FSF, January 2009 Read online

  Stross, being Stross, comes down pretty strongly on the side of flamboyant individuality—complete with his characteristic open source optimism about the ability of individuals to reboot their lives and reshape their destinies. In this, as in many other regards, the author of Accelerando continues to fly the glorious colors of sf's Golden Age. But though Stross's unabashedly individualist stance may be sf's version of old-fashioned comfort food, there is nothing old-fashioned (or comforting) about his vision of a Tik Tok, robot-eat-robot, clockwork world winding down in the aftermath of humanity's self-inflicted extinction.

  * * * *

  If Freya has to face the unnerving idea of life as an unwitting beta release, then Paul Melko's characters face an even stranger dilemma: what's the meaning of life when your entire species is just leftover tech from someone else's Singularity?

  Melko's protagonist—a five member “pod person” called Apollo Papadopulos—is born onto a ravaged Earth inhabited only by those left behind after a Singularity Event that is creepily evocative of the mass suicides of Jonestown and Heaven's Gate. When a wired guru tries to kick off a second Rapture, Apollo must struggle to discover his place in the world—and to unravel the core mystery of pod existence.

  Melko tells Apollo's tale through a series of deftly handled changes of POV as each pod member adds his or her facet to the composite story. The strength of this book is its laser-tight focus on the character, psychology, and subjective experience of the pod members:

  Chemical thoughts pass from hand to hand in our circle, clockwise and counterclockwise, suggestions, lists, afterthoughts. I stand between Moira and Quant, adding what I can. This is our most comfortable thinking position. If we rearrange ourselves, me holding Manuel's hand perhaps, or Moira and Meda together, the thoughts are different. Sometimes this is useful.

  Ideas whirl past me and I am only a conduit. Some thoughts are marked by their thinker, so that I know it is Quant who has noted the drop in temperature and the increased wind speed, which causes us to raise the priority of shelter and fire. Consensus forms.... The list passes among us. We reach consensus on decision after decision, faster than I can reason through some of the issues: I add what I can. But I trust the pod. The pod is me.

  People often talk about first novels in a condescending “good-enough-for-a-first-effort” tone. But this is a first novel that burns with the raw energy of a writer who's terrified he doesn't have what it takes to keep the reader's eye's glued to the page. The writing is polished and starkly beautiful, and the new images and ideas keep coming at you right up to the last page. Some writers do their best work when they're scared; Paul Melko is obviously one of them.

  And besides ... no real sf fan can resist a story that includes gems like: “Our hands are cold: we have removed our gloves to think."

  * * * *

  The last book in this month's column is Earth Ascendant, the second novel in Sean Williams's remarkable Astropolis series. Words like riveting, gripping, and page-turning get tossed around pretty cavalierly, but they all apply to the Astropolis series. In Earth Ascendant Williams expands on the grand galactic history that he sketched out in Saturn Returns and the superb linked novella Cenotaxis. These books are not without fault (after all, if I build them up too much you'll only be disappointed). But despite their flaws, they have a scope, an intellectual reach, and an intoxicating speculative energy that makes me feel all starry-eyed about the future of science fiction.

  In Williams's future, time is the evolutionary jackhammer pounding human nature into a new shape. Once humans were the beneficiaries of a rich pan-galactic civilization held together by virtually immortal collective minds called Forts. But when a tech plague called the Slow Wave ravages the galaxy, the Forts die and humanity is left to its own meager devices. The scattered survivors struggle to keep interstellar civilization afloat, but without the Forts it's a losing battle against time, distance and entropy. And the collapse threatens individuals as well as cultures; most post-humans long ago incorporated some type of Fort-like multiplicity into their own personality architectures and must now “find new ways to survive in a galaxy beset by failing communications and unreliable transport."

  Life after the Slow Wave is a cognitive game of Paper, Rock, Scissors in which something's going to get cut, covered, or shattered no matter which choice you make. “We do what we must to survive,” one character tells another during a pivotal moment of betrayal. “Remember that and you'll be a lot happier."

