The Medusa Chronicles (prologue)

This review was fast lane commissioned by @toxinvictory.


This might be a difficult project to tackle, given that it's a fan sequel to a novel that I haven't read. And fan fiction of an author who I probably should have read much more of by this point in my life.

Sir Arthur Charles Clarke was one of the biggest names in the twentieth century's second wave of literary science fiction. He, Isaac Asimov, and Robert Heinlen are sometimes called the "big three" science fiction authors of the highly productive 1940's-70's era. Clarke's most famous work is undoubtedly the "Space Odyssey" series, largely because of how successful the movie adaptation of the first book ("2001") ended up being. The rest of the series probably would have gotten the same fame if he hadn't waited over a decade between books; seriously, he wrote "2001" in 1952, and only just barely managed to publish "Final Odyssey" a decade before his own death in 2008. Yes, it took him fully half a century to finish that series.

He's also the namesake of Clarke's Law - "Sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic." Clarke definitely had a thing for superadvanced aliens with godlike power borne of technology. What grounds his work in a way that many similar authors' lack is that, for the most part, Clarke's depiction of future human technology is pretty close to hard scifi. Of the kind that only a licensed engineer and patented inventor like himself can convincingly pull off.

I've only read one Clarke novel so far, making him the member of the "big three" whose work I have the least firsthand experience with. And, one of the books by him that I did NOT read was 1971's "A Meeting with Medusa," to which 2016's "The Medusa Chronicles" by Stephen Baxter and Alistaire Reynolds is a fan-created sequel. Which brings me to the point of this whole extended intro. I'm being forced to rely on the blurb at the start of this book (and a little bit of internet searching) to understand what this is a sequel to, and I'm sure I'm missing a lot of important nuances.

But, given that the authors of "Medusa Chronicles" saw fit to write a "last time on," I can only trust their judgment when it comes to which bits I need to be filled in on.


Sixty years into our future, a British aviator named Howard Falcon is killed in a crash and then resuscitated through a highly experimental cybernetic reconstruction. For reasons that I haven't been able to find either in the blub or through cursory googling, the success of Falcon's treatment is not followed by a wave of other dying patients being saved with cyborg bodies. Years afterward, he's still the only one.

When the 2090's roll around, Falcon is sent on a mission to explore the atmosphere of Jupiter. They couldn't figure out an aircraft that can both withstand Jovian conditions and keep an organic human pilot alive, but they can get around that by installing Falcon into a probe. The mission was a success, and Falcon's airship-like probe was released into the gas giant's upper atmosphere to begin a long, solitary exploration. He discovers that Jupiter has a rich biosphere, with clouds of aeroplankton being grazed by titanic jellyfish-like creatures he dubs "medusas," who are in turn nibbled on by carnivorous manta-like fliers. Falcon manages to kinda-sorta befriend one of the giant air-medusas. It's not clear from the summaries how intelligent these creatures are, but evidently they're social animals at the very least.

On his return to earth, Falcon contemplates the kind of loneliness and estrangement from humanity as a whole that he suffers as the world's only cyborg. His meeting with the medusa meant something to him, as did his long lonely exploration before and after it. What exactly it means to him, I'm not sure, but something. The end of the book also apparently states that the life-extended Falcon is destined to serve as the ambassador between humans and artificial intelligences in the chaotic centuries to come. That feels like it comes out of nowhere, since the meat of the book is about him meeting fully organic aliens, but maybe it would make sense if I actually read it.

At any rate, this book is going to be about those chaotic centuries that Clarke teased but never got around to writing about himself.


So, with that catch-up on the original "Meeting with Medusa," it's now time for this book's prologue! I feel like the catch-up WAS a prologue, and that whatever comes after it should just be called a first chapter, but whatever.

Prologue​

We open on Howard Falcon reminiscing on a long-ago childhood. He's eleven years old, enjoying the sky during the first big snow of the winter. The picturesque-but-not-too-harsh snowfall comes courtesy of the Global Weather Secretariat. I guess we have weather control by the time Falcon is eleven. And also a one-world government that's functional enough to get the seasons right. Damn, this is optimistic for a book written in 2016. As he looks out the window at the sky, his parents are baking bread and stoking the hearth fire; they're apparently part of some paleo-romanticist cultural movement. Unlike them, Falcon dreams of the sky. Of being in it, unbound from the earth's surface, unshackled from gravity.

