From: Damien Broderick (d.broderick@english.unimelb.edu.au)
Date: Wed Nov 29 2000 - 21:39:28 MST
At 12:55 PM 29/11/00 -0500, Sabine wrote:
>I'm reading the new book by Poul Anderson right now. I'm almost at the
>middle of this book and so far I'm very amazed by it's story.
>
>Has anyone already read this book? What's your opinion?
Maybe I sent this previously, apologies if so. It's the review I wrote for
The New York Review of Science Fiction, which was published in slightly
different form:
========================
*Genesis* by Poul Anderson
New York: Tor Books, 2000; $23.95 hc; 256 pages
reviewed by Damien Broderick
Stanislaw Lem, the great Polish polymath and sf writer/critic, published
*Fantastyka i Futurologia* in Cracow in 1970. It included a long discussion
of Olaf Stapledon's magisterial 1930 novel *Last and First Men* and its
even grander sequel *Star Maker (1937)*.[note 1] Lem critiques several
aspects of Stapledon's two billion year future history, noting almost in
passing that its repeated total regressions in technological progress are
implausible, constructed only for the literary motive that taking into
account genuinely expectable change would have made it impossible to write
the novel.
Vernor Vinge would independently rediscover what he would term the
Singularity more than a decade later (in his *Marooned in Real-Time*,
1986).[note 2] Lem wrote:
[start indented block]
But let us keep in mind that another vision, in which the species'
cataclysmic degeneration is not so profound - in other words, in which
there would be some continuity in the current of civilizational
transformations - would have made it impossible to write the book. For the
ascent that follows exponentially from this premise would surpass the
capacities of any artist's imagination. This means that even if the fate of
humanity is not at all tragic, we are incapable of plausibly foreseeing -
in the very distant future - different qualities of being, other than the
tragic... But the existence of future generations totally transformed from
ours would remain an incomprehensible puzzle for us, even if we could
express it.
It is a law of civilizational dynamics that instrumental phenomena grow at
an exponential rate. Stapledon's vision owes its particular form and
evenness to the fact that its author ignores this law... Technological
development is an independent variable primarily because its pace is a
correlative of the amount of information already acquired, and the
phenomenon of exponential growth issues from the cross-breeding of the
elements of the mass of information... His cautious pen never drove the
narrative to `techno-orgiastic escalation'... (pp. 285-7)
[end indented block]
Vinge realized this much later, eventually creating a Zoned universe, in *A
Fire Upon the Deep* (1991), that allowed certain restrictions on routine
and swift technological transcendence - allowing him, as well, to create a
rip-snorting yet principled space opera. Lem's entire discussion is worth
reading for its nuance as well as its priority. His scathing criticism of
the failure of imagination of Western sf is now rather dated, happily, but
still applies to most `consumer fodder' science fiction.
His own apparent lapse of imagination - that proviso, `in the very distant
future' - is compensated by his insistence that *already* we have achieved
most of the great technical breakthroughs expected by Stapledon no sooner
than millennia or even millions of years hence. `[T]he moment of the
chromosome structure's discovery cannot be separated by "long millennia"
from an increase in knowledge that would permit, for example, the species
to direct its development' (p. 285). He even preempts Vinge's metaphor of
an event horizon of prediction: `[Stapledon] has invalidated the real
factors of exponential growth, which obstruct all long-range predictions;
we can't see anything from the present moment beyond the horizon of the
21st century' (p. 287).
No less remarkably, perhaps, Lem made a cognitive leap still seldom seen, I
believe, in most futurism. There are reasons to doubt his conclusion, but
it is an impressive leap of connective imagination:
`Predictions beyond 80 or 100 years inevitably fail. Beyond that range lies
the impenetrable darkness of the future, and above it, a single definite
sign indecipherable, but impinging on us all the more: the Silence of the
Universe. The universe has not yielded to the radiance of civilizations; it
does not scintillate with brilliant astro-technical works - although that
is how it should be, if the law of psychozoic beings were an aspect of the
exponential ortho-evolution of instrumentality in cosmic dimension.' (p. 288)
Must we assume that cosmic superintelligences, whether AI or augmented
organic beings, future human or past alien, would place their stamp
detectably on the physical universe? In Arthur C. Clarke's *The City and
the Stars* (1956), advanced intelligences re-position seven different
coloured stars to form a ring in the heavens. They might not be so modest.
