The Anubis Gates — Tim Powers

Rating: 4.5/5

I’ve read a couple of Tim Powers novels in the past, but not nearly all of them. The Anubis Gates was one that I had been aware of and heard good things about for a long time, but never quite got around to reading. I’m glad I finally made time. The Anubis Gates is a well-researched, exceptionally tightly-plotted adventure story with a sympathetic hero, plenty of sinister villains, excellent pacing and great dialogue all bound together with Powers’ signature otherworldly style.

I know Powers has a wider range, but the books of his I’ve read have always been in the dark historical fantasy style, and The Anubis Gates is not an exception. The book is exhaustively researched, with many real-life details about the historical figures that appear in it, such as Lord Byron and Samuel Taylor Coleridge. Like On Stranger Tides and The Stress of Her Regard, Powers flavors his historical setting with a generous serving of sorcery.

In Powers’ novels, magic isn’t the benign or straightforward pursuit of the Harry Potter novels or a Dungeons and Dragons game. Powers’ sorcery in The Anubis Gates is potent, terrible, thoroughly corrupt and unnatural, and profoundly costly to the practitioner. Immortality and the ability to kill with a quickly-spoken invocation are minor abilities, scarcely worth mentioning. The truly powerful sorcerers concern themselves with much larger-scale and darkly malign plots, such as punching a hole to the otherworld near London and bringing back the ancient Egyptian gods to scour England from the face of the world.

The book’s hero is a Virginian English professor named Brendan Doyle, a scholar of Samuel Taylor Coleridge and the obscure 19th-century poet William Ashbless. He is given a bizarre job interview in London by an eccentric old millionaire dying of cancer who claims to have discovered the secret to time travel. Doyle signs up to accompany the millionaire and a group of rich tourists back to 1810 to attend a lecture by Samuel Taylor Coleridge. It was supposed to be a quick trip — just attend the lecture and get back. Unfortunately for Doyle, his group isn’t the only one that knows about the gates.

From there the story broadens out to include deformed beggars, werewolves, body-switching and dopplegangers, centuries-old sorcerers, a mysterious English secret society, more time travel, and at least a half-dozen diabolical plots. Doyle’s knowledge of history serves as a rough guide to him, but when a sorcerer can kidnap someone and replace him with an exact duplicate, history fails as a completely accurate guide to actual events.

Time-travel novels always seem to walk a thin line between bizarre causality paradoxes that break the reader’s sense of immersion, and an overreliance on fate and destiny that can detract from the tension of the plot. Powers walks this line quite well in The Anubis Gates. I never got the feeling that history could significantly change, but I also certainly never felt that the characters were on rails, or that their actions were irrelevant to the outcome of the story. Things were recorded as they came out, with a lot of gaps left in the explanations. Too often novels do the opposite, forcing actions to come out as they were recorded. I feel Powers’ approach is the superior one.

The latter half of the book moves at a pace just short of frenetic. New information is exposed and situations arise without much pause, and if you hadn’t been paying close attention to the foreshadowing that was set up earlier in the book, there’s quite a bit that can go over your head. I’m sure a reread would expose many more subtle hints than I actually caught on my initial read. The conclusions to the many diverse plot threads are very satisfying, and Powers provides a nice denoument at the end that, although predictable by this point, provides a perfect ending to the novel.

All in all, The Anubis Gates is a tight, quick, and fun novel that I have no qualms recommending to anyone who enjoys historical fiction, time travel, or dark fantasy. It is my favorite Powers novel that I’ve read to date.

Well, I finished my third Charles Stross novel a day or so ago. This time it was Iron Sunrise. Set in the same universe as Singularity Sky, Iron Sunrise is not a direct sequel, although the main characters are the same and there are some references to the previous book.

Iron Sunrise — Charles Stross

Rating: 4.5/5

I’ve really enjoyed the Charles Stross novels I’ve read lately. Luckily, I still have some more to go, with the promise of more coming out soon. Iron Sunrise is the latest of his published novels in the Eschaton series.

If you are unfamiliar with this, the premise is that at some point in the fairly near future, experiments in quantum entanglement allow information to be transmitted faster than light. Due to special relativity, this implies that information is being sent into the past — in effect, time travel. When the future Internet starts receiving information from it’s own future, it quickly bootstraps itself into a quasi-godlike entity called the Eschaton, and teleports 9 billion of Earth’s 10 billion people onto various worlds throughout a 1000-parsec volume of space and over hundreds of years of time. When Earth recovers from the subsequent economic disruptions and starts venturing out into space again, they discover myriads of existing human societies scattered throughout the nearby stars.

The Eschaton wishes to preserve its own existence, and may have other motives that are subtly hinted at throughout the series. The only serious threat to an entity such as the Eschaton is uncontrolled faster-than-light travel and the attendant causality violations. The Eschaton would strongly prefer not to be edited out of existence retroactively, and has the power to defend itself with extreme prejudice. Of course, it prefers to act subtly if possible rather than obliterating uppity planets with killer asteroids and supernovas.

