he year is 2210, and it's a hard time to be an entrepreneur.
"Smart technology"--which tried to guess what its users wanted before
they wanted it--is dead, having been responsible for the destruction of
a Mars colony. The death of that colony in turn inspired a worldwide
anti-technology backlash that devastated the Earth's human population,
wiped away its old nations, and took decades to burn itself out.
The survivors find themselves living in two authoritarian states. Free
China is isolationist, communist and anything but free. The rest of
the globe belongs to Ecotopia, a world-state based on "dumb technology"
and micromanagement of the planet's ecosphere. An eXtranet connects
everyone in an all-pervasive way that far outstrips today's Internet. A
Tibetan Zen Buddhist brotherhood monopolizes mining in the asteroid
belt, and is so rich it can afford to soft-land payloads of rare metals
on surprised Earthers' front steps.
At the extremes of these rarefied societies are loners like Prudence
Odingo, who prowl the far reaches of the solar system looking for
oddities that will fetch millions of dollars back on Earth. Odingo's an
archeologist unfairly exiled from Earth by a treacherous mentor, and
she's just discovered something that will make up for her years of
frustration: proof of intelligent life.
That proof comes in the form of wheeled alien artifacts that have been
buried for 100,000 years under the ice of Jupiter's moon Callisto. She
returns them to Earth, where her old nemesis conspires to have her
declared a fraud. Before he can succeed, though, something equal parts
amazing and terrible happens. Jupiter's moons suddenly "skip" forward in
their orbits, and a comet once on course to hit the gas giant now has
Earth in its sights. It can mean only one thing: interplanetary war.
Meet some not-so-jolly Jovians
Wheelers is a collaborative effort by two science professors, Ian
Stewart and Jack Cohen. Their knowledge--Stewart of mathematics, Cohen
of biology--combines to give the book a hard biotech edge. The authors
are at their best when they're honing that edge with their inadvertent
antagonists, the intelligent gas-bags that created the wheelers, moved
the comet and live in Jupiter's atmosphere. They aren't the first ones
to suggest that Jupiter's seemingly harsh clouds could harbor life, but
they've created one of the most successful characterizations of it. The
book presents a detailed, juicy look at the jellyfishlike Jovians,
their "wheeler" servitor race, the giant gas-filled cities they both
live on and the complex ecosystem that encompasses them.
The book's weakness is its immense scope. David Brin took six
Uplift novels to delve into similar origin-of-life themes, and
while that's probably too many, the ideas in Wheelers can barely
be contained by its 512 pages. The book introduces a gaggle of
characters scattered through time and space, and the fleeting
introductions to them don't give readers much time to appreciate their
complexities. One pivotal character, Moses, goes from living with his
mother on the plains of Africa to being abducted by poachers to living
as a street child in China to surviving in a pre-technology experiment
known as the Village to hurling towards Jupiter. It all happens over
the course of a few years, and all--apparently--without any deep
psychological trauma for the kid.
Moses is another weakness of the book. The authors abandon their
hard-sf approach with him, favoring instead an ambiguous "sixth sense"
that lets him empathically understand animals and--eventually--the
Jovians. He's sort of a poor man's universal translator, and he turns
what could have been a compelling first contact into a ho-hum exchange.
The Jovians, however, make up for these flaws. The authors' intricate
portrayal of nonterrestrial life is a refreshing break from the boring
gray aliens that dominate the mainstream consciousness. These aliens are
truly alien, and they're all the more interesting because of it.
