> SCIENCE FICTION:
AURORA By Kim Stanley Robinson (Orbit, 480 pages, $29)
Two of the best SF novels you’ll read this year, Neal Stephenson’s Seveneves and Kim Stanley Robinson’s Aurora, follow a similar outline: the long-term survival of a segment of humanity placed on board a starship ark, and the way they adapt to new ways of life and political structures — and indeed become a new kind of species — in the process.
Aurora begins with a giant space station full of various Earth biomes about to finally arrive in the Tau Ceti system, which is where several potentially inhabitable new homes are located. The voyage, which began in 2545, has taken 170 years, putting a great deal of strain on the artificial ecosystem of the ship through the effects of a multi-generational form of cabin fever known as “zoo devolution.” Fractures erupt that tear the community apart and put the entire population at risk.
THE YEAR’S BEST SCIENCE FICTION: 32ND ANNUAL COLLECTION Ed. by Gardner Dozois (St. Martin’s, 704 pages, $45.99)
It’s time again to rejoice in another volume in Gardner Dozois’s long-running anthology of the year’s best SF short fiction. With the recent end of the only comparable annual volume, The Year’s
Best SF series edited by Hartwell and Cramer, this is now the single must-have SF collection for every fan.
As always, you can expect a terrific variety of styles, genres and tones gathered from across the SF spectrum, all served up in generous helpings.
ARMADA By Ernest Cline (Crown, 368 pages, $31.00)
In 2010, Ernest Cline had a megahit debut with his novel Ready Player One, which was all about the fanboy/geek/ nerd experience that marks the muddy confluence of late 20th-century pop culture with 21st-century gaming and virtual reality.
In Armada he’s back with more of the same. Zack Lightman is a high school student in Beaverton, Ore., whose favourite video game about alien invaders suddenly takes a turn for the real one day. Thousands of misspent hours are about to be redeemed.
The twitchy novel is so packed with in-jokes you get the sense the characters could carry on whole conversations just by quoting dialogue from their favourite movies. Cline has clearly targeted an expansive niche that straddles the YA and “kidult” demographics so it’s perfectly natural Zack and his missing father share an identical headspace: there is no generational gap any more, or division between the real and the digital. Space has become the new Neverland, where no one has to grow up and you can save the world with a joystick.
DARK ORBIT By Carolyn Ives Gilman (Tor, 304 pages, $29.99)
First Contact with an alien civilization never does run smooth. In Dark Orbit exoethnologist Sara Callicut joins a team of scientists on a mission to a newly discovered planet dubbed Iris, where things go wonky in a terrible hurry.
Made of crystal and inhabited by a mysterious tribe of blind people, Iris has other curious properties arising from its being located where various dimensions of the universe happen to be folded close together. This means that quantum effects can be experienced in the macro world, with one of the more remarkable results being a breakdown between consciousness and external reality.
When this dark pocket of the universe enters an origami phase people start disappearing and reappearing at an alarming rate, and soon everyone is at risk of dimensional collapse. Gilman manages to tie it all together in a satisfying way though, thanks mainly to a thrilling plot structured around the conflict between science and more intuitional ways of thinking.
Alex Good is the editor of Canadian Notes & Queries.