Skip to main content

Waking Hell (SF) - Al Robertson ****

In his sequel to Crashing Heaven, Al Robertson manages both to do the expected and to surprise us.

Let's get the surprise out of the way first. Having established a very strong pair of central characters in his first 'Station' novel - Jack Forster and the malevolent but somehow likeable puppet-like virtual entity Hugo Fist - the natural thing to do would be to give us another Forster/Fist story. I was a little sad to start with that he didn't - in fact our previous main characters are sidelined to a couple of mentions (Fist, it seems, is now a chat show host) and instead we have a new central character, Leila to get to know. She's going to have to save the world. Which is something of a challenge, given that she's dead.

There's no doubt that Robertson likes to set himself serious challenges as a writer. Because Leila is a digital, computer-based entity, made up of memories and the 'weave' (internet) remnants of the person after death, she can't actually be somewhere. Whenever she takes part in a scene, the only way she can see, for example, is either through surveillance cameras or through someone else's eyes if they are suitably digitally equipped. It says something for Robertson's meticulous style that he gets away with this and Leila comes across as a person without slipping up too much on the practicalities of her interacting with her environment.

As in the first novel, we have a society on a space station orbiting a ruined Earth where there is a huge interplay between the real world and virtual reality, up to and including a pantheon of gods which are actually digital corporations. But now, Robertson has the chance to fill in some of the past, as well as giving us a fast-paced thriller where the survival of the human race is at stake (again). There are some genuine surprises here and plenty of clever extensions of the whole digital universe metaphor.

As with the previous book, I would say that strictly this is mythology rather than science fiction, because the real-life metaphor in the virtual world is too strong to ever reflect reality. (For example, when a computer virus is produced, it appears in the form of a glowing green test tube.) There are a good range of secondary characters - I particularly liked The Caretaker (though I did guess his true nature earlier than I think the author intended) and the virtual entity Cassiel, who really grows through the book. Perhaps the only issue here was Leila's brother Dieter, who, partly due to the circumstances we find him, in proves a frustratingly vague contributor until the last minute.

As with the previous title, Robertson gives us lots to think about around the way virtual reality and life could become more and more enmeshed - and what that implies for society. There's also a lot about the nature of personality and memory. So we get a good mix of thought-provoking concepts and a page-turning thriller. The only reason the book doesn't have five stars is I felt the parts set on the Earth and the ending felt a little rushed and didn't work quite as well as the rest. But that doesn't stop Waking Hell being, overall, one of the best contributions to truly original SF of the last decade.


Paperback:  

Kindle:  
Using these links earns us commission at no cost to you


Review by Brian Clegg

Comments

Popular posts from this blog

The Decline and Fall of the Human Empire - Henry Gee ****

In his last book, Henry Gee impressed with his A (Very) Short History of Life on Earth - this time he zooms in on one very specific aspect of life on Earth - humans - and gives us not just a history, but a prediction of the future - our extinction. The book starts with an entertaining prologue, to an extent bemoaning our obsession with dinosaurs, a story that leads, inexorably towards extinction. This is a fate, Gee points out, that will occur for every species, including our own. We then cover three potential stages of the rise and fall of humanity (the book's title is purposely modelled on Gibbon) - Rise, Fall and Escape. Gee's speciality is palaeontology and in the first section he takes us back to explore as much as we can know from the extremely patchy fossil record of the origins of the human family, the genus Homo and the eventual dominance of Homo sapiens , pushing out any remaining members of other closely related species. As we move onto the Fall section, Gee gives ...

Pagans (SF) - James Alistair Henry *****

There's a fascinating sub-genre of science fiction known as alternate history. The idea is that at some point in the past, history diverged from reality, resulting in a different present. Perhaps the most acclaimed of these books is Kingsley Amis's The Alteration , set in a modern England where there had not been a reformation - but James Alistair Henry arguably does even better by giving us a present where Britain is a third world country, still divided between Celts in the west and Saxons in the East. Neither the Normans nor Christianity have any significant impact. In itself this is a clever idea, but what makes it absolutely excellent is mixing in a police procedural murder mystery, where the investigation is being undertaken by a Celtic DI, Drustan, who has to work in London alongside Aedith, a Saxon reeve of equivalent rank, who also happens to be daughter of the Earl of Mercia. While you could argue about a few historical aspects, it's effectively done and has a plot...

Amazing Worlds of Science Fiction and Science Fact: Keith Cooper ****

There's something appealing (for a reader like me) about a book that brings together science fiction and science fact. I had assumed that the 'Amazing Worlds' part of the title suggested a general overview of the interaction between the two, but Keith Cooper is being literal. This is an examination of exoplanets (planets that orbit a different star to the Sun) as pictured in science fiction and in our best current science, bearing in mind this is a field that is still in the early phases of development. It becomes obvious early on that Cooper, who is a science journalist in his day job, knows his stuff on the fiction side as well as the current science. Of course he brings in the well-known TV and movie tropes (we get a huge amount on Star Trek ), not to mention the likes of Dune, but his coverage of written science fiction goes into much wider picture. He also has consulted some well-known contemporary SF writers such as Alastair Reynolds and Paul McAuley, not just scient...