Galaxy's Edge Magazine: Issue 2, May 2013 (24 page)

Brian Herbert and Kevin J. Anderson are entertainers and they are very skilled at what they do. And in
Sisterhood of Dune
, they deliver. If you’re a purist and don’t think anyone should touch Frank Herbert’s masterpiece, then there’s nothing here for you. If, however, you’re looking for a few hours with a fine adventure story, you really can’t go wrong with
Sisterhood of Dune
.

***

The Hydrogen Sonata

by
Iain M. Banks

Orbit 2012

Hardcover: 528 pages

ISBN: 978-0316212373

The Hydrogen Sonata
is one of Iain M. Banks’ Culture novels wherein an ancient civilization called the Gzilt are about to Sublime and a number of entities want to participate: either to scavenge when the Gzilt disappear (to God-knows-where), or to exact revenge before they go, or to capture an ancient criminal whose mind is downloaded into a mysterious cube. Then there is Vyr Cossont, a four-armed beauty who plays an eleven-stringed instrument something like a harp (she’s attempting to learn how to play “The Hydrogen Sonata,” an unplayable masterpiece that makes for a nice recurring trope to the novel).

Part of the problem for Ms. Cossont is that no one knows where civilizations go when they Sublime and there’s evidence to suggest that it might be nowhere at all. It might just be a hoax. Ms. Cossont, who is a member of both the Culture and the Gzilt, has a personal problem, however. She doesn’t want to Sublime and quite a few Ship Minds (who actually run the ships which the races of the Culture travel on) are more than just a little bit interested in the Gzilt civilization and why everyone is racing there to get a piece of the action or a piece of the pie.

This is one of Banks’ superior Culture novels and it’s written with great humor, for both the milieu it embraces and the diverse cast of characters involved. I was especially taken with the Ship Minds who have minds of their own and seem to be more curious about the Gzilt than the humans. Their conversations break up the action in the book and it’s clear that Banks was having a dandy time writing
The Hydrogen Sonata
.

I think right now that Banks and Alastair Reynolds own the space opera. Others have mastered it as well but few have created a galaxy-wide semi-organized melange of cultures as Banks, cultures and characters which still, after eleven or so novels, still surprise and entertain. One trope I enjoyed in
The Hydrogen Sonata
was the Girdle City—a city about two-hundred kilometers high that circles the Gzilt world at the equator. Millions of people live in the Girdle City. One scene (actually two) centers around a floating palace, something like a giant Zeppelin that travels the hollow core of the Girdle city. It’s a classic BDO (Big Dumb Object) I’ll never forget.

The Hydrogen Sonata
was a delight from start to finish. And to Banks’ credit, it’s a stand-alone novel, not part of a continuous series or the beginning, middle, or end of a serial work. You can read it without knowing anything at all about the Culture stories because Banks so ably fills you in as you go with just enough information to allow for it to make sense
and
to make you want to read more Culture novels. I’m already on board.

***

The Devil’s Nebula

by
Eric Brown

Abaddon Books 2012

Mass Market: 352 pages

ISBN: 9781781080238

I picked up
The Devil’s Nebula
by British writer Eric Brown for two reasons, maybe three. First of all I had seen Brown’s books at my local Barnes & Noble bookstore for a while now and hadn’t really paid any attention to them. He’s had no real press here in America as far as I can tell even though he’s quite accomplished. Brown has written nineteen novels and has published easily half a dozen short story collections. So I thought I’d give him a try. Secondly, I have never heard of Abaddon Books and I was impressed with their stylish logo on the spine and the book’s great cover art work. Thirdly, perhaps most importantly, so many American publishers are consolidating and eating up smaller publishers (and shrinking their own midlist in the process) that the print venues for fiction are shrinking. Thus, I am an advocate for the smaller presses or publishing houses that are taking up a lot of the slack. (And many thanks to Barnes & Noble for stocking a wide array of publishers in their SF and Fantasy section. If we didn’t have access to these other publishers, I’d only be reviewing the major writers in the field from just the major publishers…which would be something of a drag.)

