman friendly way. So if you are into that sort of thing, you will enjoy bits and pieces of this novel. Just make sure you set your expectations low in terms of interpersonal drama and suspense. There isn’t any.

Still, it is a worthwhile read for the educational value alone. That and it is a classic that inspired many writers, and made the Busard ramjet to be one of science-fiction’s most beloved sub-light propulsion systems.

On the other hand, sometimes you read a premise of a story and it is so mind-bogglingly amazing your pants literally fall of on the spot. Please keep in mind that there is nothing sexual in this sort of de-pantsment. It’s just that certain types of awesomeness are simply best faced in your underwear. Bit Rot by Charles Stross is exactly that kind of a story. Let me tell you just how awesome it is.

Bit Rot is a story:

1. about sentient androids (descendants of now extinct humanity)
2. on a relativistic deep space jaunt toward distant stars
3. and suddenly there is a zombie outbreak
4. and it is also ultra hard SF with like science in it

If your pants are still on, you are probably made out of stone, or an alien replicant of some sort who does not appreciate the “high-culture” of the internet. Charlie Stross however definitely does. Sometimes it is easy to forget that the man is one of us, seeing how he has a real life publisher and actual genuine book deals. But the stuff he writes sometime is so much in sync with the collective wants and dreams of the netizens it is not even funny.

Image somewhat unrelated but very on topic. By ~OSCAR-N.

A lesser writer would take the above premise and play it for jokes, but Stross takes it absolutely seriously. Not only does he develop a plausible explanation how a “zombie” style plague could break out amongst synthetic arndroid colonists, but he also confidently ties it into one of his book continuities. The story is actually supposed to be taking place in the Saturn’s Children universe. Unfortunately I have never read that book, mainly because of it’s cover. No, seriously I have no clue what his publisher was thinking but it made me avoid it. I generally make a point of not buying books with gratuitous amount of cleavage on the cover. But after reading Bit Rot I might need to re-consider because the setting actually sounds intriguing. Either way, the short story stands alone quite well and you actually do not need to have any knowledge of the novel to fully enjoy it.

It is distant future, and humanity is now long gone. The only thing we have left behind is the sprawling support system that is run by sentient androids of all shapes and sizes. After the last human died, instead of closing shop the care-takers decided to just continue doing their thing. There was no robot uprising or mass genocide mind you. Humans simply got fat, lazy and complacent and eventually didn’t even really feel like getting out of the house to reproduce so they have faded away. The androids were designed to act and think much like humans so that they could better empathize with their masters and so they inherited a lot of our good and bad traits. Some are nice, some are jerks and etc. They still remember humans quite fondly and refer to them as their “ancestors”.

In general their bodies are self-repairing and they have almost indefinite lifespans and as such they are much more suited to very long, interstellar jaunts at relativistic speeds. The story is about two “sisters” who sign up for one of such trips, mostly to get away from their rich, spoiled arrogant “mother”. I’m putting these words in quotations because they are all robots, so they don’t reproduce biologically. The protagonists consider themselves “sisters” because their personalities have been based on the same template. A rich Earth socialite forked them off in order to live vicariously through their adventures. But they got tired living in her shadow and booked a one way trip into the unknown to forge their own destiny far away from home. En route there shit goes terribly wrong (or terribly right, depending on whether you are a character or a reader of the story).

It has been quite a while since I have seen an original take on zombies. While zombies in space have been done before, I don’t think I have ever seen a zombie story that involved androids and no humans. Neither have I ever seen hard science used to explain the plague. Bit Rot has probably the best, and most plausible kind of zombies out there. My only complaint about the story is that it is too short. Stross ends it just when things start to get really interesting, leaving the rest to the imagination of the readers. I would love to see it fleshed out to a full length novel, a movie or a video game. Anything really, because the premise is amazingly awesome.

If you have a few free moments, definitely check this one out. Good news is that the full text of the story is available online. The formatting is not the best though, so I recommend running it through Instantpaper, Readability or Pocket to get the enhanced readable version instead.

