Anna Davour blogs about Fantastic fiction & SF

You might like this book if you enjoy:

• action-filled thriller type plots
• time travel
• science fiction stories with philosophical implications, but not too much
• doom and apocalypse

Keep reading if you would like to know my thoughts on Final Days in a context of hard science fiction. 

The last third or so of Final Days was a fun read, but for a hundred pages in the middle I kept reading mostly for the grazing cars. Cool gadgets help a lot when I fail to feel really involved in the plot.

As the title reveals, it's a story about the end of a world. A mysterious alien artefact is lost, and those who know about it have reasons to believe that it's going to destroy all life on Earth. At the same time, there are political tensions over the access to the wormhole technology that allows transfer to the space colonies in other star systems. The array of wormhole gates is located on the moon, and controlled by the very powerful organisation Array Security and Immigration (ASI), based in the Western Coalition. Saul Dumont is an ASI agent who gets involved in it all, partly as a consequence of his failures.

I found Saul a somewhat colourless character, despite his mild drug addiction and his personal problems. He thinks he is investigating the sabotage of the gate to the Galileo colony, where his wife and daughter live. For ten years, no-one has been able to travel between Earth and Galileo, and Saul is eager to find out who is responsible for separating him from his family. What his superiors really want to get is details about the imminent destruction and its cause, and therefore Saul finds himself at the centre of the events threatening billions of people. There is a lot of action and violence, but I didn't really care about Saul himself.

He gets more interesting in the second half of the book, when he interacts with people in situations not always involving a lot of running and fighting, and reveals more complex feelings. And he gets to ride a Saturn rocket, which is actually kind of cool in a future where very few actually travel through space.

That detail with the Saturn rocket struck a chord in me, which made me a bit worried. There is a strong streak of nostalgia in some flavours of hard science fiction, with authors who clearly seem to think that the future was better in the past. I'm talking about the kind of technology romanticism that seems uncomfortable with the developments in society and comes together with a certain political conservatism. Like Michael Flynn in Firestar. He describes a return to space coupled with a kind of soft revolution that transforms our whole culture, art and literature and everything, to something easier and more understandable. The effect is to make him look like he skipped a couple of decades and just cannot comprehend the world he lives in. I'm not sure I want to be like that. Still, I can't help being charmed by the old fashioned rocket. It makes a wonderful contrast between the easy everyday travel between celestial bodies in the portrayed future, and the much more heroic (i.e. uncomfortable) journeys of the early space pioneers.

Also, Gary Gibson avoids getting overtly nostalgic about the Right Stuff, and never gets ideologically annoying. (There are actually interesting post-colonial issues in this future, where the wormhole technology gives the Western Coalition control over the colonies, while the Pan-Asian Congress demands equal control and their own gates. I like it when Earth is described as a whole, multi-faceted planet.)

Still, Final Days is definitelyhard SF. The story is much more about the physics of wormhole gates and the technology of the future, and about time travel paradoxes and free will and the destiny of humanity, than about a few specific characters. Perhaps the most memorable person in the story is the elderly Amy, who together with her husband runs the space tourism company owning the Saturn replica rocket. That Amy makes a reference to a "cold equation" tells us that Gary Gibson very much knows that he's a part of the conversation in hard science fiction. ("The Cold Equations" is a much debated short story by Tom Godwin, first published in 1954.) The story is also full of action and suspense. Will mankind survive? And at the end, I actually cannot be sure that Saul did the right thing. It's an interesting situation. I must say that I also enjoyed the attempt at exposing the inherent problems with wormhole travel. This is a very commonly used trope in science fiction. One example is how Peter F. Hamilton uses wormholes to connect the planets in his Commonwealth universe, another is the "farcasters" in Hyperion by Dan Simmons that allow the river Tethys to cross several planets. Still, the fact that this kind of faster-than-light travel allows for certain kinds of time travel and all sorts of paradoxes is usually just forgotten. In Final Days the gates are even called CTCs, for "closed timelike curves", a term referring to the description of a phenomenon like a wormhole within the theory of relativity. Don't worry about the details, Gary Gibson is not weighing down the story with lengthy explanations, but it's still an important plot point. (There's the conversation again. Science fiction collectively exploring common tropes.)

