Queen of Candesce by Karl Schroeder

Sun of Suns introduced the worlds of Virga, a huge (planet size) artificial structure, filled with air, worlds/nations (generally wheels or cylinders), and artificial suns (including the central sun of suns). The level of technology has been deliberately suppressed, as the creators had decided they wanted reality, not the virtual artificial nature that humans see over the rest of their universe (see some of Schroeder’s earlier novels). The result is a world where wooden ships and bicycles travel through “space” (an air-filled albeit gravity-less space in this case) between worlds and where weapons technology is, by and large, at about the level of the 18^th century. That is, it’s the perfect environment for an old fashioned swashbuckler. Or you can look at it as the modern equivalent of something out of Planet Stories, but in this case set in a world where the settings and the science are done right.

The first book told the story of how one group of people traveled to across their world, first to obtain a cache of treasure which contained one of the keys of candesce – a key to the sun of suns – and then traveled to the sun of suns itself to temporarily disable the technology suppression field that it generates. This enabled radio to work for a brief time, which enabled their home fleet to beat back a sneak attack. The story comes to a satisfying conclusion, but it also leaves several loose ends, including the fate of Venera Fanning, the wife of the expedition’s commander and a skillful leader (and at times a ruthless powerbroker) in her own right. Queen of Candesce picks up Venera’s story.

Venera lands on the ancient world of Spyre – the largest existing cylinder in Virga. It is made up of a mishmash of small nations – some as small as a modern office complex – all with complicated rules of interaction, many paranoid and turned inward, and all trying to keep anyone from leaving Spyre or even traveling without permission to less Spyre – the inner wheel/nations within the cylinder of greater Spyre. A group of preservationists – also eccentric and hostile to those outside the group – build railroads across Spyre, not for transportation but to literally preserve Spyre. Spyre is old and decaying, and some parts have broken loose and been flung off into space. The preservationists are trying to balance the rotation by moving heavy objects to the right location, even if it means they must pass through a sometimes hostile sovereign state. Schroeder has done a great job of creating a world that feels like something Jack Vance could have created at his peak. Spyre and the story of Venara’s treck across it is comparable to some of Vance’s most imaginative creation (though Schroeder’s style in describing it is his own).

The story starts with Venera falling to Spyre. She is found by Garth Diamandis, a self described aging gigolo. It follows her and Garth as she ascends from outcast to position of power – a position she needs if she is ever going to be able to go home and payback those who have wronged her and created the situation that presumably killed her husband (last heard of when his ship was destroyed with all hands in the previous book). Along the way, she encounters several strange societies and makes both allies and enemies; the latter includes the nation of Sacrus, who figures out who she is and what she is carrying (the Key of Candesce). The key, which can be used as a political weapon since who holds it also has power over the central sun, becomes a focal point in their struggle.

Eventually, she and Garth come to the last remains of the kingdom of Buridan: a solitary, decaying tower. Venera manages to use this as a way to power, masquerading as the heir to the lost nation and thereby giving her a seat on Spyre’s council. She brilliantly manipulates the council to accept her claim, even though many have their doubts, and alter uses this position in her back and forth with Sacrus.

But Venera’s journey is more than simply of an outcast coming to power. It’s also one of personal growth. As the book opens, she is not only cold blooded but sharply focused on her own ends. She needs to get home and take revenge; nothing else matters, and she’ll do anything and betray anyone to get their. But as the book progresses, she becomes more and more entwined with Garth around her, and picks up more and more obligations to the people she is leading. She finds that she can no longer simply abandon them to pursue her own ends.

Like Sun of Suns, Queen of Candesce brings its main story – Venera’s power stuggle on Spyre and her rise to power there – to a satisfying conclusion. And like the previous book, it still leaves the next step – Venera’s return home – to the next volume. This is another fine novel by Schroeder. I only wish we didn’t have to wait another year for the next part.

First Among Sequels by Jasper Fforde

I love to read, and tend to read widely. While I read a lot of science fiction, I also read mysteries, historical fiction, some contemporary fiction, and a number of the classics, from Austen and Dickens through Joyce and Faulkner. So I really fell for Jasper Fforde’s The Eyre Affair, the first of his novels about Thursday Next, literary detective. “Literary detective” is meant literally here. Thursday lives in a world similar to ours but where books are a far more important part of ordinary life, and the literary detectives deal with crimes involving literature. In The Eyre Affair, this becomes even more literal when Jane Eyre is kidnapped out of the first edition of her novel and held for ransom. Thursday must rescue Jane and defeat the villain – which of course she does. Thursday returned in several more books – Lost in a Good Book, The Well of Lost Plots, and Something Wicked – in which we find our more about the world inside of books as Thursday must solve more literary crimes. All are good books, though the latter two seem to lose their way a bit; they’re fun, but not really up to the level of the first two books in the series (in part because the universe Fforde created was getting so complicated that it threatened to tie itself into a knots). First Among Sequels, the latest in the series, is a step up toward the level of the earlier books in the series – fun, witty, and exciting.

The book starts years after Something Rotten. Thursday is now in hear early fifties, married, and with children: one a genius, another apparently destined to invent the time machine and lead the ChronoGuard (though he’s showing no signs of doing anything other than being a lazy teenager who likes to sleep past noon and listen to heavy metal bands). SpecOps has been disbanded, and Thursday works for Acme Carpet, which is secretly a freelance SpecOps (paid for both by installing carpet and by Thursday's elicit cheese smuggling).

