Brian Stableford: Year Zero (2000)

Edition: Five Star, 2003
Review number: 1247

Year Zero is about the Millennium - an odd novel to see its first (American) publication in 2004. Odd, too, to find a novel by a British author in a British library - in an American edition. Central character Molly makes the decision that she won't be year 2000 compliant - to her, 2000 will be year zero and she will be able to use this to make a new start in her life. She is a former prostitute and drug addict who has two daughters housed with foster parents, and her aim is to be able to persuade social services that she can take over the care of the two girls herself. Soon after she makes her decision, strange events begin to happen to her - she meets Elvis in a local supermarket, befriends an angel, is abducted by aliens (and this is only in the first few chapters!).

Year Zero is a problematic novel. There are two main issues. The first is that there is too much going on; each little scenario (Elvis, the angel, the aliens, and so on) could fill a whole novel - something by Tom Holt or Robert Rankin, for example. Sometimes this works, but here it just irritates. Maybe it is because the encounters come too swiftly one after another, and they are not allowed space to develop and interest the reader.

The second problem is that this is clearly meant to be a humorous whimsical fantasy in the style of Holt or Rankin, but it is just not particularly funny. There are amusing moments, and sometimes clever jokes, but on the whole Year Zero reads as though it were intended to be taken seriously. If it is, then there are other problems - Molly is not a very convincing character, and she does not really change as a result of her surprising experiences; the eventual reason which is revealed as to why she is the centre of all this is glib and extremely hard to accept, even in science fiction; and the tone of the writing is too light.

There are good things about Year Zero. It is sufficiently entertaining to keep the reader going to the end. For the genre aficionado, there are little homages to other science fiction writers, nods to novels like Stanislaus Lem's The Futurological Congress as well as the more obvious use of fringe popular cultural motifs like the alien abductions. But all in all, it is a second rate version of a Tom Holt novel, only worth reading to pass the time.

Brian Stableford: The Omega Expedition (2002)

Edition: Tor, 2002
Review number: 1206

I had high expectations for the culminating novel in one of my favourite science fiction series of recent years. Apart from anything else, it includes many characters from the earlier stories, and promises to wrap up the story of the human quest for emortality (not immortality, just immune to aging and disease.)

The main part of the story is, like that of Dark Ararat, told from the point of view of a man recently revived from cryogenic suspension. But Madoc Tamlin is not someone who was voluntarily frozen at the beginning of an interstellar voyage; he is one of the longest frozen survivors of those whose fate was entrusted to one of those companies which already exist that freeze the dead (or, in this case, dying) to preserve them until a cure is found for what killed them. Tamlin is one of the characters from Inherit the Earth, but he doesn't remember when and why he was frozen. No one really has much interest in reviving the thousands of bodies in this state, but Tamlin has been thawed as a test run for a much more famous frozen body, the financier Adam Zimmerman, whose fortune endowed the foundation which centuries later made the crucial breakthrough which made emortality possible.

The Omega Expedition is, unfortunately, the weakest novel in the series. For me, the disappointments began with the introduction, a brief reprise of the other five novels. Something I liked about this series of self-contained novels is the way that it seems to consist of two trilogies, the second of which apparently goes back and fills in the gaps. It seemed an unusual way to organise a series, but it is definitely interesting and effective. However, it turns out that this was the result of the way that the publisher commissioned the novels, rather than Stableford's initial idea.

This is a small beginning to what to me was a whole series of disappointments. The first section is the story of Adam Zimmerman's life, as retold by historian Mortimer Grey, the central character of The Fountains of Youth. To me, this section seemed sentimentalised and dull, though it's title suggests that it may be aimed by Grey at children. (The phrase "children of humankind" could also refer to the various factions of post-humans, and it is unlikely that small children would have much interest in the philosophy of Heidegger.) It is strange that such a famous author as Grey is supposed to be turns out to be so uninteresting to read, though as it also would be odd if people whose bodies are full of nano-technological computer enhancements still thought in straightforward prose, this could be seen as a problem connected with reducing his words to a linear form. The main central section, the narrative of Madoc Tamlin, is much more interesting to read, and he of course would be more accustomed to writing in this format (though actually describing exciting events must help!).