Emblematically - since They might be impelled by aesthetic whimsies as
readily as by economic imperatives. Consider a fragment from a recent
Australian young adult sf novel (please forgive the self-indulgence):
[start indented block]
Now the sun was definitely brighter. In the year 2,173,698,172 its furnace
was burning harder, and according to Daddy it was more than ten percent
hotter than in our own time... The earth was empty again...
`Oh my god,' Dad said, as the first stars began to prick out in the heavens.
`Funny way to set up your satellites,' I muttered... `They must have built
more of those orbital rings and stuck them everywhere. You'd think they'd
bang into each other.'
`Not satellites, darling. Those are stars,' Daddy said, and came and sat
down beside me on a shelf of cooling rock, putting his arm around me
tightly. `That's what they've done to the stars.' The sky was a vast
curving criss-cross grid of points of hard light, like atoms seen from
inside a crystal.
Someone had actually revised the sky. Somebody had come in and moved the
stars around. Some Mind had reached out and flicked the billions of
burnings suns of the Milky Way as if they were some kid's marbles.
`A moiré pattern,' Dad mused.
`A what?' I looked at the changed universe with horror, but also
wonderment...
`It's a spherical grid,' Dad was saying in a frail voice, `all the stars
have been moved to locations at regular intervals on a series of concentric
spheres,' but I hardly heard a word. I just looked and looked, and you
could see places where the spots of brilliance ran together, which was just
where the lanes of light overlapped in the endless dark deeps of galactic
space. The Milky Way itself was gone, its billions of stars relocated into
the grand crazy rational design. But you could pick out the core of the
galaxy, because that was the brighter place that the endless onion skins of
stars wrapped themselves around.
`Wow,' I said. `Oh, wow.' [note 3]
[end indented block]
All this as prelude to Poul Anderson's interesting attempt to confront that
basic and almost unsurmountable fact about the far future. Technological
time will be neither an arrow nor a cycle (in Stephen Jay Gould's phrase),
but an upwardly accelerating curve. It will pass through what Vinge terms a
Singularity and what I call the Spike. [note 4] Unless self-inflicted
disaster inevitably reduces intelligence to ruin and global death, it is
plausible that consciousness will proliferate, mutating and extending its
own capacities, perhaps replacing its very substrates - relocating itself,
for example, from limited organic bodies to very much more adaptable
synthetic forms (discussed by Hans Moravec in his recent astonishing book
*Robot*). [note 5] Poul Anderson, like Fred Pohl and other sf writers
steeped in the ever-revised history of the future, is familiar with
Moravec's extrapolations, and builds them gracefully into his own saga of a
galaxy a billion or more years farther off into deep time.
An earlier version of *Genesis*, a 100-odd page novella, appeared several
years ago in Gregory Benford's uneven anthology *Far Futures*. Anderson's
tale was perhaps overshadowed by Greg Egan's extraordinary "Wang's Carpets"
in a competing volume, Greg Bear's anthology *New Legends*: a
post-Singularity story so uncompromising that it seeded his remarkable
novel *Diaspora*, probably the most rigorous posthuman sf work yet published.
Now Anderson extends his story of Gaia's plans for ancestral Earth
threatened by a swelling, terminal Sun. The vast, immanent AI custodian and
consciousness of the world, Gaia rather frighteningly wishes to allow the
world to perish in final flame rather than disrupt the `natural'
astrophysical trajectory. Other mighty Minds throughout the galaxy, and to
the `shores of the Andromeda', find this plan perverse. One such godlike
node, Alpha, hives off a sub-mind (still Olympian by our standards), and
sends Wayfarer to Earth to investigate and intervene. A still more
diminished aspect or agent of this fragment, a reconstruction of the early
upload engineer Christian Brannock (merely a human-scale genius), visits
the planet as his larger self communes and debates with Gaia. What he
finds, inevitably, is baffling yet emotionally moving (in its constrained
way), recalling those Norse sagas Anderson loves so well.
