Gardens of the Sun [Paperback]

Paul McAuley is surely one of our best writers. This is intelligent, world creating, thrilling and optimistic space opera - without the naivety of much American SF. The world building goes on against a back drop of flawed humanity, full of politicking, jealousies and the small cruelties we all love to inflict on each other. So it is, so it will be. The context is biodiversity but this time its human biodiversity and the opportunity to build a post human experience as well as human one, a technological fueled optimism that resonates so much in 2009 . We can build and mitigate anthropogenic climate change. There are no hero's as such, just people muddling on doing there stuff not always well or even nicely .

It really must be read after the Quiet War though as i do not think it stands well alone

As an aspiring writer it makes insanely jealous . Nuff said

This book is the second of a pair. The first was The Quiet War. See its reviews for the background to this one.

After the Quiet War, many of the Outers are rounded up into prison camps. The ones that escape capture, the Free Outers, flee to Miranda, a moon of Uranus, to recover and rebuild. They are forced to flee again to Triton, a moon of Neptune, after Greater Brazil sends ships after them. Again they are moved on, this time by Ghosts, fellow Outers who follow a reclusive leader who in turn follows orders from a future version of himself, who is supposedly on an extra-Solar planet. Orbiting remote Nephele, the Free Outers, now wary of permanent habitats, build the "Gardens of the Sun", detached bubble habitats that are closed eco-systems drawing extra energy from the Sun.

The Gardens of the Sun are but one of many types of long-term closed habitats, ranging from the many scattered emergency self-regenerating survival cabins Outers need in case of suit or major habitat failure to the artistic creations of the Outer 'gene wizard' Avernus, who delights in creating hidden 'gardens', each one following a completely different design in its combinations of 'tweaked' living organisms, based on archetypal animal and plant patterns. A more utilitarian approach is taken by Sri Hong-Owen, who creates 'cut' humans for various purposes, not all pleasant. Both women come to very different ends which signal how their approaches differ.

The Outers draw their strength as a community of individuals working together. The three Earth blocs against them, united under the banner of the Three Powers Alliance, soon start squabbling over the spoils of war. Earth's bloc governments are very much like many of Earth's national governments now: dictatorial, controlled by cliques, using a veneer of democracy. These governments use their own people, and there are some poignant moments for a spy and a war hero who discover the truth about their engineered roles and rebel. While things change on Earth, it appears a spent force, woefully contradicted by greed for, and Green zeal against, wealth and power. In contrast Outer society is very much idealised (apart from the cultist Ghosts). Even in defeat, these individualists never give up. Living a seal away from a killing vacuum presumably breeds discipline and endeavour.

While there is no FTL drive in sight, and robots are just clever, but not intelligent, workers, this novel re-invents optimism in space exploration. It sidesteps the dead end of building another Earth by terraforming Mars, and instead proposes a new goal of colonisation of the entire solar system, and hints at a new type of 'generation starship', built around Outer closed eco-system designs.

What many people have yet to realise about Paul is that his writing it not only gripping but beautifully constructed from the characters he creates to the situations and worlds in which they inhabit. Each word is carefully chosen to fit the situation and whilst it can feel a tad spartan at times it's a novel that really will remain with you long after the final page it turned. In this, the sequel to The Quiet War, the reader is literally thrust into the struggles after the events in the previous novel unfurled and really won't be let go until the dawn breaks with you realising you've been up all night. A master of Hard Sci-Fi and an author who will be as revered as a number of predecessors in years to come, you really have to try him to see the quality. All in all, this is a great offering and one that left me clamouring for the next novel as I turned the final page. Dammit, its going to be a long wait.