The Long Mars

It has been fifteen years since Yellowstone erupted on the Datum, gouging the heart out of America and plunging the world into a volcanic winter. Emigration to the worlds of the Long Earth has increased, and the population has become attenuated, stretching out across the near-infinite space of the stepward worlds.

The ur-pioneers Joshua Valiente and Sally Lindsay find themselves once more roped into adventures not of their own making. Joshua is recruited by the AI Lobsang to investigate the apparent rise of an intellectually superior subspecies of human, while Sally's father - Willis Lindsay, father of stepping - calls on her to accompany him on a mission not just to Mars, but to The Long Mars (roll credits.) Meanwhile, US Navy captain and veteran explorer Maggie Kaufman is sent out to delve deep into the Long Earth. With two 'Twain' airships and a crew of navy personnel and scientists, her goal is to travel a quarter billion steps from Earth, into worlds as alien as any Mars.

As with previous books in the Long Earth cycle, The Long Mars is a multi-stranded narrative with a somewhat take-it-or-leave-it approach to the conventions of dramatic closure. The main narratives are Sally and Maggie's, with Joshua's primarily serving to set up the final conflict which bring the two other threads together, and the dominant theme of the book is that of the alien. This theme is expressed in the many Marses which exist in their own long chain, distinct from the chain of the Long Earth and only crossing at the Earthless Gap (which may mean that a) every Earth's Mars connects to a different Long Mars, b) every Mars's Earth connects to a different Long Earth, or c) that the Long Mars and Long Earth intersect entirely, but not in a fashion which line up with one another,) but also in the remote Earths which developed in a radically different fashion to the Datum, and the thought processes of the Next.

As in The Long War, the science in The Long Mars is better than the fiction. Although written as a conventional narrative, it has more of a documentary quality to it, leading to an open ending and a lack of really likable characters. Again in common with the previous book, the most sympathetic character is a semi-outsider, aging rocket jockey Frank Wood. In the nature of high-concept hard SF, the resulting novel is more interesting than involving (I think I said the same thing about much of Neal Stephenson's oeuvre,) but it is definitely interesting.

The Atopia Chronicles

Kindle Unlimited is slowing me down by offering free audiobook readings. I like audiobooks, but they go slower than reading a book myself. On the other hand, I'll probably drop Unlimited in a few days when the free trial expires, and it's been a nice interlude.

The most recent 'read' from my list is Matthew Mathers' The Atopia Chronicles, a complex novel of interweaving narratives set largely on the artificial floating island state of Atopia at the dawn of an era of synthetic reality. A fusion of AI and VR, synthetic reality is intended to save the world by giving everyone everything they could want at a fraction of the material cost of real-world equivalents. While adults struggle to adjust to the new technology - skins which overlay and filter reality, a proxxi alter ego to control your body while you explore the metaverse, and even the ability to distribute your consciousness into dozens of subjective viewpoints simultaneously - the first generation to have had access from birth are reaching maturity on Atopia.

The Atopia Chronicles begins as a series of interweaving narratives, each exploring aspects of the PSSI (poly-synthetic sensory interface) technology against the backdrop of a world on the brink of ecological collapse. An advertising executive filters out everyone who annoys her and ends up virtually isolated from humanity in a story reminiscent of a Twilight Zone episode. Atopia's security chief and his wife adopt simulated children to try to save their ailing marriage; one of the pssi kids struggles with his relationship with his brothers while another misplaces his corporeal body; a millionaire fights for his life at the heart of a web of predicted future deaths; and the commercial launch of the system becomes intertwined with a plot to destroy Atopia.

The first two-thirds of the novel are the most successful, with the increased presence of the arc plot and the emergence of an almost cartoonish villain diminishing the core strengths as a speculative technological SF story. In a lot of ways, the distributed narrative is strong enough not to need the arc, and certainly not to need a villain, and there is a curious parallel with the fictional universe, with the more interesting technique ultimately being subjugated by conventional narrative devices even as Atopia's ideals are subjugated by a self-made monster.

World War Z

I deliberately chose a cover without
Brad Pitt on it.

World War Z is subtitled 'An oral history of the zombie wars', and it does exactly what it says on the tin. In a series of semi-overlapping narratives, it describes the rise of the zombie plague, a pathogen originating in China and spread by ambulatory corpses and infected refugees (and via the illegal trade in rapidly harvested organs) through the first hand accounts of more than forty characters interviewed by a UN investigator after the end of the Zombie War.

The book uses its multiple viewpoints to explore the war from as many angles as possible: civilians, survivalists, military personnel of several nations and politicians of varying persuasions. Its focus is American - justified both by the nationality of the investigator and the narratives of other post-war nations, in particular the 'Holy Russian Empire', an expansionist theocratic state - but its scope is global, with the account of the commander of the ISS throughout the crisis one of the most powerful.

By its nature, World War Z is prime material for an audiobook adaptation, and it has had several. The one attached to my kindle edition is pretty damned good, although I am now greatly tempted by the super-plus all-star version with this cast.

I'm incredulous that in adapting this book for the screen anyone didn't think that the best idea was just to cherry pick a couple of these stories and film it as a mockumentary, spliced with 'archive footage' from the zombie wars. How did they not do that? Instead we got a crappy action movie which tried to jam poor Brad Pitt back into the action hunk mould that kept him from achieving his true potential as a talented character actor for so long.

World War Z is a satirical novel, using the zombie war as a lens to examine the nature of human reaction to disaster, both singly and corporately. It takes an unusually even-handed approach, with American isolationism and capitalism taking as many knocks as Soviet collectivism, and paints a vivid picture of a world at and after a war for which it was utterly unprepared. It tells tales of heroism and folly, of great heart and towering cynicism. Governmental incompetence, corporate malfeasance and models of morale are all covered, from the brutal tactics of the Russian leadership to largely uninfected Cuba's switch from faltering Communist casualty to the great boom economy of the war.

It's not a perfect book, and certainly there were a couple of points in the English section where I felt that Brooks had gone awry a little, but it's a satire more than a political assessment and some inaccuracy can be allowed. I can't speak for the effectiveness of the Russian and Chinese sections in particular, but it certainly lacks the triumphal pro-Americanism of, say, the movie. In particular the segregation of 'Unified Palestine' by the Israeli and Palestinian authorities is plagued by violent resistance from both Jewish and Muslim extremists, but isn't overrun with the living dead as soon as an American points out that they're fucked.

The Long War

The Long War is the sequelt to Terry Pratchett and Stephen Baxter's probability-hopping The Long Earth, a tale of human expansion into a frontier of infinite possibility.

In this second novel, Joshua Valliente is trying - and failing - to settle down, while his old partner Sally is stirring things up to protect the trolls and other humanoids who inhabit the Long Earth but, never having experienced the pressure of being restrained to a single reality, lack humankind's technological edge and his father in law is heading a drive for US colonies in the stepwise Earths to declare independence from the Datum (original) Earth.

The Long Earth was an interesting work of speculative fiction, and The Long War continues that. It's political aspects are perhaps more successful than some of the more dramatic episodes detailing Joshua and Sally's adventures among the hyper-aggressive 'Beagles', and the heart of the novel is actually their friend and ally, critically ill former cop Monica Jansson, who stands out from the ensemble in coming across as a real person. As with many harder SF titles, The Long War's ideas are better than the characters who surround them.

While it has its flaws, The Long War is still a good book, if radically different from anything else Pratchett has published. If Baxter's touch is more visible in the broad strokes, however, Pratchett is there in the details, and especially in many of the character moments. It's worth the read, but I will definitely be waiting for the paperback price on The Long Mars.