The Quiet War (Gollancz) [Kindle Edition]

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.

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.

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. The setting is the solar system, after Earth has been devastated by global warming, and is beginning to rebuild, while thriving colonies have been established on the moons of Saturn and Jupiter.

All sounds idyllic but it is not. Earlier, colonists from the Moon fled to Jupiter and Saturn after the colony on Mars was nuked by China. Earth is now controlled by three power blocs, Greater Brazil, the European Union and the Pacific Community. All are run by powerful families who squabble behind the scenes. The poor live in overcrowded cities, denied access to the regenerating countryside. Science is fostered, but mainly to create weapons, sometimes involving brutal biological and psychological re-structuring of people.

In stark contrast, the descendants of the Moon colonists, known as the Outers, live in free communities, run by continuous e-ballots. They delve into the physical and biological sciences, especially genetic engineering, to improve their technologies and bodies and to spread new forms of life by creating new ecosystems on previously sterile moons. The 'Quiet War', a low-intensity conflict with little all out fighting, deliberately engineered by factions in Greater Brazil, breaks out after a reconciliation mission to build an Earth-like habitat on Callisto is sabotaged.

On one hand the novel succeeds as a classic space opera, with a militaristic regime trying to control freedom-loving individualists. There is plenty of action, from a ground assault on a domed city to balletic space battles, using clever weapons and some effective 'dumb' ones, like asteroids used as missiles. Heinlein would be proud. On the other hand, this is very 'modern' science fiction, with subtle insights into politics, very well drawn characters on both sides, awe inspiring new science, like organisms adapted to life in a vacuum on cold, dead moons and beautiful, poetic descriptions of vistas on the various moons and planets. This book is a perfect blend of a mainstream novel with a rigorous approach to science fiction.