_Permanence_, Schroeder
Andrew Plotkin
I should qualify that, I suppose, because sci-fi has layers upon
layers of old. _Permanence_ is old-fashioned early-Eighties
Analog-and-Baen flash-bang.
I apologize if "old" means Forties to you... really, 1980's is not
old-skool to me either. That was the *new* stuff to me, when I was
getting my bearings in the sci-fi world. Remember when the dynamic,
in-close, all-the-way-to-the-trim-line cover art was hitting SF?
Spacesuited figures flying in your face? No more static landscapes and
spacescapes with distant starships...
Okay, so now you know what era _Permanence_ is out of. Karl Schroeder
obviously loves Cherryh and Sheffield. Society, economics, and big
set-pieces of alien technology. The characters are strictly secondary.
The economics are kind of cartoony, and so are the physics (I caught
some authorial goofs). Heck, so are the characters. Doesn't mean I
didn't have fun, though.
The background is: the human race colonized the stars, using
slower-than-light ships. Not just the bright Sol-type stars; there
turn out to be a lot more brown dwarfs, ranging from cool red
semistars down to barely-warm superjupiters. Energy is energy, so the
planets of these "halo stars" are just as colonizable as the lit
worlds. You need to put up a lot of streetlights, of course.
Interstellar civilization is maintained by the cyclers -- giant ships
that cruise at 85% lightspeed in multidecade circuits. If you want to
take part in civilization, you build launch lasers in your star system
-- that way cargo ships can drop off a cycler, decelerate to your
world, trade, and then accelerate back to catch the mothership before
it's out of range.
Then, one day, some smartass invents FTL. But it's the backwards of
the usual sci-fi gimmick. You can only fire up an FTL drive *within* a
gravity well. A big one. A G-type star works great. A brown dwarf...
not so great.
The halo worlds are suddenly (ahem) out in the cold. The lit worlds
are days apart now, instead of decades. Economically, they have no
reason to give a flying fart about the halo any more. The halo worlds,
with half their economy abdicated out from under them, begin to slowly
wither.
So there's that. There's alien civilizations. There's alien starships.
There's military conspiracies. There's alien conspiracies. There's
conflicting *human* civilizations -- the Cycler Compact for one. (The
launch lasers are maintained by a religious order, because they have
to keep the faith over multi-decade timespans.) There are other human
and alien religions.
There's the Rights Economy (which exploded from Earth with the FTL
revolution, and reads like an if-this-goes-on of our current
copyright/fair-use argument.) There are long scenes of exploring alien
starships, and exploring alien civilizations, and exploring alien
technology; and space battles, and hand-to-hand battles boarding
hostile spaceships...
I don't know that I'm really convinced by *any* of this. It's
cartoony, as I said. The civilizations all seem a bit too willing to
abide by the author-I-mean-God-given laws of their culture -- even
when the laws originated centuries ago, light-years away, or both.
(There's always *someone* willing to make an exception. Particularly,
sheesh, for personal gain. And I don't buy the Rights Economy at all.)
The spans of time and distance are a bit too glossed over. (The book
includes several slower-than-light trips between stars. Only a couple
of light-years, and 0.85c gives you some timeslip, but I felt like the
characters were skipping months.) The cosmic principles of
civilization, ultimately revealed, are a bit thin.
But there *is* an awful lot of stuff, and the author makes a game
attempt to keep it well-rounded. Perfectly readable. I think it would
have been acclaimed as a genre-transforming masterpiece in 1980, but
what can you do? :)
--Z
"And Aholibamah bare Jeush, and Jaalam, and Korah: these were the borogoves..."
*
* Make your vote count. Get your vote counted.
Charlie Stross
as <erky...@eblong.com> declared:
> But there *is* an awful lot of stuff, and the author makes a game
> attempt to keep it well-rounded. Perfectly readable. I think it would
> have been acclaimed as a genre-transforming masterpiece in 1980, but
> what can you do? :)
Space opera is still coming to grips with most of the ideas
Bruce Sterling coined in "Schismatrix". (No kidding, no
exaggeration: if you haven't read "Schismatrix", you are
missing *the* seminal space opera of the 1980's.) I'd argue
that Al Reynolds does a better job of portraying the corrosive
effects of deep time on human societies and the human psyche.
On the other hand, Karl has a very interesting handle on our
tendency to fill niche ecologies, and on the long term
implications of intelligence once it levers itself up off a
planet. "Permanence" is a novel of ideas, in other words,
rather than one you'd read for believable, well-rounded
characters: but it's still well worth reading, especially if
you like Analog-fi.
-- Charlie
Peter D. Tillman
Charlie Stross <cha...@antipope.org> wrote:
> Stoned koala bears drooled eucalyptus spittle in awe
> as <erky...@eblong.com> declared:
>
> > But there *is* an awful lot of stuff, and the author makes a game
> > attempt to keep it well-rounded. Perfectly readable. I think it would
> > have been acclaimed as a genre-transforming masterpiece in 1980, but
> > what can you do? :)
>
> [Sterling comments shifted below] I'd argue
> that Al Reynolds does a better job of portraying the corrosive
> effects of deep time on human societies and the human psyche.
