The Quiet War (Gollancz S.F.) [Hardcover]

 

 

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McAuley returns to the harder end of the SF range with this expansive and complex novel. The story unfolds on a big scale - it offers heady thrills and exciting set pieces - but as ever with McAuley the real success of the book is down to the powerful and precise characterizations. Stories live or die with how much you care about characters, and the people here, for all their posthuman wonders, are utterly believable and true. Few writers succeed at the macro and micro as well as McAuley. His best novel since White Devils and his best pure SF book since Fairyland.

Sorry, but I had a few problems with this one.

The characters were gossamer thin. The politics, as depicted, was infantile and simplistic. The communities shown, where they were shown at all, were smug bourgeois facsimiles with few concessions to the complex reality of human beings. And in spite of all the hints (for they are only hints, not true scientific explorations) these characters are human, albeit faux humans. In the real world, having a pacemaker fitted or recieving hormone or genetic treatment does not make one 'evolved'. Nor does plastic surgery.

The space technology is sketched out sparingly, relying on knowledge of SF tropes and info-dumps that expand at length without really illuminating. The action scenes and supposed ruthlessness of the nasties comes across as written with the bored air of a pacifist who doesn't really want to delve into the full complexities of war. And the secret agent, in spite of his supposed conditioning, was about as much use as a chocolate ashtray. The baddies should simply have sent an untrained conscript and saved themselves a lot of time and money - the level of professionalism would have been about the same. If this is the best Paul can do with military style action scenes then it would have been better not to have bothered. They were neither exciting nor necessary.

The only redeeming features of this novel are its depiction of the bodies in our solar system, like Callisto, and the vacuum organisms, which are truly unique and, on a place like Callisto, surely very relevant. I honestly feel it would have been better if Paul had just ditched the right-on utopianism and concentrated the entire novel on the vacuum organisms, because I got the sense that this was the only subject the author truly loved and cared about. If he'd stuck to this passion, which is close to his own profession, then I think he could have produced a ground breaking, and easier to read, science fiction (real science fiction) novel that would have rivalled anything that A.C.Clarke wrote.

As it is, this novel is a rough diamond buried in layers of pointless and not very convincing regolith. Two stars for the effort and the promise.

Let me tell you a story.

In the far-flung future, humanity has spread across the stars. Earth has very probably gone the way of the dodo: if it exists at all, it's a smoldering mess of a planet, barren, stricken, utterly bereft of life or the prospect thereof. We past generations have had our wicked, heathen way with the world, leaving our by-all-accounts more evolved descendants no choice but to venture further afield in order to survive. People have colonised distant planets, moons, built interstellar cruisers, fleets of space-liners. They have gone on.

But resources have become dangerously scarce. Despite centuries of peace, humanity has fallen back on fears it had thought long forgotten. Tensions are at an all-time high; factions squabble with one another; politicians bicker pointlessly. And then someone, somewhere, starts a fight. Like a rash of pimples, war breaks out.

Stop me if you've heard this one before, why don't you!

Evidently, Arthur C. Clarke award-winning author Paul McAuley has. The Quiet War - part the first of a duology concluded in this year's Gardens of the Sun - is smart, self-aware sci-fi from an author who's learned his lesson. It's a novel which takes as its refreshing core tenet not another interminable iteration of the same old space battles we've been reading about for decades - dare I say centuries - but the build-up to boiling point. McAuley's business in The Quiet War is the slow burn which leads to the titular conflict rather than the fast thrash of so much science fiction.

In Professor Doctor Sri-Hong Owen and "the traitor" Macy Minnot, McAuley offers up a pair of narrative chaperones - one on either side of the ever-escalating crisis. Macy is a reclamation engineer come to the Outer reaches of the galaxy that she might assist with the construction of a biome: an ambitious self-sustaining tented environment on Callisto seen by some as a generous gift from friendly elements in the Pacific Community's government who hope to foster peace, and by others among both strands of humanity as a golden opportunity to deposit a spanner in the works.

Sri, meanwhile, is more highly placed in society than Macy. A gene wizard to rival Avernus, who in her youth - after the great Overturn - pioneered the very technologies which made life so far from home sustainable, the Professor Doctor answers directly to the heads of the ominous and powerful "families" who domineer over the people of Earth like Mafioso prime ministers. She too becomes entangled in the ill-fated construction of the Callisto biome, and when, inevitably, the last hope for peace between the Outers and the Pacific Community comes crashing down, preparations for war begin in earnest. Neither Sri nor Macy wants war, but war it will be, and they must each pick a side.

