The Medusa Chronicles, Chapter 2: Adam (2.8-9)

This review was comissioned by @toxinvictory.


It's been a good long while since I read the first arc of this novel on the fast line. Time to resume it in the main queue. It's not a long book, but it's still a book, so expect it to continue for at least the next couple months alongside whatever else comes next in queue.

This rather adorably socially-inept fan sequel to Arthur C. Clarke's "Meeting With Medusa" follows transhuman astronaut Howard Falcon years after his historic discovery of alien life on Jupiter. So far, he's been a guest on the World President's cruise, made friends with some uplifted chimpanzees, and played a minor role in stopping a terrorist plot. Also, all the humans he knows are assholes.

The last thing that happened was that the personal assistant robot that played a more significant role in stopping the terrorist plot answered a question in an odd way that suggests it might be smarter and more independent than people had given it credit for. The significance of this isn't yet clear, but both the ending of the original Clarke story and the back cover text of this one hinted pretty heavily at AI playing an important role in future events. The titular "medusa" alien that Falcon encounter in the Jovian atmosphere will also presumably show up again at some point.

Anyway, before continuing with Falcon in the wake of the foiled terror attack, we have a historical interlude set in TTL's 1967. We were told earlier that the point of divergence from OTL was the USA and USSR joining forces to save humanity from an asteroid in that year, so presumably we're about to learn more about this incident.

Interlude: April 1967​

At NASA's famous Houston facility, a pair of astronauts are told that their Apollo mission has been cancelled. Or rather, they're still going into space, but instead of trying to reach the moon they're going to prevent human extinction.

It's not the kind of news that anyone can take lightly, and our two astronauts - Mo Berry and Seth Springer - are no exceptions. Our viewpoint character Springer in particular is put out that he most likely will never set foot on the moon like he'd spent the previous years dreaming he would. It was bad enough when the Apollo 1 disaster (ah, so that did still happen ITTL. Springer had been preparing for one of the subsequent Apollo-series attempts) took the wind out of everyone's sails, and now this. Their work environment just keeps on getting more and more stressful.

The NASA director lays it out for them. The story went public while the astronauts were on their way in, so ironically they're a little bit out of the loop compared to the general public. The Icarus asteroid - so named because part of its orbit sends it darting straight toward the sun before Earth's gravity well adjusts its course - is due to make its usual once-per-twenty-years close pass. As luck would have it, the US military was scanning for Icarus as a test of some newfangled missile detection system, and it's fortunate that they chose this particular asteroid to scan for, because it turns out that a close encounter with another rock has messed with Icarus' trajectory. When it enters Earth's gravity well in the summer of 1968, it won't be leaving again. It also just so happens that Icarus is about a mile across: right around the same size as the K-T impactor. So, they have a pretty good idea of what this thing is going to do to Earth.

Fun times for saprophytic fungi and bacteria. The rest of us, not so much.

Naturally, the experts have been scrambling to come up with a countermeasure ever since the initial reports were confirmed the other day. The director wants to hear Springer and Berry's own input, though, since they're most likely going to be the ones who actually put whatever plan it ends up being into practice.

Erm...I'm not sure if calling them into the office, laying it on them, and demanding an extemporaneous response is the most productive way you could have done this, bossman.

Well, after getting it through their heads that this isn't a bizarre office prank or something, the astronauts get out their papers and calculators and start making suggestions. A lot of the possibilities they talk through are quaint to a modern reader (the talk of how much it would take to blow the asteroid up entirely, for instance), but in context I think it fits. In 1967, only a fraction of the science on this subject had been done, and only a fraction of the science fiction on this subject had been written, that we have nowadays was available. So, while it does drag a bit while they waste time discussing possibilities the reader knows won't be deemed the best, it does fit the time and place.

Eventually, they conclude that a high-yield nuclear bomb detonated right against Icarus as far from Earth as possible would be the best bet for changing its course. Like I said, obvious to a modern reader heh. The problem is getting a nuke that big to the asteroid in a short enough time. America doesn't have the spacelift necessary to move a bomb that big that quickly. Nobody does. Springer can't focus on the math very well, now that everything has fully sunk in; he can think of nothing but the fate of his children, one of whom will have a descendant who we know will be very proud of Seth and also a douchebag.

