Helpful Score: 3
I think that to review this book I am going to have to use spoilers. There's no way to talk about it without spoiling something, and to tell you the truth I wish someone had spoiled this stuff for me, because the jacket description, the artwork, even the title are a bit misleading. The book I read, which I think was actually pretty strong (if old-fashioned) big idea science fiction, is not at all the book I was expecting to read. The spoilers will be kept general, on the order of "spoiling" Romeo & Juliet by saying it's a tragedy where everyone dies by the end, but I'll put it all behind a cut anyway.
------------------CUT FOR SPOILERS-------------------
The apocalypse comes quickly, an asteroid that sneaks up in the Earth's blindspot, so only seven people manage to make it off the planet to Tycho Base. This isn't a problem, because they've been preparing for something like this to happen, so the base is manned by robots and run by a computer; there's cloning technology (which is apparently not prone to replication error) and they have frozen samples from plenty (a number is never given) of people and animal and plant species -- everything they need to one day terraform the Earth. What is a problem is that they weren't prepared yet, so the base isn't fully functional. The seven survivors do what they can to make records of their lost (entirely American) civilization, and then they die.
All of which happens before the start of the book. The computer watched the planet for who knows how long (eons) keeping itself and its robots running, until the planet cleansed itself after the meteor impact -- there's a mention of volcanic activity that subsided and an Ice Age that came and went, but magically the continents are still in exactly the same place. Then it began to run its program, which involved birthing the clones of five of the survivors who have the skills to reseed the planet with life like we had known it. They're raised by the robots and holograms of their progenitors which have personality and some sort of artificial intelligence (the holograms can respond to their children, and learn, and think, though there's never any talk about artificial intelligence) and when they reach adulthood they're sent down to the planet to survey and spread the building blocks of our sort of life.
This begins a cycle. Clone generation after clone generation is born and raised identically, hundreds or thousands or millions of years apart from previous generations; each generation tries to plant the seeds of life and steer it to provide a good place for humans to recolonize, building on records left by previous generations of clones. Because they do receive the same upbringing and are genetically identical, it's easier for the reader to think of the clones as all the same person -- every Dunk (the narrator) is the same, even though Williamson has them often say they are their own people. And every time they go down to the planet, some of them die, or they discover that life has taken a very unexpected (and dangerous) turn.
They actually do manage to start several small human civilizations, but they are wiped out in their turn, and the computer on the base has to resurrect yet another generation to start again.
There are alien encounters, though they aren't at all convincingly alien. And the whole thing ends up feeling like an exercise in futility. The poor clones, born to die, seem like science fiction versions of Sisyphus.
I think that all this was Williamson's goal, and if so then he did accomplish what he wanted with the book. I didn't particularly enjoy it, but I think it is what it was intended to be, so I have to say that it's well-done. What hurt it (beyond my dislike for exercizes in futility) was that it felt like a throwback, like Williamson (who was 93 when this was published, and first started writing in the late 20s) never got beyond the science fiction of the 1960s. As mentioned above, there's no evidence that Williamson understands plate tectonics -- by the end of the book we must be hundreds of millions of years in the future, but the clones still look down from the moon at "the Americas" or "Asia" or "Africa" or "the Mediterranean." The whole question of artificial intelligence is never raised, and it really needed to be for me to get any picture of how Tycho Base worked. His portrayal of relativistic space travel seemed. . . inaccurate, though I will admit I'm not a physicist. I should say it doesn't at all fit with what I know from modern science fiction novels written by physicists.
And even more than all that science that seemed lacking in what felt like a hard science fiction novel, the race and gender relations portrayed in the book are very much a product of a 50s/60s mentality. There are three women in the eight people cloned at one point or another: one is the keeper of the cultural artifacts, a virgin locked in her tower of the past; one is a biologist who "understands and enjoys" sex and shares with all of the men who are interested; the third is cloned only twice, the girlfriend of one of the men who, when she isn't cloned, becomes a sort of mythic ideal he spends his life pining for. The women never play any role in reseeding the planet; often they end up being held captive in Tycho Base by the paranoid alpha male.
Of the men, one is a Latino of some sort (it's never clear where his ancestors are from, but we meet him in New Mexico) and the pilot; in every incarnation he simply follows whoever leads. Another is "black as tar, though he had an Oriental poker face" and he is the one person who forced his way onto the shuttle leaving the dying earth. A night watchman at the facility, he kept the crowds back while the chosen few made it onboard with their supplies and then pulled a gun and insisted that they take him and his girlfriend (the soon-to-be mythic ideal) with them. He isn't resurrected at first, but when he is he immediately is set up, time after time, against the paranoid alpha male, and time after time he loses. In one iteration, the alpha male sets up a tyrannical government that runs on slave power, and all the slaves are clones of "El Chino," the former night-watchman.
So when I pretended to myself that it had been written in 1958, I could look past all those elements; when I reminded myself that it was published in 2001, I had to roll my eyes and wonder what the editors at Tor were thinking.