The Devil’s Nebula
is a stand-alone novel in a milieu called Weird Space—but this is not a dark fantasy novel nor is it horror. The “weird” gets explained fully later in the novel.
The Devil’s Nebula
involves the Expansion, a vast but loosely-organized confederacy of worlds. Within the Expansion are a few malcontents who’ve fallen between the cracks, so to speak. Ed Carew is the captain of a small band of misfits who are captured and sent into the domain of an evil race called the Vetch (nice name, that) to look into what was behind a distress signal sent from a lost colony fifty or so years earlier. Carew and his cadre have to go into the Devil’s Nebula or get executed on the spot by their Expansion overlords. When Carew and crew arrive at the source of the distress signal, they find that the original colonists have been enslaved by some Lovecraftian nightmares and the book details Carew’s efforts at freeing the survivors of the original colonial effort.

As I said a moment ago, this is not a fantasy or horror novel. The aliens are merely creepy in a Lovecraftian way and how they interact with the colonists is one of the cleverest tropes I’ve read in science fiction. I’d say it’s rather daring of Brown to even suggest it. The novel itself reads like one of the military novels of David Drake or David Weber, but there’s much less emphasis of military hardware and fighting and more on the very human situation the colonists find themselves in.
The Devil’s Nebula
is carefully written, expertly paced, and full of surprises. I am doubly thankful that this book was a stand-alone, but I think we’ll be seeing a lot of Ed Carew and his team and more of Weird Space.

****

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Paperback:

http://www.amazon.com/dp/1604502002?tag=arcman-20

.

Kindle:

http://www.amazon.com/dp/B001I45KB6?tag=arcman-20

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Publisher’s Direct

http://www.PPickings.com

Greg Benford is a Nebula winner and a former Worldcon Guest of Honor. He is the author of more than 30 novels and 6 books of non-fiction, and has edited 10 anthologies.

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Views expressed by guest or resident columnists are entirely their own.

THE REAL FUTURE OF SPACE

by Gregory Benford

Space Opera Meets the Accountants

Space opera is big these days. Myriad authors send us into distant futures where vast interplanetary or interstellar societies struggle, their cause manned (nearly always; not womanned) by masters of vast ships that sail to operatic destinies.

Since the term was invented in 1941 by Bob (“Wilson”) Tucker, space opera has had a grandiosity we pedestrian scientists could long for but seldom believe. Lately, however, developments in our rather plodding space program have provoked in me some hope that such futures make sense.

The best argument against space is its cost. The price of getting into orbit ($1 million per person-mass to reach low Earth orbit) is so high that few commercial ventures make sense. So far, only communications satellites at geosynchronous orbit have made economic sense. They have lowered the cost of intercontinental calls by orders of magnitude.

Yet space opera boasts giant spacecraft and huge space colonies. Who pays for them?

Another way to pose the problem is, what would a viable, economic space program look like at the end of the 21st century?

The British have acquired a taste for the recent style of space opera—note Iain M. Banks’s series, Ken MacLeod, Colin Greenland’s
Take Back Plenty
, Peter Hamilton’s popular mega-scale space operas, and more recently Alastair Reynolds and Charles Stross—all working with futures fragrant of gargantuan techno-sizzle. Interestingly, all these authors and futures are somewhat vaguely socialist. In this they contrast with the sober, often nostalgic near-future looks at the space program by Stephen Baxter, notably
Titan
.

A greatly expanded economy will surely be necessary to afford the vast space resources beloved of epic drama. Real-world moderate, welfare-state socialism, as seen in Europe, can afford no grand space operas. Europe has no manned space program at all. The investment for economic benefit is too steep—hundreds of billions just to set up a single solar-power satellite in near-Earth orbit, for example. The second such satellite would cost far less, of course, since the infrastructure would be done—but that first step is a killer.

Unless one envisions a society with limitless wealth (say, by matter duplication using the transporter, that Star Trek staple), there will always be limits. And the sad lesson of most advanced societies is that they get fat and lazy. Both anarchist and libertarian societies may avoid this, because they aren’t top-down socialist. But nobody knows that, because they haven’t been tried.

