That our maturity lags behind our inventiveness is one of humanity's gravest shortcomings. For while our brains are capable of phenomenal feats of innovation, the results of which have transformed the world around us, our adolescent morality, in not growing at a pace with our intellectual might, has left us at a loss as to how to come to grips with our power. We are children who have been given handguns to play with. And lacking the training, the respect and the knowledge, we invariably fire blindly, only realizing, with experience, our mistakes.
. This is a difficult lesson to learn for it's not as though maturity is something that can be quantified. More over, it's not as though we can all collectively decide to stop innovating until we're ready to cope with the next step in the technological revolution. We have no choice but to hold on tight and ride the ride, praying that the power we have invented does not fall into the wrong hands. This is the theme of Mr. Hamilton's concluding novel of the Greg Mandel series. It is one that serves the work well.
Now fully on the mend from the twin devastations of political extremism and economic stagnation, England is once again a power to be reckoned with in the international arena. Having nearly been wiped out by anthropogenic climate change, the effects of which elevated its seas, destroyed its crops and turned its climate tropical, the UK is still afloat largely thanks to the powerful and ubiquitous Event Horizon, a corporate superpower with its countless, enterprising tentacles sunk deeply into every technological venture man's dreams have made into reality. Helmed by Julia Evans, its stoic and sound-hearted CEO and granddaughter of its founder, the business titan has almost singlehandedly transformed orbital space travel into a fairly common occurrence, deploying its numerous resources to the harvesting of materials from nearby asteroids in order to replenish Earth's dwindling non-renewables. All this while setting a benchmark of ambition to the rest of the human race which has been so beaten and battered by the Warming.
But after 20 years of largely steady growth, all of that precious progress is in jeopardy. For Royan, Julia's prince consort and one-time, big league data thief, has disappeared. The only clue left behind is a strange flower which is carried to Julia Evans by a high-tech courtesan who is no more aware of its mysterious origins than its recipient. But when Evans has the flower analyzed and realizes it is extra-terrestrial in nature, she is plunged into a race against her competitors to discover just what the flower means and what its consequences are to a human race still recovering from three traumatic decades of global upheaval. For the last time, she turns to her old friend Greg Mandel, ex-military, ex-PI turned orange farmer, for help. After all, Royan means as much to the one-time hardman as he does to Julia and, if he has anything to do with the alien heart of this tangled web, he is in serious danger.
While the Greg Mandel series has had its ups and downs, its successes and its misfires, The Nano Flower is a fitting end to a rewarding trilogy. In advancing the story 20 years from the previous novel, Mr. Hamilton has neatly dispensed with two of the trilogy's biggest problems, Julia Evan's awkward youth and the malformed Peoples Socialist Party whose collectivist policies ground England to a halt. The former, which was a significant drag upon the momentum of A Quantum Murder, is all-but forgotten here. For a middle-aged Julia Evans is far more capable of carrying off the machinations bestowed upon her by her creator than was the adolescent of the prior tales. The jackbooted latter is swept firmly into the past with the dawn of a new world that has replaced the nation state with superpowered corporations that have moved well beyond the restraints of state government. As grim as this future may be, it makes infinitely more sense than the era of the clownish PSP.
The Nano Flower has its weaknesses. Periodically, it devolves into interminable battle sequences customary of Alastair Reynolds. More over, it continues to put forward the argument that future will and ought to be written by business titans whose genius and eccentricity will be the engines that drive us onward. The former is a matter of personal taste. The latter, meanwhile, is at least redeemed by the author's acknowledgement that this approach is an ultimately problematic one in which humanity's future more or less becomes dependent upon the personal character of a handful of hyper elites. This is more than he was willing to grant in either of the prior novels. Given that I've pointed out the flaws in this argument twice before, it's only fair to acknowledge the extent to which the author has tried to shore up, here, the holes in his case.
A fantastic and memorable series... At times philosophical, vengeful, sexy and futuristic, it fulfilled its ambitions to be more than run-of-the-mill science fiction. These were as much experiments in sociology and human nature as they were high-tech thrillrides meant to take us on a vicarious journey into tomorrow. And though A Quantum Murder was the only true mystery in the lot, the plot here keeps the reader guessing, often enough. Lovely work. (3/5 Stars)
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