  The Forts are among the most resonant and thought-provoking creations in recent sf. And if the Forts are a grand sf speculation, then their Frags—the severed, near-autistic survivors of the Slow Wave—are a piece of grand science fiction pathos. They are idiot savants, speaking in shreds and shards of language, quoting poetry, obsessively counting angels on quantum pinheads. Only after encountering a number of Frags did I finally figure out what their oracular utterances reminded me of: AI koans.

  Is Williams suggesting a vision of human culture as a kind of vast emergent artificial life form? Is he hinting that the riddles of pre-sentient AI might be symmetrical under rotation with the slow heat death of post-sentient civilization? If so, the hint remains just that: veiled, oblique, open-ended. Williams offers no answers—here or anywhere else in the series.

  He walks a fine line here, and reactions to the Astropolis books will probably vary depending on individual readers’ tolerance for ambiguity. Personally, I enjoy it. The quest for rigor in sf can all too easily become a fetish for the closed, univalent, airless storyline. Clarity is good to a point, but it's easy to forget that in real science some logic (yes, I really am shameless enough to stoop to the easy pun) is fuzzy.

  For those who crave clarity, however, Williams does offer one clear view of humanity's future—albeit a somber one. Throughout the series his characters keep stumbling on grisly pig-piles of corpses. These are the physical remnants of once-mighty Forts: confused frags who panicked when they were severed from their collective brains, failed to take rational survival measures, huddled together, and died blindly seeking communion in the only way still open to them. This macabre image seems to bring us full circle from the collective as bogeyman to the collective as savior. Resistance isn't just futile. Resisting the collective is resisting evolution. And the wages of resisting evolution are extinction.

  The weel of evolution may grind slow, this month's authors seem to be saying, but it grinds exceedingly fine. I'll leave the last word to Stross, who dishes up the perfect image of humanity's futile race against change and time (along with a nouvelle wave tip of the hat to Ed Bryant) in his description of the nomad city, Cinnabar:

  Cinnabar rolls steadily around the equator of Mercury on rails, chasing the fiery dawn.... Sixteen tracks span a cutting that slices across craters and through mountain ranges with Sisyphean consistency—a cutting with a floor of melted rock, fused by the continouus megaton heat-flash of an orbital mirror over a hundred kilometers across. The city grinds ever onward along this artificial scar, a vast articulated behemoth two hundred meters wide and twenty kilometers long, The domes and spires of the rich gleam beneath the vanishing starlight, their peaks clawing toward the blazing, unrefracted sunrise that must forever stay just out of reach.

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  The Perfect Infestation by Carol Emshwiller

  On her Website, Ms. Emshwiller comments that her favorite author is Franz Kafka. Perhaps the author of “The Metamorphosis” would have enjoyed this story.

  This is the best idea we've ever had. Not that there aren't some problems to it. It's the perfect disguise. Creep in the ear and take over the world. But don't bother with the opposable-thumb creatures. That's where most other takeovers made their big mistake.

  We keep telling our young seeds not to be tempted by thumbs. Those creatures’ lives are thankless. Full of wars and work. All sorts of problems. More anxiety than you'd want. We wouldn't wish that kind of a life on any of our kind even while waiting for the ta
keover. You young ones might as well enjoy your confinement in a happy host. Not only that, a host that gets looked after all its life.

  What you want is fun and play and getting stroked and patted. Opposable thumb beings don't get much of that—not that they don't like it just as much as any creature. What you want is getting patted but also having teeth.

  Don't take on the characteristics of your hosts. If you do, you'll feel loyalty you shouldn't feel. You should be loyal only to your own kind. Don't ever forget your breezy blowing relatives. Don't worry about getting found out as you take over. If the opposable-thumb creatures spot you, they'll take you for a floating dandelion seed.

  On the other hand, you shouldn't waste too much time getting ready. We have to take over before these creatures completely destroy their world.