But still, if I ignore all those throwback elements, the book does accomplish what I think Williamson intended. It seems an awfully depressing future, full of futility and hubris, but I got it, and I think the book would work for people who like reading that sort of thing.
------------------CUT FOR SPOILERS-------------------
The apocalypse comes quickly, an asteroid that sneaks up in the Earth's blindspot, so only seven people manage to make it off the planet to Tycho Base. This isn't a problem, because they've been preparing for something like this to happen, so the base is manned by robots and run by a computer; there's cloning technology (which is apparently not prone to replication error) and they have frozen samples from plenty (a number is never given) of people and animal and plant species -- everything they need to one day terraform the Earth. What is a problem is that they weren't prepared yet, so the base isn't fully functional. The seven survivors do what they can to make records of their lost (entirely American) civilization, and then they die.
All of which happens before the start of the book. The computer watched the planet for who knows how long (eons) keeping itself and its robots running, until the planet cleansed itself after the meteor impact -- there's a mention of volcanic activity that subsided and an Ice Age that came and went, but magically the continents are still in exactly the same place. Then it began to run its program, which involved birthing the clones of five of the survivors who have the skills to reseed the planet with life like we had known it. They're raised by the robots and holograms of their progenitors which have personality and some sort of artificial intelligence (the holograms can respond to their children, and learn, and think, though there's never any talk about artificial intelligence) and when they reach adulthood they're sent down to the planet to survey and spread the building blocks of our sort of life.
This begins a cycle. Clone generation after clone generation is born and raised identically, hundreds or thousands or millions of years apart from previous generations; each generation tries to plant the seeds of life and steer it to provide a good place for humans to recolonize, building on records left by previous generations of clones. Because they do receive the same upbringing and are genetically identical, it's easier for the reader to think of the clones as all the same person -- every Dunk (the narrator) is the same, even though Williamson has them often say they are their own people. And every time they go down to the planet, some of them die, or they discover that life has taken a very unexpected (and dangerous) turn.
They actually do manage to start several small human civilizations, but they are wiped out in their turn, and the computer on the base has to resurrect yet another generation to start again.
There are alien encounters, though they aren't at all convincingly alien. And the whole thing ends up feeling like an exercise in futility. The poor clones, born to die, seem like science fiction versions of Sisyphus.
I think that all this was Williamson's goal, and if so then he did accomplish what he wanted with the book. I didn't particularly enjoy it, but I think it is what it was intended to be, so I have to say that it's well-done. What hurt it (beyond my dislike for exercizes in futility) was that it felt like a throwback, like Williamson (who was 93 when this was published, and first started writing in the late 20s) never got beyond the science fiction of the 1960s. As mentioned above, there's no evidence that Williamson understands plate tectonics -- by the end of the book we must be hundreds of millions of years in the future, but the clones still look down from the moon at "the Americas" or "Asia" or "Africa" or "the Mediterranean." The whole question of artificial intelligence is never raised, and it really needed to be for me to get any picture of how Tycho Base worked. His portrayal of relativistic space travel seemed. . . inaccurate, though I will admit I'm not a physicist. I should say it doesn't at all fit with what I know from modern science fiction novels written by physicists.
And even more than all that science that seemed lacking in what felt like a hard science fiction novel, the race and gender relations portrayed in the book are very much a product of a 50s/60s mentality. There are three women in the eight people cloned at one point or another: one is the keeper of the cultural artifacts, a virgin locked in her tower of the past; one is a biologist who "understands and enjoys" sex and shares with all of the men who are interested; the third is cloned only twice, the girlfriend of one of the men who, when she isn't cloned, becomes a sort of mythic ideal he spends his life pining for. The women never play any role in reseeding the planet; often they end up being held captive in Tycho Base by the paranoid alpha male.
Of the men, one is a Latino of some sort (it's never clear where his ancestors are from, but we meet him in New Mexico) and the pilot; in every incarnation he simply follows whoever leads. Another is "black as tar, though he had an Oriental poker face" and he is the one person who forced his way onto the shuttle leaving the dying earth. A night watchman at the facility, he kept the crowds back while the chosen few made it onboard with their supplies and then pulled a gun and insisted that they take him and his girlfriend (the soon-to-be mythic ideal) with them. He isn't resurrected at first, but when he is he immediately is set up, time after time, against the paranoid alpha male, and time after time he loses. In one iteration, the alpha male sets up a tyrannical government that runs on slave power, and all the slaves are clones of "El Chino," the former night-watchman.
So when I pretended to myself that it had been written in 1958, I could look past all those elements; when I reminded myself that it was published in 2001, I had to roll my eyes and wonder what the editors at Tor were thinking.
But still, if I ignore all those throwback elements, the book does accomplish what I think Williamson intended. It seems an awfully depressing future, full of futility and hubris, but I got it, and I think the book would work for people who like reading that sort of thing.
