Disposable Lit Reviews

TOR, 2007
331 pp.
ISBN 0-7653-5453-5

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Among the many subgenres of science fiction, none garners as much automatic respect as the worldbuilding novel. I’m not talking about the worldbuilding which has to accompany every SF or fantasy novel, the groundwork of culture and technology which will form the backdrop of the tale. The focused worldbuilding novel is one in which the created environment is a character as important or moreso than any of the human (or comparable sentient being) characters. Usually such a world is based on some audacious conceit into which the author has poured a hefty share of extrapolative thinking to give the reader a wholly alien world which is nonetheless unassailably plausible. It’s exploration of this artifice which drives the narrative; the author has to show off the full scope of his world, and the reader is only too happy to be taken on the tour. The standard examples cited of this kind of worldbuilding-as-star story are Hal Clement’s Mission of Gravity and Larry Niven’s Ringworld.

The best of the these worldbuilding opuses present plots which isn’t only designed as an excuse for show-and-tell. Not only is the story one which could only be told in such an environment, it’s the story which the environment requires to be told. And as there’s a fair amount of such storytelling in Sun of Suns, I’d better get away from general observations and into specifics.

The world of Virga which Karl Schroeder imagines in Sun of Suns is a huge inflated sphere around an artificial sun — think of a Dyson sphere, but filled with atmosphere. Human societies either coalesce around larger asteroids which lazily orbit through the air, or simply inhabit regions with wheel-shaped towns which provide gravity with their spin. The inner countries bask in the glow of the main sun, Candesce, the “sun of suns” of the title, which cycles on and off in a diurnal cycle; farther out, some individual nations have their own smaller fusion-powered suns, which allows them to lord over the smaller nations which have to depend on them for light and heat. Regions unlit by any sun simply become “winter,” where eternal twilight reigns among the floating icebergs.

Why do humans inhabit such a space? That’s never covered in this book, but the details of how humans inhabit this space are so fascinating that the lack of a history of Virga never becomes a liability. Technology is at a vaguely industrial level; cities are made of wood, and people travel short distances over open space by simple flaps or wings on hands and feet and longer distances by two-rider jet-engine “bikes” or via larger enclosed airships. (The source or manufacture of fuel is never elucidated, and neither is food production, except for scattered references to poor farmers growing their crops on soil collected in mesh bags.) Electronics and electrical power are not much in evidence, and interference from Candesce prevents any sort of broadcast transmission. One could peg the technology vaguely at the steampunk level, but that doesn’t do justice to the thought-out manner in which these people live, from the centrifuges available for exercise aboard ships on long voyages to the wind-up fans connected to every handheld lamp (because without the convection currents provided by gravity, a flame would otherwise die quickly).

The political situation is likewise inevitable. Slipstream is one of the stronger nations in the outer regions of Virga, centered on an asteroid whose orbit takes it slowly through other, lesser domains. In a generation, Slipstream can leave one country and enter another, and it makes a habit of conquering those smaller countries in its path. One such is Aerie, a hanger-on just on the verge of igniting its own small sun before Slipstream puts an end to that plan, and young Hayden Griffin, son of the Aerie solar engineers who were killed in Slipstream’s attack to destroy the nascent sun, has now dedicated himself to a resistance movement in Slipstream in order to get close to and kill the general who ordered the attack that destroyed his home.

There’s so much in Virga, that I count as a flaw Schroeder’s introduction of confusing hints about the universe outside Virga, a human civilization governed by “artificial reality” — apparently some sort of virtual reality made real at such a level that such disciplines as engineering no longer exist. One of the characters Hayden encounters is a refugee or exile from that outside world, and her short snapshots of life outside of Virga make no sense to him or, frankly, to us. It’s such a radically different existence outside the sphere that its inclusion here is more annoying than intriguing; it’s a concept which doesn’t mesh well with the general tenor of this book.

Maybe successive volumes in the series (this one ends on a pause in the action that ’s not exactly a cliffhanger) will elucidate the outside universe in such a way that it seems like it belongs in the same books as Virga. I would be happy with simply exploring further the ramifications of living in this world of endless sky.