Tamlin's narrative, however, is not without its own problems. As has already been mentioned, Stableford has already used the device of an individual waking up from cryogenic suspension; it is useful to the writer because the narrator would need to have many aspects of the world in which they find themselves explained, making this a natural part of the scenario and removing one of the biggest problems science fiction has as a genre - integrating the explanation of the background with a realistic narrative. This time round, though, the idea is used too clumsily to be convincing. While there are successful science fiction novels which have long sections of lecturing in them (Stapledon's Last and First Men comes to mind), this is not one of them. The action, when it does occur, is only the precursor to further lengthy discussions. Stableford has already in this very series shown he can impart a great deal of information without resorting to such dull exposition, so why does he suddenly start doing it here?

It is always a pity when the quality of a series drops; where the novels form a linked story, this is generally around the middle, and happens because the plot is insufficiently taut. Stableford avoided this by having a series made up of independent novels, but that makes the disappointment of this culminating volume even more acute. The cause? I suspect that he was keen to move on to something new; he just had to get this novel completed first.

Brian Stableford: Dark Ararat (2002)

Edition: Tor, 2003
Review number: 1194

Like its predecessor, The Cassandra Complex, Dark Ararat fills in something of a gap in Stableford's future history, lying between Inherit the Earth and Architects of Emortality. Each of the novels in the series (except the last, which I have yet to read) is a self-contained look at some aspects of the quest to bring immortality to the human race. Despite being part of this series, Dark Ararat is more tangential to this quest, and actually marks a return to one of the staple plots of (post-Campbell) science fiction - the adventures of the early pioneers to descent to the surface of an alien world, one which is considered a possibility for human colonisation. It is about genetics, and mortality, but is more concerned with setting up a plausible scenario in which the DNA molecule isn't the replicator at the centre of living organisms.

A book I have recently read is the cleverly argued Evolving the Alien by Jack Cohen and Ian Stewart. It deals with what we might be able to expect to find in terms of life on other planets; speculation about what properties would be universals (true of life anywhere) and what would be parochials (true only of life on Earth). It is a book which makes it hard to read any science fiction dealing with aliens subsequently without starting to judge the biology according to its arguments.

Many older science fiction depictions of alien environments fail the tests by making their backgrounds too earthlike - grass like plants might be a universal, or at least commonplace, but the word "like" in that statement is very important. The plant may fill a similar ecological niche to grass on Earth, but only those aspects of its appearance and life history implied by that niche will be identical to those of real grass. Because writers are interested in other things (communication with intelligent aliens, or the technicalities of space flight and planetary colonisation, for example), they often haven't spent so much time thinking about just how different things might be.

It seems to me, on reading Dark Ararat, that I am not alone in having been impressed by Evolving the Alien. The alien planet, whose name has not been finalised but could be Ararat or Tyre, seems to have been constructed with Cohen and Stewart's ideas firmly in mind. The whole series of novels has already demonstrated Stableford's interest in the biological sciences, and here he has thought through an entire planet of ecologies based on a system of replicator molecules which are different from earthly DNA - replication via an encoded genome taken to be a universal, DNA a parochial.

The problem which many meticulously worked out science fiction stories have, and it is one which makes many people dislike the genre as a whole, is that the background takes over the story, pushing character and plot into minor roles. Stableford avoids this pitfall by making his plot melodramatic and organising it so that exposition of the background becomes a natural consequence of its outworking. This plot is partly a murder mystery, and partly a tale of political manoeuvring.

Not all the colonists have been thawed from the cryogenic suspension in which they travelled from Earth over seven hundred years, and the story starts when two men are woken, one to replace a murder victim, an ecologist, and the other a policeman to investigate the killing. Conflicts have arisen between the colonists and the ship's crew (who are descendants of the original crew and want to drop the colonists off and move on elsewhere) about the suitability of Ararat for colonisation, and these tensions are heightened by the possibility that there is intelligent life on the planet - stone tools have been found, and the victim was killed with a replica of one of them.

Dark Ararat is just the kind of clever, thoughtful and well written science fiction that readers have come to expect from Stableford; it keeps up the standard of one of the genre's best series in recent years.

