I just finished Scott Westerfeld's The Risen Empire, book one of a trilogy. I usually stay away from trilogies that are not yet finished, but since I really enjoyed his Evolution's Darling I decided to take the chance.
If there are three genres I by default try to avoid it is space opera, military sf and romance. But Westerfelt manages to mix them together in a pleasant soup, that I can perhaps swallow thanks to the presence of some favorite spices: nanotechnology, information management, posthumans and AI.
The setting is The Risen Empire: an interstellar empire held together by slower than light starships and FTL communications, united by an emperor who has monopoly on a form of immortality. It is a conservative and slow-moving society, held back by imperial institutions, a large "undead" population and long delays. Senators are elected for 50 year terms, spending a few years travelling to the central world and then freeze themselves between the senate sessions (letting their staff monitor developments and wake them up if something happens). Decisions are similarly long-range, with plans made so that a suitably educated generation will be adult when a fleet passes by their world. Against this order stands the Rix, a high-tech cult that worships the emergent superintelligences of planetary networks and try to awaken them on all worlds. Of course, the Empire does not want anything like that and both sides are at war.
The main plot allows the author to explore both the mechanics of the war through the eyes of a starship captain trying to contain a Rix incursion and the politics of war through the eyes of a politician on the remote central world. It is a functional plot that enables him to describe the many wonders of the Empire without too many data dumps, although as a plot goes it is relatively straightforward. Overall, the setting is not particularly original in the large. Few of the big components are new: interstellar empires run by mad immortals, emergent posthuman superminds, empaths, imperial administrations monopolizing immortality in quasi-religious ways, ruthless transhuman supersoldiers and romance-at-a-distance. The main characters are mostly familiar: the conservative but secretly vulnerable commander, the idealistic politician navigating around necessary compromises, the competent executive officer secretly in love with her superior. We have seen them before in different permutations. It is in the technological details Westerfelt gets things right: teleoperated micro-crafts, automated house construction, the problems of micromachinery dress uniforms and living in a synesthetic high information density world.
It was especially this last factor that really stimulated me. Most people have extra visual and auditory fields linked to the information systems around them:
"At her command, data swelled before Oxham in secondary and tertiary sight and hearing, blossoming in to the familiar maelstrom of her personal configuration. Nameplates, colorcoded by part affiliation and striped with recent votes, hovered about the other Senators flowing up the steps; realtime polygraph-poll reactions of wired political junkies writhed at the edge of vision, forming hurricane whorls that shifted with every procedural vote; the latest headcounts of her party's whip AI invoked tones at the threshold of hearing, soft and consonant chords for measures sure to pass, harsh, dissonant intervals for bills that were losing support."- - -
"Nara Oxham often wondered how politics had been possible before second sight. Without induced synetsthesia, the intrusion of sight into the other brain centers, how did a human mind absorb the necessary data? She could imagine going without synesthesia in certain activities -- flying and aircraft, day trading, surgery -- where one could focus on a single image, but not in politics. Noninterfering layers of sight, the ability to fill three visual and two auditory fields with data, were a perfect metaphor for politics itself."
Just as sf formulated the dreams of spaceflight and AI, this is a formulation of our dreams of the perfect interface.
The setting mixes hard sf with some rather soft elements. Some are nice additions, like the different kinds of gravity: "hard", "easy", "wicked" and "lovely". Normal gravity is hard, artificial gravity is usually the unreliable easy kind, wicked gravity is a dangerous weapon and lovely gravity is the ridiculously expensive luxury gravity used by the emperor (and his cats). Other elements are pure mistakes that annoy me to no end. A self-constructing house separates hydrogen and oxygen from water to burn as fuel?!
In the end this might not be a very deep novel that challenges our notions about anything. But it is good entertainment that often thinks a few extra steps about the implications of the technology and brings up wonderful images. If the trilogy holds this level it will at least be a fun read. If it manages to actually get into the real issues, like how does compound minds actually relate to the inhabitants of their worlds or whether there is a way for the empire to function without having to choose between death and flexibility, then it could become truly great.
