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Learning the World, or, | ||||||||||||||||||
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ome 14 millennia in the future, humanity has spread through a large part of the universe in generation starships, each of which, approximately every four centuries, chooses a star system in which to establish a new "habitat." In all that time, no ship has yet discovered other intelligent life.
But when the starship But the Sky, My Lady! The Sky! reaches a star system where it expects to end its journey, it detects electromagnetic signals coming from the surface of a planet. When the humans confirm that the signals originate from an intelligent species, they realize that they are living in "a different universe" and must "start learning the world all over again."
In alternating chapters, Learning the World plays out this First Contact scenario from the point of view of several humans, including the running commentary of the "biolog" of a young woman named Atomic Discourse Gale and the personal and professional journey of Darvin, an alien astronomer. On the starship, the discovery of intelligent life leads to sharp divisions among the humans. The younger residents—the "ship generation"—are determined immediately to undertake the colonization they have been "born and bred" to achieve, while the older inhabitants, the "founders," are worried about the consequences of revealing themselves to a civilization apparently still in an early industrial stage of development.
Meanwhile, the race of winged creatures on the planet's surface must deal not only with the gradual revelation that they are being observed by a spacecraft from another world but also with the consequences of that observation to the "trudges," a related species that they believe to be nonsentient and so use as forced labor. As Darvin and his colleagues discover more and more about their pending visitors, the conflicts among the humans grow more extreme; by novel's end, the central issue of whether to violate a "Prime Directive" of noninterference in alien cultures yields unexpected results.
Ken MacLeod is one of the most highly regarded of the current generation of British hard-SF writers, and after reading Learning the World, it is easy to understand why. Although the novel does not, on the surface, break new ground, it approaches the classic themes of generation starships and First Contact with remarkable energy and intelligence.
A plausible transcendence
The plausible, even matter-of-fact details of the environment of the generation starship still manage to convey the transcendent enormity of a human-made ship whose engine is a "cosmogonic machine" that, in processing reaction mass, creates universes: "From each compacted explosion ... a new singularity exploded out of space-time and inflated in an instant to give birth to a new cosmos."
The political and economic structure of the ship's society is also worked out in convincing detail, and while the characters occasionally veer off into the abstract discourse one might expect of the hyper-intelligent and more or less immortal residents of a generation starship, each character remains distinct and believable. Likewise, MacLeod's depiction of the culture of the winged aliens (or, as Atomic Discourse Gale refers to them, the "alien bat people") is vivid and engaging, with the astronomer Darvin emerging as the most compelling character in a novel whose characters are never less than interesting. And, not unimportantly, the author communicates all of the above in flawlessly readable prose.
Perhaps most tellingly, MacLeod turns what could be a weakness into a strength. Gale's "biolog" is, of course, instantly recognizable as a blog of the future, and the starship's various virtual environments (including a dizzying system of online futures trading) are similarly familiar to the early 21st-century reader. At the same time, the "alien bat people" have a popular form of literature, "engineering fiction," that speculates about possible futures and alternate presents, and an important step in Darvin's unraveling of the mystery of the approaching spacecraft involves a visit to "The Anomalies Room," where government operatives catalog and analyze reports of strange occurrences: unexplained lights in the sky, sea monsters, mysterious half-"human" creatures spotted in the wilderness.
But by novel's end, it is clear that MacLeod has grafted these elements of our own time onto his far-future tale to make the point that, even if certain kinds of behavior remain the same, the outcomes of that behavior can be different. Like all the best science fiction, Learning the World reverses the old saying: The more things stay the same, the more they change.
Note in particular the novel's closing meditation on the emergence of intelligence in the universe—a striking and powerful conclusion to a consistently entertaining novel. —Brett
Also in this issue: Counting Heads, by David Marusek
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