e first encounter Prosper Gregory Leung—otherwise known as "Spur"—while he's recovering in a high-tech hospital from injuries suffered while fighting massive forest fires on his homeworld of Walden. Walden is a deliberately backward planet, isolated from the transhumanist Thousand Worlds. Here, individuals seeking the simple life can farm and create crafts and play and socialize in a kind of faux-19th-century setting. It's the only life Spur has known—until he begins surfing the interstellar communications network through a terminal at the hospital, which is run by "upsiders," the advanced humans from the stars. By sheer accident, he makes contact with a youthful potentate known as the "High Gregory." Spur discloses that Walden is at war: The many fires on the forest-world are being started by pukpuks, the original human settlers who were displaced by the Waldenites and now want their planet back.
The High Gregory is intantly intrigued. War offers him and his fellow posthumans a kind of testing ground for their various theories and practices of advanced poli-sci. Before you can say "quantum information channels," the High Gregory, a dozen of his peers, and their guardian named Memsen (an exotically scary woman) have landed on Walden and demanded that Spur be their guide.
Spur might be happy to comply if he weren't already juggling many troubles. His wife, Comfort, is ready to divorce him, because Spur could not protect her little brother Vic when Spur and Vic went firefighting together. What Comfort doesn't know is that Vic proved to be a pukpuk sympathizer and died in a suicidal terrorist ploy. Spur can't bring himself to disillusion Comfort just to save his marriage. And then there's Spur's Dad, Cape, who seems to love his apple orchards more than he loves his son. Will Spur ever cease playing second fiddle to some Macouns? Will the High Gregory and his posse totally destroy the artificial society of Walden in order to save it? Or will the pukpuks succeed in burning up the whole planet first?
Knowing an unknowable future
The Singularity—that postulated moment in human history when we plunge over an informational event horizon—has thrown a shadow over SF. How can a writer tell stories about the by-definition-unknowable future? The obstacle seems insurmountable. Luckily, the ingenuity of the SF-writing corps is up to the task. Starting with Vernor Vinge, who divided up his galaxy into different zones of mentation so that he could focus on humans not too dissimilar to us, authors have come up with various strategies for coping with the transhuman future. In this book, Kelly fashions a clever out for himself: By setting his action on a deliberately retrogressive planet, he can craft absolutely comprehensible characters who have to deal with the posthuman aspects of their era much as we would. In Spur and his comrades, Kelly has found likable, heartwarming, engaging vehicles for his tale.
Now, this is not to say that he avoids the "upsider" viewpoint entirely. After all, the High Gregory and his peers are onstage frequently. And from the moment when this spritely Peter-Panish character first pops up on Spur's viewscreen, Kelly succeeds in making him truly advanced and otherly. We really get the sense of a more-than-human brain and perspective at work.
So when you add Spur's all-too-empathizable problems together with the High Gregory's outre concerns, you get a wacky yet grounded adventure reminiscent of James Schmitz's classic novel The Witches of Karres (1966). Kelly's tale is droll and comedic, melancholic and pathos-inducing by turns. Spur is a fully rounded character set in a world that hums with a rich, hinted-at backstory of almost Cordwainer-Smith proportions. And the Thoreauvian themes are not just window-dressing but fully explored as well. (Leave it to my fellow New Englander to adapt the philosophical hermit of Walden Pond to SF.) With his immaculate prose and perfect structural tricks (Spur ends up where we first encountered him), Kelly's book offers a richly satisfying blend of adventure and philosophy.
If you enjoyed Rudy Rucker's Frek and the Elixer (2004) or John Kessel's "Stories for Men," you'll find Kelly's unique amalgam as juicy as one of Cape's Pippins.
