Peter Watts' THE FREEZE-FRAME REVOLUTION

I love generation spaceship stories, but perhaps even more so I love the idea that a crew, using whatever science-fantastical suspended animation technology combined with science-fantastical light-speed or faster travel, can live for centuries, millennia, or, in this case, spans of time that make geologic time seem like the blink of a may-fly's eye. Especially when they're written by masters like Alastair Reynolds, or, in this case, Peter Watts.

In The Freeze-Frame Revolution, a genetically engineered offshoot of the human race called "Spores" that I can't help but compare to the nebbishes of T.J. Bass' Half-Past Human and The Godwhale (and perhaps prefigured by the early Genesis scorcher "Get 'Em Out by Friday") are on a galaxy-spanning mission to build "gates" so that the rest of humanity doesn't have to spend thousands of years in hibernation between work days, just to travel between stars. As the story opens, the Eriophora*, her A.I. pilot known as the Chimp, and a crew of 30,000 Spores have been on this mission for some six million years.

Our heroine, Sunday Ahzmundin, is wrapping up a shift awake with a few other members of her "tribe" (the designers of the mission having kept an idea similar to good old Dunbar's Number in mind while establishing its sociology) when one of them has a full-on mental and emotional breakdown, fixated on the idea that the mission for which they were bred has been a failure for all that thousands and thousands of gates have been built, because when was the last time they had any contact with any humans other than themselves? And also, sometimes, when a gate is brought online, various dangers lurk on its other side, ready to attack. Sunday gets her to settle down and get in her coffin and writes it off as something like Spaaaaace Madness (you coveteth my ice cream bar!) It's only after Sunday has been through another long sleep that she learns that her friend and crewmate who freaked out was awake during the only known attack on the ship that actually did damage. D'oh.

The rest of the story unfolds a few days at a time over the course of more millennia, as Sunday, who has always had a closer-than-usual relationship with The Chimp to the degree that Sunday gets awakened with greater frequency than pretty much anyone else when there's a problem The Chimp can't quite handle alone, starts piecing together enough unpleasant facts about the reality of their mission, its parameters, and how reliable The Chimp's memory and personality really are, to reach the conclusion that not only is an extremely slow-motion revolution absolutely necessary but has already been going on!

The conspiracy that unfolds/is constructed is the coolest thing about this very cool novella, as Sunday discovers the ingenous ways its members have developed to communicate with each other across the eons, and how some of them have managed to hide and stay awake to steer their plan through its final stages.

The audio book, as narrated by Emily Woo Zeller, carries an emotional wallop that I think it would be easy to miss in print. Zeller emotes all over the place; some have complained about this, but I think this adds a necessary depth and urgency to the characters/ predicament, so if you're going to check out this nifty little gem, I highly recommend doing so this way.

A devastating few hours of goodness await.

*A hollowed out asteroid straight outta Book of the Long Sun, iykwim. In fact, this is a lot like a condensed and more traditionally science fictional version of Book of the Long Sun!

Rivers Solomon's AN UNKINDNESS OF GHOSTS

 I can never resist a generation ship story, especially during another pass through the weird contained world of Gene Wolfe's Book of the Long Sun*, this time along with the boys from the Alzabo Soup podcast and their listeners, so when I found out about River Solomon's An Unkindness of Ghosts I ran, didn't walk, to my local library when I found out their copy was at last available, and now on hold for me.

Only it wasn't a hardcover. Sad trombone. And they didn't have the ebook in that lending pool, either. Sadder trombone.

But then I noticed that the audio book edition is part of the "Included in your subscription" selections and my head exploded into candy, especially once I listened to the sample and heard the narrator, Cherise Boothe, who has a pleasantly androgynous voice and a true talent for a variety of accents and speech patterns that makes her the perfect choice for this material.

The Matilda, on which this story takes place, is a hell of a generation ship, you guys. Like, Snowpiercer in space, only so much worse. Because it's basically a plantation in space, you guys. With all the horror that implies.

