Fairyland | The Breath of Suspension | Starplex

Fairyland

Humanity has long kept "dolls" as servants and playthings, but with some outside help the dolls are about to evolve...

• Fairyland
• By Paul J. McAuley
• Avon Books
• $12.50/$16.50 Canada
• Trade paperback, Oct. 1996

lex Sharkey is a gene-hacker -- a maker and dealer of psychoactive viruses -- barely surviving on the fringes of third-world, post-millennial London. This is a future where the homeless have set up permanent communities in the parks, while the wealthy keep dolls -- gengineered humanoid life-forms -- as pets.

Hopelessly in debt to a Triad gang, Alex takes an illegal job creating reproductive hormones for the sterile dolls. Alex thinks the dolls are to be bred illegally for fighting and as sex toys -- a marginally troubling outcome but one he can live with if it will save him from the gangster's retribution. But Alex's new employer -- a strange and brilliant child named Milena -- has farther reaching plans for the newly fertile dolls.

Leaving Alex in the lurch, Milena takes her augmented creations and disappears into the wilds of a rapidly changing Europe. In her wake, a new life-form emerges that is as far evolved beyond its doll ancestry as man is from Neanderthals. Known as fairies, these secretive creatures flourish on the fringes of a fragmented society. Like their namesakes, fairies have preternatural abilities and an uneasy relationship with humankind. Alex -- uprooted from his livelihood and possibly infected by a nanotech geas by Milena -- joins with the members of a loose network of fringe-dwellers to try to find the mysterious heart of Fairyland and uncover the true intent behind the fairy glamour.

Fairyland is an intense, dense and enthralling read. British author Paul J. McAuley takes many of the currently fashionable tropes of science fiction -- nanotechnology, genetic engineering and virtual reality -- and extrapolates from them a unique and compellingly gritty future Earth. The story itself, told from various viewpoints along an attenuated timeline, is exciting and complex. Perhaps a little too complex, as the end is information dense and requires a lot of brain power to follow all the high-flying ideas McAuley tosses out.

McAuley's characters are engaging, though -- a reassuring mix of the morally challenged, the innocent and those in between. His depiction of the inhuman fairies is particularly clever and believable; symbolically linking the gengineered creatures to their mythical namesakes without being too contrived. The real heart of Fairyland, though, is the landscape -- a Europe that is ravaged by war, overcrowding and a pestilence of nanoplagues, yet also vibrant with hope that seems to spring from its most devastated areas. The intrusion of a new, possibly superior species into this unstable social ecosystem evokes a chilling sense of the fragility of humankind's reign over the Earth.

Overall, Fairyland is an amazing book -- full of exciting ideas that are plausibly extrapolated and told in a thrilling and powerful narrative voice.

McAuley's lyrical and evocative prose creates a vivid picture of a world that is definitely the offspring of our world, without falling back on cyberpunkish "brand name dropping" or meaningless minutiae. Highly recommended. -- LRC

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The Breath of Suspension

Stories of time travel and art, identity and other worlds...

• The Breath of Suspension
• By Alexander Jablokov
• AvoNova
• $5.99/$7.99 Canada
• Paperback, Oct. 1996

his reprint of Jablokov's first full-fledged collection contains 10 stories, ranging in length from merely short to short novel, all of which appeared previously in Asimov's Science Fiction Magazine between 1985 and 1992. Many of the stories are set in strange retro-futures with decadent ecclesiastical or aristocratic hierarchies. They are often peopled by artists and their art, and many concern time travel -- literally or figuratively.

The title story is a novella set in the same milieu as Jablokov's first novel, Carve the Sky, and begins in a monastery. The narrator, Vikram Osten, has reached the end of his life and, in a series of flashbacks, tells the story of his meeting and consequent acquaintance with Aya Ngomo -- the discoverer of ngomite who would later be made a saint.

