His Majesty’s Dragon–Naomi Novik–Del Rey

Glasshouse–Charles Stross–Ace

Rainbows End–Vernor Vinge–Tor

Eifelheim–Michael Flynn–Tor

Blindsight–Peter Watts–Tor

Reviews by Anne KG Murphy

It’s July, which means if you haven’t voted for the Hugo awards (and you plan to) you should get a move on–the deadline is July 31. Even for those of us who are not members of this year’s Worldcon (who vote on the Hugos), the list of nominees can make an interesting, if not always completely dependable, recommended reading list. This year’s nominees for Best Novel include a dragonback romp by air and sea (His Majesty’s Dragon by Naomi Novik), an interesting contemplation of power and psychology in a time when people and things can be both duplicated and edited (Glasshouse, by Charles Stross), an adventurous exploration of personal and (potentially) international drama as a post-senility poet reawakens in the cyberenhanced world of his granddaughter’s generation just in time to help save the planet from a viral do-gooder (Rainbows End by Vernor Vinge), and two very different alien contact stories: a high-minded moral, intellectual and social alternate history exploratory called Eifelheim by Michael Flynn; and a tension-filled battle between instinctive experience and cognitive analysis, the outer and inner space psychodrama that is Blindsight, by Peter Watts.

In His Majesty’s Dragon, readers will find themselves sharing the frustrations and sometimes exhilarating successes of Temeraire and Captain Will Laurence, two like-minded souls who are thrown together when Temeraire hatches on the deck of Capt. Laurence’s ship and accepts the harness from him, propelling the duty-bound Laurence out of His Majesty’s Navy and into His Majesty’s Aerial Corps. Laurence bucks up under his highly unusual career move, and finds that piloting and caring for his unique and rapidly growing dragon is rewarding in ways he never anticipated.

Temeraire is an inquisitive and thoughtful fellow, with the impetuousness, passion, and charming ignorance of youth. The mature and disciplined Laurence proves a perfect counterpoint to the young creature. With years of service to Britain under his belt, Laurence is dedicated to defending his country, but he will find his loyalties challenged when it comes to what is expected of himself and Temeraire.

Set in the time of the Napoleonic wars, Novik’s trilogy (His Majesty’s Dragon, Throne of Jade, and Black Powder War) is alternate history at its most creative and detailed. What if (she asks) there be dragons? Rigged with ropes, guns and crew not unlike a naval ship, in Europe Novik’s dragons serve in the military much as airplanes will serve later in history (though airplanes are perhaps less likely to be boarded mid-battle). The characters and relationships in His Majesty’s Dragon are believable, the story is nicely scripted, and the sense of high-seas adventure has lead many to compare the series favorably to the work of Patrick O’Brian. Well-written and captivating whether describing battles in midair or political intrigue at ground level, this is an outstanding first effort and ought to win Novik the John W. Campbell Award for best new writer (it has already brought her the Locus Award for best first novel).

As we have come to expect from Charles Stross, Glasshouse is chock full of multiple what-ifs, but the ones that are key to the plot involve memory editing and nanotech assemblers that can manufacture nearly anything given time, mass, and the appropriate program (or original to copy). Such assemblers can be used as transportation gates, passing people from one place to another as information and reassembling them at the other end of the trip, but if those A-gates are corrupted or reprogrammed, people can be transformed in mid-transit. Glasshouse proposes a few interesting voluntary (and involuntary) mental and physical transformations people might experience, along with implications of the misuse of such technology.

The main character, Robin, has apparently voluntarily wiped most of his memories and is in rehabilitation, knowing little about himself other than that he is very good at dueling and other types of violence. An intriguing four-armed woman named Kay draws him into a role-playing experiment that is supposedly about investigating emergent social structures in a technologically backwards culture, but soon seems to have more sinister motives. In the process they give up their bodies and names, to be placed in body and gender assignments determined by the experimenters. Complexities of mind/body identity, social psychology, conformity and rebellion against cognitive dictatorship make this book heavier than a mere adventure. This is a good thing, but it may not be to everyone’s taste; I found it distinctly slow in the middle, but it picked up my interest again toward the finish.

Rainbows End considers a similar sort of involuntary mental editing, only in the form of a virus that could leave people vulnerable to suggestion so strong it’s more like compulsion–every marketing executive’s wet dream, and apparently an active experiment of some unknown agent. There is a danger the viral technology could be made to work on everybody–if it does, who will control it, to what end? To find out, an international team of investigators hires an independent cybernaut whose white-rabbit online presence only hints at the power and whimsy of his talents. Circumstantially enmeshed in the situation is the Gu family: Robert Gu, an elder poet who has been cured of his Alzheimer’s and given various youth-restoring treatments, his son and daughter-in-law, who both work in security, and his granddaughter Miri, a teenager who goes to school with a mix of peers that includes Robert and other rejuvenants who are being retrained to the modern world.

Situated mostly in southern California, Rainbows End is well-written and briskly paced. The technology it highlights is wearable VR delivered and controlled through contact lenses, wired clothing and neural interfaces; the primary theme is self-expression, with a secondary cautionary theme about uploaded knowledge programs and other ways being wired might open people to losing control of themselves. VR-enhanced reality is second nature to the young people in the book, who construct sophisticated multimedia compositions in school and overlay visual jokes for their peers, but Robert Gu and other elders must come to it slowly, initially through awkward interfaces that seem like interactive paper.