  Feel no jealousy for thumbs. You don't need them. You'll have other abilities.

  Later, when the signal for the takeover comes, it'll be so high the thumb creatures won't hear it. That's another good reason for this host we picked out especially for you.

  It's a pretty good world. So far. But you have to be careful. You mustn't seem too smart. Be sure you don't do anything that isn't native to the species we've selected.

  So spread out, waft down, and take over.

  * * * *

  I went for a small cute host. I was in the mood for fun. It had been a long hard voyage in cramped quarters. It was good to go off by myself.

  I like my host so much I don't think I'll ever want to give him up. I wonder if I'll have to at the end. He's mostly white with one ear up, the white one, and one black floppy ear.

  I want to look straight into the opposable-thumb people's eyes. I want to smell their crotches. I want to get a pat or two—see what that's like.

  The only trouble is, my host is in the wrong part of town. I don't want to be cared for by just anybody. Of course right now it's raining and you'd think I'd take what I can get, but if we're going to take over the world, why not do it from the top down? Why not begin with the rich so we can pass the waiting time in luxury? But for that you have to be in the rich part of town.

  The pods in charge said to spread out. I did that. I wafted and floated about for hours and ended up down here, and here was this perfect funny-looking host.

  The rich live on a hill and they have a view of the ocean. They have a chunk of the beach.

  Now, though, I drink from the gutter.

  I'll go up and find a rich opposable-thumb old lady. I can change her life. A cat only goes so far in changing one's life whereas I get people outside and walking.

  But now I'm dirty and matted, wet and shivering. I'll take this misery up to see what the rich will do about me.

  * * * *

  I sneak uptown. But I'm getting too cold and wet to be choosy. I think I'm going to have to make do with whoever comes along.

  And what comes along is a very wet and cold older man, shivering as much as I am.

  I had slipped through a gate where I saw an old lady at a window. I hid under the bushes by the garage when ... (I was thinking: No sense in coming out for just anybody. I was thinking: I'm small enough to be let up on the couch. I was thinking: I hope she likes music) ... when ... along comes this man.

  We look at each other and there's instant recognition—of cold and damp and misery. His hair is plastered to his forehead and he smells of wet earth.

  I wag my tail as fast as I can and he throws back his head and laughs a big laugh. Without him telling me to do it, I “speak” three times. But I wouldn't have had to do anything. When we looked at each other and saw our misery, we were stuck with each other.

  This isn't what I wanted, but it'll have to do. For now. And I can see in this creature's eyes that they were right about the thumbed ones. There's loneliness and pain and much too much thinking.

  I'm still looking for a fun time after that long bunched up confinement. Wet and miserable as he is, even so, he did laugh that great big laugh. He's the best I can do.

  He says, “I see we agree about the weather."

  Just how much dare I show I understand? I don't have many options. I know better than to nod. I cock my head this way and that. That makes him laugh again.

  He takes me into the garage. It's a little warmer in there. He finds an old towel and wipes himself off a bit and then me.

  He says, “You wouldn't be bad looking if you were cleaned up some.” And then, “I know exactly what to do with you."

  * * * *

  There's a connecting hallway between the garage and the house. He brings me inside to the kitchen. Now I see he has a limp and that the sole of one of his shoes is built up by more than an inch.

  It's nice and warm in there. Also quiet. Seems as if nobody is home but us. First thing he feeds me some very good leftovers, beef cooked in wine. I want to savor the food, but I don't dare. That wouldn't be like my species. (If I get to live like this I wouldn't have to jump up on the table to snatch tidbits.)

  Then he cuts out the tangles in my coat and gives me a bath. I even get blow dried. He keeps talking all through it. That's what they told us: These creatures talk all the time. Cramped in as we were on our voyage, that would have been hard to bear, but this isn't. Mostly he talks a lot of nothing but I do hear that I'm supposed to cheer somebody up. He tells me I should smile.