I also found it sort of refreshing to read about a future with recognisable humans and technology in the year 2235. The augmented reality of Final Days is not very far from what we can do now, with a smart phone, but much more integrated with daily life. Most people wear contact lenses containing their personal data ("ubiquitous profile", including money) and communications device. They also display the desired amount of information and helpful instructions in the wearer's field of view.

It's not our immediate future, but still a world just a step beyond ours. No backups of your personality, no quasi-magical nanobot utility fogs, no emerging intelligences on the internet, no singularity. I guess I sometimes get a bit tired of those things, and like variation.

As I mentioned in the beginning, the grazing cars was another piece of future technology that I found fascinating. Kind of cute, but a bit incongruous with the rest of the worldbuilding. It actually doesn't seem to be a very good idea.

A second hire car was parked near Jeff's own, where it shuffled closer to the verge and began tearing up the same patch of grass, sucking the biomass deep into its guts prior to converting it to ethanol.

Can you imagine hauling around large amounts of concentrated biomass for the cars to eat -- instead of just bringing the ethanol from a centralised distillery? And how do you deal with the waste? You know what a street looks like where horses are used.

Still, if it hadn't been for the cars I might have stopped reading before getting to the good parts. That's hard SF for you.

Marya Morevna, when you longed to see the world naked and watched for what was hidded behind everyday things, did you know where it would lead you? When you saw the three birds turning into men, did you recognize the structure of your tale? When you learned the date of your death, did it change your way of life?

They say there are only twelve plots, or seven, or three. These contain all stories there are to tell. Perhaps it is true that the human brain has a tendency to find certain patterns, to patch together precisely these stories from the jumble of events, meetings, and random catastrophes and triumphs that life brings. Maybe, but it does not reduce the value of telling the stories, and retelling them again.

In Deathless Catherynne M. Valente lets the Russian folk tale of Marya Morevna play out in parallel with some important decades in the history of St. Petersburg-Petrograd-Leningrad, with revolution and war. We know what will happen, we know at least the outlines of this story -- even if we this time also get to see the house imps joining the Party and forming committees. Most readers will also recognize the structure of the fairy tale, and we understand that certain things have to be. Even if we are not familiar with all the creatures of Russian folk lore, we understand what they mean. There is an inevitability to it all, that partly feels horrible and claustrophobic, partly comforting and secure.

Knowing how it ends rarely makes a story less interesting, often more so. In a fairy tale, we expect certain turns and we know at least roughly where it will lead. Variations of folk tales is nearly a genre in itself, maybe partly because the well known is a secure framework for telling important stories. Also because if the reader can be expected to know the story, she will understand which points are new, or emphasized by the author.

Marya Morevna comes to the Country of Life, becomes the warrior queen, confronts Baba Yaga, travels to the Country of Death. Everything is expected, and everything is new and surprising. The writing is beautiful. The triangle of Marya, Koschei and Ivan becomes a dark comment on love and matrimony: who is to rule? The world we know fades out of focus and back again. The tragedies of Leningrad in the war gets entangled with the struggle against the boundaries of free will.

Life is like that. Life is not like that.

This is a book about the technologies that will shape our lives in various ways in the near future and in the coming 100 years. It's all extrapolated from the current front line of technology and from new knowledge that is anticipated to be exploited soon. Michio Kaku is a physicist who has made a name as a popularizer of science, through his books and as host of various TV shows. Physics of the Future is based on interviews with scientists and people who are involved in developing and trying out the discussed technologies.

The title is a bit misleading – it's clearly chosen because the book is in some ways a sequel to Kaku's Physics of the Impossible, which discusses seemingly impossible things people do in fiction and what it would take to make some of them possible. Physics of the Future is not about what we will learn in physics in the future. Not even only about how physics will be applied in the future. It's about computers, robots, medicine, economics, energy and, yes, about space travel. Every chapter is divided into three parts: the current state of the art, what we might be able to do around mid century, and visions for the "far future" in about 100 years.