Recently, Stross collaborated with another author I like: Cory Doctorow, and published a jointly written novel titled Rapture of the Nerds. I read it weeks ago, and have been mulling over a review ever since then. It’s probably one of the hardest reviews I have ever written, because no matter how much I try I can’t seem to stretch “meh…” into a thousand word essay.

Rapture of the Nerds Cover

It’s not that the book is bad. It is perfectly decent novel. In fact, if you read the synopsis it is the kind of book I like: near future, post singularity novel about baseline human interactions with “weakly god-like” entities living in the Marioshka cloud built around the sun. I honestly don’t know how it is even possible to mess something like that up. And yet here we are.

Never mind, scratch that last thought. To be fair the authors did not mess anything up. They did not drop the ball at any point. I guess I’m just kinda disappointed they did not deliver a fancy slam dunk but instead went for a classy but less impressive 3 point shot. Are these basketball metaphors doing anything for you? Because I have no idea what I’m actually talking about. Those are basketball terms, right? Or is slam dunk a hockey thing? I’d google it but that would actually require me giving a fuck about sports, but unfortunately I’m all out of fucks to give for the week. So you guys will just have to deal with it.

I guess my problem with the book is that it is just perfectly unremarkable. I found it enjoyable, but about on the same level as one enjoys plain oatmeal. It’s tasty, filling and nutritious but not necessarily something you would want to write home about. There is nothing in that novel that either Stross or Doctrow haven’t covered somewhere else in much better way.

What does it mean when you put down a book and have nothing to say about it (either negative or positive)? Does it mean that the author has succeed creating something that is perfectly acceptable? Or does it mean that he or she failed at stimulating your imagination and making you think about things.

Maybe the book is not actually that bad. Maybe it’s me. I admit that I hard really hard time getting into it. Normally I devour most of the stuff by Stross or Docrtorov. I like the writing style of both authors and this book is something in between, which is still quite agreeable. But I just never got to that point where you can’t put the book down because you need to know what happens next. I was always just mildly disinterested in the story: just not enough to stop reading. I think it might be because I just could not stand the protagonist.

And no, I didn’t mind the fact that he/she changed gender like five times throughout the book. That I actually found interesting and unique about the character. It’s a pity that these gender swaps were involuntary though – it would be probably much more engaging to have a story told from the point of view of a truly gender fluid character. I dislike Huw Jones for an entirely different reason: (s)he is a closed minded, technophobic, prejudiced misanthrope who chooses to live a neo-ludite life in a house without electricity. Huw hates the cloud with a passion, despises and distrusts any kind of artificial intelligence and considers anything transhuman to be an disgusting abomination. In other words, Huw is a person I have almost nothing in common, and can’t seem to relate to at all. If we met in real life we would probably instantly develop deep dislike and disdain for each other.

Sometimes you find books that have magnificent bastard anti-hero protagonists who you just love to hate. Unfortunately this is not one of such books. Huw is just lousy, resentful, whiny jerk from the very start of the novel to the very end. I guess the fact that the protagonist who hates all technology gets implicated into, and becomes a major player in a high stakes intrigue concocted by the cloud entities is supposed to be ironic and funny. But it isn’t. Huw is dragged by force from one fun locale to another, and the authors fill his/her life with all kinds of colorful explosions of mind bending and reality altering clarktech which (s)he hates with a passion of thousand suns. Huw whines, complains, then begrudgingly learns to use technology to advance the plot, then discards it with disgust and goes back to being technophobe until the next time. It’s like pulling teeth really – the shtick gets old after the first chapter, and you really want the character to finally get with the program and stop being so backwards. But that never happens.

As a result, it hardly ever feels like the protagonist has any agency. People just drag Huw around, maneuver him/her into an advantageous plot position and just wait until (s)he stops whining. You can of course write a novel about someone with little to no agency, but hat requires a different plot structure. The plot of Rapture always hinges on Huw doing something (s)he is not very keen on, and a lot of the conflict is just watching him/her stall and complain a lot before caving in.

