Through science, humanity has gained access to unimaginable power. It has conveyed the knowledge to level cities and decode genes, measure the stars and explore the ocean depths. It has even allowed us to create synthetic life while blunting the attacks of terrifying diseases. From healing to history, from war to wealth, all has been made possible through science except for one critical element. Science cannot grant wisdom. Science cannot bestow the kindness to deploy its secrets only for good. Science cannot transmit morality. It has no tests to pass, no thresholds to meet. Knowledge simply is, waiting for anyone to harness it. This has been a difficult lesson for humanity to learn. It has come at the cost of nuked cities and experiments gone terribly awry. And even then we are left to wonder how long the lessons stay learned. Mr. Swan ruminates in his expansive and fantastic space opera.
The year is 2525 and, despite numerous, bone-jarring bumps along the way, humanity has survived its rocky ascendance into an interstellar civilization. Dictatorial Revolutions and interspecies wars have come and gone, leaving behind a legacy of fear, paranoia and religiosity. For experiments with genetic engineering, nanotechnology and artificial intelligence have all ended badly enough that a species-wide taboo has grown up to ban their use. Nonetheless, remnants of these experimental eras live on, not only in the fearsome tiger men of Grimalkin but in the optimalized humans of Dakota. They persist in the posthuman mindscapes of the Proteans and in the generational memories of the lost colonies. These unsubtle reminders of humanity's boldly investigative past have bequeathed the 26th century with a tangled knot of desires and prohibitions that have fractured human space into three basic factions.
Siding with Earth and it's surrounding systems is the Roman Catholic church. The only institution to have survived the various upheavals of the last three centuries, it has effectively become Earth's government, providing moral guidance while rigorously enforcing its various bans on forbidden technologies. Locked in a cold and polarizing alliance with the church is the Caliphate, a cluster of Islamic worlds which have overcome the political chaos of their turbulent past to cohere around a notionally liberal interpretation of both Islam and its law. Between these two frictional forces reside various unaligned worlds, planets where political, economic and societal experiments have been allowed to unfold, adding to the diversity of life in this corner of the galaxy.
In Prophets, the trilogy's first instalment, this delicate balance of powers is unsettled by two seemingly unrelated but eminently disturbing revelations. First is the re-discovery of a series of lost human colonies which have kept themselves separate from the rest of the galaxy for nearly 200 years. This self-imposed seclusion is shattered when a protean egg ship, a vessel containing a theatre of digitized minds, crashes onto the surface of one such colony, bearing a terrifying message, that, in the course of its mission to transport the minds to their eventual destination, it stopped to investigate an anomaly around CY Virginis, a nearby star. Its encounter with the unknown force nearly destroyed the powerful Protean egg, forcing it to limp away in hopes of finding a safe harbor to repair itself.
Thought to be a threat, the colony distrusts the Protean warning. For two other ships have arrived on the heels of the egg, not only further violating its seclusion but dispelling any notion amongst the colonists that the egg was acting alone. The first of these visiting vessels is composed of mercenaries captained by a banned intelligence that has been lured to the lost colony by a foe thought long dead. The second ship proves to be of far greater concern to the wider human community when it is revealed to be a new class of Caliphate vessel, one that has made a quantum leap forward in sophistication. Where did the knowledge to make such sudden and remarkable progress come from and does it have anything to do with the thing that attacked the Protean egg? Actors from each of the human factions converge upon the lost colony to bear witness to a new, dark era of humanity. In Heretics, the trilogy's second volume, Adam, the name given to the enemy threatening all of human space, has, with a single, incomprehensible stroke, damaged many of the vessels, communications networks and political alliances that once gave order to the region. The resulting chaos has prevented anything like a concerted resistance from forming against Adam's relentless march of destruction. Unleashing his energies against overmatched worlds, the humans who have witnessed his atrocities can only look on as he forceably redesigns entire civilizations, first reducing them to rubble and then rebuilding them into a configuration pleasing to him. This awesome application of force causes increasing numbers of frightened members of all factions to join him, become a small faction of Adam's overall essence, diversity to be added to the ideal new world he will create when he is through annihilating the old.
Despite Adam's best efforts, however, Father Malory, an agent of the Vatican who conned his way into the mercenary crew that first witnessed Adam's coming, has escaped back to Bakunin, a free world where there is at least some assets to deploy against this overwhelming threat. His efforts to create an alliance among the notoriously individualistic residents of Bacumin, however, prove fruitless until new developments properly convey the urgency of the moment. For Adam has finally reachedEarth and there seems little hope of stopping him from crushing the cradle of humanity.
In Messiah, the trilogy's climactic entry, the war for human space reaches its zenith when Adam's advance is momentarily halted by a loose alliance of human and posthuman forces resisting his tyranny. The rebellion, which is bound together by nothing more than the desire to survive free of Adam's destructive will, threatens, on any number of occasions, to fragment under Adam's relentless pressure. But every moment they fight extends a meager window of time in which a small group of mercenaries and scientists can burrow under the surface of Bacunin, desperately searching for answers to an power left behind by an ancient civilization. Perhaps, if it's power can be harnessed, Adam can be turned back. After all, should they fail, there will be nothing, for anyone, but servitude or death.
Though Mr. Swan relies too much upon the tropes of the genre, and though he is perhaps too fond of the religious allegories that underpin his story, Apotheosis is nonetheless outstanding science fiction. It possesses the moralizing of Star Trek and the nihilism of the re-imagined Battlestar Galactica, the pomposity of religion and the geekiness of futurism, stirring these heady ingredients into an unholy stew of entertainment and philosophy that thrills far more than it bores. Yes, the author's characters trend towards the archetypical, and his plot twists succumb too often to the obvious, but these deficits are more than offset by his consistency of vision and his relentlessness of execution. For when it's time for Mr. Swan to play his difficult cards, to compel his audience to endure the same devastation imposed upon his characters, he does not shy away. He acts with the resoluteness of a hangman, shoving us far from the redemption offered by the easy path. In all of this, he has earned my respect.
A review of this trilogy would be incomplete were it not to comment upon its two primary virtues. Firstly, Mr. Swan rejects the all-too-common deployment of religion in science fiction. Instead of casting it as the extremist boogeyman against which his individualistic heroes can act, he takes the more nuanced approach that religion will still likely possess its moral authority in the centuries to come. It may lose all else to science, but when tragedy strikes and humanity requires something solid and ancient to fallback on, our various faiths will be there to fill that gap. And should the tragedies be of sufficient devastation, doctrinal faith might well take back the mantle of power, promising to steward humanity through an immoral time. Secondly, Mr. Swan's discussion of banned technologies and the taboos that will inevitably arise from their misuse, while not in any way new -- Frank Herbert has him beat by 40 years -- nonetheless holds the reader's attention. The author's refusal to give voice to his own position on the matter allows the reader to pick a side in the inevitable war between the forces that wish to advance swiftly and those who wish to do so cautiously. This allows his chronicle to be different things to different readers, a pleasing outcome given the degree to which science fiction can oftentimes be polemical and narrowminded.
Apotheosis is not perfect, but the degree to which it strives to be different while relying upon the trappings of the old bestows upon it a freshness that is exceedingly welcome in a space rife with derivations. Bold work... (4/5 Stars)
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