Thursday is still heavily involved in the book world, where the Council of Genres is having to deal with such pending crisis as the potential border war between the genres of Racy Novel, Feminism, and Ecclesiastical Literature. Racy Novel, having been declared a part of the “Axis of Unreadable,” claims to have developed a “dirty bomb,” which if exploded will hurtle obscene phrases into other novels. Meanwhile, “read rates” are going down across the board, causing another crisis of sorts, as more and more people stop reading and instead watch such popular reality TV shows as Samaritan Kidney Swap and Britian’s Funniest Chainsaw Mishaps.

To complicate things for Thursday, she winds up with first one apprentice, then two. Over the years, of course, Thursday’s adventures have been turned into books (with titles They Eyre Affair, Lost in a Good Book, etc.). So of course, since all characters in books exist in the book world, so does the character of Thursday next. Thursday had been unhappy with how the first four books turned out – too full of sex and violence, so she had pushed for a different type of fifth book, and The Great Samuel Pepys Fiasco had featured a kinder, gentler, very new-agey Thursday Next (and sales tanked). So Thursday is saddled first with Thursday5 (the kinder, gentler Thursday), then also with Thursday1-4, who is brash and obnoxious.

In the midst of all of this, Thursday is trying to figure out why read rates are dropping, who is trying to kill her, what the ghost of her Uncle Mycroft was trying to tell her, what strange conspiracy was underway in the book world, and why the Goliath Corporation was now acting nicely toward her. By book’s end, she must save all of English Literature from being destroyed and turned into bad reality TV. (If that were to happen in our world, the books would still be there; we could ignore the bad TV versions. Not so in Thursday’s world.) Along the way, we get plenty of amusing literary references and cameos (from the whole cast of Pride and Prejudice to Dr. Temperance Brennan) and some great jokes. Fforde is clearly widely read himself, and has a great fondness and appreciation for the classics. (If you haven’t read Fforde, take my word for it that all this seemingly overly complicated stuff does fit together (mostly) in amusing ways. Pick up The Eyre Affair and you’ll see what I mean.)

The whole thing comes to a pretty satisfying conclusion in the next to the last chapter, before that last chapter takes the couple of lose ends still left and sets up the next book. Fforde’s Web site indicates that the sequel is planned for 2009. I can’t wait!

Pushing Ice by Alistair Reynolds

The last fifteen years or so have seen a resurgence in space opera. Moreover, space opera is not just prevalent but mush of what is being written is very good indeed. In fact, by most standards – ranging from breadth of ideas to complexity and inventivenss of the created universes to characterization to writing quality – modern space opera stands and head and shoulders above its ancestors of the 1930s and 1940s.

Numerous writers – Iain Banks, Vernor Vinge, Stephen Baxter, and others – have been major contributors to the new space opera. (I’d recommend Hartwell and Cramer’s The Space Opera Renaissance to anyone who wants a comprehensive overview.) But perhaps no one has done a better job of combining old fashioned sense of wonder with hard science and modern sensibilities, all within the scope of marvelous adventure stories, than Alastair Reynolds. Reynolds burst on the scene with Revelation Space, and followed that with three more novels in that universe. He also has produced a number of good short stories and a stand-alone novel. Pushing Ice is also a standalone novel, not related to the Revelation Space universe. Yet, like his earlier novels, it’s marvelously inventive.

The story starts in the relatively near future and first looks to be an adventure story set in the solar system. But, in a series of steps, Reynolds leaps further and further into the future, at each step unveiling more wonders. The Rockhopper is a ship of miners who push ice – that is, mine icy comets. As the novel starts, though, a spectacular event causes them to abandon the comet they are working on. Saturn’s moon Janus suddenly left its orbit and is in the processing of leaving the solar system. Rockhopper is the only ship in position for a flyby – mankind’s only chance to get a good look at whatever alien technology is driving Janus. At this point, the novel seems to be a B.D.O. (big dumb object) story, akin to Rendezvous with Rama. But that all changes when Rockhopper is caught in Janus’s wake, pulled along with it out of the solar system at a speed very close to that of light toward Spica, where astronomers, pointing their telescopes, have detected a massive artificial object in orbit. This, apparently, is Janus’s destination.

From here though, the novel continues to defy expectations. At every point when it seems it is going to settle down – whether as a B.D.O story or as the story of human’s rebuilding society on Janus – it changes gear, heading in a new direction and revealing new wonders. Reynolds deftly moves from one spectacular happening to the next, one-upping himself time after time.

The two major characters of the novel are Bella Lind and Svetlana Barseghian. Sometimes friends, often rivals, sometimes enemies. Bella is the captain of Rockhopper who makes the decision to stay with Janus, rather than making a risky attempt to escape its influence and remain in the solar system. Svetlana is an engineer who Bella overrules at several key instances; she thus blames Bella (with some justification) for their predicament. Both are stubborn to the point of mulishness and capable of holding grudges that last for decades. Both, though especially Svetlana, can be unlikable and frustrating – to the point that you want to grab them and shake them. Yet the tension between the two – mediated by Svetlana’s husband Parry Boyce – helps to center and ground the novel amidst all the spectacle of the universe around them. And every time I found myself thinking “nobody could possibly carry on a grudge for that long,” I just have to look at the news and remember that there are parts of the world where people still hold grudges over what happened centuries ago. (Or, closer to home, remember how some SF fans held grudges for decades over who was or was not excluded from the first Worldcon.)

This is a very enjoyable novel, a skillful mix of sense of wonder, adventure, and character, with a believable (if strange and wonderful) background. It comes to a satisfying conclusion (though Reynolds does leave room for a sequel, should he decide to write one). Reynolds continues to be a major force of the new space opera, and I hope to see much more from him.