The Golden Age by John C. Wright
The Golden Age trilogy is a must-read for any reader of sci-fi. John C. Wright isn't a brand-new voice in the field, but he's newer than most and much more interesting. He has the ability to infuse his stories with a real sense of humanity like Gregory Benford does. These are people that you understand and can sympathize with no matter how strange their world or ways of life are, and that's saying a great deal about an author's ability to write characters. His story is also a stunning portrayal of a realistic future in which people have mastered the ability to alter their consciousnesses to match their physical reality and vice versa, not to mention the incredible power they wield over the physical universe. He asks a great many questions about how people would deal with such power, and answers them convincingly.
On the one hand, this series could be seen as a sci-fi adventure romance, like Indiana Jones in space or Star Wars. On the other hand, the science doesn't invoke the "wink, wink, nudge, nudge" kind of suspension of disbelief that such science fantasy does. His technology is merely a reasonable extrapolation of things we can already do into things that we will be able to do. There's no telepathy, no ESP, no ghosts in the machine. These books could also be read as allegory for the consequences of extreme insularity and an attempt to hold on to a mythical "golden age" as the eternal standard for a society.
John C. Wright's writing style is both fun and trying, as he uses a lot of technical jargon (lawyer jargon, not engineering). He writes magnificently at times, but also as if he's viewing the world through the eyes of someone trained in the legal profession. I mean, whereas many authors would simply gloss over aspects of law, he delves into them in detail and causes great confusion to his reader as we attempt to keep up with what the parties involved are saying. It helps to have a dictionary beside you at all times as you read these books.
The story, in short, is of one Phaethon Prime Rhadamanth, a visionary who has been so thoroughly censured for his vision of the future that he was forced to undertake a memory wipe to make him forget what it his he did. From the beginning though, he becomes involved in either a paranoid delusion or a real threat to human existence and the entire Oikumene (the Greek word meaning inhabited world). At the same time, he's embroiled in a legal dispute with his "father", who either is a perfect copy of the original and thus the legal "inheritor" of his own property, or a flawed copy which gives all rights to his "son". It's pretty weird. The meat of the story is the lengths Phaethon has to go to in order to reclaim what is rightfully his: the Phoenix Exultant (an absolutely beautiful name, and that kind of language mastery is one reason to read this series), a spaceship meant to take Phaethon on interstellar voyages. Phaethon is opposed by the Oikumene itself, as well as hidden enemies (or delusions).
I can't even get into all the amazing ideas Wright has in this series. It's like every other page has something that will have you going, "Wow, that's mind-blowing", in terms of originality. In short, I can't recommend these books enough, and I seriously hope Wright is going to write more science fiction soon.
2 comments:
I thoroughly enjoyed the book overall, but was most amused by his focus on law. Wright isn't above tossing a little satire into his books, and while he does treat legal issues of the future with seriousness, he's not above taking some shots at the absurdities of the law that we'd be familiar with today. My favorite example of this is the scene where Phaethon goes before the probate court, whose judges are personalities recorded into large, black, granite-like cubes who are tasked merely to judge based solely on precedent with no emotion, compassion or concern for justice. Clearly he's making fun of what some regard as the ideal judge in our time, as one who judges solely on legal authority and exercises none of their own sense of justice. But some of the other legal issues he deals with he tackles in all seriousness, especially regarding the fate of Phaethon's "father" Helion, who in losing a significant piece of his memory may end up being judged no longer "Helion" as an independent personage, but merely a recording. Wright stuns the reader with his treatment of future issues I think his approach to the law of such an unimaginable future is most fascinating.
There is that, but of course a lot of it is going to fly over a layman's head. I agree about his sense of humor though. He definitely gets a chuckle now and then.
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