The first of these books won a Hugo award a couple of years ago, and while Hugo-award-winning books aren’t always to my taste, I’ve rarely found books so honored to be badly-written.
The premise of the first book is that, in our not-too-distant future, the Earth is inexplicably wrapped in a force-field or “membrane” that shuts out the stars, and after some investigation is understood to slow the passage of time on the planet while the universe outside passes by, thousands of years for each day. The discovery of purpose of this envelopment, and the nature of the entities responsible - eventually labeled “the Hypotheticals” - consumes much of the book, and the well-drawn characters that inhabit it.
The story is told through the eyes of three characters, brother and sister Jason and Diane Lawton, and their friend and neighbor Tyler Dupree. Jason becomes involved at the center of the scientific and technological response to the “Spin” as it comes to be called, Diane retreats into a series of religious cults and communities, and Tyler acts as a narrator and observer.
One of the things that struck me as interesting about the first book is that Wilson shows a respect for the religious impulses of his characters - when faced with something immensely larger than oneself that changes the destiny of the entire world, the question “Is this God’s will?” isn’t entirely unreasonable. That’s unusual in a genre that often treats religion and belief in God with a Gene Roddenberry-esque amount of disdain.
Because of the accelerated passage of time outside of the Spin membrane and the inevitable expansion of the Sun as billions of years pass outside, Jason puts in motion an audacious plan to terraform Mars and send humans to live there, to develop and possibly understand the purposes of the Hypotheticals. What ultimately happens is unexpected, and Jason, Diane, and Tyler are all literally transformed by the end of the book by the alien technology that has come to determine to course of their lives.
The second book follows the events of the first. The Spin has ended and the Hypotheticals have placed an Arch in the Indian Ocean which leads to another habitable world (and other Arches with other, less hospitable worlds, beyond). But while the New World is being colonized and exploited, the still-unscrutable purposes of the Hypotheticals are working themselves out as a group of scientists try to engineer a human being who can communicate with what are now understood to be alien machines.
Ultimately some of the big-picture purposes are worked out, although the answers aren’t entirely comforting or expected.
These are good page-turners, particularly the second book, with a good mixture of Big Ideas, exciting plotting, and vividly-drawn and sympathetic characters. Wilson does a good job of mixing his speculative “What If” questions that are the hallmark of good science fiction with real, and very human people.
If you’re a fan of or at least familiar with Isaac Asimov’s “Foundation” series, then you’ll find this review comprehensible and potentially interesting. Otherwise this is probably just gibberish.
I remember reading the Foundation books as a teenager, in a grey, omnibus hardback edition that I bought used at a county library booksale. From the introduction to that edition I remember Asimov mentioning that his series and the Lord of the Rings were contenders for the 1966 Hugo award for best series, and surprisingly Asimov’s book won.
The setting of the Foundation books is a distant future when humanity has colonized much of the galaxy, and a huge galactic empire has emerged as the central government for quadrillions of the galaxy’s human inhabitants (with no aliens in sight). Hari Seldon, a mathematician and historian, has developed a branch of predictive mathematics called “psychohistory” that can, with considerable accuracy predict the future destinies of human societies. Seldon come to understand that a collapse of galactic society is immanent and unavoidable, and develops with his colleagues a master Plan to dramatically shorten the inevitable interregnum and dark age, and preserve what he can of human scientific and cultural knowledge from the immanent chaos. The rest of the series follows the execution of that Plan, its inevitable setbacks, and ultimate success. Asimov drew heavily on Gibbons “Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire”, and the Foundation series is in a sense that account writ large on a galactic stage.
There was a trio of “Foundation” books published in the 1990s — I read a couple of them, but found them almost as forgettable as the (terrible) Brian Herbert successor books to the Dune series.
“Crisis” is set many thousands of years in the future, in the height of the Second Empire, which is even greater and more powerful than the First. The galaxy is benevolently run by the Lyceum, a group of scholars who manipulate human events to ensure stability and optimal outcomes using the now much more deeply-developed tools of psychohistorical prediction. They also ruthlessly suppress development of advanced mathematics, knowing that emergence of other groups of “predictors” would diminish their ability to control events.
Humankind has also developed the “fam”, a “tuned psychic probe” that grants the wearer dramatically enhanced cognitive abilities, memory, and access to the omnipresent data network and is permanently linked the the human mind with which it is joined.
The book follows Eron Osa, a psychohistorical scholar who is “executed” by having his fam destroyed for a crime he doesn’t even remember. The novel unfolds as we trace Osa’s childhood into the present, while also following him as he struggles to orient himself in a world that he can no longer understand and missing much of his past.
The big ideas here are about the nature of prediction and secrecy, and the uses and misuses of power. This is a big, long, and baroquely-complex book. However I find Kingsbury’s book a pleasure to read at times, and worth a now second reading. If you liked the Foundation books, then you’ll find this a faithful successor.
…so I made this one. You can make one too!
The Patched Pirate