Brian Stableford: The Cassandra Complex (2001)

Edition: Tor, 2001
Review number: 1105

Following his well received trilogy about the search for a way to bring immortality to the human race, Stableford has now written a prequel. The early advances in this endeavour in his future history came from research to counter the bio-engineered diseases released in the Plague Wars which end some decades before Inherit the Earth, the first of the trilogy. The Cassandra Complex is set at around the beginning of these wars, as the nations of the West watch the progress of "hyperflu" across the world towards them.

The Cassandra Complex has a similar form to the first two novels, also concerning the investigation into a crime among those involved with longevity technology. Lisa Frieman is both a police officer (in forensics) and a biological researcher with connections to the distinguished Morgan Miller (bizarrely misnamed on the jacket synopsis as Jordan Miller). The story starts when she is woken by the sound of intruders in her home, part of a concerted set of attacks which include the kidnapping of Miller and the destruction of a huge experiment. Mouseworld consists of hundreds of thousands of mice in a maze of connected cages intended to see if their strategies for survival might suggest ways for human beings to cope with the overpopulation crisis (which makes their destruction seem a strangely motiveless crime as the approaching war seems certain to solve this problem in a much more drastic way).

Lisa Freeman is intensely involved in the investigation, due to her combined roles of policewoman, biology expert and Miller's closest friend (and former lover) as well as being a peripheral victim. She is not entirely believable, but it is nice to see a central character who is rather more elderly than usual in science fiction.
Nanotechnology and biological engineering are hot topics in science fiction at the moment, and most of the stories they have inspired are set far enough in the future that current controversies about genetic manipulation can be ignored. (The trilogy itself is one example of this.) It allows a writer to explore ideas about what might be done with this sort of technology in a way that the moral issues make impossible in a more contemporary setting. Here, though, Stableford is writing about the near future, the main part of The Cassandra Complex being set in around 2040 with flashbacks to as early as 1999. Thus, Stableford has different concerns here; The Cassandra Complex is not about what could be done with the genetic techniques of the future but rather the dramatic potential of today's concerns about overpopulation, animal experimentation, cloning, biological warfare and the potential for accidental or deliberate release of harmful material. Except on the most obvious of these issues, Stableford seems to want to sit on the fence, not offending anyone (there are, of course, few who would argue that the development of biological weapons is a good thing; the most positive reasons anyone can come up with is to claim it is necessary in the world in which we live). The controversies do give the story a currency which is lacking from the more abstract speculations, though I would expect characters actually involved in biological research to have stronger opinions about the issues than Stableford actually gives them. To make them discuss the issues would, however, add more explanation and argument to a novel already rather overburdened with them.

Before the industrial revolution, most of the potential disasters faced by human societies were biological and ecological (plagues and famines). Then technological disasters seemed uppermost in the mind of the public (nuclear war); but now we have a combination of the two. The constant prediction of disaster is what gives the novel its title, the Cassandra complex being what is suffered by those who predict disaster but are ignored, a prime example being those concerned with the problems of overpopulation.

It is the characterisation which means that The Cassandra Complex doesn't quite live up to the standards set by the other three novels; it contains interesting ideas, and a good (and quite difficult) puzzle. It is certainly enough to make me keen to read Stableford's next novel.

Brian Stableford: The Fountains of Youth (2000)

Edition: Saint Martin's Press, 2000
Review number: 876

The third novel in Stableford's trilogy about the efforts made by the human race to postpone and eventually eradicate death is rather different to the first two. Set farthest into the future, its characters are the first generation of true emortals, not subject to death by ageing or disease. While the earlier novels were both murder mysteries, The Fountains of Youth purports to be the autobiography of Mortimer Gray, a historian who has written an epic history of death - a subject which fascinates those who are no longer subject to it.

The genre of autobiography is ideally suited to the more thoughtful mood of this novel, which is to a large extent an exploration of the psychological effects that the abolition of death might have. The ideas include the rather disturbing aestheticisation of death, with suicide parties and even the tailoring of new diseases to overcome the advanced immune systems of the emortals. Gray's work is used, against the wishes of the author, as an inspiration for this kind of movement.

