Alastair Reynolds' EVERSION

One of my favorite of Alastair Reynolds shorter works is a fiendishly gruesome little puzzler of a novella called Diamond Dogs. Set in his Revelation Space universe, it tells the story of a small party of mathematically inclined geniuses, two of whom are childhood friends who grew up at the highest strata of their society setting puzzles and traps for one another of greater difficulty than can even be imagined by us Earthbound, non-augmented humans of our own century. As adults, one's family makes an intriguing discovery on "the ragged edge of human space" where only one other human party has ever explored, only to die one by one of an unguessed-at number of various baroque and visceral "punishments" when they failed to solve a series of alien puzzles of increasing bizarre complexity. It's a compelling and memorable read, but not for its subtly drawn or complex or relatable characters. Those are found elsewhere in Reynolds' oeuvre (see especially his Poseidon's Children trilogy). But I always wondered what it would be like if Reynolds had held back the intense plot of Diamond Dogs for a longer work with more developed characters. 

Now I know. 

"The geometry..." he murmured. "The geometry! I think I can see it! Each quarter section is homeomorphic to a triangle!" He stared back to us, wide-eyed and uncomprehending of our own inability to visualize what was plain to him. "Can't you see it? It's beautiful! And hideous! It's... not right!"

Eversion, the master's latest, shows us not only what Diamond Dogs would be with better characters and actual stakes, but also takes another go at the intriguing ideas Reynolds explored in Terminal World, in which different levels of a city-state exist at different levels of technological development, those levels determined by the "resolution" at each level, i.e. how fine the grain of the very stuff of each level can get and what levels of precision it will allow. Except, again, the emotional and existential stakes turn out to be much higher in Eversion, for all that it, too, has a mathematical puzzle at its heart.

A ship called, just like the one that carried Dracula to England, the Demeter, has been engaged by a boorish Russian oligarch/magnate to follow up on a magnificent discovery at the edge of the known world. The magnate, Topolosky (wink), spared no expense on equipment but values secrecy over quality when it comes to the mode of transportation and the crew who will get him, his burly assistant Ramos, and his pet mathematics prodigy, Dupin, to where the mystery awaits. Meaning the captain and crew are competent but not spectacularly so, but, Topolosky thinks, are less likely to ask awkward questions or make unreasonable demands for things like advance warning of hazards to life and limb, etc. This is a nice and meaty beast of a plotline right here, but this is Alastair Reynolds hitting new heights of narrative brilliance, so of course there is a lot more going on.

For starters, Topolosky isn't our point of view character; the ship's medical man, Silas Coade, is. It's Silas' first voyage and he is a terrible lubber as it turns out, so he spends most of his time cooped up in his digs until he is called upon to save Ramos' life after a terrible accident, after which time he forms a friendship with the man as the Demeter nears its mysterious destination and various tall tales and outright lies on the part of Topolosky can no longer be denied. It's the Age of Sail and they're way north of Spitsbergen and approaching a cove and a hidden lagoon where a bizarre structure they call the Edifice awaits them. No, wait, it's the Age of Steam and they're tramping along the coast of Patagonia looking for a fissure that will admit them to the interior of a vast glacier concealing a mysterious Edifice. No, wait, they're aboard a state-of-the-art airship approaching the hole at the bottom of Antarctica that will admit them to the interior of the Hollow Earth where a mysterious Edifice clings to the ice and rock above the Void. No, wait, they're plying interstellar space on a ship that would make Flash Gordon or Buck Rogers proud and approaching a... oh, no, wait, they're on a spaceship, but it's just moving within our solar system, following up on an earlier effort to explore what's under the ice on the Jovian moon of Europa...

Each iteration of the story unfolds gracefully and reveals a little bit more of the true nature of the Demeter and its mission. Silas is an aspiring novelist in addition to being a doctor, and he's keeping the crew entertained with his futuristic imaginings of what a more advanced version of their mission might be like -- or are they retro ones? Along the way, the crew's lone female member, the lovely Ada Cossile, keeps nagging at him to do better, to try harder, to get it right, damn it, hinting that their situation is way more dire than it seems.