The other thing that slightly bothered me is that the authors got things a little bit too right. For example I think that their the depiction of the cloud is just spot on. It’s basically the Internet as we know it right now, but with people living there. It’s kinda like I always imagined these sort of networks to be like. But Stross and Corry make it extra shitty to make Huw hate it all that more. And that kinda kills it. The glorious cyberspace to which chosen ones ascend to become “weakly god-like” super-entities turns out to be a masturbatory shit hole populated by jerks, and focused on bullshit idle discussions. The whole place is like a message board thread, 7 pages past Goodwin’s Law and still going strong.

Same goes for the depiction of the future of United States. It was both depressing and little too much on the nose. Apparently after all sensible people migrated to the cloud the country was overrun by religious wingnuts. So the nation is an ecological disaster zone, polluted by toxic waste, almost entirely radioactive and overrun by continent sized mutated killer-ant colony. The survivors live under the boot of crazy Evangelical theocracy which is secretly ruled by hedonistic sex cults. Clever? Yes. Accurate? Ouch, its almost too much.

The sharp satire Stross and Doctorow deliver in this novel hit too close to home for me. I can see the humor in it, but it just made me sad. They take all the things I love and enjoy and piss on them relentlessly and with reckless abandon. They rip apart the internet culture, they use Huw to ruthlessly rip on blind technophilia and reckless transhumanism, and they depict the country where I currently reside as a hell hole beyond help and any hope of redemption. It kinda hurts… But on the other hand, it is mostly just lighthearted ribbing, and it lacks impact. If they really leaned into their punches they could have easily ripped my hard up and made the experience somewhat cathartic. Sometimes anguish is good. But Rapture of the Nerds always pulls it’s punches and delivers nothing but mild annoyance.

Sometimes you will read a book, and you just fall in love with the setting. You actually want to go and live in that universe and you start writing notes for a FATE campaign using that setting. This is not one of such books. Sometimes a setting is so twisted, and repulsive that it has the opposite effect: you just love to hate it. And you also start trying to figure out how to convince your friends to play a game based on it. Rapture of the Nerds falls somewhere in between these sweet spots: the setting is kinda cool, but kinda shitty at the same time. It has cool elements, but nothing that would really make it stand out.

The end result of all of this is a book that just doesn’t have all that much of an impact. It’s almost as if the authors couldn’t agree on the tone. Sometimes the book is positively wacky, sometimes it becomes sharp, almost mean-spirited satire. Other times it tries to play serious for a bit and goes for plot twists and late reveals. You will read it, shrug, put it back on the shelf and likely never think about it again. Which is kinda sad considering what it could have been.

There are books that simply tell a great story in a very compelling way like Lord of Light, The Sparrow or City at the End of Time. Only Forward is not one of these books.

Sometimes you read a book, and you hate every single page. That’s what happened to me when I read Capacity. Only Forward was not like that either. It is something else altogether.

Only Forward Cover

Only Forward by Michael Marshall Smith is probably a book unlike anything else you have read before. And I don’t mean that it is an experimental, odd-ball performance piece like House of Leaves. It is a very traditional, old school novel. The strangeness comes from the way it is plotted. Not necessarily the plot itself but the way in which it unwinds. And therein lies the difficulty of reviewing it. The more I tell you about it, the less you are going to enjoy it. In a way, this book is all about the journey you take with the narrator through weird twist and turns the plot takes. It’s all about marveling how the story flips and flops around every few chapters keeping you guessing as to what exactly is the whole thing about.

I purchased the book on an impulse. It is yet another one of those times when Amazon recommendations came through for me, providing an astonishingly accurate recommendation. So in a way I went into it blind, which is probably the best way to go. For a regular novel, I could tell you the genre, the setting and give you some idea of the story without spoiling anything. But this doesn’t necessarily work for Only Forward because, true to it’s title, the book has this kind of forward momentum that takes it away from the original premise very quickly.

