Jericho Iteration
Authors: Allen Steele
“An author with the potential to revitalize the Heinlein tradition.” —
Booklist
“The best hard SF writer to come along in the last decade.” —John Varley, author of
Slow Apocalypse
“One of the hottest new writers of hard SF on the scene today.” —
Asimov’s Science Fiction
“No question, Steele can tell a story.” —
OtherRealms
Winner of the Locus Award for Best First Novel
“Stunning.” —Chicago Sun-Times
“[Steele is] the master of science-fiction intrigue.” —
The Washington Post
“Brings the thrill back to realistic space exploration. It reads like a mainstream novel written in 2016 A.D.” —
The New York Review of Science Fiction
“A damned good book; lightning on the high frontier. I got a sense throughout that this was how it would really be.” —Jack McDevitt, author of
Cauldron
“An ambitious science fiction thriller ߪ skillfully plotted and written with gusto.” —
Publishers Weekly
“A splendidly executed novel of working-class stiffs in space.” —
Locus
“Reads like golden-age Heinlein.” —Gregory Benford, author of
Beyond Infinity
“Readers won’t be disappointed. This is the kind of hard, gritty SF they haven’t been getting enough of.” —
Rave Reviews
“A high-tech thriller set against the backdrop of an alternative space program. Allen Steele has created a novel that is at once action-packed, poignant, and thought provoking. His best novel to date.” —Kevin J. Anderson, bestselling author of the Jedi Academy Trilogy
“Science fiction with its rivets showing as only Steele can deliver it. This one is another winner.” —Jack McDevitt, author of
The Engines of God
“With
The Tranquility Alternative,
Allen Steele warns us of the bitter harvest reaped by intolerance, and of the losses incurred by us all when the humanity of colleagues and friends is willfully ignored.” —Nicola Griffith, author of
Ammonite
“Unanswered questions, high-tech, hard-science SF adventure, and action—how can you fail to enjoy this one?” —
Analog Science Fiction and Fact
“Allen Steele is the best hard SF writer to come along in the last decade. In
The Jericho Iteration
he comes down to a near-future Earth and proves he can handle a darker, scarier setting as well as his delightful planetary adventures. I couldn’t put it down.” —John Varley, author of
Slow Apocalypse
“A portrait of a writer who lives and breathes the dreams of science fiction.” —
Analog Science Fiction and Fact
Allen Steele
for Kent, Lisa, and Megan Orlando
Introduction to the 2013 Edition
Part Two: The Nature of Coherent Light
Part Four: His Court of Love and Beauty
T
HE JERICHO ITERATION
was my fifth published novel, and in several ways it was a departure from my previous work. It was my first novel to take place entirely on Earth. It was the first novel of mine to be told entirely from a first-person point of view. It was my first book-length effort at combining the science fiction and mystery-thriller genres. And it was my first novel to have a hardcover first edition in the United States (my four previous books had been published in hardcover in the UK).
All this represented changes I was going through at the time. In late 1990, my wife and I moved from New England, where we’d been living for the past five years, to St. Louis, her hometown. Linda had gotten homesick and wanted to return to the place where she’d come from, and I was ready for a change of scenery, so we packed up our stuff and moved to the Gateway to the West, where we’d live for the next seven years before deciding to move back east. I’d lived in Missouri before when I’d gone to grad school at the University of Missouri in Columbia, and so I’d visited St. Louis many times; the city wasn’t completely unknown to me.
After three years in a small New Hampshire town, relocating to a major Midwestern city still came as something of a shock. I’d lived in urban areas before, but it had been several years since the last time I’d heard anything at night besides crickets and bullfrogs or felt it necessary to lock the door when I left the house. Sirens made me look up alarm, I had to relearn how to drive in heavy traffic—indeed, the car I owned was a Jeep Cherokee, which I customarily drove without either doors or top; I finally reattached them, albeit grudgingly—and even having my mail delivered to my door instead of to a rural post office box was something I’d forgotten. So I had to get used to this new life faster than I’d expected.
At the same time, my writing was changing as well. My first four novels—
Orbital Decay
;
Clarke County, Space
;
Lunar Descent
; and
Labyrinth of Night
—had all been set in outer space, as had most of my short fiction. But I’d become tired of writing about space; I wanted to do stories where I didn’t have my characters floating in zero gravity or exiting through airlocks. And there were other speculative concepts I wanted to explore. I’d touched on artificial intelligence in
Clarke County, Sp
ace, for instance; now I wanted to investigate it further, putting my own spin on science-fictional ideas that had become popular but hadn’t been treated quite the way I might have treated them, if given the chance.
