Ursula K. Le Guin, “The Lathe of Heaven” (1971) – George Orr dreams effectively- that is to say, some of his dreams come true, shifting reality behind them. That’s the premise of this Hugo Award winner from scifi legend Ursula K. Le Guin. Orr doesn’t want to do this anymore, and his attempts to self-medicate his dreams away lead to him being put in the care of psychiatrist Dr. Haber, who sees the potentialities of Orr’s ability when combined with Haber’s hypnosis chops. Haber soon has Orr dreaming up all kinds of things to improve their lot and that of humanity, generally leading to unintended consequences. Dreaming away overpopulation (this is the seventies, when people were worried about that) leads to a great plague obliterating much of humanity. Dreaming away war between nations leads to war between planets, and dreaming away racism leads to everyone being the same gray color (something tells me people would still develop something like racism, but hey, it’s a scifi novel). Orr, something of a natural Taoist, wants to stop getting in the way of the Way of things; Haber, almost a parody of the sort of scifi ubermensch Le Guin and the rest of the New Wave in scifi were trying to get away from (and their authors), insists on their (mostly his) ability to change the world for the better. Eventually, Haber’s faustian power grab does himself in and nearly destroys consensual reality while they’re at it. Short, effective, and moving, this one earns its place in the canon of speculative fiction. *****

Charles Stross, “Accelerando” (2005) (narrated by George Guidall) – One thing that has struck me lately is how, outside of the “New Wave” of scifi in the late sixties through the seventies, scifi will depict the most outlandish developments — often transcending the merely human plane — in fairly conservative ways, literarily speaking. Probably this is a good thing- I’m generally more interested in inventive concepts and gripping plot than I am in literary experimentation. But it is interesting, beyond prose, how often old tropes find their way into these stories of dashing future exploits.

Both family/lineage stories and, to a much lesser extent, monarchy find their way into the posthuman explorations of noted blogger and novelist Charles Stross in “Accelerando,” arguably his flagship work. “Accelerando” started life as nine short stories, linked together by three generations of the Macx family, who experience (and affect) the rapid changes of the twenty-first century. We start with Manfred Macx in a recognizable near-future and as a recognizable near-future (or present) type- the peripatetic internet entrepreneur/techno-hobo, wandering around Europe drinking beers and coming up with “six ideas before breakfast” about how to hack normal economics into post-scarcity, AI-and-human-upload-friendly forms. He makes some deals with some uploaded sentient lobsters to start mining in space, and takes real hell from his dominatrix tax lawyer wife Pamela. Their kid, Amber, does some shenanigans to divorce from her mom, moves to a Jupiter orbital platform as a teen where she eventually makes herself queen, and before long leads a group of other space-teens to an alien communications portal just outside the solar system, or uploads of their brains anyway. The son her left-behind body has, Sirhan, meanwhile tries to write the history of the post-singularity future as assorted post-humans and AIs turn out to want to make the solar system unfriendly to biological life.

There’s a lot going on here. What starts as a hippie-ish dream of “ajambic” post-scarcity gift-economy economics becomes a nightmare of sentient corporations creating “Economy 2.0” and dismantling the planets to make “matrioshka brains,” concentric rings of massive super-computers to run simulations of intelligences forever. This supposedly solves the Fermi paradox of why aliens haven’t come knocking- at a certain point, most advanced civilizations basically upload themselves up their own asses and don’t want to bother exploring away from the good bandwidth. Despite having been on the cutting edge of technology for a century, the Macx clan winds up helping to lead a relatively-technologically-backwards group of humans who want to keep their bodies into forming colonies in deep space, away from their “vile offspring.”

Probably another reviewer would want to geek out over the other technological gee-whizzery Stross comes up with, and there’s plenty of it, much of it very creative, but I want to talk about the underlying paradigm a little. Beyond the family lineage stuff and the space-monarchy (potential birthday lecture topic in future years- a brief history of space monarchies), everything is very rules-based. Getting ahead means hacking the rules. Amber essentially hacks both corporation and sharia law to liberate herself from Pamela, and Pamela hacks sharia right back to try to retrieve her. Manfred’s whole career is finding strange loopholes, creating automated corporations and doing other shenanigans. Sirhan is more conservative, more rules-attached, and by that time the “rules-based order” to borrow a phrase from international relations has gone pretty distinctly anti-human. Force seldom seems to decide anything. Hacking and shenanigans does. When parasitical aliens hijack Amber’s crew in a simulation space, they don’t just threaten to blow up her spaceship once she starts maneuvering against them, which would be pretty easy because it’s just a flying canister with computer-stuff in it. It’s a consistent vision of the future, but one that clearly gelled pre-9/11 and came into full form pre-Trump, and is more than a little eye-roll-worthy. Stross is every basically decent technie nerd that cannot, will not, understand structural conflict, especially between classes, and thinks progress is basically finding the right systems to render conflict irrelevant. He’s far from the worst in that clade and has a sense of humor about the “rapture of the nerds” — it doesn’t really work out — but still. An entertaining yarn with a lot to think about, down to both Stross’s vision and his limitations. ****