The novel which came into my mind while reading The Fountains of Youth was Olaf Stapledon's Last and First Men, but it is really more like Robinette Broadhead's story in Pohl's Gateway series. Stableford's narrative fails to convey as alien a personality as Stapledon's arrogant last man, nor does he make a rapid pace of change in the long life of his central character as apparent as Pohl does. Stableford's concerns are different, and the character of Gray is different; he is not interested in technology and he is not writing out of contempt for the past. Gray is almost a scholarly hermit, not paying that much attention to what goes on around him except as it affects his obsession with death, and even his interest in that is quite philosophical.

One very odd thing about Mortimer Gray is that, in a world where death has been virtually abolished, he keeps on encountering it. He survives a major catastrophe when quite young, but that it just the first in a series of accidents. Of course, the historian of the human battle of death needs such an encounter to suggest the theme of his work, but it makes his attitude to death atypical and for him to continually just escape from it is not very believable.

One of the interesting ideas in the novel, not really connected to its main theme, is the way that the history is structured. Each of its ten parts consists of a vast organisation of supporting evidence, in the form of links overlaid on the future equivalent of the World Wide Web - clearly using a more sophisticated form of hypertext than we do at the moment - with an overriding commentary. It certainly seems to me that as new generations arise who grown up familiar with the ideas of hypertext, its use will become more and more sophisticated, and the linear narrative with the occasional link which is the form of most web pages today (including this one) will be less and less common.

The novel is more obviously a vehicle for Stableford's ideas than the preceding ones, because these ideas here are more to do with psychology than technology. In the end, this makes the novel more thought provoking but less gripping.

Brian Stableford: Architects of Emortality (1999)

Edition: Tor, 1999
Review number: 792

In most trilogies, each novel continues more or less directly from the previous one, with many of the same characters. There is, however, a lengthy gap between Inherit the Earth and Architects of Emortality. In this time, big advances have been made in the use of microscopic robots (nanotech) and genetic manipulation of embryos to increase the human lifespan. Everyone can expect to live two or three hundred years, and this has brought huge changes.

Like Inherit the Earth, this novel is a murder mystery, with very old men being killed by genetically engineered flowers delivered by a beautiful young woman (even by the standards of a time when body image and facial appearance are changed according to fashion). The motives for the murders lie deep in the past, when most of the victims worked on some aspect of the research which moulded the world imagined by Stableford, making them "architects of emortality".

The tone is lighter than in the earlier novel, with little jokes like the names of the investigating police officers, Holmes and Watson., It doesn't have the sense of significance of Inherit the Earth, either. The plot is more important, though the setting is still interesting. The earlier novel is better, but this is still a highly readable piece of speculation.

Brian Stableford: Inherit the Earth (1998)

Edition: Tor, 1998
Review number: 617

Inherit the Earth is heavily influenced by the cyberpunk subgenre exemplified by the novels of William Gibson: there is the same high tech, decayed urban background; the same cynical view of the world. Stableford's novel (first in a trilogy) is set much further into the future than most cyberpunk has been, after the world has begun to recover following decimation of human and animal populations by genetically engineered diseases in what are known as the Plague Wars. Now the rich (and even, to a large extent) the moderately well off) are protected by biological and microscopic computer hardware augmentations to their natural immune system, and the major concern of the large firms which effectively rule the world is the development of what is known as "emortality", where these enhancements make death only a remote possibility.

Damon Hart is the son of Conrad Helier, whose invention of the artificial womb had made possible the survival of the human race at the end of the Plague Wars. He has rejected his inheritance (both material and intellectual, walking out on the members of Helier's research team who acted as foster parents) to become a knife fighter in underground virtual entertainments (where experiencing the pain of a wound is one of the main pleasures) and then a programmer of virtual environments. He is drawn back into the world of his original background when police come to question him after one of his foster parents has been abducted.

An exciting story with a meticulously constructed background, Inherit the Earth is one of the best science fiction novels I have read in the last few years. It has a broader scope than most cyberpunk novels had, and is rendered more believable for reading now because it extrapolates from current trends in computing rather than those of fifteen or twenty years ago. (Computers and particularly interfaces have developed so fast that they have left science fiction behind - the most dated looking scenes in Star Wars, for example, are those involving computer displays.)