Our main characters are immediately people I wanted to cherish close to my heart even though I knew that they were both going to be in so much danger. There's Aster, born and raised and stuck in the levels of the ship referred to as the "Tarlands"**, where a hereditary underclass that just happens to be highly melanated live in semi-squalor between shifts doing manual labor on the gigantic ship's complicated array of enormous Valley Forge type farm modules where the whole ship's food supply is grown and tended to by hand. No cute little Hueys, Deweys or Louis, here. But at least no short-sighted bureaucrats are ordering that all of these modules get scrapped as economically unviable.

Everybody who lives in the Tarlands has to do a daily ten-hour shift in the farm modules, even if, as Aster is, they are devastatingly intelligent, educated, inventive and creative. Since Aster is all of these, Aster is perpetually stressed out, especially since she also serves the Tarlands as a sort of space age medicine woman, with a secret botany lab carved out of some forgotten sections of the ship where she experiments on everything from plant genetics to pharmaceutical development in addition to serving as an old-fashioned sawbones, in which role we first meet her as she is required to amputate a child's gangrenous foot -- the child having gotten severe frostbite when the upper decks of the ship decided to dramatically reduce if not outright cut off the power and heating to the Tarlands when their ancient ship myseriously stopped functioning at optimal levels. Better that than sacrifice their recreational uses for that power.

Aster gets away with this side work of hers largely due to her close-but-ambiguous*** relationship with an upper decker, Theo, himself born of a Tarlands mother but was light-skinned enough to pass as an upper decker and thus whisked into his father's privileged world. Theo has grown up to become an actual shipboard physician and, as the son of a late"Sovereign" of the vessel and nephew of the brutal warlord who is poised to become the next Sovereign (and as the novel begins, the current Sovereign of the ship is suddenly very unwell), Theo is actually the ship's Surgeon General despite still being in his mid- to late 20s. Raised at least partially by the same foster mother as Aster was, he has grown up as Aster's playmate and friend and most trusted confidante despite the difference in their stations, and uses (and abuses) his privilege to shield her from the consequences of her disregard for regulation and protocol as they hit adulthood. That they have sort of noticed that maybe they have developed feelings for each other that are not exactly of the sibling variety crops up, but really, for the most part, Aster considers herself mostly gay and Theo is taking advantage of some botanical decoctions of hers to sort of subtly transition into even more of a "girlie man" than his evil uncle already takes him for. A fraught and fascinating pairing, is Aster and Theo's... and then there's Giselle, another foster sister, who is cantankerous, moody, sexy, attention-grabbing and mean as a snake... 

That's all just setting up the pieces before Solomon starts moving them around the board in a bloody spaceborne chess game from hell. Aster's roommates perpetually come under undue scrutiny by sadistic power-drunk guards acting on the Lieutenant's imprimatur, who single out Giselle for sexual abuse and a pair of openly lesbian lovers for good old fashioned beatings. Aster's own movements keep getting curtailed as the Lieutenant, who fancies himself even more of a god-king than the usual "sovereign" of the Matilda does, begins to tighten his grip on the whole ship but especially upon those dark-skinned "animals" in the Tarlands, even to resorting to the good old fashioned "low diet" of Nelson's navy, to keep the Tarlanders' just healthy enough to work but not so energetic or capable of cognition to actually rebel against his increasingly cruel tactics.

Ah, but while the Lieutenant and his thugs are excellent at authoritarianism, terror and violence, they don't really understand the ship they and their ancestors before them have occupied for over 300 years and on which their descendants are likely to be stuck for hundreds of years more before it arrives (assuming it doesn't break down en route, or collide with an asteroid, or...) at the "promised land" of some unspecified exoplanet out there that might not even have been chosen back when the Matilda was launched. But there are other people aboard who do understand the ship, and one of them happens to have been Aster's mother, Lune, who was a genius engineering type despite the circumstances in which she lived, and who taught herself many secrets before giving birth to Aster and then disappearing, presumed dead...