> On the other hand, Karl has a very interesting handle on our
> tendency to fill niche ecologies, and on the long term
> implications of intelligence once it levers itself up off a
> planet. "Permanence" is a novel of ideas, in other words,
> rather than one you'd read for believable, well-rounded
> characters: but it's still well worth reading, especially if
> you like Analog-fi.
>
Second to that. Permanence certainly has an Analogish cover:
http://www.sfsite.com/06a/pm129.htm
The cyclers are the neatest part of the backstory -- see
<http://www.kschroeder.com/1010176411/index_html> for the
details, which are interesting of themselves (for spaceflight buffs like
me, anyway) and spoiler-free.
Lots more neat Permanence stuff at his main website, too.
> Space opera is still coming to grips with most of the ideas
> Bruce Sterling coined in "Schismatrix". (No kidding, no
> exaggeration: if you haven't read "Schismatrix", you are
> missing *the* seminal space opera of the 1980's.)
I just finished rereading the Mechanist/Shaper stories in Crystal
Express, and will have to put SCHISMATRIX on the to-reread-soon list. I
think the current edition ["Schismatrix Plus"?] has those stories
conveniently appended. I'd forgotten the original stories actually form
a short mosaic novel. A little rough around the edges, but still very
cool.
The socko story (imo) in Crystal Express is "Green Days in Brunei"
(1985, reprinted often) which is pretty near perfect. The doomed affair
of Turner Choi and Princess Seria -- wow!
Plus: dreaming in AML!
"REACH-GRASP-TOGO=(MOUTH)+SIP; RETURN" [drinking coffee]
Is AML a real language, BTW? Looks like Sterling (or proofreader) got
the syntax confused in this snippet.
[isfdb's] http://isfdb.tamu.edu/cgi-bin/ch.cgi?Bruce_Sterling
Boy, he sure hit his stride around then. And what's this?
Angel Engines (unpublished)
Living Inside (unpublished)
The Necropolis at Fang Shan (unpublished)
-- sold to two 'lost' anthologies (one to the notorious TLDV,
http://isfdb.tamu.edu/cgi-bin/pw.cgi?61de1d
-- which still has a LOT of interesting stories locked up, looks like...
Cheers -- Pete Tillman
--
"We're not into science fiction because it's *good literature*,
we're into it because it's *weird*" --Bruce Sterling,
http://www.chriswaltrip.com/sterling
Scott Beeler
[Re: Bruce Sterling]
> The socko story (imo) in Crystal Express is "Green Days in Brunei"
> (1985, reprinted often) which is pretty near perfect. The doomed affair
> of Turner Choi and Princess Seria -- wow!
>
> Plus: dreaming in AML!
>
> "REACH-GRASP-TOGO=(MOUTH)+SIP; RETURN" [drinking coffee]
>
> Is AML a real language, BTW? Looks like Sterling (or proofreader) got
> the syntax confused in this snippet.
Reminds me of the little computer-language poetry bits in Carter's
_The Fortunate Fall_.
> [isfdb's] http://isfdb.tamu.edu/cgi-bin/ch.cgi?Bruce_Sterling
>
> Boy, he sure hit his stride around then. And what's this?
>
> Angel Engines (unpublished)
> Living Inside (unpublished)
> The Necropolis at Fang Shan (unpublished)
>
> -- sold to two 'lost' anthologies (one to the notorious TLDV,
> http://isfdb.tamu.edu/cgi-bin/pw.cgi?61de1d
> -- which still has a LOT of interesting stories locked up, looks like...
Speaking of lost Sterling stories, I just read the new Howard Waldrop
collection _Custer's Last Jump and Other Collaborations_, which is
largely early works from the mid '70s, plus the recent "One Horse
Town". But the weird bit is the Sterling collaboration "The Latter
Days of the Law", apparently written in 1976 but never published,
because at that time nobody wanted to buy (from two barely known
writers) a noirish detective story set in 11th century Japan, and I
guess it sat in a drawer ever since. It's a very good story too, I
thought. A lot of fun.
--
Scott C. Beeler scott...@home.com
Michael Stemper
>Interstellar civilization is maintained by the cyclers -- giant ships
>that cruise at 85% lightspeed in multidecade circuits. If you want to
>take part in civilization, you build launch lasers in your star system
Ah, so they check for the existence of a launch laser before dropping
in? That's ever so much nicer than that Niven story -- was it "The
Fourth Profession"?
--
Michael F. Stemper
#include <Standard_Disclaimer>
You can lead a horse to water, but you can't make him talk like Mr. Ed
by rubbing peanut butter on his gums.
Andrew Plotkin
> In article <bckvoo$h5r$1...@reader1.panix.com>, Andrew Plotkin <erky...@eblong.com> writes:
>>Interstellar civilization is maintained by the cyclers -- giant ships
>>that cruise at 85% lightspeed in multidecade circuits. If you want to
>>take part in civilization, you build launch lasers in your star system
> Ah, so they check for the existence of a launch laser before dropping
> in?
There seems to be good communication. People know who's in the cycler
system and who isn't. Really, a cycler wouldn't plan a path past a
star system unless it was confident it could do business there.
(Also, I misstated the tech. It's particle beams, not lasers.)
> That's ever so much nicer than that Niven story -- was it "The
> Fourth Profession"?
Right.