  Afterward he holds me up to the mirror. What a nice thumb person!

  * * * *

  Then I get presented to my old lady. Just the one I'd hoped for.

  He's gotten dressed up for the occasion. He's put on slacks and a sweater.

  "Mother,” he says, “I brought you somebody to cheer you up."

  She's lying back on a big couch. Not doing anything at all. And she does look morose. I can smell it, too. Just like they said, the opposable-thumb creatures have a hard life. I'd rather be back on our transport's cramped hold than to be her right now.

  She looks like the man except her hair is all white while he only has a little white at the temples. Neither one is handsome. Even if he hadn't called her Mother, I could have smelled that they're relatives. Inside myself I congratulate my host creature for his nose.

  "Poor little guy. He needed a lot of cleaning up."

  She doesn't say anything, but I can see on her face how much I please her. She reaches for me and now I get to feel what getting stroked and petted is like. I can see why they wanted us to experience it. Dry and warm and fed and cuddled ... I fall asleep. I see why they warned us not to get too much under the spell of getting stroked.

  * * * *

  And I do cheer her up. I dance on my hind legs. I twirl. I wag myself all over. I talk back to her in whimpers and whines. I sing when she listens to opera. I haven't seen her on the couch doing nothing since that first time.

  She keeps calling me a Pussy Cat. I understand almost everything the thumb creatures do (after all, I've been trained for these creatures), but I don't understand that.

  She starts right out teaching me tricks. The usual ones: roll over, speak, sit. It's hard not to do everything just right the first try. I want to please. It's my host's nature. I mustn't get too caught up in my own intelligence. They warned us about something else, too. Enjoy yourself, they said, but beware of love.

  * * * *

  Remember that we love you more than any of these creatures ever can. We know who you really are. We love your thistledown and rudder. We love the sharpness of your probes.

  * * * *

  And they have to walk me. Down the street there's a coffee shop. They sit at the outdoor tables and have breakfast every morning. I don't think they ever did that until I came along. I'm good for both of them.

  I behave myself, trotting at the man's left heel as if I had been trained for it. I only misbehave if there's a chance to make them laugh. Even though he always acts as if he's cheerful, he needs as much cheering up as she does.

  As we sit, I watch the people pass by. I check out their smells. My man needs a woman to make him happy.
I can tell if any passing women are compatible with him or not. But when I find the perfect one I don't know what I should do about it. Except maybe put on a performance of all my comical tricks. I'd try to be a conversation piece so she couldn't help but come over to say something about me.

  * * * *

  Watch the sunrise over the water from the highest window, pick a clear day. Remember that this world will soon belong to us. You'll be free, then, to drift and float about with no host at all. And you can come back to us to love and be loved. Be patient.

  * * * *

  These messages have become an interruption. I know we need to be reminded of our mission, but I'm not going to forget what I'm here for. It's that this interruption comes just when I smell a good match for my man.

  As usual we're at breakfast. She's walking by. Not young. A little gray at the temples just as he is. He ought to like her looks because she has the same sharp nose, the same slimness with hunched shoulders as if they both think they're too tall.

  My man never holds my leash as we sit. He doesn't need to. I never run away, but now I do. I let her get a head start down the block and then I take off after her. Of course right away my man jumps up and runs after us as best he can. They can't afford not to have me. I'm their happiness.

  But how to stop her? She's striding along and I've got short legs. If my man gets to me before I can stop her they'll never meet, and he's moving a lot faster than I thought he could.

  I manage to get up to her feet, run between them, and trip her. She goes down harder than I wanted her to, but I had to do it. Right away I smell pain.

  My man kneels beside her. He keeps saying he's sorry—so, so, so sorry. He can't figure out what got into me. I never did anything like this before.

  He touches her shoulder ... keeping her down. “Don't get up yet. Rest a minute."

  I was so focused on her smell I didn't notice much else about her but now I see she's attractive in spite of her nose and her large mouth. In fact those are what make her looks special.