BUT, someone else seems to have covered Lune's tracks, tearing pages out of precious library books and having "checked out" all the important ones 29 years before the events of An Unkindness of Ghosts. Aster's story shifts then into a detective narrative of sorts as she uncovers clues, interviews witnesses and does all the usual gumshoe stuff while also performing all of her other responsibilities and trying not to get brutally assaulted in the process because curfews keep getting tighter and Theo's passes start getting honored less and less frequently. Eventually she pieces together what needs to be done (and Book of the Long Sun echoes some more) but not before things come to a truly violent head that even seems to have troubled audio book narrator Boothe. So, some trigger warnings for violence and sexual assault and racism are in order, very much, yes.

But it's a fascinating enough tale to reward the (comfortable, white) reader who bows to the need to live with and digest narratives like these -- even though that reader is probably the one most likely to use the story's unabashed brutality as an excuse not to finish it. Don't be that reader. Be the reader that finishes it and honors Aster's and Theo's and Melusine's and Giselle's and Mabel's and Pippa's and Vivian's stories, and the Lieutenant's too, because they echo stories from our collective past, and warn us what our collective future is going to be like if we keep ignoring the lessons the past is always, always trying to teach us.

Let's take better versions of ourselves ad astra.

*And yes, just to address it, I do plan to finish "SUNS SUNS SUNS" sometime soon, since so many people still seem to be reading it even though I petered out several years ago. But I've got some original fiction very much related to this material that I'm working on this year and next, so it's gonna have to be squeezed in. I find myself wanting more to write about Book of the Long Sun than Book of the New Sun, but I don't like that BotNS is still incomplete on here.

**Yeah, yeah, it's not subtle. But look at what's going on in this endless year of 2020 And Some Months and tell me that subtle is going to get the job done.

***Really close but also really ambiguous. Because both of these characters, in addition to other burdens of their respective births, are also kind of gender fluid. Aster is what we'd call assigned female at birth, but she is powerfully muscled, has hard and masculine features (by her own description) and more than a touch of hirsuitism. Theo was always a bit too girly for his family's liking but eventually found their favor by his choice of profession, even though some of the medicines that Aster makes for him have some estrogen-like effects on him. Cherie Booth voices both narratives brilliantly, which is why she was the best possible choice for this audio book.

Alastair Reynolds' ON THE STEEL BREEZE

Caveat lector: I'm not sure I can be wholly rational just yet in discussing On the Steel Breeze, Alastair Reynolds' astonishing sequel to last year's Blue Remembered Earth. I'm still coming down from the high. And the tension. And the intensity. And the tiny soupçon of disappointment that one element of this dense yet sprawling, intricate yet straightforward, staggering hunk of novel didn't get quite as much "screen time" as I would have liked, but which I feel safe in expecting will get a lot more play in the next volume of Poseidon's Children oh please I hope Mr. Reynolds thank you sir.

As such.

Where Blue Remembered Earth introduced us to Poseidon's Children's First Family of Space, the Akinyas, and their sort-of-deceased (it's complicated) matriarch Eunice, and then sent Eunice's grandchildren traipsing all around the solar system on a high stakes treasure hunt, On the Steel Breeze sends us in two directions as we follow the triple life of Eunice's great-grandaughter Chiku Akinya, daughter of Sunday of Blue Remembered Earth's cosmic punchline. Faced before the novel's narrative begins with a decision she decided she refused to make -- whether to hare off alone after great-grandma's missing spaceship, the Winter Queen, to join the crew of millions aboard an early wave of generational starships setting to colonize a promising exoplanet that just also happens to offer the most tantalizing mystery ever to tease a Kepler-ish space telescope, or to stay home and live a sort-of-ordinary life standing for the Family on Earth -- Chiku has had herself not only cloned twice over, but paid to have the three clones neurally linked via implants and other cyberpunk hoodoo so that they can routinely swap memories and all three of them share in their triple adventures.*

