Fantastic Metropolis

1. Confluence’s Place

For the well-versed SF reader, perusing Paul J. McAuley’s Confluence brings a complex sense of recognition. There is an immediate recognition, of countless allusions to earlier works of SF and Fantasy, of genre tropes revised and reorganized; Confluence is a sort of Valhalla of speculative fiction, populated richly with familiar literary ghosts expertly revived. But there is a more general and deliberate recognition also, of an authorial will to greatness, to the production of a masterpiece. Confluence emulates its predecessors not only by quoting them, but also by replicating their genius: it succeeds in being a Great SF Novel, perhaps the most impressive long essay in the genre to emanate from Britain in the 1990s.

There are several ways to go about the attempt at greatness in SF, but one method in especial has yielded many favorable results: writing a Grand Planetary Romance, with a dying fall. The form is timeless, its far future displacement a reasonable guarantee against the obsolescence that overtakes all imagined near futures; and its exotic coloration facilitates a texture of Science Fantasy, that enticing mingling of scientific rigor and mythic splendor. Consider Vance’s Dying Earth quartet, Wolfe’s The Book of the New Sun, Aldiss’ Helliconia, Paul Park’s Starbridge Chronicles, and Ian Watson’s Books of Mana, those well-regarded multi-volume exercises in world-building, replete with descriptive intricacy, elegant baroque invention, and ironic formal stateliness. None of them will die soon; they can be reread endlessly, their monumental fascination never exhausted. The temptation to add to their ranks naturally seized the ambitious Paul McAuley; and he has succeeded, without qualification.

In his thousand pages, divided more or less equally into Child of the River (1997), Ancients of Days (1998), and Shrine of Stars (1999), McAuley exploits another advantage of the Grand Planetary Romance, its ability to amount to a compendium of allusion, that already cited and more immediate engine of recognition. Grand Planetary Romances are set on ancient worlds, ones suffused so utterly with antiquity that they are dense summaries of everything; in describing them, the author will naturally allude to everything, or at least to the past totality of genre. And coming late to the game, McAuley inevitably refers not only to all of SF, echoing many of its subgenres and literary highlights, but to the earlier Grand Planetary Romances specifically. Before considering how he departs from and transcends his models-Confluence’s more important, and very real, mark of distinction-his text’s elaboration of references should be considered.

2. Confluence’s debts

The setting of Confluence is the eponymous world, artificial and vast. In McAuley’s scheme, it is the creation, millions of years hence, of the Preservers, our distant descendants, who, obeying the trajectory of many of SF’s godlike races, guide the destinies of less evolved species before rising into a higher cosmos, never to be seen again. The lesser species, in line with the far-future confections of Cordwainer Smith, are animals uplifted to intelligence; they are left to inhabit the great flat expanse of Confluence, their trajectory a slow and cyclical one deeply reminiscent of the Asia of old (see Aldiss, see Park), their civilization ritualized and formally cadenced (see Vance), and their hope of escape from the languor of the cycle dependent on the intervention of a (perhaps) divinely inspired wandering messiah (see Wolfe). The ten thousand bloodlines of Confluence live along or near the banks of a Great River (see Philip José Farmer), where they very gradually find fuller awareness; each bloodline will sooner or later undergo an awakening from docile animal to more assertive human consciousness, a process that usually entails a Change War, in which those transformed beat up on their more retarded kinsmen. The remnants of the Preservers’ technology are everywhere evident (see Wolfe): intelligent machines maintain the world’s paradoxical integrity, mechanical artifacts are present wherever one digs, and the massive black hole through which the Preservers ascended is prominently visible in the night sky. But the pre-industrial tenor of life on Confluence changes very little, a stasis supervised by the fanatically conservative bureaucracy (see Park, Aldiss) centered in the great city Ys (see Wolfe’s Nessus). But ripples start to beset the pond (see Clarke’s The City and the Stars).

Confluence has begun to face civil wars. In the first, thousands of years in the past, various intelligent machines rose up in revolt (see John Milton), destroying much habitable land and most of the infrastructure whereby the peoples of Confluence could access the recorded wisdom and counsel of the Preservers. The regime faltered, but survived, regaining control. But in the quite recent past, as recounted in McAuley’s prefatory story ‘Recording Angel” (1995), a human expedition from before the age of the Preservers returned from a futile search for intelligent life in the Andromeda Galaxy; one of the crew (all of whom are clones of a single original) played the Serpent’s role, sowing seeds of doubt among some of the bloodlines and occasioning a bigger and more enduring revolt in consequence. By the time of the trilogy’s action, the rebels are in command of large areas; they and the bureaucrats of Ys are essentially reaching stalemate; the moment for intervention has arrived.