In these operatic futures the classic criticism of left-socialist economics has gone unanswered: that markets provide far greater information flow than do top-down, directed economic systems. Through prices, each stage from raw materials to finished product has an added cost attached, as an increased price to the next step. This moves economic information through great distances and over time, which feeds back to the earlier stages, all working toward higher efficiency. Classical socialism ends up starved for feedback. Committees or commissars are not enough to replace the ever-running detail of prices.

Politics does not offer simple maps, but one should distinguish between the Banks/Reynolds/Stross pole and the MacLeod pole. The BRS pole seems Libertarian/anarchist, and by Libertarianism I mean anarchism with a police force and a respect for contract law. MacLeod is the closest thing to a true classical socialist, as in
The Stone Canal
. But even MacLeod is all over the board. Though socialism was his earliest fancy, he experiments with multiple social structures. In later works he espouses variants of libertarianism and anarchism, and even occasional capitalism.

The BRS pole is very muscular, quite capable of militarism and imperialism when necessary (consider Banks’s
Use of Weapons
). Socialism isn’t just cradle-to-grave security here. Contracts count for a lot (Reynolds’s
Revelation Space
), and mild anarchism is often the preferred social structure of the major protagonists. In Charles Stross’s
Singularity Sky
the aliens are capitalists who value everything in trade in terms of its information content, a breath of hip economics.

The whiff of welfare socialism in these novels contrasts with the bright, energetic atmosphere. This calls into question whether advanced socialist societies could plausibly support grandiose space-operatic futures.

In some ways, popular socialist thinking parallels Creationism. Unable to imagine how order and increasing complexity can arise from unseen competitive mechanisms, socialists fall into the belief that advanced societies must come from top-down direction—often, in practice, from a sole master thinker, the Chairman-for-life so common in totalitarian states. In politics, everybody is entitled to their own opinion. But not everybody is entitled to their own facts—especially not in economics.

In sf, economic dodges began well before
Star Trek
’s moneyless economy. Idealists have always hated mere money. It seems so, well,
crass
. Still, with no medium of exchange, there is no way to allocate scarce resources, so inevitably politics and brute force dictate outcomes.

Typically in such regimes, one can still amass wealth, just by owning things. To avoid state controls and taxes, barter returns—presto, we’re back in the Middle Ages.

Money isn’t the object of people’s lives, it’s just how we keep score. Money measures economic matters. Without it, we can’t see what works and what doesn’t.

Few in sf ever go beyond this simple truth. Certainly
Trek
seems oblivious to it.

Granted, there are still too many future societies where one doesn’t even get to see how the plumbing works, let alone the economy. However odd the future will be, it surely won’t be a repeat; economics evolves. The leftish space operas of recent years have plenty of quantum computers and big, Doc Smith-style planet-smashing weaponry, but the hard bits of real economics they swerve around. Maybe because they haven’t any real answers, or aren’t interested. Opera isn’t realism.

Though New Wave sf had a leftist tinge, it had no real political/economic agenda. The common association of hard sf with libertarian ideas, on the other hand, may have sprung from a root world view. Science values the primacy of the individual mind, which can do an experiment (thought experiments, as with Einstein, or real ones) to check any prevailing theory.

This heroic model lies deep in Western culture. Individual truth and a respect for facts is the fulcrum of libertarian theory. Of course, anarchist societies (not socialist), as in Ursula LeGuin’s
The Dispossessed
, can depict the struggle of the lone physicist against the collective, received wisdom. But
The Dispossessed
’s logic is not about economics—it is a deeply felt story about a single man’s sacrifice and discovery. The social satires of Pohl and Kornbluth have more bite, and probably more useful truth for today.
The Space Merchants
by its title foretells much we may learn from.

I speak first of economics because it is something of a science, with its own Nobel Prize, and it influences the science of space—real space, not the sf operas—quite crucially. In the end, the accountants want to know who is going to pay for all this, and why.

What possible economic motive could a space-faring society have?

Mining the Sky

Motives answer needs.

Within a century we are going to start running out of two essentials: metals and energy. Within about 50 years most of our oil reserves will be gone—farewell, SUVs! The Middle East will cease to be a crucial tinderbox, simply because countries there will be poor and doomed. Most policy makers know this but seldom speak of it in public—half a century is unimaginably long for a politician.

