The first of a diptych that sits between Baxter and Tchaikovsky, and with a passing resemblance to Harry Turtledove's Crosstime Traffic books, the setting is the Pandominion, an empire comprising tens of thousands of Earths. The citizens of this empire are "selves", the generic term for all its sentient inhabitants regardless of their biological lineage (in these timelines, pretty much every mammalian species had a stab at filling the niche occupied by humans). The Pandominion is also a post-scarcity civilisation, having the inexhaustible resources of infinite Earths to draw on. But historical materialist friends of SF will be interested to note this doesn't mean the Pandominion is a classless society. The traffic between the Earths is monitored and controlled by a Moon-sized AI, and this in turn is employed by a capricious bureaucracy. This society observes the formal trappings of liberal democracy, but the reader is left in no doubt where the power lies. The bureaucracy also controls the Cielo, the Pandominion's force of enhanced and power-armoured super soldiers backed by a supply of inexhaustible and impressively destructive armaments. Yet the empire doesn't go in for conquering worlds - it appears every member has been admitted by consent. They exist, like all militaries, to secure the power of the ruling class and as insurance against external threat. Pandominion explorers have discovered around 17,000 scoured worlds. These are formerly habitable realities that, approximately 500 years before the discovery of step technology, were subject to a cataclysm that wiped out all life down to the microbial level. The speculation is this was the outcome of an unimaginably devastating war between realities, and it's part of Cielo training to give new recruits a tour of these tombstone worlds.
But all is not well in the Pandominion's extensive garden. Stumbling on a mining operation by an AI, a stupid incident in which a group of scientists and a small detachment of soldiers are killed sees the bureaucracy overreact and in it goes mob handed. Except the AIs, which are dubbed by their organic enemies as the Ansurrection, are no push overs and are more than capable of meeting and beating the pride of the Pandominion. There is war across hundreds of Earths, and both sides are in a race to build the mega weapons to defeat the others. Could a new scouring being imminent?
So much for the background. The story follows three characters. The first, Hadiz Tambuwal, is a scientist living on a billionaire-funded campus near Lagos. Her world is much like ours, except more polluted and exhausted of resources. Environmental catastrophe is compounded by swarms of earthquakes, and civilisation falls apart amid the poison and the devastation. She's left alone with a life time's food supply, and only an artificial intelligence experiment for company. With nothing else to do she carries on her research, and stumbles on the ability to step into alternate Earths. Finding the first pleasant but empty of civilisation, she mocks up drones and is able to initiate experiments where they step into hundreds of worlds per sortie, looking for any with signs of sentient life.
This is where we're introduced to Essien Nkanika. He's from a Lagos not dissimilar to our own, and has lived right at the bottom of the pile. He's been a slave, a scavenger at the city dump, and as we find him, a sex worker who prowls the bars down town. His experience has made him amoral and utterly ruthless. One night he encounters Hadiz, and they go back to her place in the docklands. Gradually he's inducted into the mysteries of stepping and quickly realises this could be the making of his fortune. If only Hadiz could be disposed of. Unbeknownst to both, their trips between worlds were noticed by the Pandominion and a small unit of Cielo are dispatched to meet them.
The final character is Topaz Tourmaline FiveHills, or Paz to her friends. She lives on Ut, and is a self whose species climbed the sentience tree from rabbits. She has floppy ears and powerful hind legs that enable her kind to run faster than practically any other Pandominion lineage. Also, though she's 19 she is officially designated as a child in her culture until she turns 30. Whether that's a comment on kidulthood and adulting is up to the reader's judgement. The war with the Ansurrection is raging, but Ut seems far away from the fighting. And besides, Paz has just made friends with the new girl in her class. Dulcie Standfast Coronal is, like her, a bit socially awkward and her AI familiar (not dissimilar to the demons in Pullman's His Dark Materials) doesn't appear to have the same functions as everyone else's. With reports of selves being kidnapped by the Ansurrection, might there be something fishy going on?
Spoilers below.