It's a bit of a scifi cliche, obviously, but the context does help a little bit here. This isn't foreshadowing him growing up to be a space explorer, it's him growing up to be a gas giant explorer. The specific details about the winter sky that the prose calls attention to - the opaque clouds, the wind whipping particles into a frenzy - map much closer to a Jovian storm than they do to outer space. I like this. Usually, the "child dreams of flying, grows up to be a space captain" thing feels kind of forced, because being in the sky is actually not very much like being in space at all. But here, for a kid who grows up to become an aviator by choice and then a Jupiter-explorer by necessity? I dig it.

After looking out the window for a while, Howard starts putting on his winter clothes and also scoops up his little robot toy. It's been designed in a whimsically retro-futurist style, looking like a robot from some old fifties movie. This may or may not be an affectionate dig at this novel's original source material. Anyway, this little robbit seems to have artificial intelligence of a roughly Siri level, which frustrates young Howard, but it's still fun to play with. Yeah, if he gets cyber-converted in the 2080's, then this childhood scene is probably taking place in the 40's at the very earliest, so this type of "smart" device is the equivalent of a shitty old nokia brick for the era. The robot ("Adam" as he named it) reacts to him mentioning snow by suggesting they build a snowman, which is always the first thing it says when someone mentions snow around it. Anyway, Howard slips out of the house, ignoring his mother nagging him about not wearing the right boots, and starts building a snowman as per Adam's insistence. It's not a very good snowman, but Adam tells him that it's perfect.

Suddenly, Adam spots something flying through the sky overhead and raises his little robotic arm to point it out. Okay, that's a little more proactive than Siri, I might have been underestimating this thing. He's at least Alexa tier. Anyway, the thing he points out is some kind of powered balloon aircraft. Futuristic blimp or something. Falcon stares after it, and knows from that moment that he wants to fly in the sky.


And, that's the prologue. I'm not sure if that really tells us anything about Howard's character that wasn't already at least implied by the summary before it. Him having always liked the idea of being flying through the clouds, and him being the sort of child to play by himself with his robot instead of with the neighbour kids, are both things I'd have already assumed. Well, anyway, cute vignette if nothing else.

Chapter 1: Encounter in the Deep​

Nice inversion from the end of the prologue. "I want to go up in the sky!" Hahaha, fuck you kid, we're going in the exact opposite direction.

We open on a ship (a sea ship, not a space ship) pushing its way through a stormy winter ocean. It's a large military vessel, so even though the waves are nasty no one can feel them up on deck. Not that Howard Falcon would probably be bothered either way, though, with his synthetic body being rated for prolonged stays on Jupiter. He's perched ondeck near the prow, zooming in and polarizing his eye-lenses to watch the drones swarming around below the waves. We've jumped ahead to post-cyberfication, I guess. This might still be before the events of the original Clarke book, or it may be afterward, with him already having returned to Earth. Anyway, the proximity of these aqua-drones is making Howard nervous. They're supposed to be there, obviously, but still, an impact with one would be unfortunate. Especially with President Jayasuriya aboard at present.

President, eh? If there's still a one-world government like there was during Howard's childhood, this could be a very, very important individual.

Well, after a few minutes of Howard's drone-watching he is joined by the ship's captain and an old aviator friend of his named Geoff Webster. I'm guessing Webster was a character from the original novel. Also, we learn three interesting details.

1. They do indeed have the World President herself aboard, and that she personally invited Howard Falcon to join this cruise, which isn't something even a recluse like himself can turn down. Dang, he's been made important! Granted, from what the background blurbs said, he might be the only human to have ever seen extraterrestrial life in person, so sure, fame is warranted.

2. It's January 1, 2100. So yes, right after the events of "Meeting With Medusa," with Howard having just made it back to earth within the last year.

3. Howard might not be integrated into a Jupiter probe right now, but even just on its own his synth body isn't all that humanoid. There's not much detail provided, but he apparently has an "undercarriage" that moves around on balloon wheels. I'm picuring a box-on-wheels design with a semi-humanoid upper torso and arms, kinda Wall-E ish. I hope they at least gave him some nice metal nipples with built-in rocket launchers.

Anyway, Geoff introduces him to Captain Embleton, an extremely blunt British navywoman who manages to suppress a shudder when shaking his cold, robotic claw but makes up for it immediately afterward with insensitive comment after insensitive comment. Asking him if he can still write his autograph with those robot arms of his, and commenting on his face. He still has an organic face, apparently. It's paralyzed and leathery-looking, but he still has it. I'm not sure how I'm supposed to be imagining Howard, but my mental picture is getting weirder and weirder.

Howard takes this all pretty well, with seeming good humor. Either thick skin, or just legitimately does not care about the opinions of mere fleshy humans at this point.