So right away this novel sings with tension as it threatens to split off into three stories, but really we only get two. Chiku Yellow (they designate themselves by colors)'s path keeps her mostly confined to Earth until circumstances force her to start roving around the solar system a little bit like her mother and Uncle Geoffrey had to in the prior book; Chiku Green is off to ride the inside of a re-engineered comet like a high-tech Whorl (c.f. Gene Wolfe's Book of the Long Sun) heading for a planet named Crucible, roughly half of which is covered by an artificial structure/design carved right into the substance of the planet, which humans have named the Mandala, and upon which there are to be cities and other facilities already there and waiting, built by self-assembling giant robots that were sent ahead at a much faster speed than the pokey asteroid arks, for the tens of millions of humans caravaning through interstellar space to their exciting new home.

But of course, the plot has quite a lot to say about that, and it's a doozy, involving artificial intelligences that have sort of accidentally arisen out of the 31st century's giant super-internet (I'm oversimplifying, but also trying to avoid spoilers) and are stone paranoid about being discovered and exterminated, the prior novel's panspermian-versus-machines-and-robots culture wars, the desperate race to develop new technologies on the fly (as in the generational ships' engineers developed engines that let them speed up to 13% of light speed but nobody bothered to figure out how to slow them back down at journey's end until they'd all been on their way for quite a while. Trust me, this thinking makes sense within this weird range of cultures Reynolds has imagined for this far-future anthropocene), political coups and counter-coups within and among the rag tag fleet caravan of generational "holoships", and Akinya family dynamics..

Plus the powers that are already there at Crucible. Something made that Mandala, you guys. And it's attracted attention before. Dude.

PLUS...

Elephants. As in descendants of the herd the Panspermians were raising in secret on the Moon in Blue Remembered Earth (Elephants on the Moon, you guys! And now elephants on an interstellar spaceship? What next, a shark in a spacesuit? Well, close...) But this is where my tiny soupçon of disappointment comes in because while we get the joyous image and idea of elephants traveling on a spaceship alongside humans, and are teased with the idea of David Brin-style "uplifted" elephants that have the potential to just basically become another sentient race out in space, it's just bare glimpses of them that we get in On the Steel Breeze. This is understandable with everything else that's going on, to a point, but like I said, a bit disappointing. BUT, there is hope. As in hints that an uplifted elephant, a Tantor to use the phrase they themselves prefer, to distinguish them from the ordinary elephants that are also along for the ride, might at last become something besides cargo, however unusual and precious; might be a full-fledged point of view-ish character in the next novel. Or at least a supporting one like, say, a Remontoire. And that would be glorious indeed. So the soupçon of disappointment really just enriches the flavor of the overall recipe. Marmalade ain't marmalade without that bitter orange peel...

And really, I'm just scratching the surface here. There is all of this, and all the atmospherics, the grand sweep and sense of awe at the vast scale of the universe that we always expect from Alastair Reynolds -- plus, I'm delighted to say, some of his best characterizations yet. In the various Chikus, we get fully developed, flawed and 100% relate-able women who bear extraordinary burdens, sometimes falter under them, sometimes heave them up and hurl them at their foes like champs, and are always, always believable, even when dealing with the unbelievable. I've liked a lot of Reynolds' characters before, but this is the first time I really and truly cared and empathized, so that as events came to a head in the novel's last fifth or so I started referring to this novel as On the Steel Stroke because I was so stressed and distressed by what the Chikus Three were dealing with.

You will be, too.

And now, I think I need to go have a lie down.

*This is the first of many things in this novel to just give me the shivers. The good kind. The envious kind. The I wish I could do that right now kind. Just think of it! Who wouldn't want to get to experience each possibility that branches off from a major life decision like that? Not only would it take the sting out of tough life changing decisions -- ok, one of me marries this guy and one of me stays single... or one of me goes off and teaches English abroad and the other stays here and does the community work I've been doing... or one of me stays in college and gets that probably useless PhD in Classics and the other goes out and gets a damn job... whatever it is, you could try it. This would be a way to have it all, people. The good and the bad. See? Shivers.

