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Heaven's Reach
As aftershocks from the Big Bang rock the Five Galaxies, will Streaker finally make it home?
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Heaven's Reach
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By David Brin
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Bantam Books
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$24.95/$34.95 Canada
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Hardcover, June 1998
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ISBN 0-553-10174-9
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Review by Brooks Peck
 eaven's Reach is the final book of the New Uplift Trilogy, David Brin's current cycle of novels set in his Uplift universe. Here the numerous threads of character, adventure and emotion that were first spun in Brightness Reef and Infinity's Shore are finally drawn together, tighter and tighter, into a web of danger, cataclysm and revelation.
The Terran exploration ship Streaker has managed to escape from the planet Jijo with her cargo of ancient mysteries--artifacts and data that the supposedly more mature galactic civilizations will happily kill to possess. But, as ever, she is hounded, this time by a Jophur battle cruiser. Their conflict, though, is soon entirely dwarfed by events that are literally rocking the Five Galaxies. A "time of changes" has come, which is a shifting and settling of the universe--aftershocks of the Big Bang--and the results are devastating. Space itself heaves and bucks, and while most intelligent species do their best to duck and cover, certain parties are attempting to use the disaster to further their own strange goals, and they insist that Streaker be party to these designs.
It's impossible to be more detailed without giving away many secrets not just of this novel, but of the whole Uplift universe. That's right, this is the Big One, the book where Brin finally reveals the real nature of galactic civilization, and the mystery of Streaker's discovery. He also unveils the truth about the retired races, the Transcendents, the Hydrogen breathers, Machine life forms and even the Progenitors. Along the way he takes his characters, and readers, on one wild ride.
Two questions for every answer
Readers in need of a sense-of-wonder fix should apply to Heaven's Reach. For once Brin doesn't hold back on either action or ideas. The range of his imagination is stunning, from the destruction of solar system-sized habitats (a million or so of them) to the eerie subjective reality of high-level hyperspace. The ideas come peeling away like the layers of an onion. Every time the characters think they have arrived at the ultimate truth, that reality parts like gauze to reveal a new, more complex truth.
At the same time the novel doesn't lose track of its characters and their personal goals. Not much, anyway. Granted, there's a fair bit of standing and gaping, then discussing and interpreting the wonders (for the sake of readers), but many of the characters face challenges on a personal level that are just as intense as the big ideas, if not more so.
How many people will get to this gem of a novel, though? The first two novels in this trilogy ask quite a lot from readers. The books are long and have an overabundance of characters, intricate plot lines, and--especially in Brightness Reef--not much action. It's really too bad, because Heaven's Reach gives such a stupendous payoff.
Happily, Brin leaves readers with new questions about this universe, and it's clear he'll be visiting it again.
I swear you'll feel your brain stretching and growing to accommodate all the cool ideas in this novel. It's a blast.
-- Brooks
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Diaspora
The posthuman always knocks twice
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Diaspora
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By Greg Egan
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Harper Prism
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$23.00
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Hardcover, Feb. 1998
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ISBN 0-06-105281-7
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Review by Damien Broderick
 atima begins vis life--"ve" is neither male nor female--as a coded digital string of data far more sophisticated than old-fashioned human DNA. Swiftly coming of age among vis friends in an expanded virtual reality, ve develops an artistic delight in higher mathematics. Before the third millennium is done, ve learns that the human world is doomed. But that is just the start of vis voyage into the true complexity of the universe.
From the elaborate conceptory of Konishi Polis on Earth in 2975, Egan plots nothing less than the next three thousand years of life, mind and their elected varieties in an onion-shell universe vastly larger than anything humans now perceive. Mere "fleshers" are obliterated early by a nearby supernova, leaving their uploaded and Gleisner robot successors heirs to the known cosmos. In a sensational, concerted and frankly demanding act of reality-creation, Egan finally shifts some of his posthuman characters into a macrosphere (dubbed U*) boasting extra spatial dimensions. Luckily, their minds and bodies can be morphed to deal with the shocks--as readers' minds will be, too, struggling to render Egan's textual hints into graphic reality.
Orlando braced himself. "Now show me U-star." His exoself responded to the command, spinning his eyeballs into hyperspheres, rebuilding his retinas as four-dimensional arrays, rewiring his visual cortex, boosting his neural model of the space around him to encompass five dimensions. As the world inside his head expanded, he cried out and closed his eyes, panic-stricken and vertiginous... That he could see this entire volume all at once almost made sense when he thought of it as the bottom hyperface of the transparent window, but when he realized that every point was shared by the front hyperface of the opaque floor, any lingering delusions of normality evaporated.