Captain Embleton introduces everyone to her robotic assistant, a little Roomba-sized drone named Conseil (Howard whimsically asks it how it feels about building snowmen. A private joke to himself, that no one else has any chance of understanding anything about, and he says it out loud. Yeah, he literally just does not care about trying to relate to baseline humans at this point), as well as some other recent space travellers who are just now wandering over across the deck. Tall, willowy people with powered exoframes helping them walk and hold themselves aloft in Earth's gravity. Third generation Martian colonists, apparently. Okay, we've colonized Mars. And did so early enough in the 21st century for there to have been three generations of them. God, the techno-optimism, it gives me space diabetes.

The captain explains that the frames they're using to navigate Earth's environment comfortably have some neural cybernetics going on, and that they were adapted from the experimental implants first tested on Howar Falcon himself. Congratulations, you were a hero for the Martians even before you made news for the second time by discovering life on Jupiter. He doesn't seem to be especially moved by this, for good or for ill.

When Howard and his old air force friend don't seem all that interested in the Martians, the captain changes the topic to those drones she saw Howard watching a minute ago. They're called "sea sprites," apparently. Howard's response to this explanation is...okay, is he making a dad joke here?

"I was in the navy, but even I am out of my depth." That feels like a dad joke. If it wasn't intended as such by the authors, that just makes it funnier and also causes it to retroactively become a core part of Howard's characterization.

At the mention of dolphins, Captain Embleton goes into a really clumsy, forced monologue about the state of Earth's biosphere. Things have recovered a lot since the bad old days of the early-mid 21st century, and there are plenty of actual dolphins in this area along with other spectacular sea life. Erm...have things really changed that much in the last decade, though? I'm not totally clear on how long Howard's roundtrip Jupiter trip took, but it seems to have been not more than a few years. I feel like he should already be familiar with the recovery Earth has made since...um...well, we already had global weather control when he was eleven years old, so I don't know if he had even been born yet when things stopped getting worse and started getting better. Anyway, this definitely feels like an "as you know."

As they chat dolphins and aqua-drones, the three of them wander back down along the mile-long deck of the vessel. We learn a bit more about the ship now, and it's interesting enough. The Sam Shore is an American aircraft carrier from the early 2010's. The USA (or a successor state of the USA's, it's not clear) was an early joiner of the planetary government, and the Sam Shore was inherited by the World Navy. It's decades obsolete at this point, of course, and worn down from its long service as well, so the aircraft carrier has been repurposed into a presidential yacht. The sea-sprites are maintenance drones that they release whenever the ship isn't under power, because Sam Shore needs constant hull and propeller maintenance these days. Those drones are remote controlled by another new technological addition to the vessel; a central artificial intelligence named Bosun. Even Bosun is getting on in years now, though; the captain claims that her little Conseil drone is more sophisticated than Bosun, and she only seems half sarcastic. Howard is still preoccupied by those drones swarming the sea around their hull, though, and we soon learn why.

Howard's accident, the crash that led to his experimental reconstruction, was apparently caused by bad drone traffic control. Howard had been flying one of those newfangled balloon aircraft that seem to be popular in this future. A freak storm ruined his visibility, and also interfered with the navigation of a UAV camera platform. The impact breached his balloon, causing the crash that killed him.

So, yeah. It makes sense that drones would make him nervous. Especially when he's on a ship and they're circling around it. The people around him are about as sympathetic to his post trauma anxieties as they are to his physical condition. To the point where Geoff laughingly says "oh hey, a camera drone not too different from the one that literally fucking killed you is headed this way right now, hahaha how funny" as that little Westerlund News robot from Mass Effect comes floating over their way. Said Mass Effect refugee is followed by yet another recent arrival from off-planet; Matthew Springer, the "conqueror of Pluto." I'm guessing he didn't discover anything as interesting out there as Howard did on Jupiter, but he's still the human being to have travelled furthest away from Earth by far, so it's a big claim to fame nonetheless. Apparently, his expedition took place at around the same time as Howard's. He has his drone fly up really close to Howard (while still keeping nearly all of its cameras trained on himself) and is even more condescending about Howard's cybernetic appearance than everyone else so far.

Which seems like a bad idea, considering that Howard's frame is apparently over seven feet tall according to a new bit of description. Also, it apparently has what looks like a chest that rises and falls as he breathes.

Howard's appearance is making him sound closer and closer to final boss material the more it's described. I'd be a hell of a lot more careful to avoid provoking him if I were these people.

