oward the end of the 21st century, a colonizing mission has been mounted from Earth to the star known as 47 Ursae Majoris. The starship Exodus is crewed by the "creche-born," two dozen freakish specimens of altered humanity permanently immured in life-support tanks and carrying out their lives both in a virtual landscape and in the real world by inhabiting "proxy" android bodies (a technology at the focus of Mixon's previous novel, Proxies, from 1998). Upon reaching its destination, the Exodus plants a colony on a moon of a Jovian world named Fire. This moon, Brimstone, has a thin, oxygen-rich atmosphere, but is almost too frigid to sustain human life. Nonetheless, the Exodus dumps the real colonists—several lineages of clone families, whose members are always born as twins—here with the minimum of equipment, then takes off for its next stop.
All this is backstory conveyed throughout a tale that begins in media res some two decades after the establishment of Amaterasu, Brimstone's main settlement, which occupies convenient albeit claustrophobic caverns. Our protagonist is Manda CarliPablo, a rare singleton whose artificial-womb twin died before her birth. As an outsider excluded from many of the odd emotional and practical realities of clone culture, Manda has become a feisty loner. This quality of independence will stand her in good stead over the course of roughly two weeks, during which time the very survival of the colony will be in doubt.
First comes the discovery that Exodus has not really departed the 47 Ursae Majoris system. The ship is lurking nearby, and the creche-born have further designs on the colony. Despite some internal bickering among virtual factions, these paranoid, narcissistic geniuses have managed to insinuate their tendrils into the machinery of the colony. Like puppet-masters, they yank various strings from a remote vantage, and can turn deadly against any resistance. As if this threat were not enough, Amaterasu next suffers a quake which ruins much of its infrastructure. The terraforming project known as IceFlame must be delayed while the colonists struggle for such simple neccessities as enough to eat.
But the biggest monkey wrench in the lives of Manda and her peers comes with the discovery of an alien native life form deep beneath the ice-topped seas of Brimstone. After meeting and falling in love with Jim LuisMichael, Manda finds herself heading underwater with him to contact the aquatic aliens. As they begin to communicate with the strange beings, the creche-born launch their climactic assault. Trapped four kilometers underwater, Manda has a long road back to Amaterasu to participate in the decisive battle.
Wandering through a well-designed world
In her afterword to this ingenious if somewhat overextended hard-SF novel, Mixon cites such "soft-SF" influences as Ursula Le Guin and Kate Wilhelm, as well as the more predictable Kim Stanley Robinson (for his Mars trilogy). This mix of technology and tears, science and sympathy, world-building and emotional bonding places her squarely in an exciting camp of such left-brain/right-brain fusion artists as Linda Nagata, Maureen McHugh and Kathleen Ann Goonan, each of whom exhibits a differing blend of these qualities. In addition, the work of Alex Jablokov springs to mind as a collateral influence, although Jablokov seems to belong more in the Ings-McAuley spectrum of post-cyberpunk SF than Mixon does.
In any case, Mixon has a sure hand with both halves of her equation. In terms of the speculative technology on exhibit here, she has done her homework. From the "livesuits" that the colonists must wear to survive, to the ecology of Brimstone, to the virtual landscapes of the creche-born, and on to the infrastructure of the colony, Mixon has all her nuts and bolts in place. She creates a world that is inherently believable and lived-in. The reader will have no trouble visualizing any of the strangenesses or comprehending the sometimes complicated machinations of the various actors.
As for the sociological/characterological development, Mixon performs very credibly as well. The weird behaviors and adaptations of the clones and Manda's estrangement from same are conveyed quite empathetically. There are no barriers to riding Manda's shoulders or sympathizing with her. By the novel's hard-won denouement, any reader will feel that Manda has earned her reward.
Finally, the native Brimstonian life form is a fine creation as well, a non-carbon-based creature that thinks differently from us, yet shares certain drives. And the first-contact rituals between alien and human—although cut short by creche-born intervention—show some rethinking of the old cliches of the genre.
What prevents this book from earning a higher grade, however, is the same problem I identified in my recent review of Roger MacBride Allen's The Ocean of Years: There's simply too much wordage expended getting from Point A to Point B. Almost as long as one of Mixon's models (Robinson's Red Mars [1993] is 572 pages in paperback), this book contains about half the essential action. Consider the underwater escape sequence that begins in Chapter 30. It takes 40 pages to get Manda and Jim up from the bottom of the ocean and into a hut on land. In a Jablokov or Ings or McAuley or Alastair Reynolds novel, those same 40 pages would have featured about three paradigm shifts and six changes of venue. Speed and uncomplicated action are not always virtues, but more often than not in science fiction of this sort they decidedly are.