John Wyndham, “The Day of the Triffids” (1951) – I’ve heard this called the grand-daddy of post-apocalyptic fiction. On the one hand, this sounds wrong — I feel like there are earlier examples, like “The War of the Worlds” — but on the other hand feels right in a genre relevance sense. The apocalypse, unlike most, is a two-parter. First, a species of carnivorous plant called the triffids appear. This isn’t much of a problem at first, because people can control them, despite their deadly poisonous stingers and increasingly apparent ability to communicate with one another. Then one day, a mysterious shower of comets — or something that look like comets — blind the vast majority of people on Earth (one wonders if Jose Saramago read this one).

Biologist Bill is one of the lucky ones with sight- he was in the hospital with a triffid sting to the eyes and hence couldn’t see the comet shower. By the time he’s able to get up and out of the hospital, civilization is already collapsing. Wyndham effectively describes the pathos of roving gangs of blind people attempting to loot to survive, the sighted either lording it over the blind as kings, trying and failing to help them, or trying to secede from the rest of the species.

If “Day of the Triffids” created post-apocalyptic conventions, it did a very good job, as it all colors within the lines: Bill rescues a sighted girl and they promptly fall in love; they entertain but reject various humanitarian theories of how to deal with the crisis as doomed, through no fault of themselves, of course, they’re still the good guys; they meet up with a group of like-minded survivors led by someone making philosophical/sociological points that all lead to “free love;” Bill and Josella get separated and Bill undertakes all kinds of adventures getting her back.

It’s all well done. The triffids are genuinely creepy, even if a lot of surviving in the early parts of the book is more about avoiding disease and hunger than avoiding them. The anti-humanitarian lessons are contrived but not forced, in a literary sense. The characters are well-realized, especially for midcentury science fiction that doesn’t make a display of literary qualities. It’s worth reading both from a history-of-genre perspective and on its own merits. ****’

Vernor Vinge, “A Fire Upon the Deep” (1992) – Hard(ish) scifi space opera “goes to the dogs” in this one! Ha, ha, not figuratively, but in the sense two human children wind up in the clutches of rival factions of medieval dog-like pack-mind aliens. The action in “A Fire Upon the Deep” is split between Johanna and Jefri, last survivors of a human colony that gets eaten by a super-advanced malignant AI, and a crew of spacers hired by a human from the same society, Ravna, who goes looking for the ship they were on. The ship had to bail on dog-alien planet and, of course, also contains a way of defeating the Blight, as the evil AI is known.

This is a big (600 pages or so) book with a wide sweep. We go from hyper-advanced space colonies to dog-alien castles and encounter a number of interesting Vinge concepts along the way. Perhaps the most important are the “Zones of Thought.” As it turns out, Earth is in the Slow Zone- the closer to the galactic core you get, the slower the speed of light is, and in turn the slower do neurons fire and advanced tech becomes impossible even if it could be designed. The advanced space civilizations exist in the Beyond, where faster-than-light travel is possible, and the Transcend, inhabited by god-like energy beings. You have to be careful not to get caught in the “Slow Zone” nearer the galactic core, or in a zone storm, where your tech stops working. Vinge also tells us what the space internet looks like- a lot like usenet newsgroups from the nineties, an interesting take from the pre-social media days. The pack minds of the “Tines,” as the humans come to call the dog-aliens, are fleshed out, with gestalt personalities, telepathic communications (and confusions if packs get too close), and multi-generational layering. This is echoed in the shared mind of one of the human shipmates, who was reanimated by a Transcend god-thing that the Blight kills, and is left with some of the god’s abilities and personalities along with his reanimated baggage. Heady stuff! Vinge takes his time with all this, too, which turns out for the best even if it makes the book a little long and slightly confusing in some places.

Vinge sets up multiple ticking clocks, from the threat of the Blight, to the race between Ravna’s crew and the Blight’s fleet to seize the spaceship with the anti-Blight weapon, to the impending rumble between rival groups of Tine eugenicists (one mean, one less mean) that endangers the human children they’ve taken in. The clocks are always ticking but he still takes the time to throw in other complications: betrayals, horrifying discoveries about perfectly nice plant-people, the imperial ambitions of cute butterfly-aliens, the humans helping the Tines up the tech tree, etc. Vinge throws in a lot and most of it is good. One thing you don’t get a ton of is the libertarian posturing I’m told Vinge indulges in (he’s won the libertarian “Prometheus” scifi award multiple times), and that I can do without. All told, a decent, if perhaps overstuffed, scifi adventure with a lot of neat concepts. ****