Iron Sunrise starts off with a bang. In fact, this may be one of the biggest opening bangs in a novel that I can remember, as the star in the Moscow system is iron-bombed by a rogue causality-violating device, inducing a tremendous nova that destroys all life in the inner system. As the outer stations are evacuated, a young girl guided by her “invisible friend” finds some odd documents and hides them before leaving. Years later, these documents cause several interstellar organizations to take a sudden and extremely unhealthy interest in that girl.

Charles Stross’s writing has been a pleasure to read in every book of his I’ve tried so far. In Iron Sunrise, his well-thought-out Eschaton setting provides the steel, his plentiful references to the cutting edges of physics and computer science serve as the flint, and his energetic writing style whacks them together to produce a lot of sparks to ignite the imagination. Stross uses FTL and instantaneous communication in his novels, as many authors do, but Stross’s extensive knowledge of some of the major gaps in modern physics give his versions of these hoary SF tropes more believability.

Like Singularity Sky, Iron Sunrise is a space opera at its core. Stross has balanced his universe out very precisely in order to retain as much fidelity with known science as possible while still enabling swashbuckling interstellar adventure, and I think he succeeds fairly well. In many ways, I think Iron Sunrise is the better book. It benefits from human adversaries that are comprehensible and intelligent, unlike the Festival and the hierarchy of the New Republic from Singularity Sky, who were, respectively, not. Stross’s writing is also a bit calmer and less frenetic in this novel than the previous one, which I think improves it. Singularity Sky seemed to suffer from idea overload at times and Iron Sunrise benefits from a slightly slower and more consistent pace.

It will be interesting to see where Stross goes with the Eschaton setting after this. There are a number of questions that need answers, and a number of different directions he could take the series. At this point, it’s anyone’s guess. I would recommend Iron Sunrise to anyone that likes hard science fiction, particularly if you’ve enjoyed Stross in the past.

I recently finished reading Richard Morgan’s Altered Carbon. I’d heard a bit about this book in the past; it had made a pretty big splash for a debut novel, but I hadn’t read it. It arrived a few weeks ago in the CARE package of books my uncle Eric sent to me, and after making it to the top of the pile, I finally got to read it. It was an excellent book, reminding me of a cross between a Raymond Chandler novel and the movie Blade Runner.

Altered Carbon — Richard K. Morgan

Rating: 4.5/5

Richard K. Morgan’s debut novel, Altered Carbon, is quite an achievement. Drawing freely from the tropes of film noir, detective fiction, and cyberpunk, Altered Carbon is not only a tight mystery with excellent pacing but also a deep exploration about what it really means to be a human individual.

In Morgan’s world, death has been robbed of most of its sting by the “stack”, a small cybernetic implant that sits at the base of the skull and digitally records a person’s thoughts and sense perceptions — in effect, the complete personality. In the event of a person’s physical death, the stack can be downloaded into another “sleeve” (body), overwriting the original personality and allowing the downloaded person to live again in the new sleeve.

Of course, human nature being what it is, this doesn’t necessarily lead to a golden age for mankind. Real death through destruction of the stack is still possible, unless you are rich enough to have yourself backed up regularly. Choice bodies are expensive, and unless you are wealthy or useful, providing for your own continued existence in anything other than a virtual condo or a cheap synthetic sleeve may be beyond your means. Virtual experiences mediated by computer software are widely available, but when you are in virtual space you are completely at the mercy of the host computer system and the subject to the whims of whomever controls it.

In Morgan’s setting, humanity has managed to lever itself off of Earth, with the help of an alien legacy discovered on Mars. FTL communications allow a sort of interstellar mobility for some people, as it is possible to transmit your coded personality to another planet for “ensleevement” there. Of course, this type of travel is prohibitively expensive and only available to the fantastically wealthy or to those people with exceptional skills that are employed by the fantastically wealthy.

The main character of Altered Carbon, Takeshi Kovacs, is one of the latter. A former member of the Envoy Corps, the most elite miliary unit of the UN Protectorate, turned criminal, Kovacs is serving a long sentence in storage on the colony planet of Harlan’s World when he gets selected as an investigator for an exceptionally rich and influential man on Earth. Granted a new sleeve and a six-week lease on life, he is instructed to solve the mystery of how his patron, Laurens Bancroft, was killed. The police think the investigation is a waste of time. They’re sure it was suicide.

Any novel that deals with digitization and transfer of human consciousness has to be informed by some sort of materialistic assumptions. A belief that the mind arises solely from material causes is known as “materialistic monism”, and almost all novelists that deal with transhuman themes have to assume this in one way or another. Most, however, shy away from some of the more bizarre consequences of such a position, such as personality blending, editing, duplication and destruction, as well as the more basic issues of whether you are the same person in a 15-year-old girl’s body as you were when your mind was in the body of a 40-year-old male. Even some of the most cutting-edge, avant-garde transhumanist writers try to preserve distinct identities and mental images for their viewpoint characters, likely because it becomes very difficult to write about and identify with hive minds or entities with no fixed personality features.