Carey has done an excellent job of producing a pacey, compelling, and interesting narrative with well-rounded characters and consistent plotting. Among its immediate peers in alternative history, it matches Tchaikovsky's Eden and avoids the aimless meandering of Pratchett/Baxter. In verve, the balance of action, and execution it's closer to Peter F Hamilton's space opera, the Salvation trilogy. For a thick book, there's no fat, but neither is there one improbable scrape followed by another. Like the Hamilton its tone is borderline young adult. The swearing, gore, and infrequent but functional sex scenes just about edge it out but there is a cartoon quality to proceedings. Less Hanna-Barbera unlike some) and more anime, or comic strip. Which isn't surprising considering Carey's pedigree. Over-the-top weaponry, especially the machines fielded by the Ansurrection used to butcher the Pandominion's forces lend itself to such an imaginary, but what cements it are the vestigial animal qualities of the selves. In addition to rabbits, Infinity Gate features characters whose species evolved from cats, dogs, hedgehogs, reptiles, bears, birds. I've probably missed a few. If that sounds like The Get Along Gang with guns, attitude, and timeline-hopping technology, you're not far off. A rabbit girl and adorable AI familiar plus power armoured cats wouldn't hurt marketing a film or streaming adaptation to a mass, teen-adjacent audience.
More interesting is the concern for multiplicity and a plea for difference. For all the diversity of selves in the Pandominion, the bureaucracy and the Cielo hold it together in a disciplined unity to keep the polity and, with it, the class power of their worlds intact. There are distinctions made by selves between those who matter - the empire's worlds and its citizens - and those who don't: the worlds, and therefore the civilisations that exist outside of it. They effectively do not exist, a point reinforced by the conditioning/brutalisation of the Cielo's new recruits. There is also a strong distinction between organic and artificial intelligence. The AI helpmeets used on Ut, and the huge computer that enables cross-time traffic are frequently likened to slaves, and there is some discussion of the ethics of stunting machine intelligences at a service level. AI in this culture is a tool with strictly circumscribed parameters. Despite the cybernetic enhancements enjoyed by Pandominion citizens this hard distinction remains in play. This prejudice frames their antipathy to the Ansurrection. AI isn't alive, it is an automaton. They are a form of non-existence that threatens the Pandominion with death, and has to be destroyed.
Through the point of view of Cammy, we learn the Ansurrection is alive as well. But different. They are fractal life forms, and multiplicity is at the core of their being. There are trillions of intelligences in their civilisation, but their individuality is not discreet. They combine, disassociate, copy, and flit between machine bodies. Their life is so different that they have a hard time believing the Pandominion is alive, let alone intelligent. Because selves are biologically discrete and "alone", the Ansurrection cannot fathom what they are - albeit their attacks on its worlds has been enough to designate them a nuisance. Hence the abductions and the infiltration of agents into Pandominion society. The AIs have got no conception of sociality. They are blind to biological multiplicity and brush it aside. The Ansurrection are indifferent to it as they grind up and strip mine worlds. Cammy then becomes Infinity Gate's most important character. Paz and Hadiz are comfortable with the hybridity she embodies, while for the Pandominion she is a target for capture and study.
Valorising multiplicity and difference is the zeitgeist of contemporary SF. It's deeper than mainly white, mainly Anglo-American authors peppering their narratives with queer female protagonists of colour. In Tchaikovsky's Doors of Eden, the solution to the coming death of the multiverse is not to try and save one at the expense of the others - the solution favoured by his fascist, white supremacist baddie - but allowing all the parallel Earths to bleed into one another. Only by embracing and reckoning with difference can we be saved. In Hamilton's Salvation, it's the military defeat of a hive mind monoculture trying to assimilate the galaxy to its religion. Their defeat not only saves humanity, but frees the scores of species they had interred to meet their God at the end of time (very similar to his Commonwealth novels, albeit those aliens, another hive mind monoculture, want to destroy everything else). It's not that variety and multiplicity is simply good, it is life. Therefore, without reading the sequel, Echo of Worlds, we can suppose that the antagonism between Pandominion and Ansurrection is heading one way. This might involve shedding their present forms (indeed, the narration is clear we're following the Pandominion's final days), but integration rather than annihilation is where we'll end up. The embracing of difference, a liberation of the postmodern sublime and the junking of their limiting oneness - or the rhizome and not the tree - waits at the end of Carey's many worlds.
Infinity Gate is not a deep book, but it is typical of the front rank of commercial SF in the 2020s. It is modish while escaping unoriginality, thrilling without being trashy, and cartoonish without the cringe.
Image Credit
No comments:
Post a Comment