It starts as sort of a noir detective story set in an odd SF setting: a sprawling futuristic city that is divided into self-sufficient, self governing neighborhoods that cater to very narrow special interest groups. There is neighborhood for people who like to live in total silence where noise is outlawed, one which is populated solely by cats, one which is a big country club, one which is a lawless hell-hole where rival gangs can have all-out drug wars. The narrator seems to be some sort of a detective who gets hired to find a missing person…

Unfortunately the narrator, who also happens to be the protagonist, is completely unreliable. He constantly lies about his past, only to reveal the truth much later. He omits important bits of the story so that he won’t have to reveal more things about himself and he fully admits it. You quickly realize he is not really a detective at all, and the case was given to him because he possesses a very special set of skills. What these skills are, and why they are important for this case? Well, he won’t reveal that until much later in the story. But for the time being he keeps doing detective like things, chasing leads, investigating and etc…

Then the bottom of the story falls out, and it turns into a rescue expedition into a very peculiar, separationist neighborhood that cut itself off from the rest of the city and forbids any communication in and out of it. Then as soon as you come to terms it is no longer a detective story, it switches gears again and starts messing with the genre and the setting itself. Every time you think you figured out what this book is actually about, Michael Marshal Smith suddenly switches gears and goes somewhere else entirely. But the consistency of writing and narration ties it all together so neatly you barely notice when these shifts happen.

It is a neat book, full of little surprises. Once it is all said and done, it might seem a bit underwhelming. The bits near the end of the book which reveal why the protagonist is so “special” didn’t really wow me that much. It’s probably because I expected something more science, whereas Smith went more the fiction route. But I found the storytelling entertaining and engaging enough to keep reading till the very end. Smith tells the story in light heated, witty way with his tongue permanently planted in his cheek. The world he creates is wonderfully wacky and silly but he never really seems to cross over into full slapstick or satire. It’s one of these books that probably won’t make you laugh out loud, but it will keep you smirking as you read it.

It is not mind blowing, life changing or anything like that. But it is a fun read. If you in the market for something to cleanse your pallet between reading hard SF or serious heart wrenching stories this is probably a good book to pick up.

You probably know my list of go-to authors by now: Stross, Vinge, Stephenson, Dukaj. I’m going to tentatively add Egan to this group. Tentatively not because he doesn’t fit in, but because I have only read one book of his so far. So as far as I know Diaspora might be a wonderful fluke – a one time flight of fancy, preceded and followed by mundane and boring body of work. It certainly doesn’t seem this would be the case, as I already ordered few of his other books but I guess only time will tell.

Diaspora is absolutely wonderful. It is one of the most entertaining books I have read in quite a while… Which you probably wouldn’t be able to tell from Amazon reviews, many of which are rather negative. Why, you may ask? Well, to be completely honest the book doesn’t really have strong characters and the plot is a little bit muddled. There is really no antagonist, and the plot is mostly driven forward by the desire of a few characters to solve a scientific puzzle.

Diaspora by Greg Egan

Let me set the stage for you: it is a semi-distant future. Most of earth’s population currently exists as software constructs living in what is know as “polises”. Each polis is essentially a computing space governed by its own charter and shared set of values agreed upon by its citizens. They are all networked together of course, and citizens are free to visit “scapes” (eg. shared virtual forums or meeting places) that are hosted in other polises or immigrate and re-host themselves at will. It really works like one big internet so you home polis is mostly just a matter of preference and personal taste. For example the Carter-Zimerman polis citizens like to think they exist as part of the physical world outside and like to feel rooted in the realities of that universe therefore their public spaces usually have collision detection so people can touch and bump into each other. They also usually pick a gender and make it part of their identity. The Konishi polis on the other hand are big on personal autonomy so their icons/avatars in public spaces pass through each other like ghosts and tapping someone on the shoulder to get their attention would be considered a gross violation of physical space. They also are genderless as they do not think keeping with the ancestral sexual dimorphism should have any relevance for asexually reproducing citizens who are in essence pure software.

The first chapter of the book actually depicts a process during which one of the main protagonists achieves sentience. It is actually quite remarkable and it shows Egan actually knows a thing or two about software. He essentially describes a budding of a neural network from a primitive deterministic seed into full sentience. I have never read anything like it and this is probably the best, most technically accurate and probably the most poetic description of a self organizing system achieving self awareness you can find in literature right now. It is probably worth picking up this book just for that.

