Special Circumstances

Celestial Matters by Richard Garfinkle

A successful combination of an alternative history with hard sf ideas, in particular a vividly detailed invented cosmology makes this a remarkable first novel for Richard Garfinkle.

The novel begins in the 935th year since the founding of the Delian League (should be about 500 AD). In this novel, Alexander the Great managed to keep his empire united and he did not turn back at India but kept going until he met with the Middle Kingdom. As the novel begins, there are two superpowers in the world: the Delian League, which consists of Persia, India and the rest of Europe united under the banner of Athens and Sparta and the Middle Kingdom which rules over the Far East and which has established colonies in North and South America.

The one thing that makes this particular alternative history remarkable is the notion that Aristotle's Laws of Physics are exactly right. All of them: so the Earth is stationary at the center of the universe and all the celestial objects rotate about the earth on their own individual "crystalline spheres". Furthermore, the Chinese notions regarding Chi and the functioning of universe is also exactly correct. These rival scientific notions of the universe co-exist in this novel but the science of each side is mysterious to the other. The novel is set in this convoluted cosmology and the success of this book is that it makes it come alive in your mind.

The plot of the novel involves Project Sunthief, the Greek plan to steal a bit of sun's fire itself to use as a weapon against the Middle Kingdom. The essence of a star extracted from the Sun is the fifth element (the quintessence) which is distinct from four elements: earth, wind, air and fire. The fifth element will be the secret weapon the Delian League can use to turn the tide in the long-running cold war against the Middle Kingdom. The head of the project is a Spartan, Aias. His team includes his second-in-command the Persian, Mihradarius and his science officer, the Indian, Ramanojon (sic) along with his navigator, another Spartan, Kleon and his bodyguard, the Stoic, Captain Yellow Hare. The novel follows their trip to the Sun on the airship "Chandra's Tear" with the constant danger of Chinese sabotage and the knowledge that one of the crew is a traitor.

The end result is a rare novel that might appeal equally to fantasy and hard-sf readers. There are some similarities between this alternate history and one published years later: "The Years of Rice and Salt" by Kim Stanley Robinson, but while they both come up with somewhat similar geopolitical settings, each novel speculates about very different outcomes.

%T Celestial Matters
%A Richard Garfinkle
%I Tor Books
%D 1996
%G ISBN: 0312859341 (hc)
%P 348
%K science-fiction

Review written: 2001/02/20

China Mountain Zhang by Maureen F. McHugh

The quote from Camus that starts this book is illustrative about its goals:

A simple way to get to know about a town is to see how the people work, how they love and how they die.

The `town' in this case is a future world which is admirably rendered, gradually taking on depth as the novel proceeds. There have been quite a few sf novels that have the People's Republic of China as the dominant world power. But this speculation hasn't been as written into an sf novel as carefully as is done here. Here McHugh attempts to write about the contemporary relationship between America and China within the context of a science fiction novel about China as the only global superpower.

The future as depicted here is seen through the lives of several characters. One of the main characters is Zhang Zhong Shan or China Mountain Zhang. He's an engineer in training who at the start of the novel cannot afford to go to China to study engineering. He also happens to be gay, in a society where everything is expected to be straight and according to the rules set down by the Party.

The novel changes its first person view to several characters throughout the novel. This style is reminiscent of "Stones in the Wall" which is a non-sf novel written in Chinese by Dai Houying, available in an English translation (since I have not read many Chinese novels I'm not sure if this is a common device). Supposedly secondary characters reappear later with chapters of their own. The novel opens in an economically depressed America which has gone through a Communist revolution (called the Great Cleaning Wind -- insert scatological reference here). It moves later to China which now has the dominant universities and technology and which influences culture in the rest of the world.

Apart from the story of Zhang, there is a parallel thread of a small commune of colonists in Mars. This is the weaker part of this novel. While this part of the book is interesting it has little to do with the rest of the story arc. The story of Martine and Alexi struggling on a farm in Mars is left hanging without a resolution to their ongoing problems. Perhaps this was a point that McHugh wanted to make about their life, but it comes across as if she just ran out of pages to satisfactorily tell their story.

About halfway through this book, you might wonder if there is a plot hiding behind all of these vignettes. This is probably the wrong question to ask of the author. Think of this book as the kind of anthropological sf made famous by Ursula Le Guin. However, The final result is not as skillful as a Le Guin novel; this novel ends quite abruptly. While Zhang's story-arc is resolved, the other characters are suddenly shifted to the background. This is probably just as well, since if the book was any longer than it is, it would just be tedious.

The other misstep is a strangely monotonous lecture on political theory given towards the end of the book by Zhang. However, the combination of feng shui, architecture and engineering that Zhang learns in China, which she dubs Daoist Engineering, seems like one of those nonsensical pursuits that could just become widely popular.

While McHugh is good at explaining the Chinese spoken occasionally by the characters, in a few places there are some words used without an adequate translation nearby. Here are those words:

shanglou: downstairs
xialou: upstairs
zhongguo ren: Chinese person

%T China Mountain Zhang
%A Maureen F. McHugh
%I Orb Book, Tom Doherty Associates
%D 1992
%G ISBN: 0312860986 (pb)
%P 313
%K science-fiction

Review written: 2001/02/09