There’s always been a subtle autobiographical aspect to my work, in that I’ve often used places where I’ve lived as settings, or experiences that I’ve had as backgrounds for my characters. Shortly after moving to St. Louis, I decided to put space fiction aside for a while and write about the city where I now lived. This manifested itself in a series of stories, each unrelated to one another, about St. Louis, which I wrote for
Asimov’s Science Fiction
,
Science Fiction Age
, and various anthologies. The first few stories came out well enough that I became confident enough to consider writing a full-length novel about what I’d come to think of as my adoptive hometown.
Likewise, I wanted to write a story told from the viewpoint of a working journalist. Until I sold
Orbital Decay
, I’d been an investigative reporter for a weekly alternative newspaper in Worcester, Massachusetts. I didn’t miss the long hours and low pay, but I still had a certain nostalgia for that time in my life, only a few years earlier, when I knew just about everything that was going on in the place where I lived, and my job was reporting it to the public.
Shortly after my wife and I moved to St. Louis, a bizarre incident occurred which gave me the essential idea for this novel. A quack scientist publicly declared that he’d figured out exactly when the nearby New Madrid fault would undergo a major geological shift, thereby triggering a major earthquake that could potentially destroy much of the city. This sort of prediction is impossible, of course—not even the best geologists in the world can forecast precisely when and where an earthquake will occur—but it didn’t stop the local news media from treating his claim as if it were established scientific fact.
The quake didn’t happen, but the episode did make me aware that St. Louis was particularly vulnerable to such a natural disaster. Once this was combined with a growing interest in the cutting edge of cybernetic technology and the possibility of both artificial intelligence and artificial life, I had the novel I wanted to write.
The research was fun. Work on this book gave me an excuse to explore parts of the city that I might not have learned very much about otherwise, and do things—like go to the Veiled Prophet Ball one year—that I might not have done if they hadn’t presented themselves as opportunities for great scenes. Most of the locales depicted in this novel exist in real life, including Gerry’s house in Webster Groves, which was my own.
Oh, and the dog who appears in the novel? That’s Zack, who was my canine companion and best friend for fifteen years. I still miss him.
Like a number of my early works,
The Jericho Iteration
has outgrown the time in which it was set. St. Louis did not suffer a catastrophic earthquake on May 17, 2012, and I couldn’t be more pleased that it didn’t. And while New Orleans was devastated by Hurricane Katrina, and many New Jersey and Long Island communities were struck hard by Superstorm Sandy, none of these places were impacted in quite the same way as St. Louis was in this novel. ERA was never intended to be a stand-in for FEMA and should not be misinterpreted as such, as some readers apparently have done. I dread any circumstances that might cause a major American city to come under martial law, but real-life disasters such as the ones that occurred after this novel was first published have shown me that reality is (as usual) more complex than fiction.
Nonetheless, I hope the New Madrid fault remains asleep for a long, long time to come.
Allen Steele
Whately, Massachusetts
May 2013
L
ET’S TALK ABOUT JERICHO
.
According to the Book of Joshua, the Canaanite city of Jericho was destroyed after Joshua marched his army around the city’s walls for six days. On the seventh day, upon his command, the Israelites blew their ram’s horns and began to shout. The walls collapsed, thus allowing Joshua and his followers to overrun the Canaanites and claim the city as their own.
That’s how the legend goes, at any rate. About twenty years ago, archaeologists studying the ruins of Jericho in Israel, just outside Jerusalem, arrived at a different conclusion. They uncovered evidence suggesting that Jericho had been destroyed not by ram’s horns but by a major earthquake caused by a geological fault line running through the Jordan Valley. Furthermore, the city was destroyed at least a hundred and fifty years before the reported date of the Battle of Jericho. Hence, the Talmudic account differs considerably from modern interpretations of the same evidence: in short, people took credit for something nature had already done.
And now it’s Friday, April 19, 11:32
P.M.
About three and a half millennia since the fall of Jericho, give or take a few hundred years, but who’s counting? It doesn’t make much difference in the long run. The more things change, the more they remain the same.
I’m sitting cross-legged on the living room floor of an abandoned, half-collapsed house in south St. Louis. It’s the middle of the night, and I’m dictating these notes into my pocket computer. Joker’s nicad is still fully charged, but I’m nonetheless keeping an eye on the battery LED. If it runs low …
Well, I’m sure I can find another. They’re not as hard to find on this side of town as, say, an unclaimed can of Vienna sausage. On my way here I passed a scavenged 7-Eleven about four blocks away; southside looters normally don’t go after batteries, although you never know.
I heard recently about a teenager who was killed scrounging through a video rental shop; seems he had been trying to make out with an armload of movies when a street gang that had claimed the store as their turf caught him. The story that made its way to the
Big Muddy Inquirer
was that they had strung him up from a telephone pole; when he was found the next morning, he had a copy of
Hang ’Em High
wrapped around his purpled neck. A touch of irony, if you like that sort of thing, although I doubt the guys who murdered him would know irony if it shot ’em in the ass with a Smith & Wesson.