A medium-length piece, "The Death Artist," again deals with personality and identity. Elam's art consists of getting himself cloned, then killing off the clone in inventive ways while his original body lies safe and secret in its adytum. At the other end of the spectrum, "Living Will," one of the shortest pieces in the book, has nothing to do with time travel. Set very much in the here and now, it is the story of an elderly man programming a computer with his own personality. His friends, colleagues and wife wonder why he is taking on such a challenging project so late in life. They get their answer in tragic circumstances.

With their similar tropes of time travel, alternate history and religion, their repeated themes of identity, memory and the relation of art to life, readers could be forgiven for assuming that most of these stories and characters are somehow linked. Jablokov's style occasionally compounds this problem. In several stories he personifies lakes and seas as "insolent" or "irritable," a trick that is hard to pull off even once, let alone in multiple stories. The tone, too, is sometimes at odds with the subject matter. In "The Death Artist" he does such a good job of showing readers how trivial life is that, when they discover what really happened to Elam's sister, they don't much care. His longer pieces often feel both crowded and incomplete. For example, the emotional power of "The Breath of Suspension" stems from the knowledge of the importance of ngomite -- a knowledge available only after reading Carve the Sky.

It is when he works closer to home, and at shorter length, that Jablokov excels. "Living Will" is a stunning piece of work, a moving, searching examination of personality, love and choices. Here there is no decadence, no exotic Lords of Time, just a man, his wife and his gradual mental failure. A truly marvelous story. "Above Ancient Seas," another short piece (and the only one set on another planet), is practically perfect: simple, powerful and utterly believable. These two gems alone make the book worth reading.

Wildly inconsistent but always rich and interesting. -- Nicola

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Starplex

Dark matter, light reading

• Starplex
• By Robert J. Sawyer
• Ace Books
• $5.99
• Paperback, October 1996

stronomers suspect that visible matter -- stars, nebulae, people -- makes up only about 10 percent of the total mass of the universe. All that humanity knows, a character in Robert J. Sawyer's Starplex comments, is but "the scum on a pond's surface." The mysterious "pond" is made of so-called "dark matter."

Keith Lansing and the multi-species crew of the good ship Starplex uncover the secret of dark matter and eventually meet gaseous dark-matter aliens (the "darmats"). The crew discovers that life-as-we-know-it is an incidental side-effect of the darmat's early efforts to redecorate the universe by molding galaxies into more aesthetically pleasing shapes.

In addition to solving one of astronomy's greatest riddles, Lansing and crew also solve a few other mysteries, fight an interstellar war, and search for a dark-matter alien infant the size of a planet. Thanks to some marital counseling from a superevolved being, Lansing even manages to weather his mid-life crisis. "Mid-life" might be a misnomer, however, because Lansing's wife, a beautiful and brilliant biologist, happens to be researching how to thwart the aging process.

For some readers, one of the chief pleasures of science fiction is the gradual process of understanding the strange and interesting setting created by the author. Starplex doesn't aim for that sort of reader. Sawyer's interstellar society will be familiar to viewers of Star Trek and Babylon 5, and he provides most of the necessary background detail in big info-dumps planted in the early chapters. Sawyer even includes two diagrams of the Starplex's bridge.

The novel does offer some fascinating moments: the ship's initial investigation of a dark-matter cloud, the disturbing death-rites of the alien Ibs, and the unfolding plans of the mysterious entities who have created a handy network of "shortcuts" through space, which humans and their alien allies use to travel to distant star-systems. These shortcuts turn out to be just a part of an audacious engineering effort that makes Larry Niven's Ringworld look like a high-school science project.

Overall, however, Starplex reads like an above-average Star Trek novel. Sawyer's writing can be painfully wooden, and there are too many scenes on the bridge with Lansing snapping orders. The multiple plotlines dilute rather than reinforce suspense, and the war between the humans and the piglike Waldahud particularly bogs down the story.

When it comes to combining hard science and high adventure, Sawyer falls short of such writers as Greg Bear, Vernor Vinge and Stephen Baxter. But readers in the mood for a light, quick read with some interesting ideas and an optimistic view of the future might enjoy Starplex..

This reminded me of Fred Pohl's Gateway, which has similar concepts but much better writing and characterization. -- Curt

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