Voices/Future Tense

Geodesica: Ascent
Geodesica: Descent

By Sean Williams with Shane Dix

Geodesica: Ascent
Paperback: 379 pages
Publisher: The Penguin Group
Language: English
ISBN: 0-441-01269-8

Geodesica: Descent
Paperback: 384 pages
Publisher: The Penguin Group
Language: English
ISBN: 0-441-01378-3

Plot Summary:

In the late 21st to mid-22nd century humanity invented a faster-than-light drive (although not hugely faster) and expanded to the stars, finding occasional evidence of vanished alien civilizations along the way. Late in this process the Singularity took place in the Sol system which then apparently cut off all contact with its various colonies. Human civilization continued among the stars until the 24th century when suddenly Sol appears on the scene again, conquers the scattered human colonies using superior technology and establishes the Exarchate. Under Exarchate rule, solar systems are renamed and are each controlled by an “Exarch”, a multi-plexed post-human operating in multiple augmented bodies. In OA terms they would fall somewhere between a Superior and an S1 transapient.

Some thirty years into the rule of the Exarchate, a new alien artifact is discovered when it drifts into the solar system of the colony world of Sublime. What it is is not clear but just as the investigation has begun; a swarm of nanoreplicators explodes out of the artifact, consumes the research station, then the planet, and then most of the Sublime solar system and forms a shell of interdiction around the entire star. Presumably everything in the system, including its ruling Exarch, has been destroyed. Now jump forward ten years.

The Palmer starship (or Cell as they are called) Nhulunbuy discovers a second artifact in deep space and transports it to the system of Bedlam, ruled by the Exarch Isaac Deangelis. Under a heavy veil of secrecy the artifact (codenamed Geodesica) is deposited in a rapidly constructed research facility and begins to be (very carefully) studied. Very quickly, exciting and disturbing things begin to be discovered.

The artifact appears to be an entrance to some sort of tunnel-like network, although a network of what is unclear. The hope (and fear) is that the artifact could be the key to a new form of interstellar travel, perhaps one much faster than the FTL drive that even the Exarchate is still limited to. Although no definitive evidence of this has been found yet, various parties start to act on this assumption. And the chase is on.

Within the Exarchate various rebel elements become apparent and attempt to wrest control away from Deangelis and the central authority of Sol only to be stopped by the intervention of the Archon, a mysterious entity who represents that authority and who is as far beyond the Exarchs as they are beyond humans. Among the human population of Bedlam, Melilah Awad, almost two centuries old and chafing under Exarchate rule demands that all information about the artifact be released for the benefit of all. And the Palmer starship captain Eogan, once Melilah’s lover and no longer totally human since joining the Palmers, is caught in the middle.

Vast forces build around the Bedlam system and we learn that the destruction of Sublime was neither the result of alien technology, nor as complete as had been believed. As Book 1 ends a climactic battle ensues, Bedlam falls to the same forces that destroyed Sublime, and Deangelis, Melilah, and Eogan are propelled through the artifact and into the network it leads to.

As the second book of the Geodesica series opens, we find Isaac Deangelis, Melilah Awad, and Palmer Eogan fleeing through the alien space-time network of Geodesica pursued by hunter-killer drones sent by the Archon. Meanwhile, the rebellion among the Exarchate is growing and threatening to descend into civil war. We see various elements of all this through the eyes of Isaac Deangelis in different incarnations (remember that Exarchs operate in multiple bodies and Deangelis was fragmented during the events around Bedlam). The story cuts back and forth between events inside the Geodesica network and the building war against the Archon and Sol until finally we find ourselves millions of years in the future where events reach a rather unexpected climax. Geodesica plays games with space as well as with time you see and what seems like only days or weeks inside the network to our heroes, turns out to be rather a lot…longer.

The resulting conclusion is both inspirational and bittersweet. We see a far future humanity quite different from most depictions and end on a note of both closure and new horizons opening.

OA Relevance: Moderate

The Geodesica novels paint an interesting picture of the future containing a number of OA-esque elements, but feel quite different. The Exarchs are somewhat super-human but often depicted in ways that show they are also still all too human as well. The Archon is something else again but is onstage for a relatively short time.

The science depicted is not very hard nor do the books make any particular pretensions to that goal. This is space opera and the goal of the super-advanced technology is to advance the story, not provide a physics lesson. That said, there are several concepts that were sufficiently compelling that I found myself wondering how such a thing might work in OA. In particular the Palmer “Cells”, fractal holographic starships operating as swarms of independently maneuvering units and able to bud off functionally identical sub-parts (with a corresponding loss of size and mass) or fuse them together to make a larger vessel are fascinating. By far this will probably be the most interesting concept from the perspective of an OA minded worldbuilder or speculative thinker.

The rest of the story’s concepts are neat, or at least compellingly described, although I occasionally felt that the Exarchs as described were a bit too human. But that could just be me.

The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly:

Williams and Dix have done a number of SF stories (usually spread across multiple books) with strong transhumanist elements. Having read several of them, I would say a common thread is a strong depiction of an intriguing future that introduces several interesting elements. Unfortunately, a second common thread is that after the first book the story rapidly degenerates into a sort of plodding series of events that runs about a third longer than I really wanted to read. Equally unfortunate, the Geodesica series is no exception.

While the first book sets us up with a number of intriguing events and mysteries, (such that I kept looking for it and ordered it from Amazon the minute it became available), the second book spends most of its time following Deangelis, Awad, and Eogan around inside the Geodesica network while they work out their interpersonal issues and get nowhere very fast. In placing the characters inside an alien FTL transport system, the authors had a chance to wow us with vistas to rival Niven’s Ringworld or Pournelle’s The Avatar (both highly recommended btw). Instead we get to eavesdrop while our characters agonize their way through something like the SF version of a Lifetime movie love triangle and only incidentally explore part of the alien transport network and avoid pursuing killer robots. Character development is all very well but when alien vistas are promised (or at least strongly hinted at) it would be nice if the actual denouement of such managed to do more than bore me. Oh well.

Overall Rating: OK to Good

Buy the first book for the several cool ideas it introduces, especially the Palmer Cell. Buy the second to finish out the story and because the end bits get back a bit of the coolness factor. Buy both books second-hand if you can manage it. Pay new book prices for them and you’ll likely end up feeling you overspent.

More about the reviewer, Todd Drashner, here.

This entry was posted on Friday, November 30th, 2007 at 3:55 am and is filed under Reviews. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.