Anna Davour blogs about Fantastic fiction & SF

Imagine a world where you can travel from sun to sun in wooden ships, without worrying about space suits since all of space is filled with air. Imagine a world without planets, with spinning town wheels to emulate gravity to keep humans – descended from us planet dwellers – healthy in a free fall environment. Then imagine that all kinds of technology that we have invented in roughly the latest 100 years (and kinds not invented yet) are disabled: no electricity, no electronics, no advanced nanotech or biotech.

You get a wonderfully strange environment. This is the setting of the Virga series by Karl Schroeder. Virga is a huge bubble world, filled with air and isolated from the surrounding universe. Many of the inhabitants are unaware of the nature of Virga and the existence of an outside. Here you get far future adventure with steampunk level technology.

This is a major worldbuilding exercise. Take a look at the beautiful cover images to tickle your sense of wonder a little bit. (There is going to be a graphic novel of the first Virga book, Sun of Suns. I wonder what that will look like!)

Worlds with some of these features have been created by others in science fiction. There are perhaps never any really new ideas. One recent example is Terminal World by Alastair Reynolds (which I haven't read). In his story more advanced technologies can only function in the higher levels of a towerlike world. The Virga series develops these ideas with causes and consequences in an interesting way, perhaps deeper than anything before.

Ashes of Candesce concludes the Virga series, consisting of five books. According to Karl Schroeder himself, the books are written to stand alone as much as possible. The first three are tied together in one story arc: Sun of Suns, Queen of Candesce (these first two are also collected in one volume as Cities of the Air ) and Pirate Sun. Here the focus is on life, struggles, intrigues and battles within Virga. The final two books, The Sunless Countries and Ashes of Candesce open up to the outside, which is dominated by something called Artificial Nature. Virga is threatened, and the stakes are high: it's about the continued existence of humans, and perhaps of any embodied intelligence at all.

Full disclosure: I haven't read all of the Virga books, so my description relies partly on back cover descriptions, reviews and the author's website. Now, I'm sure I will have to get hold of the first three books. The setting fascinates me, and I want to inhabit Virga a little bit longer. Still, I can testify that it's possible to follow the story without starting from the beginning of the series.

One of the intriguing things about Virga concerns how and why someone would want to construct a place like this. The mechanism suppressing advanced technologies is contained in Candesce, the central "sun" of Virga. The control of Candesce is the ultimate prize of Virga. Of course there are obvious drawbacks with not being able to use all known technology. No unchallenged romantic low-tech bliss. People die, when they really would not have to. So there must be an important advantage, but what? Why did someone invent something like Candesce? Exploring this, and the struggle between various groups, the story also touches interesting questions like the relationship between mind and body.

My favourite character in this book is Keir, who starts out as a mystery even to himself. He knows that he is losing memories and knowledge, but he doesn't know why. In the end his secrets turn out to be very important for the solution of the conflict. He comes from a world outside Virga, and through his eyes the good and the bad aspects of life in Virga stand out in sharp relief. It's also touching to follow Keir as he loses the function of his neural implant system, the scry, which has always provided him with augmented reality information and extended memory functions.

This is an example of one of my favourite things in science fiction: how it can make the familiar strange and wonderful. Like biological memory, and how to use it. It's not necessarily optimal, but it is something that I use all the time never reflecting over the special experience. This gave me little kicks of sense of wonder for a couple of days, and at the same time made me a bit frustrated with the shortcomings of my own powers of recollection. But of course, we all use extended memory: writing, photography, sound recordings and so on. Which we also tend to take for granted.

Karl Schroeder is definitely an author to watch. I might even take a look at his earlier works, things he wrote before Virga.

You might like this book if you enjoy:

• action-filled thriller type plots
• time travel
• science fiction stories with philosophical implications, but not too much
• doom and apocalypse

Keep reading if you would like to know my thoughts on Final Days in a context of hard science fiction. 

The last third or so of Final Days was a fun read, but for a hundred pages in the middle I kept reading mostly for the grazing cars. Cool gadgets help a lot when I fail to feel really involved in the plot.