Many of the ideas are discussed in the light of two principles: Moore's law and "the caveman principle". Moore's law states roughly that computers double in capacity every two years. At some point in the not so far future Moore's law will break down because it meets the physical limits of how small we can make our integrated circuits. The caveman principle is just that people are basically the same as in the stone age. Our preferences and needs are rooted in that human nature, and this will shape how we implement our technologies and shape our future.

Of course things will not play out exactly the way described in the book, and this is discussed in the introduction. The book is about what we might do, based on what we know now, and this is the available information that we need to work with when imagining the future. A reader of popular science magazines might already be familiar with most of the things and ideas discussed here (I found this especially true for the chapter about space travel), but here a lot is collected in the same place in a nice package where you can start to appreciate how various advances can work together. Someone who is new to all of this might find the book fairly dense, but still readable.

Michio Kaku is clearly enthusiastic over the subject, and very optimistic. It's a mostly bright future he describes, where we use our collected wits and deal constructively with the problems caused by global warming and the end of oil. I actually feel that the positive picture he paints sometimes borders on the naive, when he glosses over the ethical problems with some of the inventions he describes. Yes, there are problems with creating entities with minds and make them serve us. And what responsibilities do we have to our "designer babies"? (As a friend of mine stated it: how fun is it 30 years later, when your genes are really out of fashion?) I understand that these discussions may be beside the point and that Kaku doesn't want to fill the book with them, but I miss acknowledgments that ethics can be relevant and important in shaping the future.

Some comments about economics, history and other relevant subjects far from physics also seem a bit oversimplified. I'm sure that Michio Kaku has done his research and that he has fact checked everything against experts, but being one myself I know that physicists are not necessarily experts of everything, and I reserve the right to be a bit skeptical about his historical analyses. Nevertheless I enjoy the enthusiasm and the optimism, because it makes it easy and entertaining to read the book. I put many question marks in the margins of the discussions about for example how exactly Europe came to be more successful than China and the Ottoman empire, but that doesn't spoil the rest of the book.

Perhaps the least successful chapter is the last one, "A day in the life in 2100", which is intended to illustrate what life might be like when we have access to all of the things described in the preceding chapters. It reads like science fiction from the 1930's, only with updated gadgets, and leaves me feeling unsatisfied when I put the book down. Michio Kaku is a good writer of popular science, but not as talented at fiction, and for this story did not add anything of value.

I have read enough good SF to have little patience with bad SF. This brings me to my real problem with reading this book, which is not a failure of the book but rather of me as a reader. My reading mind is shaped by decades on a high-SF-diet. The thing that keeps nagging me through the book is that the author seems to be completely unaware of science fiction literature after about 1982 or so. I know, it's very unfair to judge a book because it fails to do something the author didn't intend at all in the first place. (Actually, I hate it when people do that. I stopped reading reviews on online bookstores because of that.) I just cannot help it.

You see, I keep thinking of the perfect examples of how everything mentioned in this book is discussed in science fiction, new and old. If you talk about super intelligent mice I want to mention Flowers for Algernon by Daniel Keyes. If you talk about recreating Neanderthals I want to mention Neverness by David Zindell. If you talk about regrowing lost limbs I think of Have Space Suit, Will Travel by Robert A. Heinlein. If you talk about augmented reality (digital information superimposed on your senses) I think of The Golden Age by John C. Wright and The Quantum Thief by Hannu Rajaniemi. If you talk about extended life spans I want to mention the treatment of that in the Mars trilogy by Kim Stanley Robinson. When it comes to nanotechnology, why not mention The Dervish House by Ian McDonald, which I recently reviewed here.

This list just goes on forever.