Note that this part is only the introductory chapter, but in a brilliant masterstroke Egan is able to dump a lot of exposition. He introduces the protagonist who initially acts as the “fish out of water” reader surrogate learning about the polises and their history. We not only learn about that character and what drives him/her (Yatima is actually genderless) but about the universe itself. For example that outside of the polises there also exist enclaves of “fleshers” (ie. humans who rejected the “introdus” and chose to live in physical bodies) and gleisners (think moravecs from Illium by Dan Simmons) who left Earth and explore the solar system and the stars in robust mechanical bodies.

Then one day a gamma ray burst that no one was able to predict wipes out most of organic life on Earth. Carter-Zimmerman polis citizens are so shaken by the freak astronomical incident that they decide to mount a “diaspora” and seed the galaxy with copies of the polis hoping to ensure continuation of intelligent life, preservation of Earths’ legacy and also as means of exploring and understanding the universe as to avoid future incidents like the one which has transpired.

What do they find out there? Traces of life actually – some of which is so different from Earth based life it forces them to re-evaluate what they consider living beings. Also traces of intelligent aliens who have left behind some sign posts and keys to another universe entirely. One which has five spatial dimensions (to our three) and radically different laws of physics.

It is all written with painstaking attention to detail. Egan has background both in computer science an physics and it shows. If an author gets software and technology it is usually enough to win me over. But Egan doesn’t just pull stuff out of his ass. When he imagines an alien universe he does it from ground up – he starts with elementary particles (quarks, gluons, bosons, etc) and builds it up from there. A lot of the story revolves around the characters discussing scientific theories, testing their ideas, arguing about results or explaining things to each other. It’s kinda like Stephenson’s Anathem in which a lat of time is spent on formal dialogues about philosophy and science – but cranked up to eleven.

Personally, I live for this shit. I actually absolutely love this sort of thick, hard science lecture type stuff that at times is at the edge of my understanding. If I have to put down the book for a bit to Wikipedia advanced quantum physics concepts to wrap my head around what is going on in the story, then the author accomplished something – he taught me something new. He forced me to better myself and that’s always a positive thing. But alas not everyone likes to be befuddled by science. Some folks want to have a human element in their stories, and Diaspora is a bit lacking in that department. Granted it didn’t bother me at all, because unlocking the quantum secrets of the universe in a really clever thought experiment seems much more exciting than wondering weather two fictional characters will get it on or not.

Diaspora is hard SF at it’s best and I highly recommend it. Two thumbs up, seal of approval and a big endorsement. But approach with caution if you get annoyed if your novels suddenly turn into impromptu physics lectures. Cause that happens a lot, and it is very awesome if you are into it.

On the other hand, I always try to be a pragmatist so I do realize the fact that curing death of old age will have far reaching repercussions. It is evident that if we drastically cut our death rate, but keep our birth rates the same we will end up with severe overpopulation problem in as little as a few decades. Most futurologists and transhumanists agree that once we have a viable life extension technology we will need to all sit down and have a long hard talk about population control. It doesn’t really matter what we do, as long as we do something to ensure that the new immortals do not continue popping out new babies every year for the rest of their lives.

The Postmortal by Drew Magary depicts a world in which such a discussion never takes place. A cure for aging is discovered, and thanks to spinelessness of the politicians and social pressures nothing is done to prevent the looming catastrophe. I know what you are going to say next: “Oh, hey: someone wrote a book about how immortality is bad… Whooptie fucking do!” Hold your horses though, this book is not your usual dethist diatribe.

The Postmortal

The great thing about the novel is that Magary doesn’t actually take a side in this discussion. While he is not a transhumanist, he does not directly demonize the cure. He is actually more interested in the human stories he can tell within that framework. His focus is on the characters and their issues and their attitudes towards the cure. The first half of the book especially, portrays the cure in a rather positive light. John Farrel (the protagonist) for example, is a huge supporter and early adopter and since he also happens to be the narrator the views on immortality tend to be somewhat skewed towards the positive. A lot of the discussions about immortality in the early parts of the novel seem very genuine. I failed to detect the usual condescending sneers that are typical when a lot of SF writers tackle this subject. You really feel that John believes in the cure, and his his doubts and objections are deeply personal and completely understandable based on his established past experiences and personality traits.