The egotistical Pluto guy finally leaves, still filming for his vlog all the while. That guy managed to actually get Howard to show some irritation, though it seemed to go over his head. Captain Embleton and Geoff make a few cracks at Plutoguy behind his back, and then the former invites Howard on a tour of the ship. And also makes a crack about him probably not wanting to bother seeing the ice-skating ring, unless he wants to go through the trouble of swapping his wheels out for blades.

Not a single person will let Howard forget he's a cyborg for even one second. It's relentless, and comes from everyone. Some are worse than others, but not a single character so far has gone more than a paragraph without making some kind of joke or mention or comment. If Howard gave even slightly more of a fuck about people than he does, I think he'd be coming up with a plan to sink this ship and sabotage the lifeboats by now.

Speaking of that sentiment, the next party to approach and introduce themselves are glaring at everyone besides Howard with undisguised hostility. They also are chimpanzees. Talking chimpanzees. Super-chimps, or - as the hapless 2016 era authors had the misfortune to portmanteau them - "simps." Sorry, authors, I really am. Anyway, the simps are unfriendly toward the captain and Geoff, but they're totally simping for Howard. Ambassador Ham-207A of the Independent Pan Nation (I'm guessing "Pan" as in Pan troglodytes) informs Howard that he was a celebrity for simpkind before he made his discovery on Jupiter. When Geoff remembers aloud that there were quite a few simps aboard the airship crash that turned Howard into what he is, Ham explodes at him.

Huh, it was a flying cruise liner apparently. I'd assumed it was some kind of military or aerospace research blimp, but no. Guess this was a pretty big disaster, in that case.

Accounts from other survivors were recovered, and it turns out that Howard's last act before they hit the ground was trying to save the life of one of the simp slaves. He was unsuccessful, sadly, but the fact that he tried, and indeed spent his last minute in the air doing that instead of trying to parachute out himself, has made him a rare human to have earned simp respect. Things are much better for the simps now than they were when Howard left on his Jupiter mission. They have something in the ballpark of "human rights," have at least largely been emancipated, and even have their own small country in the mostly-restored jungles of central Africa (with a thriving economy based on unreplicable artistic depictions of themselves, no doubt). Still, the wounds are fresh, and Howard is still on the short list of humans who they'll outright simp for. They invite him to visit the Pan Nation, and hope that his chasis can be modified to enable tree-climbing, which they insist he'll enjoy.

Hmm. On one hand, yet another person not letting him go a minute without being reminded of his condition. On the other, the simps seem to be much more well-intentioned than the humans to have done it so far, and from the little dialogue I've seen so far they seem to just be naturally blunt and thick skinned. So, they definitely come across as less obnoxious, even apart from their history winning them unrelated sympathy points.

Howard seems moderately receptive to this offer, even if he also has mixed feelings about the worst day of his life being brought up YET AGAIN. The conversation is cut short when the captain points out a pod of whales breaching not far from the ship, giving them all something else to focus on.

Watching the whales reminds Howard of the Jovian medusa he discovered. A filter feeder, floating through a "sea" of hydrogen-helium mix. Similar slow, but graceful, movements. A social animal, with some degree of intelligence as well as empathy.

Then Ham the simp diplomat comes up to him again and says this:

I don't get what Ham is trying to say here, or why it's funny. Are the whales legal persons? Or is he implying that Howard counts as non-human now? In either case, I don't get why it's supposed to be funny. Maybe chimpanzee humor just doesn't work like human humor, idk.


So, that's a chapter. Quite a smorgasbord of near future scifi concepts, with the AI-refitted aircraft carrier turned presidential loveboat, the uplifted apes, the cybernetics, and the Jupiter and Pluto missions all crowding in before the camera. I hadn't heard anything about the simps until now, regarding the Clarke novel or this one. Were they even in the original, beyond perhaps a passing mention? I'm curious about that now.

Howard is hard to get a read on, as a protagonist. Too stoic to tell what he does and doesn't really care about. What the medusa means to him, and how he'll relate to nonhuman entities like the simps, whales, etc going forward, I couldn't yet guess.

I'm sort of wryly amused by this being a near-utopian optimistic vision of the future, but almost everyone in it being such an asshole. Climate change reversed, ecosystems restored, humanity unified under a democratic government, colonies on Mars, but you can't go a page through it without wishing Howard really did have built-in missile launchers he could use on these twats. Scifi usually does either one of these things, or the other, if either. The authors seem to be aware of how insufferably they've written the other humans. So, this is an interestingly mixed framing.


Chapters 2 and 3 are both a good deal shorter, so I think I'll do them together in the next post. For now, I'm definitely curious to see where this story is going.