As the title reveals, it's a story about the end of a world. A mysterious alien artefact is lost, and those who know about it have reasons to believe that it's going to destroy all life on Earth. At the same time, there are political tensions over the access to the wormhole technology that allows transfer to the space colonies in other star systems. The array of wormhole gates is located on the moon, and controlled by the very powerful organisation Array Security and Immigration (ASI), based in the Western Coalition. Saul Dumont is an ASI agent who gets involved in it all, partly as a consequence of his failures.

I found Saul a somewhat colourless character, despite his mild drug addiction and his personal problems. He thinks he is investigating the sabotage of the gate to the Galileo colony, where his wife and daughter live. For ten years, no-one has been able to travel between Earth and Galileo, and Saul is eager to find out who is responsible for separating him from his family. What his superiors really want to get is details about the imminent destruction and its cause, and therefore Saul finds himself at the centre of the events threatening billions of people. There is a lot of action and violence, but I didn't really care about Saul himself.

He gets more interesting in the second half of the book, when he interacts with people in situations not always involving a lot of running and fighting, and reveals more complex feelings. And he gets to ride a Saturn rocket, which is actually kind of cool in a future where very few actually travel through space.

That detail with the Saturn rocket struck a chord in me, which made me a bit worried. There is a strong streak of nostalgia in some flavours of hard science fiction, with authors who clearly seem to think that the future was better in the past. I'm talking about the kind of technology romanticism that seems uncomfortable with the developments in society and comes together with a certain political conservatism. Like Michael Flynn in Firestar. He describes a return to space coupled with a kind of soft revolution that transforms our whole culture, art and literature and everything, to something easier and more understandable. The effect is to make him look like he skipped a couple of decades and just cannot comprehend the world he lives in. I'm not sure I want to be like that. Still, I can't help being charmed by the old fashioned rocket. It makes a wonderful contrast between the easy everyday travel between celestial bodies in the portrayed future, and the much more heroic (i.e. uncomfortable) journeys of the early space pioneers.

Also, Gary Gibson avoids getting overtly nostalgic about the Right Stuff, and never gets ideologically annoying. (There are actually interesting post-colonial issues in this future, where the wormhole technology gives the Western Coalition control over the colonies, while the Pan-Asian Congress demands equal control and their own gates. I like it when Earth is described as a whole, multi-faceted planet.)

Still, Final Days is definitelyhard SF. The story is much more about the physics of wormhole gates and the technology of the future, and about time travel paradoxes and free will and the destiny of humanity, than about a few specific characters. Perhaps the most memorable person in the story is the elderly Amy, who together with her husband runs the space tourism company owning the Saturn replica rocket. That Amy makes a reference to a "cold equation" tells us that Gary Gibson very much knows that he's a part of the conversation in hard science fiction. ("The Cold Equations" is a much debated short story by Tom Godwin, first published in 1954.) The story is also full of action and suspense. Will mankind survive? And at the end, I actually cannot be sure that Saul did the right thing. It's an interesting situation. I must say that I also enjoyed the attempt at exposing the inherent problems with wormhole travel. This is a very commonly used trope in science fiction. One example is how Peter F. Hamilton uses wormholes to connect the planets in his Commonwealth universe, another is the "farcasters" in Hyperion by Dan Simmons that allow the river Tethys to cross several planets. Still, the fact that this kind of faster-than-light travel allows for certain kinds of time travel and all sorts of paradoxes is usually just forgotten. In Final Days the gates are even called CTCs, for "closed timelike curves", a term referring to the description of a phenomenon like a wormhole within the theory of relativity. Don't worry about the details, Gary Gibson is not weighing down the story with lengthy explanations, but it's still an important plot point. (There's the conversation again. Science fiction collectively exploring common tropes.)

I also found it sort of refreshing to read about a future with recognisable humans and technology in the year 2235. The augmented reality of Final Days is not very far from what we can do now, with a smart phone, but much more integrated with daily life. Most people wear contact lenses containing their personal data ("ubiquitous profile", including money) and communications device. They also display the desired amount of information and helpful instructions in the wearer's field of view.

It's not our immediate future, but still a world just a step beyond ours. No backups of your personality, no quasi-magical nanobot utility fogs, no emerging intelligences on the internet, no singularity. I guess I sometimes get a bit tired of those things, and like variation.

