harles Sheffield's newest novel is a sequel to his Cold as Ice from 1992, but remains eminently readable as a solo book. In that prior novel, the reader was introduced to a dynamically developing solar system in the year 2092. After a devastating war between Inner (Mars and Earth) and Outer (the asteroid belt and Jovian satellites) polities, during which nine-tenths of humanity died, the forces of civilization and progress are resurgent. Exploration of Earth's seas parallels discoveries beneath the frozen mantle of Jupiter's Europa, while ancient human weapons from the Great War resurface as the focus of political intrigues.
At the center of all these machinations sits one Rustum Battachariya, aka the Great Bat, Bat or Megachirops. Ostensibly a civil servant on Ganymede in Cold as Ice, Bat is really a self-directed intellectual sleuth, on the order of Sherlock Holmes or, more precisely, given his personal girth and appetites and agoraphobia, Nero Wolfe. A misanthropic soul motivated only by the lure of an intriguing puzzle, Bat nonetheless manages to do the selfless thing when circumstances demand. As Dark as Day opens, Bat has retired to a sanctuary on Pandora, a moon of Saturn. Following his researches into the Great War, Bat learns of an old missing planet-killer weapon known only by its nickname, "dark as day." Aided by a Fax (artificial intelligence) named Mord, Bat will troll the Seine, the system-spanning computer web, in pursuit of this lurking danger.
Meanwhile, three other plot threads evolve. Alex Ligon, scion of a rich industrial family, seeks to perfect his computer model of the whole solar system, which alarmingly predicts the death of all humanity 100 years hence. Milly Wu, in the employ of the ogreish genius Jack Beston, seeks to decrypt an alien signal from light-years away. And two war orphans from Earth, Janeed Jannex and Sebastian Birch, emigrating to Ganymede, discover that the secret of their lost heritage holds the dangerous solution to the "dark as day" threat. When all forces converge on Ganymede, including even the sedentary Bat, the stage is set for a race against mass destruction.
Talking heads tackle tough issues
Any time 10 years pass between books in an SF series, a certain amount of retroactive upgrading is demanded, to stay current with scientific, technological and cultural trends. Charles Sheffield manages to weld his new book onto the foundation of the older one pretty firmly. The solidly articulated Seine, with its quantum-entangled computers and databases, replaces the more nebulous interplanetary communications network of the first book. New data about the bodies of the outer solar system lend more verisimilitude to the environments. And the biological sciences play a larger part here, mainly with the introduction of the Commensals, beneficiaries of a longevity method involving modified schistosomes, or tapeworms.
But along the way, Sheffield abandons several tag-ends of plot from the first book. The new superhumans of Ice—both the three adult ones and the missing six children still drifting through space—are completely offstage. The much-heralded discovery of a Dyson artifact through a long-range telescope is forgotten. And the Europan crystalline life forms that were central to the first book are now of negligible import. Luckily, Sheffield creates enough new hooks to make us mostly forget these dangling distractions, but the open-ended nature of this second book as well makes us hope that answers to all the various mysteries will not take another decade to arrive.
There's a lot going on in Dark as Day, believable human interactions and plenty of ideational matter to chew on—from the ingenious methods of decrypting SETI messages to a kind of virtuality that allows one to experience decades of time in half an hour—but the book remains curiously static and unsuspenseful. Even allowing for its quadruple set of protagonists, its huge length seems padded, especially when compared to such similarly sized space operas as those by Alastair Reynolds. The only real action sequences arrive in the final 60 pages of the book, and by then, the reader is almost past longing for such thrills.
The book derives its talky, tortoisey atmosphere from Sheffield's choice to make the main character be Bat. The grossly obese intellectual, prone to long passages of silent cogitation interspersed with massive banquets, infuses the very structure of the novel with similar rhythms. The tone of this book reminds me of no other writer than the late, legendary Isaac Asimov, whose own fiction often exhibited a similar privileging of ratiocination over action. Whereas Ice possessed a kind of van Vogtian frisson in the person of Cyrus Mobarak, mysterious behind-the-scenes manipulator of events, Dark as Day abandons Mobarak and his schemes in favor of Bat's lonely cerebral quest, and that's no improvement.