Of course Magary’s idea of the cure is somewhat naive – it is a gene therapy delivered via injection. One shot and you are immortal. Few of us actually believe it could ever be this simple. But for the most part it works well within the framework he establishes. He might be new to the genre, but he handles it rather well, though I was often left wondering how exactly did the cure work. From the early descriptions I assumed it simply prevents telomer shortening during cell division. But then the author has a subplot on “cure babies” – infants and toddlers who are given a cure by irresponsible parents to prevent them from ever growing up. My grasp of genetics might be shaky, but I don’t think a telomer based cure would actually prevent a todler from maturing. It wouldn’t stop normal development, but simply prevent aging related issues like loss of skin elasticity which causes wrinkling, loss op pigment in the hair and tissue deterioration that causes a lot of old age related ailments. So for all intents and purposes the cure is just a magical injection that somehow induces biological stasis.

But, like I said – Magary is neither a scientist nor a futurologist so you can’t really blame him for not spending that much time crafting a good thesis for his cure. He does a good job of plotting around it however, and the story he is telling is rather compelling. So are the personal and societal implications of immortality. Let me give you an example:

After a few years of cure availability, a lot of newly minted immortals start to re-evaluate the institution of marriage. It turns out that “till death do us part” doesn’t have the same ring in a world where death is no longer certain or even probable. The divorce rate is at all time high, and people start experimenting with “cyclical marriages” that come with built in expiration dates. But as if to provide amusing juxtaposition to that trend, the narrator manages to fall head over heals in love around that same time, and intends to stick to traditional, endless marriage.

Magary’s writing is sharp and witty and deeply satirical. He has a lot of fun ideas that he manages to seamlessly fit into his novel. For example at some point in the book a “Sheep Flu” epidemic breaks out. The disease has been brewing and mutating inside a flock of “cured” animals and after many generations it managed to leap to humans and cause rapid and terrifying death that makes the Ebola virus look cute and cuddly in comparison. He could have probably written a whole novel just around that plague, but here it is mostly just background for the immortality plot – one of the many side effects of the cure misuse.

Other interesting, offbeat side effects include internet trolls growing tired of ruining people’s fun online, and starting to make people miserable in real life. His portrayal of the “troll” community is a bit one dimensional though. It is quite clear that Magary doesn’t really spend that much time on the internet, and while he might have toured the bowels of the online communities, he never grasped what drives these groups. Magary is painful unfamiliar with online mob mentality, and the concept of doing things for the LULZ. He clearly has been on the receiving end of trolling a lot, but has never trolled himself. Consequently, his trolls are deeply pathetic dudes with clear mental issues and sadistic urges, rather than bored, detached teenagers who just don’t give a fuck because on the internet nobody knows your mom is a dog.

In Magary’s universe, politicians are spineless and people are generally stupid and short sighted. So you could say it is much like in the real world, minus the immortality thing. As you could expect, nothing is ever done about the population growth. Or rather some countries try but fail to control the cure. China for example bans it outright, but everyone gets it anyway. US tries to ban it too, but due to political and social pressures it gets approved by the FDA and eventually becomes so cheep that just about everyone can afford it.

Eventually the one idea they do settle on is “End Specialization” which is an euphemism they come up with to take the edge of “assisted suicide”. Government starts to fund euthanasia for those immortals who get fed up with their endless lives, and incentivizes it via tax breaks for the relatives. This might seem a little harsh, but personally I have always believed that immortality is kinda pointless if death is impossible. Of course about a decade later “Hard End Specialization” is legalized. What is that? That’s where court tries you in absentia, and puts out a death warrant on you that can be claimed by private contractors.

Unfortunately both hard and soft end specialization turn out the be only half measures that do very little to actually decrease the population growth. As the world fills up with immortals, the governments start to fail and morality starts to waver. America slowly turns into a post-apocalyptic wasteland in which affluent members of society live in walled enclaves while the poor fight for survival in lawless crumbling cities or endless car parks ruled by gangs or religious cults. Eventually it all starts cartwheeling towards a very dark and foreboding finale.