As I mentioned in the beginning, the grazing cars was another piece of future technology that I found fascinating. Kind of cute, but a bit incongruous with the rest of the worldbuilding. It actually doesn't seem to be a very good idea.

A second hire car was parked near Jeff's own, where it shuffled closer to the verge and began tearing up the same patch of grass, sucking the biomass deep into its guts prior to converting it to ethanol.

Can you imagine hauling around large amounts of concentrated biomass for the cars to eat -- instead of just bringing the ethanol from a centralised distillery? And how do you deal with the waste? You know what a street looks like where horses are used.

Still, if it hadn't been for the cars I might have stopped reading before getting to the good parts. That's hard SF for you.

Marya Morevna, when you longed to see the world naked and watched for what was hidded behind everyday things, did you know where it would lead you? When you saw the three birds turning into men, did you recognize the structure of your tale? When you learned the date of your death, did it change your way of life?

They say there are only twelve plots, or seven, or three. These contain all stories there are to tell. Perhaps it is true that the human brain has a tendency to find certain patterns, to patch together precisely these stories from the jumble of events, meetings, and random catastrophes and triumphs that life brings. Maybe, but it does not reduce the value of telling the stories, and retelling them again.

In Deathless Catherynne M. Valente lets the Russian folk tale of Marya Morevna play out in parallel with some important decades in the history of St. Petersburg-Petrograd-Leningrad, with revolution and war. We know what will happen, we know at least the outlines of this story -- even if we this time also get to see the house imps joining the Party and forming committees. Most readers will also recognize the structure of the fairy tale, and we understand that certain things have to be. Even if we are not familiar with all the creatures of Russian folk lore, we understand what they mean. There is an inevitability to it all, that partly feels horrible and claustrophobic, partly comforting and secure.

Knowing how it ends rarely makes a story less interesting, often more so. In a fairy tale, we expect certain turns and we know at least roughly where it will lead. Variations of folk tales is nearly a genre in itself, maybe partly because the well known is a secure framework for telling important stories. Also because if the reader can be expected to know the story, she will understand which points are new, or emphasized by the author.

Marya Morevna comes to the Country of Life, becomes the warrior queen, confronts Baba Yaga, travels to the Country of Death. Everything is expected, and everything is new and surprising. The writing is beautiful. The triangle of Marya, Koschei and Ivan becomes a dark comment on love and matrimony: who is to rule? The world we know fades out of focus and back again. The tragedies of Leningrad in the war gets entangled with the struggle against the boundaries of free will.

Life is like that. Life is not like that.

This is a book about the technologies that will shape our lives in various ways in the near future and in the coming 100 years. It's all extrapolated from the current front line of technology and from new knowledge that is anticipated to be exploited soon. Michio Kaku is a physicist who has made a name as a popularizer of science, through his books and as host of various TV shows. Physics of the Future is based on interviews with scientists and people who are involved in developing and trying out the discussed technologies.

The title is a bit misleading – it's clearly chosen because the book is in some ways a sequel to Kaku's Physics of the Impossible, which discusses seemingly impossible things people do in fiction and what it would take to make some of them possible. Physics of the Future is not about what we will learn in physics in the future. Not even only about how physics will be applied in the future. It's about computers, robots, medicine, economics, energy and, yes, about space travel. Every chapter is divided into three parts: the current state of the art, what we might be able to do around mid century, and visions for the "far future" in about 100 years.

Many of the ideas are discussed in the light of two principles: Moore's law and "the caveman principle". Moore's law states roughly that computers double in capacity every two years. At some point in the not so far future Moore's law will break down because it meets the physical limits of how small we can make our integrated circuits. The caveman principle is just that people are basically the same as in the stone age. Our preferences and needs are rooted in that human nature, and this will shape how we implement our technologies and shape our future.

Of course things will not play out exactly the way described in the book, and this is discussed in the introduction. The book is about what we might do, based on what we know now, and this is the available information that we need to work with when imagining the future. A reader of popular science magazines might already be familiar with most of the things and ideas discussed here (I found this especially true for the chapter about space travel), but here a lot is collected in the same place in a nice package where you can start to appreciate how various advances can work together. Someone who is new to all of this might find the book fairly dense, but still readable.

