icking up directly from the first book in this thrilling hard-SF series, Echoes of Earth, this next installment in the adventures of a post-Spike humanity on the run delivers plenty of action and intriguing speculations, but does not conclusively terminate the saga, which plainly has at least one more book to run.
The events in Echoes are concisely summarized in the opening pages of Orphans: The enigmatic Spinners have been seeding Earth's thousand nascent colonies with advanced technological gifts: I-suits that confer extended life, FTL ships, a library of galactic knowledge. But use of the gifts invariably draws a second race, the Starfish, who jealously seek to wipe out anyone possessing Spinner tech. Earth—where the Spike, or Singularity, created posthuman consciousness—has already been wiped out, as have a number of the colonies, leaving only a handful of human survivors. Moreover, the humans are hardly even really human. The stars were colonized by sending out "engrams," multiple software replications of 60 elite individuals, who can download themselves into clumsy android bodies if necessary. The engrams are limited and crippled. Only Caryl Hatzis, shattered superwoman from Earth, survives in traditional form.
Along with Peter Alander, first recipient of the Spinner gifts, Hatzis is now striving to unite the contentious survivors into an organization that can, first, survive and rebuild, and, second, take the fight back to the seemingly invincible Starfish. But two new factors swiftly obtrude to shift the equations. First, Hatzis and Alander discover Gen. Frank "The Ax" Axford. Axford had smuggled his engram aboard a colony ship, then taken it over. The only military mind still extant, Axford is well on his way to making over Spinner gifts into needful instruments of war. An uneasy tripartite alliance among Axford, Hatzis and Alander is barely begun when a third set of aliens enters the picture. The Yuhl are scavengers, following the Starfish and living off the crumbs of destruction. But after 2,500 years, they know a lot about the killers, and Alander is intent on recruiting them as allies.
First-contact negotiations between mankind and the Yuhl are abetted by Spinner technology, and various secrets of the Yuhl are learned, including the identity of the mysterious Praxis, their leader. Finally, only the paranoid Caryl Hatzis stands in the way of an alliance. Even she is bending toward such a union, when the impatient Axford tosses a spanner in the works. Deliberately invoking the wrath of the Starfish, he pushes humanity and the Yuhl into a do-or-die confrontation with the space sharks.
On the other side of the ultimate disaster
Perhaps the most wonderful thing about this ongoing "radical hard SF" space opera is the blithe and insouciant manner with which Dix and Williams approach mankind's objectively dismal plight. In much of older SF, the destruction of the homeworld and 99 percent of human beings would be seen as an irrecoverable, melancholy terminus, or at best the start of some kind of dark age or interregnum, a decided lowpoint in the species' development. Not so in this series. Not only do most of the survivors bounce back quickly from the ultimate disaster, but they surge forward in quantum leaps of super-science discovery ("If you pushed hard enough ... three days could equate to a month"), goosed by genocide into new feats of creativity. Williams and Dix seem to be asserting that nothing short of complete extermination will be sufficient to quash the spirit or recovery of the race. In this sense, their work echoes such Clarkean stories as "Rescue Party," in which unsuspecting aliens discover the never-say-die indomitability of our kind.
Of course, no one is happy about the situation they find themselves in, post-Spinners, and some individuals counsel despair or surrender. But on the whole, the optimism and gung-ho attitude of the main characters speak of a very relevant courage in the face of catastrophe that has a distinct post-9/11 feel to it. When one reads in the newspaper that engineers are meticulously measuring the Statue of Liberty in order to be able to swiftly reconstruct it after a hypothetical terrorist attack, then the unfailing willingness of Hatzis and company to pick themselves up and try again sounds like a simple description of basic human nature.
Additionally, the fact that the the characters we empathize with are not human by our baseline definitions—just digital "copies"—evokes a tolerance and inclusiveness much needed today. By extending the definition of humanity to such offshoots, the authors argue implicitly for a big tent under which sentience of many sorts can shelter equally. This whole "Steel Beach" mentality, to employ John Varley's term for permanent castaways in harsh new environments, is conveyed subtly yet firmly by the authors.
This is not to say that Williams and Dix neglect the core of their story for the message. There's plenty of action here, much of it reminiscent of the best of the original space operas of John Campbell or Edmond Hamilton or Doc Smith. The climactic battle among Starfish, humans and Yuhl, with its coruscating rays and small darting ships and gigantic battle cruisers speaks to the buried Skylark of Space in all of us. Yet all the razzle-dazzle is supported by much more real science than Smith ever employed. The strange biology and culture of the Yuhl are thoroughly investigated. And most intriguing are the ontological problems brought up by the multiple iterations of the 60 engrams. When Peter Alander has to confront a damaged copy of himself and talk the doppelganger down off the ledge, we realize we are truly in a posthuman future—and that we can survive whatever is tossed at us.