Michio Kaku instead takes most of his examples from ancient mythology and talks about "the power of gods". The rest of his illustrating examples come from Star Trek and SF blockbusters, which he seems to like but not take very seriously. That is fair enough but leaves me feeling a bit frustrated. I think I personally would have preferred to read a book about technologies in fairly current science fiction literature with discussions of if and when these might be available in reality, and the science behind. The book I wish I had is an updated version of the classic The Science in Science Fiction, edited by Peter Nicholls. It was published in 1983 and is still readable, but it's too old to contain cyberpunk, new space opera, and a lot of cool scientific ideas which have been commonplace in SF recently – such as many of the things discussed in Physics of the Future. I wish someone would write an updated version of The Science in Science Fiction. I actually wish that I could write it myself (something that I could not do alone, that's for sure).

It's not Michio Kaku's fault that I feel frustrated by this. Physics of the Future is entertaining and I think the author succeeds with what he has set out to do: discussing future technologies. Thinking about it, I wonder if it would not also be a nice source of inspiration for SF writers.

(By the way: yes, it bothers me that my quick list of science fiction examples contains no works by women. That is something worth discussing.)

New and important things usually start at the edges, the borders, the intersections and interfaces. It's not through some central committee that revolutionary ideas are spawned, it's not in the limelight of the famous stages new musical expressions are tried. Things start in the gutters, in hidden corners, through the clashes between old and new, near and far.

That is the attraction of places like Bordertown.

Welcome to Bordertown is my first encounter with Bordertown. I was initally attracted by the lineup of really interesting author names in this anthology (Charles de Lint, Catherynne Valente, Nalo Hopkinson, Emma Bull, Cory Doctorow, Neil Gaiman...), but then the setting also resonates with my imagination.

Bordertown is a place right on the border between our world and The Realm, or Faerie if you like. This is a place where elves can enter into our world, and where magic works -- sort of, sometimes. The elves are not those of fairytales for little children, but more similar to those unpredictable beings of folklore. Except in Bordertown they play rock music. They don't appreciate being called elves or fairies, but call themselves Truebloods ("which, I've got to admit, sounds a bit too white supremacist for my taste" says Joey in Charles de Lint's story).

Bordertown is also a place for the odd, the strange, and those who don't really belong anywhere: typically runaway kids. You can get there if your intention is right and if you work on it, but it's not easy. Actually, noone has been able to find the way for thirteen years when it suddenly reappears. In Bordertown only thirteen days has passed. In this newly rediscovered Bordertown, the thirteen stories, seven poems and one graphic story of this book take place.

Bordertown is a shared world, where people write their stories in the same setting. It was created in the 1980's, when urban fantasy was just being invented, and is talked about as very influential on a lot of authors. There are four earlier anthologies and three novels in this world, but the thirteen years of isolation corresponds to a time where no new Bordertown stories have been published.

Being new to the setting is no problem. Welcome to Bordertown starts with two introduction texts and a short guide text of Bordertown basics, giving you most of the background you might want. There is only one story ("We Do Not Come In Peace" by Christopher Barzak) where I feel that perhaps a little more background would have been good to understand the significance of what's going on. Perhaps I just need to reread the story.

In the beginning, through the first couple of stories, I get a feeling of Bordertown as an eternal rock festival and art happening. After finishing the book I have a thorough sense of the backside of it also. Bordertown might be wonderful, but it's also shabby and dangerous.

There are gangs. There is drug trade. And there is the notorious unpredictability of magic and technology (the shifts in the magic are described as juju weather in the Nalo Hopkinson story). Noone said it was comfortable in Bordertown. You might live in a squat with only sometimes electricity and cold water, and perhaps you live just day to day for long periods. On the other hand there is music and art and all sorts of creative things going on all around.

"Bordertown is shabbier than I expected, run-down and wearing at the edges, but it's also got that makeshift cool that you'll always find in a certain part of any city. The place where the oddball stores, restaurants and clubs are all just a little hipper." ("A Tangle of Green Men" by Charles de Lint)

Here is also all of the complexity and ambiguity of life: who is good and who is evil? Who might help you, and who will make things worse? At least three of the stories in this book are centered around people who are in Bordertown with the special intention to help others, those unfortunate that get themselves too deeply into trouble.