Michio Kaku is clearly enthusiastic over the subject, and very optimistic. It's a mostly bright future he describes, where we use our collected wits and deal constructively with the problems caused by global warming and the end of oil. I actually feel that the positive picture he paints sometimes borders on the naive, when he glosses over the ethical problems with some of the inventions he describes. Yes, there are problems with creating entities with minds and make them serve us. And what responsibilities do we have to our "designer babies"? (As a friend of mine stated it: how fun is it 30 years later, when your genes are really out of fashion?) I understand that these discussions may be beside the point and that Kaku doesn't want to fill the book with them, but I miss acknowledgments that ethics can be relevant and important in shaping the future.

Some comments about economics, history and other relevant subjects far from physics also seem a bit oversimplified. I'm sure that Michio Kaku has done his research and that he has fact checked everything against experts, but being one myself I know that physicists are not necessarily experts of everything, and I reserve the right to be a bit skeptical about his historical analyses. Nevertheless I enjoy the enthusiasm and the optimism, because it makes it easy and entertaining to read the book. I put many question marks in the margins of the discussions about for example how exactly Europe came to be more successful than China and the Ottoman empire, but that doesn't spoil the rest of the book.

Perhaps the least successful chapter is the last one, "A day in the life in 2100", which is intended to illustrate what life might be like when we have access to all of the things described in the preceding chapters. It reads like science fiction from the 1930's, only with updated gadgets, and leaves me feeling unsatisfied when I put the book down. Michio Kaku is a good writer of popular science, but not as talented at fiction, and for this story did not add anything of value.

I have read enough good SF to have little patience with bad SF. This brings me to my real problem with reading this book, which is not a failure of the book but rather of me as a reader. My reading mind is shaped by decades on a high-SF-diet. The thing that keeps nagging me through the book is that the author seems to be completely unaware of science fiction literature after about 1982 or so. I know, it's very unfair to judge a book because it fails to do something the author didn't intend at all in the first place. (Actually, I hate it when people do that. I stopped reading reviews on online bookstores because of that.) I just cannot help it.

You see, I keep thinking of the perfect examples of how everything mentioned in this book is discussed in science fiction, new and old. If you talk about super intelligent mice I want to mention Flowers for Algernon by Daniel Keyes. If you talk about recreating Neanderthals I want to mention Neverness by David Zindell. If you talk about regrowing lost limbs I think of Have Space Suit, Will Travel by Robert A. Heinlein. If you talk about augmented reality (digital information superimposed on your senses) I think of The Golden Age by John C. Wright and The Quantum Thief by Hannu Rajaniemi. If you talk about extended life spans I want to mention the treatment of that in the Mars trilogy by Kim Stanley Robinson. When it comes to nanotechnology, why not mention The Dervish House by Ian McDonald, which I recently reviewed here.

This list just goes on forever.

Michio Kaku instead takes most of his examples from ancient mythology and talks about "the power of gods". The rest of his illustrating examples come from Star Trek and SF blockbusters, which he seems to like but not take very seriously. That is fair enough but leaves me feeling a bit frustrated. I think I personally would have preferred to read a book about technologies in fairly current science fiction literature with discussions of if and when these might be available in reality, and the science behind. The book I wish I had is an updated version of the classic The Science in Science Fiction, edited by Peter Nicholls. It was published in 1983 and is still readable, but it's too old to contain cyberpunk, new space opera, and a lot of cool scientific ideas which have been commonplace in SF recently – such as many of the things discussed in Physics of the Future. I wish someone would write an updated version of The Science in Science Fiction. I actually wish that I could write it myself (something that I could not do alone, that's for sure).

It's not Michio Kaku's fault that I feel frustrated by this. Physics of the Future is entertaining and I think the author succeeds with what he has set out to do: discussing future technologies. Thinking about it, I wonder if it would not also be a nice source of inspiration for SF writers.

(By the way: yes, it bothers me that my quick list of science fiction examples contains no works by women. That is something worth discussing.)