Fantastic Metropolis

If there’s a common factor in my readings of the past year, then it must be the recent theme of “singularity” à la Vinge—they were so many, in fact, that you could almost say they ended up forming a new subgenre of their own.

So it’s important to keep in mind the lure of Justina Robson’s “living” planet in Natural History, which is completely averse to terraformation and loves to “charm” and then “eat” whoever visits it. Indeed, singularities formed from nanocivilisations love to devour all that’s strange to them. In Scott Westerfeld’s The Risen Empire, a “borg” civilisation wishes nothing better than to convert the infospheres of planetary AIs and in the guise of Advent lead them to a state of awareness. Not to be outdone, Charles Stross (Singularity Sky) ushers the Festival along, composed of thousands of conglomerate nanocivilisations, plus a few others of parasitic nature, and has fun making the proletariat’s wishes come true, starting with a rain of cellular phones. But since there are no free lunches, all of this comes, of course, at the expense of the economy of seduced nations and the ecosphere used as raw material for the nano-factories that produce washing machines as easily as they can make neutron bombs, like manna from heaven to the needy. And if you want a small taste of how things are going with German sf, then you better look out for Lord Gamma by Michael Marrak, which is excellent if you disregard the last few pages, made too confusing by a tangle of mutually contradictory infodumps. However, beyond this rather hazy closure, lies and idea of how humanity could live beyond the singularity, in virtual space, and on top of that contaminated by the minds of a mistakenly assimilated alien starship crew.

On the subject of retro sf, we have Ian R. MacLeod’s beautiful The Light Ages, a historical fantasy with a touch of Dickens where the Industrial Revolution as we know it never happened, and where coal and the steam engine give way to the aether, a far more corruptible and unstable form of energy.

As for gothic horror space opera, Richard Morgan keeps on showing no mercy, and the world of immortals he weaves in Broken Angels (the sequel to Altered Carbon) continues to be a violent and hyperkinetic universe of forever war. At last, the true face of the aliens who left the ruins in Mars is revealed. Ghost starships, whose crews remain dead for thousands of years, continue to fight each other in the periphery of solar systems newly conquered by humanity. And humans—divided in factions as cruel as they are predatory—battle it out among the ruins of dead civilisations for another fistful of metatechnology. There are two scenes of indescribable horror in this book: the attack of a war nanobot swarm, which adjusts itself in response to increasingly violent weapons, and the vivisection of a soldier convicted for high treason by a machine far more priceless than the one seen in Kafka’s “In the Penal Colony.”

While we’re at it, here are two other absolutely invaluable space operas: the rigour and crystalline coldness of M. John Harrison’s Light paired with the pyrotechnics display of the third and final volume of John C. Wright’s Golden Age cycle.

As for hardcore horror, pay close attention to the extraordinary Glen Hirshberg and the stories in his first collection, The Two Sams (all of them “classics,” including my favourite, “Mr. Dark’s Carnival”) as well as Snowman’s Children, one of the most devastating books I read this year. In this novel, the fantastic is merely subjective, even when the schizophrenic Theresa meets the supposed paedophile/serial killer out in a private universe that not even the victim is able to describe.

Quieter, in the good old tradition of Unknown magazine, is Robert Freeman Wexler’s In Springdale Town, about the problem of the duplicate man and the coincidence of two irreconcilable universes. The final three pages, after a controlled and intimate beginning like in a work of “mainstream,” are so fascinating that to tell you what happens in them would very nearly amount to a crime of lèse-majesté.

And it seems the old Aztec gods are quite restless too, in the corner where they were left abandoned. Two tales of widowed parents looking for their children in the realms of Death can be found in Alex Irvine’s first novel, A Scattering of Jades, as well as in Brian H. Hopkins’ novella El Dia de los Muertos. And even though Irvine’s book was enjoyable to the last page, it was El Dia de los Muertos that, for its conciseness and for the horror of its final apocalypse, touched me most profoundly.

João Barreiros is co-author, with Luís Filipe Silva, of Terrarium (1996), considered one of the most important works of science fiction ever written in Portuguese. His fiction has been translated and published in several languages, including English, French, Spanish, Italian and Serbian. A new book, A Verdadeira Invasão dos Marcianos, will be published in Portuguese by Editorial Presença in 2004.