Tyranny has always been a powerful and destructive force. For it gives over to the one the authority and the freedom of the many, an authority which can then be used as a powerbase from which the tyrant can impose his ideas, his values and his will upon the world. But until recently, tyranny has been hobbled by certain limitations, chiefly, the tyrant's inability to directly command those who are not within his immediate vicinity. After all, a tyrant's will is considerably less fearsome when it is conveyed by letter, or by messenger, and not in person where the receiver can be influenced by all the trappings of the tyrant's station.
With the dawn of the technological age, however, the rules of the game have changed. With instantaneous communication across the length and breadth of the world, tyrants can impose their wills like never before. They can augment their powerbases with technologies that manipulate media, suppress dissent and annihilate resistance. And if such is possible today, what will be possible tomorrow? What will be possible in a century? Can democracy survive such powerful tools falling into the hands of tyrants? Mr. McAuley speculates in a novel that brings to a close the saga begun in The Quiet War.
It is the 23rd century and humanity has reached the stars. Fuelled by enormous leaps in genetic engineering, which have made possible the growing of crops in non-traditional environments, planets and moons from Mars to Saturn, Io to Titan, have been colonized by explorers and adventurers, philosophers and fortune-seekers, all of whom have fled Earth's political corruption and environmental decay. The Outers, as they come to be called, found their communities on utopian ideals of democracy and free will which help to harness the powers of experimentation and creativity which allow them to make huge, technological strides. They consider themselves the future of humanity, a species capable of adapting to any environment, of taking on any guise, of embarking on any adventure.
On Earth, meanwhile, the necessities of repairing a broken climate have nudged Earth-bound humans in an entirely more authoritarian direction. A toxic combination of radical greens, opposed to any form of genetic engineering, and hardline militarists, intent upon holding the reins of power, have abolished all forms of democracy and due process, replacing them with various strains of fascism that range from simple dictatorships to political clans. And so, while the people scrub and scrape at the torn, gray earth, trying to inject life into the corrupted soil, the powerful descend deeper and deeper into intolerance. Finding that they can no longer abide the democratic threat of the Outers, they move against them with nukes and warships, trying to impose upon them the fascism and slavery in such vogue on Earth.
But though the Outers are vanishingly few compared to the billions on Earth, and though they have been decisively defeated in the opening salvos of the Quiet War, they possess what the Earth powers do not, freedom, freedom to change, freedom to adapt, freedom to think beyond the narrow confines of their world. Their weapons are their ideas, viruses that, once they take hold, are almost impossible to uproot. But can these weapons work fast enough? Can they bear fruit before the last of the Outers are wiped out? Only time will tell.
Though at times troubled by aimlessness, Gardens of The Sun nonetheless builds on the creative successes of the work that gave it form. Where The Quiet War preoccupied itself with familiarizing the reader with the various influential factions in the author's fascist future, Gardens of The Sun is much more of a rumination on rebellion and the pros and cons of various forms of government. Here, the environmental alarmism of the first novel gives way to a re-imagination of a kind of American Revolution 23rd-century style, with a band of overmatched freedom fighters trying to live beyond the clutches of a corrupt and cruel aristocracy. All the characters from The Quiet War reappear, though, it's by no means essential to have read that novel. For, here, time moves much more swiftly, covering decades where the prior work managed only months.
For as much as Gardens of The Sun brings this duology to a satisfying conclusion, it is equally clear that Mr. McAuley was, in large part, at a loss as to how to reach the ending he envisioned. Substantial swaths of the work read like summaries of events that either needed to be covered in far more depth or ignored altogether. For the middle road the author has chosen causes the work to read like a book review more than a work of literature. Moreover, in as much as the novel's conclusion is pleasing, it is one of the least earned endings to a successful series I've ever encountered. After spending hundreds of pages building up to the series' political climax, events proceed without hardly any agency being exercised by any of the author's characters. They are, like the readers, left to look on while the world radically changes around them. Perhaps Mr. McAuley was endeavoring to make a point about the nature of change, that it takes whatever form it desires, ignoring the wishes of its prime movers, but it seems far more likely that he did not know how to bring about his denouement.
For all of the work's flaws, let there be no doubt that Mr. McAuley possesses a formidable intellect and a passion for biology. Any science junkie will be well-entertained by this duology while most political animals will find, here, much to maintain their interest. But these talents cannot, here, make up for the deep-seated flaws in plot that prevent the work from reaching anything like its full potential. Solid but disappointing... (2/5 Stars)
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