A few weeks ago I wrote about Justina Robson's Living Next Door To The
God Of Love, which I thought was okay. In that book, a thing called
The Unity exists, and although it is ineffable, it has agents that
have created weird, extant, alternative realities for human beings, a
search space whereby Unity searches for meaning, often by absorbing
the distinctiveness of individuals into itself. It has one major agent
running around, and a lot of human beings trying hard to find the key
that will unlever Unity's power over humanity. Unity is a seething
mass of all the things its ever absorbed; a great storm of "seethe"
broke away, called itself Jaeleka (the nominal titular character), and
things got weird.
I just finished the book that came before Living Next Door..., Natural
History, and it leaves me with this one strong impression: while I can
see how Robson got from Natural History to Living Next Door..., I
really, really wish she hadn't.
The second book had wonderful, complex characters and lovely set
pieces, but it didn't all add up to a meaningful story; Natural
History, on the other hand, not only has the same complicated,
wonderful, lovely characters you come to love or hate, but it does
have a meaningful story with a highly charged and yet satisfying
ending.
Robson starts with a world where human beings have genetically
engineered thousands of species of human/machine hybrids, the Forged,
who do the dangerous, dirty, environmentally challenging, or merely
drudge work. Space****ps, ocean explorers, asteroid miners, Jovian gas
harvesters, each is an individual human being whose structure has been
pushed to absurd, extreme limits. The naming scheme for these people
is wonderful, complex, and creative. Robson did marvelous work.
Crippled by an accident, Forged interstellar explorer Voyager Lonestar
Isol finds something that gets named Stuff, which allows her to repair
herself and travel instantly anywhere in the galaxy. She returns to
Earth where she tells the Forged Independence Movement that she has
the power to take them "away from the monkeys," to a world of their
own. She says she has found such a world, and allows one human
visitor, Zephyr Duquesnse, to go there, to *****s whether the Forged
or "all humanity" should lay claim to it.
But Stuff is not just wish-fulfillment technologies. And when we learn
what it is, we learn what it can do for us, but the price for some may
be just too damned high.
What annoys me now more than ever is the amount of mythology she
crammed into Living Next Door... to try and make it consistent with
this book. Natural History was good enough. Robson could have written
another book, a better book, without relying on the Stuff mythology
and then tacking on all the extra elves, mystical engines, and past
lives crap.
Everyone in Natural History book is brilliantly thought-out and
realized: Zephyr, Isol, Gritter, Tatresi, Corvax, even Bob The
Collie. If you like your SF literary, this book might just you
cry. Robson plays a bit fast and loose with her science (transitions
from Jovian to Terran space seem to take only a few hours even for
fusion-based STL craft, for example) but it's okay: it's all in
service to an excellent story.
Elf
--
Elf M. Sternberg, Immanentizing the Eschaton since 1988
http://www.pendorwright.com/
Elf's latest stories are available in paperback! Buy
the genderbending novel _Sterlings_, available
now from http://stores.lulu.com/elfsternberg
|