As a whole, this is a strong collection. There are no stories that feel boring or pointless, and only three that I'm likely to forget soon. I'm going to tell you that the contribution by Neil Gaiman is a two page poem, but that Charles de Lint has written a long story. Those who buy the book for just one name might get more or less for their money -- but they will probably like much of the rest of the anthology as well.

Stories on a border push at boundaries. "Shannon's Law" by Cory Doctorow, for example, is what happens when a science fictional mind collides with the impenetrable border to a country which seems to obey different laws of nature than the World we know. Can you peer through the veil, send information through to learn more about the Perilous Realm? "Our Stars, Our Selves" by Tim Pratt features an astronomer who (much to her own frustration) turns into an astrologer because of the strange features of the night sky visible in the Nevernever surrounding Bordertown. Nalo Hopkinson's story "Ours is the Prettiest" hints at different lands beyond The Realm, with other even stranger magic and beings. "A Tangle of Green Men" by Charles de Lint looks also in the other direction, and explores (among other things) what kind of subculture might arise in our World if it were in contact with Faerie.

Since Bordertown was invented before urban fantasy was an established as a subgenre, it was well established before it was taken over by vampires and werewolves and teenage love. The story "Crossings" by Janni Lee Simner is a revenge on the vampire romance story. It's also a devastating take on what happens when young dreamers collide with harsh reality. A vampire is a monster, and true love might not be what you think.

There is also a strong theme of finding community or a place to belong, which is especially explicit in "Welcome to Bordertown" by Ellen Kushner and Terri Windling and "A Voice Like a Hole" by Catherynne M. Valente.

These are just a few examples of the stories, I'm not going to talk in detail about them individually because I think you should discover them for yourself. One message I see throughout the book is that you cannot hide in stories to get away from the difficult things in life, but you can use the stories to be able to face your problems.

It didn't really occur to me until I put the book down that this is intended as young adult fiction -- or intended to be marketable as YA. I felt a bit stupid, since Terri Windlings introduction says so explicitly. Anyway, it just confirms what many have been saying: that a lot of interesting genre stuff nowadays is happening in YA. Also, in youth almost everyone passes through a period of feeling odd and uncomfortable, not really belonging. The search for somewhere to feel at home is really universal, and one of the things that give stories with young protagonists an appeal for many readers.

Perhaps also this experience is the point where those of us who are relatively privileged in this world can connect with people who are really standing on the outside for specific reasons. The general Bordertown feeling is that a wide variety of outcasts and lost people are visible and may belong. The stories deal with various backgrounds and experiences: skin colours, social backgrounds, sexualities, physical abilities. They are not glossing over the problems of getting along, so of course there is a lot of tension. Still, noone is expecting people to be all similar in Bordertown and all of the variety is there in plain view. I think that is very hopeful, because learning to live together starts with seeing eachother instead of hiding in our isolated corners.

Given this diversity, and the fairly distinct flavours of the different stories, I start to wonder about the dynamics of a shared world. How do you go about making it feel like one and the same place? I wonder how you tend a shared world, and how you create a book like this. The authors have to get a fairly strict framework to work within. I'm curious, I'll have to find something to read about that.

The stories are clearly arranged to be read in the order they stand. They cleverly plant details or people that you encounter again in a later story by another author, or a poem might echo as lyrics of a busker's song. I like the effect.

Still, in the end I wonder about the overall feeling I get, that the book gets darker and my view of Bordertown bleaker as I come closer to the end. In my mind it becomes less of a place of creative magic, and more of a glorified shanty town with a few shining points of hope. Was this really the intention? The introductin gave me the impression that Bordertown was intended as a place you would want to find, not a place to be afraid of.

The danger of reviewing a book directly after reading it is that I haven't yet digested the impressions. I'm not sure which view of Bordertown will remain in my mind, but I'm fairly sure that I will revisit this town some day. There are stories in this anthology that I will remember and very possibly want to reread.