All that in 3 centuries

kw: book reviews, science fiction, space fiction, interplanetary politics

Is the key to longevity a dose of androgyny? Could Al Gore's global warming film have been too conservative? Might we, and soon, command energies sufficient to make visiting Mars no more costly than taking a cruise ship from Los Angeles to Sydney? Can quantum computing lead to conscious computers? Is there a genuine solution to the problem of poverty? In Kim Stanley Robinson's novel 2312 the answer to the first question is Yes, to the last it is No, and the rest are Maybe's or qualified Yeses.

The backdrop of the novel is a combination of continued ecological destruction on Earth, continued technological progress in both access to interplanetary space and ultrafast computers, and progress in anti-aging, at least for some. From a viewpoint near the year 2400, the plotline centers on converging events in the year 2312, including the rewilding of Earth by animals and plants that had been propagated in thousands of spacefaring zoos (also used as interplanetary cruise vessels) and a turning point in the relationship between humans and their mechanical creations.

An important subplot is the courtship between two main characters, a 113-year-old "man" and a 137-year-old "woman", Wahram and Swan, with the interesting complication that both of them have both fathered and mothered children. On the spectrum of male-female, which today has only two endpoints plus a tiny cluster of hermaphroditic "errors" that are typically corrected by surgery (and a tiny number of people who become medically switched to the opposite pole), our two protagonists, and apparently all who partake of extended longevity, are near the 25% and 75% points.

I found myself wondering, "Who pays for all this stuff?" Is it really affordable for Swan to go from Mercury, her birthplace, to Earth, Venus, Titan and other locales near Saturn, and back and forth a few times between some of these places, and then to Mars? Saturn is a billion or two billion km from everywhere else, so to get there in a month you need to crank the old rocket up to around 600 km/sec, some 20 times the speed of Earth in its orbit. The 2312 Solar System is apparently filled with city-sized hollowed-out asteroids running shuttle service hither and yon, but the velocities implied by the narrative mean you need huge energy expenditure from time to time to keep your cruise ship from heading off into interstellar space. It is stated that there are 16,000 of these zooming around. You also need a pretty fast shuttle just to catch one to get on it.

Well, I can suspend disbelief enough to enjoy the multitude of interesting ideas the author weaves into the book. The idea of walking around Mercury near its terminator, so you are just ahead of being baked by the Sun, leads to some interesting plot devices, including a long tunnel walk by Swan and Wahram. A walking speed of under 4 km/hr is sufficient at Mercury's equator, and at a greater latitude, the speed needed is less so you can trot ahead enough to get in a few hours sleep before the Sun catches up with you. You just need a space suit with an air and food and water supply for 176 days, and a way to eject waste, to do a circumnavigation on foot.

A big political notion is the balkanization of humanity. The possible rise of self-directed, quantum-computer-based AI in one secretive culture, and attacks on Mercury and a couple of other places that could only have been carried out with the help of extremely capable "qubes", drives events toward one of the pivotal events in early 2312. Considering the probable need for petaflop or even exaflop capability in a phone-sized device that is required for this to work, is 300 years enough time? Probably so, and maybe quite a bit less. The bottleneck in AI progress will be, as it always has, programming not hardware. You can't program what you don't understand. Assuming humans return to space in the next century or so, and learn to (and can afford to) hollow out 30 km asteroids and colonize them, balkanization is the most likely outcome. Unity is hard to achieve, and harder to maintain, as the increasingly creaky American experiment, and the faltering European experiment, demonstrate.

The book ends on an optimistic note. While I am skeptical that the space developments found in it are likely, I am more optimistic that the human race can increase in wisdom over time. It is either that, or self-extinction. K.S. Robinson votes for wisdom.

A space opera to fly with

kw: book reviews, science fiction, space opera, interplanetary politics

I was traveling cross country yesterday, a good opportunity to get a lot of reading done. A factual text isn't sufficienty engrossing for effective escape reading; I get distracted by the grim reality of being in an airplane seat the size of a floor tile. But a good space opera is just the thing to transfer me to far horizons and make the time melt away.

