n the pages of The Collapsium (2000), we were introduced to a most marvelous posthuman future. The Queendom of Sol is the planet-spanning monarchy that governs the space around humanity's sun. Fueled by two major inventions—collapsium, a material fashioned of black-hole atoms and used in large construction projects; and wellstone, an infinitely mutable everyday substance—as well as a host of ancillary gadgets, including the matter transmitters known as "faxes," which are simultaneously dispensers of immortality, humanity has entered a golden age. No one need work or live in fear of death. Backup copies of anyone—a necessary complement of faxing—can always be reinstantiated, should one's physically perfect body experience a mortal accident. Yet even such an era holds peril. A mad genius named Marlon Sykes is building a ring of collapsium around the sun, and when his construct threatens to touch the sun and destroy that luminary, only Bruno de Towaji can save the day. After much derring-do and ingenuity, Bruno pulls mankind's chestnuts from the fire and gets to marry Queen Tamra, becoming king of the solar system.
When the current volume opens, hundreds of years have passed, and Tamra and Bruno have a teenage son, Prince Bascal. Unfortunately, Bascal is an incorrigible juvenile delinquent. One of a tiny generation of contemporary children resentful of the perks and stifling weight of their undying elders, Bascal has been sent to a semi-punitive "summer camp": a manmade planet in the distant Kuiper Belt. There, he and his 14 cohorts, all bad boys, plan their revenge. Our viewpoint on this gang is Conrad Mursk, Bascal's best friend. The prince and company make a first escape back to Earth, but are quickly caught. Exiled back to camp, they manage to leave one conspirator behind on Earth and in his place smuggle in a new buddy, a wild-eyed girl named Xmary, who becomes Bascal's lover. Now seething, the 15 youths engineer the ultimate breakout.
Literally ripping their "planette" apart to get at its buried wellstone sheathing, they fashion a crude lightsail ship—its sail emblazoned with the skull and crossbones—and take off, intending to rendezvous with a distant unmanned neutronium-gathering barge. They will use the barge's fax to sneak back to Earth and foment rebellion against the dreary, perfect status quo. But none of the teens counts on the rigors of the journey in their imperfect ship. The presence of Xmary proves a bone of contention, as does Bascal's arrogance and the strongarm tactics of his two closest enforcers, Steve and Ho. By the time the ambitious space pirates reach the barge, only five survive. And when they finally board the barge, they discover a strange tribe of castaways whose rebel philosophies dovetail with their own. Will Bascal and Conrad manage to overcome the final obstacles toward their common goal before they kill each other? Or will the Queendom shut them down first?
Huck and Tom on an interplanetary raft
Wil McCarthy does a standout job with these two books, cramming them full of action, humor, top-notch speculation and intriguing characters. Moreover, the sequel is not a mere replay of the first volume, but a major extension and widening-out. Such ambition and creative playfulness should serve this book well when award lists are made up.
The first book was a kind of posthuman fable or fairy tale. Divided into three sections, with escalating consequences for Bruno and the human race, and narrated by a nameless bardic voice, it had the kind of tripartite shapeliness of some classic myth, with larger-than-life personages and fates. In a world in which old verities like death and illness and poverty were banished, McCarthy sought to prove that recognizable human emotions and dreams and struggles would persist. In this regard, he's part of a nascent school of writers that includes Cory Doctorow and John Wright, all examining life on or near the edge of the Singularity.
This new book is less mythic and more mundane—if you can imagine a future daily life that features resurrection, alchemy and teleportation—in keeping with its themes of youthful rebellion. For Bascal and Conrad and their friends, life is intensely lived in the present. The past and the future are both immaterial. Consequently, they do not focus on the long-term sociocultural impacts of their actions as Bruno and Tamara did earlier, but merely on getting to the next moment and its challenges. This gives the book a concentrated zest but deprives it of the long view, with two exceptions. First, Bruno and Tamara's brief appearances restore the mythic dimensions. They're like Glinda the Good Witch of Oz, arriving immaculately in bubbles of power, exhibiting a kind of superhuman wisdom, tolerance and merciless justice. Second is the frame tale. For the book does not open immediately with the youths, nor close with them. Rather, we witness an ancient Conrad arriving in a strange, non-wellstone ship on a planette containing a semi-senile Bruno. The time is centuries removed from the main narrative, and an enigmatic war is ongoing. How this relates to the climax of the main narrative remains to be explained.
McCarthy's tale summons up echoes of a number of classics. The rudimentary power politics recalls William Golding's Lord of the Flies (1954). The lost-boys aspect rings changes on J.M. Barrie's Peter Pan (1904). And certainly the theme of "lighting out for the territories" harks back to Mark Twain's Huckleberry Finn (1884). Closer to home, the central conceit of intergenerational rivalry among immortals found earlier expression in David Smeds' "Suicidal Tendencies," but of course McCarthy makes it his own. All these potent riffs are fleshed out in a comprehensive portrait of humanity transformed by advanced technologies. What more could any SF reader ask for?