I will deal with the vast problems of energy supply in my next column. Less well recognized is that many metal ore deposits in the crust of the earth will be mined out within a century. Of course, substitute materials can be and have been found. But some are crucial and to substitute something else changes the world for the worse.

My favorite example of this is oysters. In Dickens novels you can read of poor people forced to eat oysters, then a cheap, easily found, but somewhat lower-class food, while the rich ate beef Wellington. Now we gobble down McDonald’s burgers and oysters are a fancy appetizer. Sure, we’re well fed—but I prefer oysters, which as a boy I ate for breakfast in my fisherman family, little appreciating my luxury.

Technology can help us greatly in the uplifting of humanity—the great task confronting us. A century ago, aluminum was a rare metal more costly than silver; now we toss it away in soft drink cans—then recycle it. But inevitably the poor nations’ growing demand will overburden our demand on the Earth’s crust and we will surely run short of the simplest metals, even iron.

As it turns out, both metals and energy are available in space in quantities that we will desperately need.

We also need a clean environment. Mining for metals comes second to fossil fuel extraction in its environmental polluting impact. Coal slag is the #1 water pollutant in the U.S., with runoff from iron mines the second.

Detailed analysis shows that metals brought from the asteroids will be competitive with dwindling Earthly supplies. Better, by refining them in space, we prevent pollution, particularly of another scarce resource—water.

There is money to be made in that sky. An ordinary metal-rich asteroid a kilometer in diameter has high-quality nickel, cobalt, platinum and iron. The platinum-group metals alone would be worth $150 billion on Earth at present prices. Separating out these metals takes simple chemistry done every day in Earthly refineries, using carbon and oxygen compounds for the processing steps. Such an asteroid has plenty carbon and oxygen, so the refining could be done while we slowly tug it toward a very high Earth orbit—a task taking decades.

Steam Rockets

Crucial in all this is the shipping cost, so attention focuses on how to move big masses through the deep sky.

Certainly not with chemical rockets, which have nearly outlived their role in deep space.

Liquid hydrogen and oxygen meet in the reaction chambers of our big rockets, expelling steam at about 4.1 km/sec speeds. That is the best chemical rockets can do, yet to get to low Earth orbit demands a velocity change of about 9 km/sec—over twice what the best rockets can provide without paying the price of hauling lots of added fuel to high altitude, before burning it. This means a 100-ton launch vehicle will deliver only about 8 tons to orbit—the rest goes to fuel and superstructure.

Moving around the inner solar system, which takes a total velocity change of 20 or 30 km/sec, is thus a very big deal. Current systems can throw only a few percent of their total mass from ground to Mars, for example. Big velocity changes (“delta-V” in NASAspeak) of large masses lies far beyond any chemical method. To get from Earth to the biggest asteroid, Ceres, takes a delta-V of 18.6 km/sec, which means the payload would comprise only half of one percent of the vehicle mass.

Using chemical rockets to carry people or cargo anywhere in deep space was like the Europeans discovering and exploring North America using birch bark canoes—theoretically possible, but after all, the Indians did not try it in reverse, for good reason.

For thirty years NASA ignored the technology that can answer these challenges. In the late 1960s both the US and the USSR developed and ran nuclear rockets for hundreds of hours. These achieved double the exhaust velocity of the best chemical rockets, in the 9 km/sec range. These rockets pump ultra-cold liquid hydrogen past an array of ceramic plates, all glowing hot from the decay of radioactive fuel embedded within. The plume does not carry significant radioactivity.

Those early programs were shut down by nuclear-limiting treaties, appropriate for the Cold War but now out of date. We will need that technology to venture further into space. NASA has gingerly begun building more of the nuclear-electrical generators they ran many missions with, including the Voyagers (still running after over a quarter of a century, and twice as far away as is Pluto) and the Viking landers on Mars. These are simple devices powered by the decay of two pounds of plutonium dioxide, yielding 250 watts of heat. Indeed, simply heating spacecraft in the chill of space is the everyday use for small radioactive pellets, which were embedded into every spacecraft headed outward from Earth orbit.

Even this tentative step back to the past seems to acutely embarrass NASA. They elaborately describe how safe the technologies are, because we live in a Chicken Little age, spooked by tiny risks.