Paired Review: When Heaven Fell (William Barton) SPOILERS
James Nicoll
When Heaven Fell
William Barton
Aspect Science Fiction (1995)
343 pages ($5.50 USA)
In most stories where humanity is threatened with invasion
and subjugation by extra-terrestrial, we manage to pull a miracle
off at the last moment. Generally, the author has to make the aliens
stupid or oddly technologically stunted in important ways to make
this work. A few authors take a different approach to the problem
that an alien invasion would pose for us, noting that the ability
to get here implies a technology advanced enough that conquering
Earth should be no problem for them. William Barton is one such
author.
(No attempt to avoid spoilers will be made)
Athol Morrison is old enough to have survived the second and
final invasion of Earth. Rather impressively, humans were able to fight
off the first invasion due to a miscalculation on the part of one of the
Master Race, who attempted to take Earth with a single ship. In the second
invasion we managed to kill almost a million of the Master Race's Jannisaries
and in return they killed eight billion of us, about ninety percent of the
human race. The remainder are being integrated into the Master Race's
empire, an empire run with the kindness and efficiency of Leopold's
Congo. Athol is one of the few tough enough to serve as a soldier in
the Master Race's military.
To make our situation that much more humiliating, the Master
Race is not another species but a collection of related AIs running on
what may be archaic equipment. The Master Race AIs may or may not be
conscious as we understand the term and that were apparently developed
by a species of non-intelligent tool users, now domesticated by the
Master Race as it follows its blind desire for survival and propagation,
a desire shared by all the subject races. As the book makes clear, our
sort of intelligence does not make us immune to the machineries of
nature selection but are only a means to an end. As well, those
ends are determined by the actions of individual interest, despite
the wider effects those actions have.
During a brief lull in the ongoing program of locating and
conquering (if the local resistance is not too determined) or annihilating
(if the local resistance is too determined to make conquest practical)
Athol returns home to his community of survivors in North America. There
he meets an old lover, Alix, and tours his old home, which is now firmly
under the boot of the Master Race. The Master Race and its servants rule
firmly but harshly and since their end-goal is not economic efficiency
but the containment of subject races by any means necessary or handy,
casual rape and murder is fairly common. Athol becomes aware that some
of his childhood friends are involved with a plot to stage a revolution
against the Master Race and since he has seen first hand what happens
to rebellious races he deliberately sabotages the rebels, many of whom
are executed out of hand. He then returns to active duty.
Many authors would have ended the book at this point, I suspect.
We then follow Athol's rise through the ranks and his increasing
corruption by power and position, since the Master Race has cunningly
arranged matters so that loyal servants enjoy substantial benefits over
the rest of their subjects, benefits like (for humans) obtaining prostitutes
of any possible type to be assigned to each soldier in accordance to their
tastes. -Any tastes-. Athol does discover that there is a secret conspiracy
amongst the jannisaries to overthrow the Master Race, which he joins after
he discovers that the conspiracy has been waiting for the right moment
for more than a hundred thousand years and that in the interim the
conspiracy is operating as a immune system for the Master Race, detecting
and sabotaging rebellions that might be inopportune. To show the disconnection
between the interests of the soldiers and the general population, some of
the conspirators have managed to arrange the extermination of most of their
own species, in order to pursue their long range goal and to enjoy the
short term benefits. Athol is a willing participant, whatever his internal
moral objections may be (and he admits he likes some of the more distastful
benefits, such as not needing to worry about consent before having sex).
He even goes so far as to recruit his daughter by Alix into the service.
The beginning of the end appears in the civilization of the Xu,
a very highly advanced race that seems to have developed FTL ships on
their own, something none of the biological species ever managed before.
The war against the Xu is more brutal than any seen before in our galaxy
and in the end it may be futile as it appears the Xu were the catspaws
of the power the Master Race were fleeing from when they relocated from
the Andromeda Galaxy to the Milky Way. The true masters are on their
way and it does not appear to me that Athol and his fellow conspirators
will ever find a way to disconnect their fate from that of the Master
Race.
This is a fairly grim novel and anyone who is looking for
work where in the end the protagonist realises the error of their
ways and fights for the 'right' side should look elsewhere. Although
Althol is intelligent, he is also just the latest interation in his
DNA's blind stuggle to propagate itself and while he may be more
conscious than his overlords, he is just as subject as the Master
Race to internal directives from a level of himself that cares nothing
for any goal save survival. His intelligence just allows him to
appreciate his situation on more levels than a Master Race AI might.
Although Athol sees a clear distinction between the way the AIs
reproduce and his method, I am not sure the difference is actually
there: the Master Race may have fewer variations from generation to
generation than humans but they are as just as subject to selective
forces (and since Barton makes a point to show us that Master Race
technology has flaws, I am sure variations do occur in the copies).
It's interesting to look at Barton's sequence of solo books in
the 1990s. _Dark Sky Legion_ is just as grim in its way as _When Heaven
Fell_, although in DSL the top rung of galactic society is occupied by
one particular human culture determined to survive in recognizable form
for as long as possible. _Transmigration of Souls_ takes a somewhat
less dark view of human self-interest and in _Acts of Conscience_ a
single human manages to act in ways that are not entirely self-serving
to himself and his genome. By _When We Were Real_, entire governments
can be induced to step in to end intolerably abusive neighboring
regimes, eventually (I would argue that in WWWR, it is no coincidence
that the brutalist regime is less advanced than the Solar one as well).
One wonders how perky a new Barton novel would be.
On the whole while I find Barton's fiction oversexed, and while
I can't say I liked reading _When Heaven Fell_ I thought it made some
interesting points about self-interest in the context of inequity. Don't
read it if you are looking for a happy tale of glorious service in the
interests of the Greater Good, though.
--
"About this time, I started getting depressed. Probably the late
hour and the silence. I decided to put on some music.
Boy, that Billie Holiday can sing."
_Why I Hate Saturn_, Kyle Baker