WE EXPECT science fiction to be otherworldly, but it can stretch well beyond
physical, planetary other worlds. Notions of transcendence, of breaking through
the boundaries of what is considered possible into realms of higher perception,
ability or intellect mark this genre. Hard science can be its backbone, ballast
or inspiration, but often metaphysics drives it, from the vast sweeps of Olaf
Stapledon’s Star Maker to Ian Watson’s God’s World .

Institutionalised religion, for instance, may have more to do with politics
than metaphysics, yet many writers have chosen the Roman Catholic Church as the
backdrop for an exploration of spiritual and moral themes. Perhaps its history
of brutal culture clashes makes it an obvious starting point for building
parallel worlds and arguments about identity and morality: many Earthly cultures
have, after all, encountered Catholicism as an alien arrival. Take, for
instance, the conquistadores reporting home after their arrival in the Americas:
“Spain, we have a problem. There are people here already.” The cardinals
responded, in historian Vine Delora Junior’s paraphrase,: “They’re not people.
End of problem.” Several excellent science fiction novels explore the impact of
transcendent religion on alien cultures including Walter M. Miller, Jr’s A
Canticle for Leibowitz, and James Blish’s A Case of Conscience.

Mary Doria Russell is a worthy successor to this tradition. Children of
God is the sequel to her award-winning first novel, The Sparrow,
which told the story of a Jesuit mission to an alien culture with two sentient
species. Beautifully written by an author with a fine ear for dialogue and a
sure touch in building complex and interesting characters, Children of
God is thought-provoking, and holds your interest to the end. Many memorable
new characters join the survivors from the cast of the first, in a story
spanning forty years of revolutionary change.

Much of the action takes place on Rakhat, a planet in the Alpha Centauri
system, where we learn a lot more about the dual society dominated by the
carnivorous Jana’ata who, for generations, have bred the placid Runa as both
servants and food. Although everyone means well and tries to understand each
other, endless cultural misunderstandings that arose during the first Jesuit
mission have upset the delicate equilibrium of this stratified society, and both
the Runa and the younger sons of Jana’ata, who are forbidden to breed, are
beginning to assert themselves.

The plot intertwines events on Rakhat with the preparations, back on Earth,
for a second Jesuit mission. Because of time dilation the voyage from Earth to
Rakhat takes only a few (subjective) months; meanwhile 17 years pass on the
planets. So Emilio Sandoz, the only person to take part in both missions, finds
that events have overtaken him everywhere he goes. On Earth, religious and
political changes leave him bewildered. On his return to Rakhat, the revolution
has all but run its course.

Moral ambiguity pervades this novel as it did the last, and Russell does not
give easy answers to any of the questions raised by Rakhati society. All three
of the species in the stories have something to offer—all are children of
God. The book is all the more satisfying for the lack of simplistic answers.

Tellingly, it’s often away from established religion altogether that we truly
get to grips with the metaphysical in science fiction. Computer-generated
realities have joined other worlds and alternate dimensions as favourite arenas
for the transcendence of the self.

Alexander Besher’s Chi is a good example of cybermysticism. As
fast-paced, humorous and eclectic as his previous two books, Rim and
Mir, it blends oriental philosophy and Omnispace (Besher’s successor to
cyberspace) in a near-future Asia. Here there is a black market in stolen
life energy—chi, or prana—which is sold to
farangs, Western foreigners, to boost their sexual or intellectual
energies. In a plot careening dizzily from San Francisco to Bangkok, Pinang to
southern Thailand, searchers chase a new source of high-quality chi,
which is being siphoned off from the body of a katoey, a transsexual
prostitute. This world buzzes with karmic forces: digital cameras photograph
auras, people tune in to one another’s chakras, and major corporations market
chiRAMS for organic telenetworking systems.

Attempting to decipher a stolen chi chip, Paul Sykes stumbles upon
the existence of “organic cyberspace” when a philodendron called Rodney patches
him into Gaia’s own interspecies communications system, operating through
morphic resonance. The chip holds messages between two genetically enhanced
orang utans, Tommy and Nita, and Paul sets off for Thailand in an attempt to
find Tommy, and through him, the “Children of Chi” who are the next
stage in human evolution.

Besher was raised in Japan and has spent several years as a consulting
futurist on Pacific Rim affairs. He knows Southeast Asia well, and the rapid
switching of locations, the Chinese and Thai words that pepper the text, and the
vast mix of cultures are exhilarating, and a little disorienting. But his wacky
style lends itself well to this depiction of a world alive with spirit, where
transspecies communication through organic cyberspace offers a hope of
salvation.

Simon Ings doesn’t seem quite so sure of the transcendent potential of
cyberspace. Headlong, his fourth novel, is an intelligent,
compassionate portrayal of one man’s struggle to rediscover his humanity after
the plugs wiring him up to enhanced sensory input are disconnected. Christopher
Yale and his wife Joanne were post-humans, working with self-replicating
nanotech machines to build new cities on the Moon, their brains wired up to
enable direct access to the computer systems and construction machines they
controlled. Telepathically linked to one another, they experienced a huge range
of senses far beyond the human norm: “I have tasted jazz, and it’s as sweet as
honey and tart as a lime. I have seen the rainbow flow of a woman’s scent, and
heard the soft, melancholy strains of her smile.”

