(2018) Andrew Bannister, Bantam, £9.99, pbk, 325pp, ISBN 978-0-857-50337-4
This is the third of Bannister’s novels concerning the Spin, the others being Creation Machine and, set ten thousand years later, Iron Gods. Whereas the others were set within the Spin, this mostly takes place outside of it and is set a hundred thousand years further on.
The Spin is an artificial collection of twenty-one stars and eighty-eight planets arranged in four concentric shells measuring only thirty light-days across. It was created hundreds of millions of years ago though nobody knows how or by whom, let alone why. The machines that created it were extremely powerful and possessed advanced AIs; some of them are still around and they still work, albeit that no-one knows it.
Most inhabitants of the Spin are aware that things are going badly in so many ways. Some are trying to tough it out on those planets that still have systems that allow the ‘old ways’ but many have either fled the Spin to other systems (where they take their chances on survival in societies that either do not want them or else simply exploit them) or have chosen to live in the relative paradise of one of the many thousands of vrealities (virtual realities). However, running the vast server farms needed to maintain the vrealities is draining the last resources of the Spin, leading to conflict between those who tend the servers and those who believe they should simply be switched off and everyone using them left to die.
The story is told by following two characters, Skarbo and Zeb. When we first meet Zeb he is on the planet Shontp. Though it is not a real planet: he is in a vreality! In real life (outside of the vreality) Zeb is a Suncropper on an unnamed planet and is part of the Wall Energy Collective. Like many planets in that part of the Spin, the sunny side of the planet is mostly covered by an orbiting Skylid, a single-molecule-thick membrane which sucks the energy out of sunlight and uses it to power the huge server farms that host the vrealities. The Suncropper Collective consists of only a handful of people and just enough sunlight is allowed to reach the ground where they live in order to grow a few crops and provide a smidgeon of warmth. They are scraping a living but may not be able to do so much longer for Skylids are also known as Shrouds as eventually their effect is to freeze the worlds beneath them and life dies out. Unlike his fellow Suncroppers who prefer the real world, Zeb spends most of his spare time in vrealities and that is where we mostly follow his exploits. An interesting aspect of the vrealities is the accelerated passage of time; a single day of real time is about a thousand years in a vreality.
Skarbo the Horologist was once a human but that was long ago. In his original form, as a student on the planet Ganff, he went up to the Great Dome one night to enjoy the starscape from outside of the city. It was while he was there, concentrating on the circle of distant stars that is the Spin, that his planet was attacked by the Baschet. Being away from the city, he just survived the devastating attack. Then, the Baschet found him and rebuilt his body and he decided that his new body would take an insectoid form. This new body would be far more resilient and allow him a further eight lives, or 'iterations' to be more exact, but he was now very close to the end of the last of these. He had spent most of his lives on the planet Experiment where he had studied the Spin for hundreds of years, producing ever more accurate models of how it works. His research had concluded that the Spin was running down, with maybe only a thousand years left before its planets and suns started crashing into one another.
His studies are disturbed by the arrival of Hemfrets, who claims to be the Regional Representative of the Crown Nebula and annexes the entire planet and all on it. In this context, annexing means reducing every scrap of it to recyclable matter with which repair and build new ships. As Hemfrets takes Skarbo and his friend-of-many-lives Bird (who flies but is not really a bird), their ship is attacked and Skarbo and Bird find themselves in a Converter Sphere, a place in space filled with old and aging spaceships, some with advanced AIs, either waiting to be melted down or finding it a good place to hide out from the rest of the universe. Some of these ships prove to be millions of years old, including the Orbiter (who we met in Creation Machine), a vast spaceship that has filled itself with forests.
The Orbiter has followed Skarbo’s work and agrees with him that the problem with the Spin is that it was never completed; if it could be completed, the Spin would be saved. However, it will take a thousand years for Skarbo to complete all the calculations. Meanwhile, the Warfront, a military coalition of billions of people and spacecraft, is only days away and it is sweeping through the galaxy devouring everything in its path. The Orbiter takes Skarbo and Bird on a mission to save the Spin; after all, as the Orbiter tells them, the Creation Machines are still out there and, if they can find the right one, a day in the real world becomes a thousand years in a vreality.
And so the two story lines converge.
As with the previous stories of the Spin, this is full of inventiveness; indeed, sometimes the ideas came so fast I had trouble keeping up with them and thought them almost skimmed over. Whilst the main story is told through Skarbo and is interesting, I felt that the exploits of Zeb in the vreality did not really amount to much, other than to illustrate how utterly real it felt, how whole civilisations could rise and fall in minute complexity, complete with interplanetary wars. The inhabitants of the vreality thought of themselves as real and behaved that way and, of course, a few such as Zeb were real people participating in it, but not much that happened in his vreality was part of the main story. Maybe I missed something? Without giving away the ongoing plot, the story ends with an odd footnote conversation between the Orbiter and Bird, now in the form of data clouds, in which they discuss levels of vreality in a way that implies that our reality could simply be a vreality created by the vreality above ours, and so on, and at that point I confess to being somewhat confused - was this just a philosophical point or an explanation?
Another thing that has left me wondering is the location for the story. For the first two novels the Spin seemed to be entirely self-contained and had no contact with the rest of the galaxy or even be aware it in terms of other worlds and societies, presumably because of the vast distances involved. Yet in this story travel between the Spin and everywhere else appears normal - maybe that is what a hundred thousand years does for you? But it did leave me wondering if the author has quite thought it all through and has a vision that has yet to become apparent or whether he is simply enjoying a vast but not too well detailed playground in which to set his stories.
In the end I concluded that this is again a well written and interesting novel from Andrew Bannister but, for the reasons above, I just did not enjoy it as much as its predecessors.
Peter Tyers
See also Jonathan's take on Stone Clock.
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