Says Avernus: "In the past hundred years we have built a plenitude of societies founded on principals of tolerance, mutualism, scientific rationalism, and attempts at true democracy. And on Earth, people have united in common cause to heal the great wounds inflicted by the Overturn, climate change and two centuries of unchecked capitalism. I hoped to see these two worthy and hopeful strands of human history unite and go forward together as equals rather than rivals, sharing unselfishly the best of each other's abilities and achievements. But instead we have war."

The Quiet War isn't about exhilarating space battles or explosive action planetside. Presumably to keep those readers who hunger for such in check, there's a sprinkling of each in McAuley's novel, but The Quiet War is more concerned with the micro than the macro of Hamilton and Heinlein. Accordingly, there's a great deal of maneuvering: relentless propagandising from representatives of both quarters of belief, press-ganging to which both Sri and Macy are subject whatever their respective stations in life. Even when the hammer finally falls, we spend only a little time in the proverbial trenches, for the true climax of The Quiet War is a spirited standoff between Sri and Avernus, the gene wizards of each "strand of human history" united at last - and yet crucially at odds with one another. It makes for a quiet finale, but a perfect one, and perfectly appropriate according to the terms McAuley has established.

On the basis of this novel you could feasibly call Paul McAuley the K. J. Parker of sci-fi, for The Quiet War is interested in the politics of war over the war itself. Perhaps some less patient readers will take issue with that; perhaps, if I'm to be blunt, they can get their fix elsewhere. Those who appreciate a measure of thought in their science fiction will find much about McAuley's novel to like, if not to love - not quite. Sri and Macy are fine characters, a little overpowered by the narrative burden they share; McAuley's prose is fluid and rich in vivid imagery, though his fondness for info-dumping too often halts the tale in its tracks; The Quiet War raises a handful of fascinating questions not often addressed in the genre and addresses them meticulously while leaving enough unanswered to make Gardens of the Sun required reading for anyone taken in by McAuley's intimate rebuttal of space opera as we know it.

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4.0 out of 5 stars Great Hard SciFi
Having grown up reading loads of SciFi as a teen, especially stories from the 1960s and 1970s - Dick, Asimov et al - I always enjoyed the way those writers managed to depict... Read more

Published 16 months ago by Remus

5.0 out of 5 stars Very Impressed
I was very impressed. This is in the top bracket of modern UK Space Opera, and the sequel, Gardens of the Sun, really works. Read more

Published 17 months ago by Scrondule

1.0 out of 5 stars Unreadable
I was really looking forwards to this book. However, I should have taken more notice of the wider reviewer comments (at amazon.com) regarding poor writing and punctuation. Read more

Published 18 months ago by Robbie Smiler

4.0 out of 5 stars Probably just to quiet
Having thought about it for a moment what I think is wrong with this book is that is has to many stories. Read more

Published 20 months ago by Haydies

3.0 out of 5 stars Good, but not inspiring
I read SF because the writer can create a new set of rules for the society, people .....
Those ideas and their consequences appeal to me. Read more

Published on 30 Nov 2009 by Mr. R. F. Jenkins

5.0 out of 5 stars Slow to start, still well worth reading.
I really liked this one, and when I was finished, still wished it had more to go. Obviously, there is, but I still think some of the characters could have been developed more... Read more

Published on 31 Oct 2009 by Daniel Nelson

5.0 out of 5 stars Superb science fiction novel, does everything right
There is not much to say about this novel, not because it is bad but because it is extremely good. In fact there is nothing to find fault with. Read more

Published on 29 Oct 2009 by A. J. Poulter

3.0 out of 5 stars I've read worse
I agree with the previous reviewer. It is good book but it lacks something, making it quiet easy to put it down for a few days. Read more

Published on 27 Jun 2009 by moonstone

5.0 out of 5 stars McAuley is one of the best
Paul McAuley accomplishes something difficult in a sci-fi book: realism. He does this through intricate characters who we can believe in and follow. Read more

Published on 21 May 2009 by L. Richards

2.0 out of 5 stars Not that interesting
I read this book and kept putting it down through lack of interest. The story has everything. Space colonies around Jupiter and Saturn, a monolithic and possibly corrupt world... Read more

Published on 12 May 2009 by bob

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