I have a feeling that depending on where you stand on the immortality issue will change what you get out of this book. For a transhumanist like me, this was a really interesting novel about what might go wrong if we don’t get our proverbial shit together. Magary’s depiction of the civilization of immortals spiraling into oblivion is frightening but also full of excellent points that could help us not to destroy our planet if and when we finally defeat old age. Most of the issues depicted in the book are completely fixable, and circumstantial and this is what makes it such a compelling story.

On the other hand if you happen to be one of the people who hates the idea of life extension, you might see the book as outright condemnation and cautionary tale of the inherent dangers of immortality. The funny part is you will probably enjoy it just as much as the transhumanist, only for a very different reason. Well done Mr. Magary. You have done well.

A lot of SF writers hand wave these issues away. Characters jump from physical to virtual realms, run parallel copies and merge their forks without as much as giving these issues a second thought. Tony Ballantyne’s novel Capacity revolves around the core belief that every self-aware instance is a person unto its own. So if you make a copy of yourself, you have no authority or leverage over it. It is it’s own person. It becomes a citizen with the rights and protections that physical humans enjoy.

Capacity Cover

We have touched upon this sort of issue years ago in the Consciousness Interruption thread. From time to time I like to revisit these rather poignant questions and shine some new light at them. For example, reading Anathem by Stephenson and Hollow Man by Simmons made me start to wonder whether or not digitization of human consciousness would be even possible on traditional hardware, considering the quantum properties of our minds. I was hoping that Ballantyne would add his two cents to this ongoing discussion but, alas he did not.

His main focus is the dilemma of involuntarily copied individuals: people who have existed in physical world and then had a copy of their consciousness made for whatever reason. That reason usually tends to be rape, torture or other abuse, but I’ll touch upon that later. The point is that Ballentyne introduces characters who used to live in physical world, and now have to adjust to being digital constructs in a processing space. As you could imagine it is a rather traumatic experience… Though the author really has a hard time writing broken, traumatized people.

In his universe, touring-grade artificial minds co-exist with digitized humans, so I was expecting him to explore the boundaries between these two groups. It would stand to reason that there would be some gray area between them – that there would exist augmented humans tat have removed themselves so far from the human condition they no longer can relate to baselines, and AI’s who either pretend to or believe themselves to be digital copies of former homo sapiens. But this is not the case. In the Universe of Capacity there is an all powerful, all knowing Social Service bureaucracy which ensures the humans do not evolve any further away from their baseline condition. They even go as far as artificially enforcing a human like life-spans to a digital copies. So instead of being immortal, the virtual people age and die just like the physical people do.

If you happen not to like it, then tough shit. If you exist in physical world, then nice counselor will visit you at your house and have a long talk with you explaining how your feelings are invalid, and tell you want feelings you should be embracing and give you appropriate prescription drugs to help you out with that. If you happen to be a digital construct, then they will just tweak your software a bit to make you feel better about the world. You know, for your own good. Funny part is that these are the good guys and Ballantyne actually defends this screwed up organization for the most part.

Or rather, the protagonists kinda do buy into that crap most of the time. There is some harsh criticism of this system in the book, but it comes from the villains who are somewhat… One dimensional. You see, they are all rapists. Some writers choose ambiguous dark character, or lovable scoundrels to e their antagonists. Ballentyne makes sure that every potential antagonist has at least one “kick the dog” moment which involves rape, torture or preferably both. Just so you can be absolutely sure they are bad, despicable people – especially when juxtaposed against the protagonist who is apparently a virgin. She is chaste by choice for reasons that are not full explained, and not readily apparent from the dialogue.

Sexuality in this novel is just… Weird. Nearly all characters have some weird sex related hangups or deviations: they are either rapists, stalkers, voyeurs, abused victims, submissive masochists, self-avowed virgins or asexual robots. And they all obsess about it constantly. Even the robots choose to wear engendered, sexualized bodies with suggestively placed panels and buttons that create illusion of sexual organs. Everyone is attractive, everyone ogles everyone else and everyone feels guilty about it. And the only sex people seem to be having is of a non-consensual kind. I honestly didn’t know what to make of it – between the slut shaming, the rape fantasies, the recurring, and always awkward “seduction of the virgin” motif it all felt just a tad disturbing. Not sleazy or low brow mind you – just kinda worrying.