The exhilaration of being earnest
Australian Greg Egan began redefining science fiction in a series of startling "thought experiment" stories in the early 1990s. Four lopsidedly brilliant novels confirmed him as the hot kid on the block: Quarantine, blending quantum theory and neuroscience; Permutation City, the finest take yet on virtual reality; Distress, about autism, community and a Theory of Everything; and now Diaspora, a voyage into posthumanity.
These books are not SF-lite with charming young geniuses running their own space armies. Readers might need to pump up for the action.
Egan's language is often clinical, flat, replete with mathematical tags and floating bits of biochemistry, astronomy and higher-dimensional analysis. But that's necessary in depicting genuinely posthuman characters whose idea of fun is building testable models of the universe in which quarks and electrons are the mouths of wormholes. Using mega-technology, they chase an alien culture of Transmuters through trillions of layers of an infinitely embedded cosmos. At last they discern the sculpted interdimensional shape of what Egan has called "the largest structure in science fiction."
Still, at quest's end, they face the same terrifying question regular humans do: what next? Suicide? Return to the Truth Mines, quarrying knowledge? When love and death are finally subject to precise understanding and control, what ancient wisdom can come to the aid of those who replace humans? None, alas--"ancient wisdom" is the distillate of dilemmas and conflicts already solved and done.
Diaspora is not an easy book. Some of it is annoyingly expository (and, as usual in Egan, emotionally remote). Perhaps his conclusion is nothing more than a stop-gap, the kind of impasse even the brightest futurist faces when peering into the unimaginable future. For all that, the episodic novel is a notable, immensely ambitious, intellectually exhilarating, and artistic bid at the impossible.
Thirteen years ago, I called Greg Egan "perhaps the most promising of the Australian SF newcomers." He has fulfilled that promise, and more. At 36, he is now perhaps the most important SF writer in the world.
-- Damien
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Earth Made of Glass
Two secret agents try to save a lost colony, and their own marriage
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Earth Made of Glass
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By John Barnes
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Tor Books
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$25.95/$35.95 Canada
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Hardcover, April 1998
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ISBN 0-312-85851-5
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Review by Curt Wohleber
 he long isolation of humanity's colonized worlds has ended. New technology permits instantaneous teleportation across light years, revitalizing stagnant, dead-end cultures. Giraut and Margaret Leones are covert operatives for the Council of Humanity's Office of Special Projects, working behind the scenes to bring wayward planets into line and make them fit members of the emerging interstellar society.
In this sequel to John Barnes' 1991 novel, A Million Open Doors, Giraut and Margaret embark on what promises to be their toughest assignment. The planet Briand is uninhabitable save for some mountain plateaus jutting above the toxic atmosphere of the planet's lowlands. Briand's political climate is just as lethal: daily bouts of ethnic violence threaten to erupt into total war.
No wonder the Brianders hate each other. The settlers were genetically engineered and conditioned to believe in the superiority of their respective cultures. The Tamils had been settled in hope of recreating a poetic tradition that flourished in India almost 2,000 years ago. The Maya of Briand embrace an unchanging literary tradition--partly generated by computers--of stories about warriors ripping out their enemies' hearts. The lower-class Maya survive--or fail to survive--by farming, unaware that the elite priests have machines that could feed the population many times over.
A volcanic eruption has forced the Maya to relocate on Tamil land, but the centuries haven't made coexistence any easier. Violence is mounting, yet Giraut sees reason for hope. A Maya aristocrat invites Giraut and a Tamil delegate to the Maya capital, where they witness the emergence of a prophet who preaches radical change and ethnic harmony. Giraut thinks he might be able to use Ix to further his own agenda. But on Briand nothing is quite what it seems.
Behind the truth there are lies, and behind the lies is truth
Societies use stories--historical narratives, myths, literature, even scientific theories--to make sense of the world. Some stories are believed to be literally true; others illustrate important moral or psychological truths. Some stories may be naive, or obsolete, or lies perpetuated by a society's leaders.
Like a prose Mandelbrot set, this theme appears at every level of Earth Made of Glass, from the individual to the interstellar. The result could have been murky and pretentious, but Barnes proves himself a master storyteller, concocting a strange yet effective blend of Robert A. Heinlein and Ursula K. Le Guin.
Barnes proves less adroit handling Giraut and Margaret's crumbling marriage. His treatment of the marriage is too familiar and superficial, and this weakens the novel's early chapters. Barnes more than makes up for the shaky start, though, gradually bringing readers under his spell with all the skill of the Maya prophet Ix. Then, with scant warning, the unexpected and the inevitable collide in a wrenching climax.
But nothing on Briand is quite as it seems. Barnes hints that the official story of Briand may not be the whole truth, but readers will apparently have to wait for the next book in the series to find out. Luckily for Barnes, good storytellers can get away with murder.
Earth Made of Glass succeeds as both a science fiction thriller and an exploration of the beliefs and values that make societies work. And you can enjoy it without having read the first book.
-- Curt
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