Science fiction roundup
“Summerland” by Hannu Rajaniemi, Tor, 304 pages, $25.99
Readers familiar with Hannu Rajaniemi’s dense, information-packed futures in novels like “The Quantum Thief ” will be surprised to find that his new novel is not only an espionage tale set in an alternate history version of 1930s England, but that several of the main characters are ghosts. The Summerland of the title is a luxury suburb for the recently deceased, as they wait for the chance to move onward to join something called the Presence. There is technology based on supernatural lore, and Germany had been defeated in the First World War by weapons like “ectotanks” and “aetherguns.” The memories of the dead can be carried around in “soulstones,” and sometimes the ghosts can occupy the bodies of the living.
The main living character is Rachel White, a veteran intelligence officer who learns from a Russian agent that there is a mole operating in Summerland. Rachel’s superiors believe she was duped, leading her to carry on the investigation unofficially. Meanwhile, we follow the adventures of Peter Bloom, that very mole, a ghost for whom the living world is nearly invisible. While the conspiracies and plots unfold in classic spy-story fashion, the wildly inventive setting gives the novel a unique kind of freshness. “The Freeze-Frame Revolution” by Peter Watts, Tachyon, 192 pages, $14.95
Sometimes sheer magnitude of scale can lend an epic scope to stories which, at the human level, remain fairly intimate. Peter Watts’s tale concerns efforts by a few crew members to rebel against the artificial intelligence that controls their spaceship, and whose motives they distrust. But the spaceship in question is carved from a massive rock powered by a singularity, the mission has been going on for 66 million years, and there are some 30,000 humans on board, most in cold storage except for a few days every century when they work their shifts. Earth was in ruins when they left, and contact with other humans has been lost for millions of years.
This makes it a daunting challenge for Sunday Ahzmundin to organize anything, let alone a revolt that might change the very nature of their mission, which involves jumping across the universe through wormholes. After a jump finds them pursued by an alien “biomechanical monstrosity,” a friend of Sunday’s is driven to a desperate act, and Sunday herself, a kind of ambassador between the humans and the ship’s AI, finds her loyalties tested. The real question she faces, however, and what gives Watts’ tale surprising depth, is what it means to be human in an uncaring universe. ‘The Book of M” by Peng Shepherd, William Morrow, 496 pages, $26.99
Peng Shepherd’s first novel ticks off the familiar conventions of post-apocalyptic tales: multiple viewpoints, battles with roving gangs, fragile communitybuilding, the safe haven that isn’t so safe after all, the pilgrimage toward a place that promises answers. What distinguishes “The Book of M,” apart from Shepherd’s graceful language and skilled pacing, is the apocalypse itself.
A plague spreads around the world that begins with victims losing their shadows, followed by a loss of memories to the point that they end up in a zombielike state, unable to remember their names or even how to get food. The married couple Max and Ory have retreated to an isolated resort, hoping to wait things out, but when Max loses her shadow and flees, Ory sets out to find her. Meanwhile we follow Naz, a young Iranian woman, and a character known only as the amnesiac, whose trauma-induced memory loss predates the plague. As their paths converge, bizarre events suggest that some of the “shadowless” can alter reality. Strong characters and surreal imagery more than make up for what is familiar in the plot.
Gary K. Wolfe is the editor of “American Science Fiction,” a Library of America anthology collecting nine classic works from the 1950s.