Perhaps this weird, off-color shame and rape fixation is so jarring because the character themselves simply are not layered enough. There is just not much to them beyond their weird hangups. They just don’t act like regular people. They have these long conversations which are emotionally dead and sterile. You know there supposed to be emotions in there, but only because Ballentyne tells you about them, stubbornly breaking the good old “show, not tell” rule on just about every page. This is not a direct quote but a lot of the book reads a bit like this:

Helen was very angry. “I am very angry!” she said with anger. The others could see she was visibly agitated and very angry.

I’m exaggerating of course – it is not nearly as bad, but while reading the book I was almost tempted to start tabulating the instances when Balentyne just names emotions without ever making you feel like they matter. There wasn’t a single instance when I was actually engaged enough to care. And that’s ladies and gentlemen is a storytelling failure.

Maybe if these characters were not so off-beat and emotionally broken by design, this story could have worked. But nearly all of them are supposed to be these traumatized emotional wrecks. The problem is that you not only don’t feel it, but you cannot relate to them. They are just weird and unlikeable and that’s a huge problem.

Which is not to say that protagonists always need to be nice, likeable characters. Robert Gu from Rainbow’s End for example is a massive jerk from page one, but Vinge can get you, the reader into this guys head and show you what makes him tick. Yes, he is a self-centered asshole most of the time but he is very much human, and not that difficult to identify with. Judy is pretty much a comic-book character, with her weird get-up and her unshakable belief in social care, and her weird virginity thing. Justinian’s actions make no sense – mostly because he is being strung along and manipulated by the AI’s that sent him on his mission. It would have worked if Ballentyne did not insist on doing play-by-play on how the attending robot uses reverse psychology to get the stupid human do reckless and suicidal things all the time. Helen, who is supposed to be the fish out of water, reader surrogate is just boring.

To make matters worse there is no conversation in the book without an obligatory “as you know…” exposition dump. And you know exactly when the author is foreshadowing because he will repeat himself three or four times throughout the next few chapters just to make sure you are thoroughly preferred. Foe example, I believe he brought up the two slit experiment not once, not twice but three times. And it was briefly explained each time, in case you missed it.

Pacing is also terrible. The book drags mercilessly, despite the fact that not much happens at all. The action constantly stops so that people can have terribly written and dreadfully boring conversation. The novel has three (almost four) parallel threads, only one of which is even remotely interesting because it contains an element of the mystery. The other two just seem like padding. The story of Justinian and his visit on the remote Gateway world where all AI’s commit suicides (but people can thrive) could have been a somewhat interesting short story. Everything else was simply uninteresting padding.

If I didn’t know any better I would have guessed that this was a literary debut of a rookie new writer, but Ballentyne has been publishing short stories and novels since the late 90’s. This is not his first novel. In fact, it is not even the first novel set in this particular universe. But you wouldn’t know it. So much time is spent explaining how the setting works I was initially convinced it was a stand-alone work, rather than second book in a loosely connected series taking place in the same universe.

There are a few interesting ideas in the novel. The sinister threat at the edge of the galaxy would have been rather intriguing if Balentyne didn’t explain int into the ground from multiple angles. A good writer introduces a mysterious menace, vaguely describes the way it works, usually by having it scare the shit out of the protagonist. Then he lets the reader’s imagination run wild thinking up all the ways it could fuck shit up if it ever got out into the world. Ballentyne has the protagonist have a chat with a really smart AI which tells him exactly why the thing is dangerous, how it works and why he should be afraid of it. And then the protagonist fears it, very, very much. Or so you are told at least.

Capacity is a prime example how a few worthwhile ideas could be absolutely ruined by a dreadfully bad execution. It has shallow, unlikeable characters, dragging exposition dumps, stupidly obvious foreshadowing, science for dummies explanations of obvious things and terrible pacing. I recommend staying far, far away from this title.