n one strange corner of the universe, six worlds and their several moons orbit tightly around their odd sun, which operates not only by fusion, but by simple oxidation. On the forested world called Enting lives our protagonist, Polystom: a confused, naive, selfish and self-preoccupied young man recently beset by twin tragedies. Both his father and co-father have just died, leaving him the unprepared Steward of Enting, ruler of a whole world, subservient only to the distant Prince on sister planet Kaspian. Luckily for "Stom," his mentoring uncle, Cleonicles, lives on Enting's habitable moon, a sphere only a few thousand miles away and reachable by simple airplane flight through the cosmic ether that pervades the System of Worlds. After visiting Cleonicles in his grief, Polystom conceives of the notion of marrying. Through the offices of an aunt, Polystom meets Beeswing, an introverted yet rebellious young woman who consents almost without volition to become his wife.
Back home, amid wealth and servants, many pleasures and small duties, Polystom looks forward to Beeswing's emotional and physical affection. But the young woman is capricious, withdrawn and uncommunicative. Married life begins to go sour for Polystom. He takes an increasingly harsh hand with Beeswing, leading inevitably to tragedy.
Our tale now switches its focus temporarily to Cleonicles. The old man is the System's most respected scientist, and has been instrumental in creating the giant Computational Device that runs the unending war on Mudworld, one of the six spheres. In what proves to be the last day of his life, Cleonicles gets to fulfill a lifelong dream by studying up close a skywhal, a leviathan that lives between the worlds. But that very skywhal brings the agents of his death.
Upon learning of his uncle's murder, Polystom finds his life looking increasingly cankered. In his maudlin, poetic way, Stom fixes on the fact that his uncle played a part in the Mudworld hostilities, and decides to join the army in tribute to the old man, and to confront "reality." Raising troops on his estate, Polystom outfits himself in fine frippery, packs his two gorgeous pistols and departs for Mudworld, once the beautiful world of Aelop but now a cratered battlefield. There, Polystom's conceits will come crashing down around him, and he will be learn harsh truths—from living beings and from ghosts.
The cruel education of a child of privilege
Adam Roberts has had four astonishing books published prior to this latest, yet remains practically unknown to American audiences. That's a shame. The first one, Salt (2000), charts the fate of feuding interstellar colonies planted on a forbidding world. The second, On (2001), is the tale of a land where gravity has literally flipped 90 degrees. Also appearing in 2001, Park Polar, a novella, is unique for Roberts in that it takes place on Earth in the near future. And Stone (2002) is space opera concerning a genocidal killer.
As his track record might predict, in Polystom Roberts bravely essays themes and styles completely unlike any of his earlier outings. His daringness this time is to take as his template the era of the first world war and its vast contributions to literature, and give that period a science-fictional spin. Polystom's society resembles Edwardian England in its hierarchies, recreations and attitudes, with Polystom himself bringing to mind P.G. Wodehouse's scatterbrained Bertie Wooster (if Wooster had been tempered with the clear-eyed acidity of Thomas Disch). But this is Wodehouse also mutated along the lines of Jack Vance and Gene Wolfe. The astrophysical setup of the System of Worlds invests everything with exotic strangeness. Wolfe's famous The Fifth Head of Cerberus (1972) seems echoed in the tripartite structure of Roberts' book as well.
Yet despite Roberts' penchant for never repeating himself, certain angles of attack and concerns remain consistent across all of his works. The paramount issue in nearly all of his books is warfare, and the toll it takes on the individual. The current novel is no exception. Roberts has an uncanny way of crystallizing the horrors and insanity of war into macabre images, creating an immediacy that smacks the reader upside the head. Consider Polystom's stumble into a crater filled with cast-off shoes—each shoe still containing a severed foot—to see what I mean.
Finally, not content with all the tactics of estrangement adduced above, Roberts pulls out all the stops in the book's concluding chapters by introducing ontological weirdnesses on the order of The Matrix—and admirably refusing to resolve them.
Possessed of an impeccable prose style akin to Ian MacLeod's, a fevered imagination, a real gift for plotting and a devotion to the SF genre, Roberts seems assured of a future much brighter than that of poor Polystom, whose brilliantly depicted lack of self-knowledge is his fatal undoing.