Posted by Anders at September 5, 2004 11:39 AMDamn you Sandberg, always one step ahead :)
I picked it up yesterday and am about 3/4 of the way through, and although I'm enjoying it I find that there are too many contrived characters introduced, a chapter devoted to and then thrown away, such as the simple marine from the hinterlands with reactions equal to that of a Rixwoman.
I also find the pro-death stance, that seems to have been cribbed directly from Fukuyama, of one of the main heros rather irritating. Particularly as so far all the immortals seem to be painted in the worse possible light.
Prehaps the later books will introduce immortals from the other cultures that arnt power crazed anti progressives. If not at least they'll be a fun read, even if not an exactly ground breaking one.
Posted by: Ben at September 5, 2004 10:00 PMAdam,
You're in luck. The duology is in fact complete. The sequel "The Killing of Worlds" is already in publication. I've read it already and it meets and exceeds "The Risen Empire".
Posted by: Nanostrodamus at September 7, 2004 08:37 PMWednesday, 08 September 2004
The first book lacked worthy material, omitting perhaps the interface descriptions and the rotary pump heart of the Rix soldier. The whole first chapter especially annoyed me. The author spent so much effort detailing orbital insertion of a micro-minature UCAV squadron, and he still ends up with a text that reads like the first chapter of "Starship Troopers" strained through a stack of last year's Aviation Week or Jane's Defense Weekly.
Ben makes a good point about immortals in science-fiction. Why do the characters tend to a stereotype of power-hungry and conservative? Exceptions do exist, (Zebrowski's "Macrolife", Sableford's "Architects of Emortality", Egan's "Diaspora", Haldeman's "Buying Time", etc.) but this particular set of traits: power-hungry, immortal, and conservative seem to make an especially memorable triplet.
Why do you suppose this is? Do people just prefer villains?
Posted by: Jay Dugger at September 9, 2004 12:47 AMWednesday, 08 September 2004
The first book lacked worthy material, omitting perhaps the interface descriptions and the rotary pump heart of the Rix soldier. The whole first chapter especially annoyed me. The author spent so much effort detailing orbital insertion of a micro-minature UCAV squadron, and he still ends up with a text that reads like the first chapter of "Starship Troopers" strained through a stack of last year's Aviation Week or Jane's Defense Weekly.
Ben makes a good point about immortals in science-fiction. Why do the characters tend to a stereotype of power-hungry and conservative? Exceptions do exist, (Zebrowski's "Macrolife", Sableford's "Architects of Emortality", Egan's "Diaspora", Haldeman's "Buying Time", etc.) but this particular set of traits: power-hungry, immortal, and conservative seem to make an especially memorable triplet.
Why do you suppose this is? Do people just prefer villains?
Posted by: Jay Dugger at September 9, 2004 12:49 AMI think there are plenty of nice immortals in sf. I just finished Charles Stross' _Singularity Sky_, and here it was obvious that it was the pro-progress immortals who were sane and nice, while the anti-progress natural lifespan people were stupid and relatively evil. Other nice immortals can be found in Heinlein's immortal stories, Iain M. Banks, Simak's _Way Station_ and so on. But most of these nice immortals are protagonists. As soon as protagonists are immortal, immortality ceases to be a distinguishing trait that can be used to separate "good" from "evil" characters.
Usually villains are more interesting than heroes, since they have a greater freedom in what they can be. A villain might have wildly inconsistent or strange traits, making him odd or fascinating, but the hero is not allowed to be too inconsistent. We value "complex characters", but that is usually a code for being a believable rich character within the normal human sphere. A villain doesn't have to be inside it.
Of course, it is quite possible to write stories with heroes that are just as wild as villains, but in my experience they seldom work since there is a need for the reader to identify himself with the hero - unless the reader is supposed to identify himself with some external observer just watching the drama unfold.
Posted by: Anders at September 9, 2004 09:10 AM