David Drake, a writer new to me, has a deft hand at interstellar politics and applying known concepts to a new idea for plying the space lanes. In What Distant Deeps, the latest of his RCN series, he pits Captain Daniel Leary of the Republic of Cinnabar Navy and his friend the spy Adele Mundy—both aristocrats who choose the military life—against an ambitious autocrat, the Autocrator Irene, who is taking advantage of an exhausted peace between two formerly warring empires to promote her own agenda of attaining a mini-empire from a few planets on the fringes of civilized space.

Both Mundy and her bodyguard/companion Tovera are described a few times as murderous psychopaths, not by enemies, but in the ruminations of Mundy's own mind; there is a lot of stream of consciousness twined amongst the action. Yet by nature Lady Mundy is a librarian, happiest when digging meaning from the data she is continually harvesting from any computer system she can break into, such as the planetary archives or an entire naval fleet's ship systems. She uncovers traces of a secretive "Farm" that is really a military camp being set up for an expected invading army. Leary recognizes the potential for such an invasion to destroy the fragile peace accord, and sets about short-circuiting the process.

To author Drake, the emphasis in RCN is on Navy. Space travel is a matter of inserting the ship into what is called the Matrix, where there are currents and forces that one can "sail" through using literal masts and sails on a starship's hull; this is followed by extraction into normal space. While in the Matrix, a ship can be guided by a skilled person who knows how to interpret the vision of an infinite array of bubble universes, and the swirls and currents that accompany galaxies, stars and starships within our own universe. There are mental and physiological effects of insertion and extraction, and a little of the drama rests upon their potential to debilitate people at critical times, such as extracting into the middle of a pitched battle. Only one major scene hinges on these effects; the author could have done more with it, and perhaps he has in prior RCN novels.

The author has done a competent job of interpreting the tropes of naval warfare into a space setting. The missiles and the plasma cannons that answer to the torpedos and cannon of water-based battles provide plenty of drama, as long as one refrains from thinking too deeply. The narrative really kept me going at times I sorely needed the escapism. Quite an enjoyable reading experience.

Jovian Swim Meet

kw: book reviews, science fiction, interplanetary politics

Not long ago (Thursday, 10/20/05) I mused on the the possibility for human-alien hybrids, just based on the likelihood that two independent DNA systems might be compatible. Shortly thereafter, I read a book based on a human-alien hybrid. At first, I thought panspermia within the solar system might offer a way for the DNA between Earth and Jupiter life systems to be compatible. But, it turns out, these Jovians are from elsewhere...just where, we don't find out, but the fact itself is a source of dramatic tension.

So, Timothy Zahn presents the discovery of life "swimming" in the Jovian atmosphere, intelligent life at that. Within twenty years, Human-Qanska communication is sufficiently advanced that between them, the two species work out a way for a paraplegic human to be merged with a Qanskan embryo, to be born and raised a Qanska. The book is Manta's Gift, and the gift in question turns out to be a sacrifice different from what you might expect. The genre is semi-hard SF, with a strong veneer of politics to provide the evil megalomaniac that SF novels routinely deliver.

The cultural re-awakening of a young human show-off and jerk (how d'ya think he became paraplegic?) who must become his race's ambassador to Jove is convincingly, if sketchily, told. The dynamics of swimming in an environment that is swooshing around the Jovian equator at several hundred km/hr has been thought through, as has the complication of a thousand-fold change in fluid density as one descends.

As it happens, the Qanskans are in the midst of an ecological crisis, and it takes problem-solvers, that is, humans, to figure it out for them. How an herbivorous species gained sufficient intelligence to be self-aware and have advanced communication skills and culture, without simultaneously developing strong problem-solving skills, is beyond me.

I have an even bigger issue, one involving physics. Much is made of the Qanskans feeling wind in the left or right ear when they turn north or south. This becomes the focus of a dramatic episode, which is a shame. If you are swimming in the thick atmosphere, it makes no difference whatever how fast it is moving; to you it is calm, absent local turbulence. A hot-air balloon or dirigible may be in still air, or in a rapid, steady wind, but the inhabitants will experience complete calm, as long as they don't blow too close to something that stirs up an eddy. The wind-in-the-ear stuff makes it seem that these air-swimmers are somehow anchored to the planet's surface, thousands of miles below. Can't be so.

These quibbles aside, Zahn has several new and interesting ideas, and a way with words that make this an enjoyable yarn.