Because of course much of the pleasure of reading fine work by a writer deep into his career is the chance to see how each new book fits into the larger picture of the writer's work as a whole.
In many ways, City at the End of Time represents the fruition of the strand of Bear's work exemplified by Queen of Angels . I confess, I feel vindicated by this, since I've always felt that Queen of Angels deserves more attention than it gets. That novel's major weakness—both internally and in terms of its wider reception—was Bear's overt reliance on voodoo mythology. For reasons that had nothing to do with the book itself, it became hard for readers to separate the loas in Queen of Angels from their opposite and better known numbers in William Gibson's neuromancer trilogy. But Gibson's loas are largely arbitrary names overlaid onto the fundamentally alien processes of emergent artificial life. Whereas I've always thought that Bear was after something else—some Straussian web of meaning flexible enough to encompass all of our worlds, internal as well as external, artificial as well as organic.
I think—I think—that this is what he's still after. And in City at the End of Time , he successfully recasts his quest in terms broad enough to encompass quantum cosmology, modern theories about galactic evolution, and even Buddhist and Hindu mythology. The result is a novel as intellectually challenging and aesthetically satisfying as anything he has ever written before.
* * * *
And now we come to the last old dog on our list: Walter Jon Williams.
I guess I ought to give you the most important news first: this book was by far the most entertaining read of anything I looked at while preparing this month's column. Its send-up of gamer culture is a hoot. The plot charges ahead like a bullet train. (This is, of course, always the case in Williams's books, but sometimes one needs to say even the things that go without saying.) The characters are intelligent and charismatic enough to resonate long, long after the last page is turned. And I haven't even gotten around to mentioning Williams's masterful deployment of the infinite narrative possibilities of pocket universes.
I complained in a prior column that NASA killed Science Fantasy. But happily technology giveth as well as taketh away. And everything we lost when NASA made Mars boring has been recouped in spades on the VR frontier. Want sword-slinging Amazons riding giant telepathic lizards? You got ‘em—and all at the low, low price of a little painless handwaving about Vingean singularities, Matrioshka arrays, and pocket universes.
Williams has taken full advantage of this technopoetic license to weave together a world that combines the sensual thrill of slumming it in the science fantasy badlands with the more cerebral joys of working out just how those lizard-straddling Amazons got there. Best of all, he has placed at the center of his book a hero uniquely conceived to illuminate the landscape: a “scholar of implied spaces” who charts the evolution of artificial universes.
This is where Implied Spaces makes the jump from mere space opera (not that there's anything wrong with that!) to full-fledged hard sf. This is new—to the best of my knowledge. And it's important.
One of the great structural weaknesses of most current hard sf is the failure to grasp the true scope of evolution. It's not really anyone's fault, strictly speaking; it's just that sf writers, albeit Very Smart Persons (VSPs), are still members of the human species. And our species still hasn't quite wrapped its collective mind around Darwin. (For more on this, see Dennett, Dawkins, Wilson, Szathmary, and a lot of other VSPs.)
All systems evolve. Including systems of information. Artificial, organic, biosphere, noosphere. It's all information. It all evolves. Even the very cogs and flywheels of evolution itself evolve. (After all, what is natural selection but a marvelously honed system for the
In many ways, City at the End of Time represents the fruition of the strand of Bear's work exemplified by Queen of Angels . I confess, I feel vindicated by this, since I've always felt that Queen of Angels deserves more attention than it gets. That novel's major weakness—both internally and in terms of its wider reception—was Bear's overt reliance on voodoo mythology. For reasons that had nothing to do with the book itself, it became hard for readers to separate the loas in Queen of Angels from their opposite and better known numbers in William Gibson's neuromancer trilogy. But Gibson's loas are largely arbitrary names overlaid onto the fundamentally alien processes of emergent artificial life. Whereas I've always thought that Bear was after something else—some Straussian web of meaning flexible enough to encompass all of our worlds, internal as well as external, artificial as well as organic.
I think—I think—that this is what he's still after. And in City at the End of Time , he successfully recasts his quest in terms broad enough to encompass quantum cosmology, modern theories about galactic evolution, and even Buddhist and Hindu mythology. The result is a novel as intellectually challenging and aesthetically satisfying as anything he has ever written before.
* * * *
And now we come to the last old dog on our list: Walter Jon Williams.
I guess I ought to give you the most important news first: this book was by far the most entertaining read of anything I looked at while preparing this month's column. Its send-up of gamer culture is a hoot. The plot charges ahead like a bullet train. (This is, of course, always the case in Williams's books, but sometimes one needs to say even the things that go without saying.) The characters are intelligent and charismatic enough to resonate long, long after the last page is turned. And I haven't even gotten around to mentioning Williams's masterful deployment of the infinite narrative possibilities of pocket universes.
I complained in a prior column that NASA killed Science Fantasy. But happily technology giveth as well as taketh away. And everything we lost when NASA made Mars boring has been recouped in spades on the VR frontier. Want sword-slinging Amazons riding giant telepathic lizards? You got ‘em—and all at the low, low price of a little painless handwaving about Vingean singularities, Matrioshka arrays, and pocket universes.
Williams has taken full advantage of this technopoetic license to weave together a world that combines the sensual thrill of slumming it in the science fantasy badlands with the more cerebral joys of working out just how those lizard-straddling Amazons got there. Best of all, he has placed at the center of his book a hero uniquely conceived to illuminate the landscape: a “scholar of implied spaces” who charts the evolution of artificial universes.
This is where Implied Spaces makes the jump from mere space opera (not that there's anything wrong with that!) to full-fledged hard sf. This is new—to the best of my knowledge. And it's important.
One of the great structural weaknesses of most current hard sf is the failure to grasp the true scope of evolution. It's not really anyone's fault, strictly speaking; it's just that sf writers, albeit Very Smart Persons (VSPs), are still members of the human species. And our species still hasn't quite wrapped its collective mind around Darwin. (For more on this, see Dennett, Dawkins, Wilson, Szathmary, and a lot of other VSPs.)
All systems evolve. Including systems of information. Artificial, organic, biosphere, noosphere. It's all information. It all evolves. Even the very cogs and flywheels of evolution itself evolve. (After all, what is natural selection but a marvelously honed system for the
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