When global economic collapse puts an end to developments on the Moon, the
Yales are forced to return to Earth, where neural implants are illegal. Their
new senses are taken from them, and they find themselves locked back into their
own skulls, suffering from Epistemic Appetite Imbalance, in which the input from
their eyes, ears and other human senses is too weak to register on their brains,
which have become accustomed to processing so much more. They divorce, and some
months later Christopher learns that his wife has been found dead with a hole in
her skull.

However, the ensuing search is less of a whodunnit than a character analysis,
and little of the real action takes place in cyberspace. The focus is on
Christopher and his grapplings with everyday life, told in well-chosen, prosaic
detail. The setting is the battered backstreets of London, now a Royalist
city-state that has seceded from the European Union where life seems to be a
struggle for almost everyone. Yet, unlike many who write about neural implants
and cyberspace, Ings remains firmly grounded in the everyday, with its small
triumphs and disasters and roots in human frailty. Yale’s relationship with his
posthuman powers is not simply one of longing for paradise lost. Rather, the
message of this mature and thoughtful book seems to be that, ultimately, the
human condition itself is wonderful enough to be worth fighting for, and
transcendant itself in comparison to the mire and immorality of a dystopia that
may be just around the corner.

A typical example of the decaying-civilisation scenario is Palace
(Voyager, ÂŁ16.99, ISBN 0 00 224642 2). The first of a new series by
Katharine Kerr and newcomer Mark Kreighbaum, it is set several thousand years in
the future in a distant region of the Galaxy known as the Pinch, where racial
tensions run high between humans and the reptilian Lep. Society is organised
into guilds that pass on technical knowledge, but the citizens look back to a
lost golden age of science. Meanwhile, the aristocracy of Palace scheme and
intrigue as they attempt to control the cyberspace Map. This is familiar
territory, and the story is not particularly well told, but there are more
volumes to come. Readers will, I imagine, be given exactly what they expect.

Jack McDevitt’s Ancient Shores (HarperPrism, $22, ISBN 0 06
105207 8) looks back from the present to hints of a mysterious civilisation that
apparently existed on Earth 10 000 years ago. A large yacht, made of a material
which does not decay, is found buried on a North Dakota farm, about 1600
kilometres from the nearest coastline. Further searches reveal a roundhouse made
of the same unlikely material, buried on a Sioux reservation. The novel then
plods through the political and economic consequences of such a find as the US
government attempts to take control without being seen to cheat the Native
Americans of their land yet again. But McDevitt fails to bring his characters to
life, and few surprises lurk in this tale of ancient artefacts.

Sheri S. Tepper focuses her attention on the ancient institution of
patriarchy. Gibbon’s Decline and Fall (Bantam Doubleday Dell,
$22.95, ISBN 0 553 10054 8) follows the fortunes of seven women who were
at college together in the early 1960s. It is now the year 2000, and life is
becoming more difficult for women. A coalition of antifemale forces, calling
itself the Alliance, is attempting to reassert male authority.

Then people’s sex hormone levels begin to drop. This phenomenon reminds the
women of their friend Sophy’s story about Elder Sister, who used to keep
everybody’s sex in her medicine bag until men overpowered her and let sex out.
Opening as near-future realism, the novel metamorphoses into a mythical telling
of the struggle between those who desire domination and the forces of balance
and harmony. It entwines Native American folk legends with modern science
fiction in a well told story of female anger.

Michael Flynn’s Firestar (Tor, $25.95, ISBN 0 312 85525 7)
also dips into the immediate future. It is a well written, densely textured
story about the desirability of heroism and courage. Mariesa van Huyten, the
richest woman in North America, is the driving force behind the Prometheus
Project, a private enterprise space programme. Mariesa knows that to establish a
permanent presence in space, not only technology is needed, but also young
people with vision, hope and belief in the future. So the project includes a
Utopian brand of education that encourages the talents of each child.

Flynn is challenging the prevailing cynicism of young people in the 1990s. As
one of his characters remarks: “Perhaps America is ready for heroes again.” If
so, Flynn provides plenty, from the macho test pilots to the black ghetto kids,
to Styx the pale young poet, to Mariesa herself, trying to change the world
singlehanded. Firestar fires the imagination with its hopeful view of
the early years of the next century.

Robert Silverberg follows space exploration to its next stage.
Starborne (Voyager, ÂŁ15.99, ISBN 0 246 13721 5) is set aboard the
Wotan, the first interstellar ship, on its faster-than-light voyage in search of
a suitable world to colonise. And we travel in the hands of a master.
Silverberg’s touch is assured, his prose clean and wonderfully effective in
developing the characters of some of the fifty crew members as they work, make
love, play Go, bicker and argue. Contrasted with the claustrophobic humanity of
these people, the worlds they visit are terrifyingly alien. Silverberg has
succeeded brilliantly in conveying the unknowable strangeness of the universe.
This is a book to devour whole, but its images will remain with the reader for a
long time.