Each iteration also comes to concern itself with a deeply deranged and near-insolvable mathematical conundrum; the Edifice is not of any known human manufacture and seems to have deformed itself -- to have turned itself partly inside-out or everted, toward an unknown but probably sinister end. And Topolosky's great wish is to explore it first, claim credit for discovering its secrets and, of course, to profit from any applications might result from the study of the Edifice -- even if it costs a life or two.

The final layer of the mystery is as beautiful as it is heartbreaking, and every tear it jerks is earned in a way that only the more recent of Reynolds' work has accomplished (I'm thinking from Poseidon's Children through the great Revenger novels, of course), because these are fully imagined people whose dilemmas and danger have real emotional heft -- but none of Reynolds' trademark awe-inspiring and cosmic scale is sacrificed in the process. He really does just get better and better, you guys! I can't wait to see what he's got for us next, and he remains my number one buy-on-sight science fiction author. Tremendous stuff!

Cole Haddon's PSALMS FOR THE END OF THE WORLD

I thought I'd see a novel in which Phish's "Divided Sky" created the universe (because, well, it did) before I saw one in which David Bowie really and truly actually was the one and only thing that kept that universe together, but that was reckoning without yet another irresistible force in the universe: Cole Fucking Haddon.

This is another wild ride, friends. Buckle up. Or don't. You might prefer it in the alternate universe into which you get flung by weird forces you can't even perceive, let alone comprehend. I mean, you do you.

Haddon's debut in prose fiction* is pretty much what I had hoped Herve LeTellier's The Anomaly would be, and then some. Which means that yes, we're dealing with Simulation Theory again, but in a much cooler way that also encompasses the multiverse and time travel and I've already mentioned that David Bowie wrote the Music of the Spheres, right? David Bowie wrote the Music of the Spheres, you guys. And saved Ali from letting fear eat his soul just as a sort of side effect. Dammit, who's cutting onions in here?

I promise I'll settle down at some point. Maybe in the next review.

I kind of liked this book, you guys. It has everything I like best in speculative fiction, including some things I haven't encountered before in speculative fiction before but now slightly resent that I hadn't, like amazing lady scientists making huge differences in multiple centuries, I Am My Own Grandpa type character arcs, interesting answers to questions like What If Elon Musk But Worse, villains that turn out to be more interesting than they seemed at first and at least one teenage antihero who is building bombs destined to explode in multiple centuries because a bunny rabbit he believes is Allah himself has been telling him to with terrible urgency and persuasiveness and you will not believe where this teenager ends up as your favorite character in the whole cast of battered babies and misfits getting ground through the gears of Haddon's many interwoven plots. Which plots both do and do not neatly resolve themselves offscreen and subtly and with enough ambiguity to keep even the most discerning alternate reality snob/comics guy happy.

A word of warning, though, to those like me who read pretty much entirely in ebook format these days (as readers of this blog know, I have extraordinary difficulty physically holding print books, let alone turning their pages, these days, and it's only gotten worse over the years): a great deal of the David Bowie-esque material takes place off screen and is told in the form of things like newspaper clippings, which are embedded as graphics files in the ebook version, meaning the print is very, very, very small and closely formatted to resemble the content they represent and even with my very best cheaters on I struggled to read these bits. Fortunately, there are only a few of these, because you absolutely don't want to skip them; they are expertly done and add a whole extra, wonderful layer to the storytelling of Psalms for the End of the World.

Now excuse me. I'm going to spend the rest of my life trying to find a way to break into the world where this book got all of the notice and acclaim and international translation attention that went to The Anomaly in this one. Who knows, maybe that's also the one where Gene Wolfe got a Nobel Prize.

*He is also an author of some kickass comic books, wrote a lot for Hollywood and even got to create a real live TV show for NBC starring the guy who played an alternate version of David Bowie in Velvet Goldmine. All of this and only then did he decide to publish a novel. Cuz why not?