Morgan does at least pay lip service to some of these issues — viruses that can perform destructive corruption of the personality feature in several places in the novel, and both editing and duplication are discussed at times. Also, he acknowledges the influence that the flesh has on the mind — romantic attraction between two personalities strongly depends on the pheromonal compatibility of the bodies they wear, and addictions to alcohol and tobacco are dependent on the habituations of the sleeve. Like most authors, however, Morgan shies away from some of the really tough questions about what this type of technology would mean for human individuality. He does this by legislating some applications (duplication) away, by not showing some of the other possibilities, and finally, by seeming to retreat to the position that the stack is the “house of the soul”, much like Descartes’ dualistic view of the pineal gland. The stack, fragile and corruptible as it is, becomes the fixed point of a person’s identity.

Morgan’s writing is pretty tight and clean, making a nice stylistic complement to the hardboiled characters and convoluted plot he serves up. He’s got a bit of everything in this novel: comedy, tragedy, greed, romance, idealism, sadism, mystery, and an illuminating and satisfying resolution. In terms of content, he reminds me favorably of Philip K. Dick, so it doesn’t surprise me that Hollywood has optioned this novel for a movie. A film version of Altered Carbon could be great if it was done with the same cinematographic sensibilities as Blade Runner. I’m certainly looking forward to reading more by Morgan in the future.

I recently read Charles Stross’s The Atrocity Archives, a book that blends the spy thriller, the cosmic horror of H. P. Lovecraft, and the techno-institutional absurdist politics of Dilbert into one magnificent novel. I recommend it very, very highly.

The Atrocity Archives — Charles Stross

Rating: 5/5

After reading Singularity Sky by Charles Stross I was willing to give the hyperbolic statements about the author the benefit of the doubt. Singularity Sky was a well-written, thought-provoking book that held my interest and delivered the goods. A couple weeks ago, my uncle sent me a copy of The Atrocity Archives, which apparently was Mr. Stross’s first published novel in the UK. Only recently has this novel been published in the US, which is flat out crazy as this is one of the best books I have read in a long time.

The Atrocity Archives is a book that blends strands from three traditional novel genres: espionage or secret service thrillers; eldritch horror a la H. P. Lovecraft; and cyberpunk-influenced science fiction. The story centers on the Laundry, a secret British government agency charged with, in Men In Black style, protecting the public from being attacked by or even knowing about the various bizarre entities that threaten our reality. The central character is Bob Howard, a computer programmer and systems administrator for the Laundry, who has recently had his application for field service approved by his supervisors. Bob immediately gets sucked in over his head on his first mission, as he exposes a conspiracy that could threaten the existence of our entire universe.

The Atrocity Archives is written in first-person, which gives the reader a greater sense of immediacy. It also encourages greater identification with the character as well as providing a rationale for not revealing information that might prematurely spoil the dramatic tension until Bob actually stumbles over it himself. I found the main character extremely easy to identify with, as he is close to my age and shares my profession and interests. Others’ mileage may vary.

The book is written in a fast, active style that reminds me of Neal Stephenson in some ways. Bob liberally salts his narrative with pop culture, hacking, and H. P. Lovecraft references, so familiarity with these subjects will greatly enhance your ability to pick up on the many in-jokes that spice the text.

One of the real triumphs of this book is that it manages to outdo or transcend most of its inspirational material. The occult and esoteric terrorism that the Laundry has to combat give a much more gut-churning feel of urgency and impending disaster than the elaborate ballet of monolithic state diplomacy that was the Cold War. The just-scientific-enough explanations of what the Great Old Ones and their kin really are make it much easier to suspend disbelief in Stross’s versions than in H. P. Lovecraft’s, with a correspondingly greater level of terror. His use of computer technology is not in itself anything groundbreaking, but he does remain remarkably true to the realities of computers and software as much as it’s possible, which adds to the verisimilitude of the stories.

Stross ties all these threads together with deft writing skills, lending humanity and personality to both his main and supporting characters. As a first-person novel, Bob obviously gets the lion’s share of the characterization effort, but there are a number of other characters that don’t necessarily get much page time that take on full three-dimensionality while they are there. In addition, he switches almost effortlessly between well-researched hard science and well-researched esoterica with ersatz-science backing. Perhaps the best example of this is when, in two adjacent paragraphs, he succintly describes both the internal structure of an implosion nuclear weapon and the construction and function of a Hand of Glory. He does this with enough confidence that the two may as well be equally grounded in known science.

My only problem with this book was that it was too short. I wanted more adventures in this setting. Fortunately, Charles Stross apparently does also. A sequel, entitled The Jennifer Morgue, will be coming out in 2006, in plenty of time to deal with the looming threat of Case Nightmare Green in September 2007 when the Great Old Ones return from beyond the stars to eat our brains. But you didn’t hear that from me.

With this book, Stross moves near the top of my list of recommended authors. I highly recommend The Atrocity Archives and hope you enjoy it as much as I did.