And all of this impossibly remote story is told to us as myth, as
repeatedly distanced construct. We are informed again and again that what
we read is nothing like the vast reality (as of course must be so, given
the premises of ruthlessly projected futurism). `All is myth and metaphor,
beginning with this absurd nomenclature [Alpha, Wayfarer]. Beings like
these had no names. They had identities, instantly recognizable by others
of their kind. They did not speak together, they did not go through
discussion or explanation of any sort, they were not yet "they". But
imagine it' (p. 112).
And we do, for we have been here before. This is the grand proleptic
mythology of Stapledon himself, of Roger Zelazny's `For a Breath I Tarry'
(1966) - in which Machine remakes Man, but there bows before Him (which is
absurd and sadly farcical, however much we loved that story in the 1960s).
In this revised version of his myth, Anderson eases our entry to allegory
via several well-formed episodes from the comparatively near future: a
boy's epiphany beneath starry heaven, in our Earth; Christian's empathy
with his robotic telefactor extension on Mercury, prelude to his own status
as an uploaded and finally multiply-copied personality; English bureaucrat
Laurinda Ashcroft who plans the first millennial salvation of Earth from
the brute assaults of a heedless cosmos; a small, neat parable of rigid,
gorgeous clan rivalries held in check and paralysis, finally, by the
emerging Mind of Gaia. These are Anderson's antinomies again (and perhaps
American sf's): the sacred autonomy of the self, the craving for
transcendence in something larger; personal responsibility, and its
terrible limits in a world linked, defined, by a billion threads.
Returned to Earth, Wayfarer's Brannock and Gaia's Laurinda tarry in 18th
century civility, falling in love (of course), driven together and apart by
a series of visitations to simulated histories as dense and real and
tormented and doomed as the `real world'. Their own personalities are no
less constructed (of course), however rooted in some small early reality,
and so the poignancy of their dilemma is the greater. But for us, knowing
that we read a fiction, and fetched in a kind of postmodern gesture again
and again by Poul Anderson from our comfortable readerly illusion, these
figures and their worlds run the risk of all allegory: can we care?
It is the great artistic problem for any form of art that expects utter
disruption. Religious art faced it long ago, and clad its transcendent
message in parable, majestic song - and quietness, sacralized domesticity,
anguish transformed at the graveside. These are territories Poul Anderson
has trodden in all his work, more so, perhaps, than any of his peers. Now
he confronts the Singularity, reaching to these well-honed tools to give
himself voice and range, and perhaps he succeeds as well as anyone can
manage - given that the task is impossible. I suspect he does not, however.
It might not be his fault, if so: it might be that it takes an entire
culture to sustain such myths. Sf has begun to grow the myths, but
meanwhile the world's culture turns them into jingles and plastic toys. It
will be interesting to see how the genre, the mode, of sf responds to this
immense new perspective. For now, Poul Anderson has made a brave early
foray into its pitiless depths.
========================
1. Parts of this chapter were translated (via Hungarian) by Istvan
Csicsery-Ronay, Jr, and published in 1986 in *Science-Fiction Studies* (Vol
13, p. 272-91).
2. Perhaps this insight was achieved prior to Lem: I would be grateful to
learn if he, too, was anticipated.
3. *Stuck in Fast Forward* by Damien Broderick and Rory Barnes (Sydney:
HarperCollins Australia 1999).
4. *The Spike: Accelerating into the Unimaginable Future* (Melbourne,
Australia: Reed Books 1997).
5. *Robot: Mere Machine to Transcendent Mind (Oxford University Press, 1999
==============================
Damien Broderick
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