Elizabeth Bear's DUST #OneBookAtATime

Not since I committed the slight error of letting the Wizard-Knight series be my first Gene Wolfe reads have I been so baffled and yet intrigued by a book as I was as I started Elizabeth Bear's Dust, the first book in her "Jacob's Ladder" series.

Superficially, the two works have a fair bit in common: mysterious, half-mythological worlds strange technology that looks like magic/magic that looks like technology, strong theological overtones*, opaque and ambivalent secondary characters, puzzling and multilayered sub-worlds. Ultimately, though Dust is better regarded as a more accessible version of some other Gene Wolfe work, his Long Sun series, which takes place aboard a generational spaceship inside a comet, governed by "gods" that are software copies of the consciousnesses of various rulers from the homeworld's deep and almost forgotten past. But where the Whorl is one complete world through which characters can travel just like they might have on Urth, Jacob's Ladder, the dying generational ship through which our two protagonists move trying to prevent a catastrophic war, is compartmentalized to the point of atomization, with each sub-world either denying the existence of others or hostile to them. Pseudo-feudalism prevails, with the most important class distinction between those whose bodies have been altered and lives extended via colonies of nanomachinery and those who have not.

As our story starts, an "Exalt" woman (i.e. a person benefiting from nanomachines) from the "Engine" world, named Sir Perceval  (don't ask), has been captured in some kind of skirmish and awaits the pleasure of the petty tyrant of another sub-world, the Rule. By a Dickensian coincidence, the Mean (no nanites) assigned to keep Perceval alive turns out to be Perceval's long-lost sister**, Rien, who brings news that the petty tyrant has designs on taking over the whole of Jacob's Ladder and ruling it the way her distant ancestor, the Captain did long ago when the ship actually moved around. Naturally this ambition is inimical not only to the ways of life of every other population on the ship, but to the ship itself, which is just barely held together through the efforts of weird and mutually hostile fragments of the machine consciousness that once ran and directed the ship on its journey of exploration and colonization before disaster struck centuries ago.

Part of the story is told from the perspective of one of these god-fragments, Jacob Dust, who watches events unfold from deep inside the substance of the ship and who is only able indirectly to influence them, through a set of nanomechanical wings he has managed to graft onto Perceval's back to replace those cut off when she was captured. His motives are unclear; his interactions with other fragments intriguing but weirdly directionless, his love for Perceval and Rien infectious. The mystery of what he/it was really up to is what really propelled me through this novel.

And I needed some propelling, because once the setting and situation became clear, so did the fact that pretty much every person or entity on board Jacob's Ladder is pretty repellent, with the possible exception of Rien and Perceval, but sometimes even they are hard to take. And not in that fun, love to hate 'em way. These beings are nasty pieces of work, and descended from even nastier pieces of work, and seem kind of naturally inclined to take decisions that are, well, repellent -- even with the excuse that the deeds they contemplate are necessary for their survival.

Dust has two sequels so far, Chill and Grail, but I don't see myself hurrying to read them anytime soon. Their blurbs indicate to me that the alienating qualities that made me sort of drag my feet in reading Dust are still very much a part of the greater narrative, and I have too many books on the infinite to-be-read pile as it is, you know?

But still -- interesting.

*Though I strongly object to the cover blurb "Can a broken angel save a fallen world?" Even combined with the pleasingly H. R. Gigeresque cover art, that's a pretty misleading bit of copy, and one that put me off the book for quite a while; this is not a religious allegory or bible story in genre fiction trappings, after all.

**Everybody who is anybody turns out to be related to everybody else in this novel. It thus teems with weird bits of dialogue like "Chief Engineer, I need to talk to your about our brother, and our daughter." Um.