Sound like an unlikely background for international intrigue? Vinge keeps the action moving while he embroils the reader in the interpersonal issues between Robert and his remarkable family and friends, all affected and enabled by various technologies they use. Vinge is up there with the best of them in his seamless integration of imaginative technology with a compelling story. My only regret in the technical arena was how they typeset the person-to-person silent messaging–it was awkward and jarring; it looked like hypertext in a way that I didn’t intuitively internalize like the naturalistic IM systems already in use. Generally, though, the enhanced cyberworld was well done. Particularly well drawn was a battle of competing alternate reality creators, fighting over the future of a University Library doomed to be digitized and shredded, Not Vinge’s best work, but an excellent read.

Another excellent book, Michael Flynn’s Eifelheim also takes place on Earth, but it speculates in both the near future and in an intriguing history. The time-split story features two communities of scholars and a deep mystery: what has happened to the village of Eifelheim?

Pastor Dietrich is the pastor at St Catherine’s Church in Oberhochwald, a secluded village in the Black Forest. A scientific man with a haunted past, he once studied among such peers as William of Ochkam. His portion of the story starts in 1348, at Matins, the Commemoration of Sixtus II and his Companions. The countryside is electrified with a great and sudden power, followed by a loud noise and a fire. As the villagers recover from the fire with the help of Dietrich and his Minorite assistant Joachim, there are rumors of watching eyes and unnatural beings abroad in the woods. Dietrich sets out to investigate, trying in vain to assure his flock that something is not unnatural just because you have never seen it before.

At the “Now” end of the timeline, Sharon Nagy is a theoretical physicist trying to solve the geometries of Janatpur space. Her domestic partner Tom Schwoerin is a cliologist–a mathematical historian. He is working to figure out why there is no modern town in a place where the patterns of history would logically put one. His growing theory is that something happened there to scare people away. Some of his sources suggest demons. Frustrated by a scarcity of information, by chance Tom recruits the librarian Judy Cao to be his research assistant. She discovers that Eifelheim was a gloss for Oberhochwald, and the clues start to come together.

This book does something that is all too rare; it illustrates how scientists are influenced by the comments and other input of the people and events around them to come to conclusions they would never would have reached on their own. All of the scholars in this book stretch their minds over strange ideas, especially Dietrich, who takes into his community a most bizarre class of men. The Krenken are far from home, struggling to get back before they run out of food that can sustain them. Technologically superior to the men of this time, they need not fear the weapons of the local Lord’s men, but the structure of their society may be threatened by the beliefs of the people to whom they reluctantly turn for shelter as winter arrives. The outer world also threatens to encroach; denunciation from the mother Church looms in the wake of spreading rumors of demons, and there is the approaching plague coming to further terrorize the populace. Their route home will ultimately be explained by Sharon’s research, but for some will involve a change in their definition of Home.

I must give kudos to David G. Hartwell for producing the best edited book among the nominees. Eifelheim is the epitome of fine science fiction, based on exquisitely tantalizing physics, a fascinating alien physiognomy and associated culture, an insightful and well-researched grounding in history, a masterful use of language, and equally satisfying suppositions as to the possibilities inherent in man’s reaction to the unknown.

I cannot say such laudatory things about Blindsight, though it obviously has its fans. Watts’ conceit is that a small pseudoscientific, semi-militant expedition to make contact with an unknown artifact in deep space suspected to be the source of the first alien mission to blitz Earth with (unmanned drone) scouts of its own will be lead by a vampire–a member of a reincarnated race that is as predatory as legend would have it. Jukka Sarasti suffers from the Crucifix Glitch–a weakness to right angles common to all vampires– that is kept in check with regular drug doses but isn’t removed completely because it relates to one of the vampire’s main strengths–an ability to see and think differently from humans. Not that the humans that round out his tiny crew think particularly normally.

Susan James, the linguistics expert, houses four personalities (“the Gang of Four”) in her partitioned brain. Isaac Szpindel is a biologist, wired into his scientific apparati so deeply his nervous system twitches and his awareness is sometimes not focused in his body at all. Major Amanda Bates and whatever army of drones and other weapons she cares to generate onsite comprises their military arm. And the narrator of it all, Siri Keaton, is a Synthesist, an autistic savant who had half his brain removed and replaced with electronic prosthetics when he was a child. Supposedly he is there to observe and report, which he does with more melodrama than you would ever expect to hear coming out of a lobotomized person whose humanity is questioned by the people around him because of his aberrant lack of emotions and the way he maintains social function through conscious analysis of informational topology instead of instinct or empathy.

What most irritated me about this book, besides the unrelenting re-emphasis of the drama and fearfulness of both the alien constructs they encounter and the vampire they brought with them, was the fact that the technology they use is awkwardly yet continuously described. They are on a spaceship with its own artificial intelligence. They drink out of squeeze bulbs and walk around the hull or drift and catch themselves, or whatever. They don’t just move and do their work, they interact with artifacts the reader is not allowed to absorb and assume. They use an online collaborative tool called ConSensus that is named nearly every time it is invoked. And they seem to have no idea what they’re doing most of the time, even when they aren’t experiencing electromagnetically-induced hallucinations.

I couldn’t wait to finish this book and be done with it. It explores interesting questions about perception, consciousness, and sentience but its base assumptions on why life forms must inherently be in conflict and how they might (violently) investigate differences between them were as irritating as the social tensions of the crew and their ineffectiveness as a team. The ending was mainly satisfying in that it was over, though the final sentence was a nice summation of where the author was aiming; your mileage may vary, but Blindsight was not for me.