ere's the sorry state of Earth in the year 2372: The planet is ruled by Canadians, who enforce a stagnant, politically correct society that has abolished all violence and risk-taking. Any offenders of government edicts are exiled permanently to a planet named Hell, a policy that has been in effect for 200 years. Hell was seeded with nanomachines that disrupt electricity, thereby dooming the Hellions to helpless, primitive conditions. Or so Earth authorities—currently led by a ruthless woman named Sophia Gorganis—hope: No one has really bothered to check in a while.
Meanwhile, nanomachines on Earth have been abandoned and outlawed. But this hasn't stopped various competing secret Societies from striving to perfect nanotech AI. The most advanced is the Sangruse Society, with their creation Sangruse 9. Sangruse 9 lives inside humans, an invisible rider endowing its horses with many powers and attributes. But the rider often jerks on the reins as well.
Peter Novilio is a member of the Sangruse Society. His secret undiscovered, he's nonetheless shanghaied by Gorganis for his other talents, accompanying a government agent, Geyl Shreve, to Hell to learn about some disturbing hints emerging from that planet. Masquerading as convicted criminals, Peter and Geyl are soon dropped on Hell, where they discover to their amazement a high-tech civilization rivaling Earth's in many ways. And that culture is bent on revenge on the mother planet.
Meanwhile, on a third world named Columbia, a separate group of patriot rebels, the Interstellar American Republic, is plotting to take Earth back from the Canadians. Led by a mystical figure named Magic Mikey, these rebels have a starship full of missiles aimed straight for Earth. Sangruse 9 has another human rep named Jaime Eigen on Columbia. But Jaime's blood-borne version of the AI is a touch mad, having encountered the mysterious omnipotent Gaians who apparently seeded the galaxy with life long ago.
Before you can say "two trains on the same track," Jaime's entity is battling Peter's entity for the fate of mankind and perhaps the whole galaxy.
The Singularity's comic upside
Jeff Duntemann published several SF stories as early as 1974. Then, as his author bio has it, he took "a quarter-century detour into technical writing." This is his full-scale return to the field and his first novel. Let me just say at the outset that if I could be sure a 25-year moratorium on his or her SF writing would allow any individual writer to produce such a great book, I'd insist on making it part of SFWA's bylaws.
Duntemann has obviously not been ignorant of the developments in the SF field since 1980. This book is absolutely au courant, and actually extends the Great Work of SF in several unexpected directions. Like most ambitiously sprawling sui generis books, this one delivers the sense—as with the work of the recently departed Charles Harness—that the author has chucked every idea he had during the writing of the novel into the pot.
On one front, the book is a social satire in the Sheckley mode. There are lots of sharp jabs at current cultural shibboleths extended to absurdity. On another front, it's a great example of the "special world that causes adaptation" motif, such as Harrison's Deathworld (1960) or Tom Godwin's Space Prison (1958). It's also a meditation on the nature of crime and punishment, like Zebrowski's Brute Orbits (1998).
But most astonishingly, it's a refinement and extension of Greg Bear's Blood Music (1985), with elements of Strossian posthuman speculation thrown in. If you can imagine Bear's creepy gray goo made into an appealing, sympathetic symbiote, then you begin to get some vague idea of the dazzling stunts Duntemann pulls off here.
Duntemann starts the book with an action-packed sequence that proves to be just a tad peripheral to the story's mainline and main characters. But who can't embrace a battle involving a crashing space shuttle, woolly mammoths and mechanical dinosaurs? The action never really lets up for a minute, although Duntemann does find time to explore the various cultures of Hell in a kind of Mack Reynolds discursive fashion. His language throughout is bold, precise and evocative, his tone good-humored and exuberant. His descriptions of the bizarre physical manifestations created by the Sangruse 9 entities, especially as they battle, are spectacular and weird. His human characters are instantly apprehensible as well.
At one point Sangruse 9 calls the humans of Hell "the most dangerous engineers in human history." This line speaks to the basic Campbellian tenets of Duntemann's vision—but it's John Campbell brought right up to 2005 and beyond.
