n the 27th century, mankind is flourishing. Biotech has made everyone nearly immortal, and a culture of surplus reigns. Star travel is limited to relativistic velocities, but many colony worlds prosper. Yet there are still frontiers of knowledge. And one of these frontiers is literally about to explode.
A probe to the double-star system SS Cygni, some 250 light-years from Earth, has just returned an intriguing snippet of video: In the accretion disk of plasma that flows from the larger primary to its white-dwarf companion, star dragons live. The novelty of their existence demands that an expedition be mounted. Those who venture outward will experience two or three years of travel; meanwhile, 500 years will pass on Earth.
The five humans who choose to undertake this familiarity-sundering mission are an obsessive, talented lot. Capt. Lena Fang, half in love with her ship, the Karamojo, whose ruling AI has its personality interface modeled on the ancient writer Ernest Hemingway. Samuel Fisher, exobiologist, who finds science easy but human interaction hard. Phil Stearn, the jack of all trades, whose one ambition is to play at the many games of life. Sylvia Devereaux, mistress of physical sciences, who dreams of experiencing the heat death of the cosmos. And Axelrod Henderson, master biotech, an egomaniac who plans to replicate himself across the universe.
On the way out to SS Cygni, the five humans have plenty of time to form shifting arrangements of lovers, friends, enemies and allies, and to theorize about capturing a star dragon. But when they arrive, they quickly find all their tidy schemes going kaboom. An explosive probe of the accretion disk brings 10,000 fusion-powered dragons storming out to damage the ship. Once the Karamojo recovers, the hunt proceeds more slowly and more subtly, eventually resulting in the acquisition of not a dragon, but a dragon's egg.
But the humans have not counted on the rage of a bereft mother dragon and her mates.
Hard SF with a layering of quest mythology
There has never been a better time for hard SF than the present, a fact elucidated by David Hartwell and other editors and critics. And with the advent of such new writers as Karl Schroeder and John Wright (both also published by Tor, which seems to be spearheading this movement), we are getting not only hard SF of the Hal Clement mode, but also hard SF that seeks to incorporate the mythologizing instincts that powered such writers of the New Wave as Samuel Delany and Roger Zelazny.
Mike Brotherton, himself a trained astrophysicist, combines the technical acuity and ingenuity of Robert Forward with the ironic, postmodern stance and style of M. John Harrison. In this, his debut novel, those twin talents unite to produce a work that is involving on any number of levels.
First, Brotherton's speculative portrait of a world divorced in time five centuries from ours is stimulating, cohesive, believable and alluring, replete with future language, future morals and future traditions. (Lover for a time to Fang, Fisher reacts to their breakup by getting a radical bodymod, not exactly an option we have today.) By setting his tale five centuries from now, and positing another 500-year transition awaiting his explorers, he implicitly sets up a timeline of never-ending change, a Utopia explosion. As Stearn says, life just keeps getting "better and better. ... And it'll be better still in the future." This kind of radical optimism is what once drove the core of SF, and it's refreshing to see this narrative engine flaring once more.
Second, Brotherton invests the weird landscape of SS Cygni and the perhaps even weirder landscape of the Karamojo—with its corridor-patrolling airfish, living chairs and beds and recomplicated wormhole drive—with verisimilitude and tangibility. Using vivid yet easily apprehendable metaphors, a la Stephen Baxter, he guides the reader through complex descriptions and concepts.
Thirdly, our author devotes as much time to the screwed-up yet sympathy-inducing personalities of his crew—including the Hemingway AI—as he does to his speculations and the landscapes. We really get the sense of a community of twisted souls and psyches trying to do the best job possible within their individual limits.
Finally, thanks to a streamlined, sexy prose style and a layering of symbolism—Capt. Fang is something of an Ahab, scared by a sea leviathan in her youth—this novel buttresses its surface action with deeper, satisfying layers of allegory and meaning. It's just about all you could ask for in a hardcore SF adventure.