Jump ahead a day or so to President Johnson giving a speech. The expert consensus, it turns out, is that America and the USSR should each send the biggest space shuttles they have carrying as much nuclear ordinance as they can. With their combined spacelift, they should be able to get enough firepower to Icarus in time to change its course. It'll be most effective if all the bombs are detonated simultaneously, which will need a manned mission with the crews of all ships cooperating closely to ensure. So, we're calling for an armistice in the Cold War to try tossing those nukes America and Russia had meant for each other at the spacerock instead. Johnon is of course also taking the opportunity to milk his own patronage of the space program for all it's worth here, as if he'd actually been doing it FOR this rather than as part of a dickwaving contest with the Kremlin. Additionally, he's declaring that the congressional committee in charge of the domestic side of organizing this will be headed by Senator Robert Kennedy.

The astronauts and their commander are watching.

Heh, even in this situation LBJ is a slimy one.

On the other hand...thinking about this a little more, I'm not sure if this really does serve Johnson's interests in particular. If the world doesn't end, then Kennedy is probably going to be an absolute shoe-in for the presidential election after this one. If anything, it seems like Johnson is probably doing him a favor in the long run.

Maybe Johnson has a QPQ with someone else in the party who's hoping to be the democratic candidate this time, so it's just this one election he wants to keep Kennedy away from? That would make sense.

In any case, if LBJ was hoping to slow Kennedy down in the short term for some reason, then we know he failed. It's already established that Kennedy took the 1968 election no matter how little time he had for campaigning. I guess co-leading the salvation of the world kinda speaks for itself as a political endorsement, heh.


The interlude ends there. I'm not sure how exactly this is relevant to the plot of the book itself, but it's a nice worldbuilding blurb I guess.

Now it's on to the second proper arc of the novel, "Adam."

The events of "Encounter In the Deep" took place in 2099. So, I guess we have an eight year timeskip, and then Falcon's cybernetic body somehow ends up living for another entire century. Wouldn't he run out of neurons? Maybe they've invented a general cure for ageing before his time runs out. Though given Falcon's quality of life, I'd be kind of surprised by his choice to use that. Yeah, dunno.

Maybe he ends up passsing the protagonist torch at some point in this arc. Hopefully to one of the talking chimps. A talking chimp named Adam? Now we're talking!

The significance of the ship incident in Falcon's life isn't at all clear to me. It doesn't seem like enough of importance has happened yet before we go timeskipping a decade onward. Maybe the point of that arc was just how alienated and out of place Falcon feels on Earth, justifying his choice to take an eight year rocket trip to Neptune or something.

Chapter 2.8​

I was at least partly right. The novel's 2107 events start with Falcon back offworld, waking up from cryosleep and trying to guess where he is in the solar system based on the weight of the gravity. The gravity is low. Very low. Not nonexistent, though, and not pseudograv. He must be on some very small moon.

He didn't know where he was traveling to? How...oh, I see, he's still waking up. Memories still fuzzy, but pressure sensors fully online and cognition busying itself with guessing games until the memories kick back in. Falcon has a very odd, very machine-like process of waking up. Is this down to the reanimation process, or does his brain itself have more artificial bits than I realized?

It quickly turns out that Falcon has been making many space trips over the last decade. In fact, he's only been coming back to Earth when he has to, and even then he almost never comes down to the surface. The reason being that the mysterious dickhead particles that have been bioaccumulating in the human population are now really out of hand.

By demand of the Marvel Civilians, even the moon is no longer acceptably far away for an ugly cyborg to exist on. And yes, the sole justification given for them not wanting Falcon around is an aesthetic one.

Also, he's apparently been rushed from planet to planet under the ongoing care of Dr. Hope Djoni. The woman who he hates because of how she openly treats him like property. And who everyone - including, it most often seems, the authors - think Howard is in the wrong for not liking.

And...apparently they've been doing more surgeries on Falcon. Testing the boundaries of cybernetic technology further and further, using the apparently one single guinea pig that they're allowed to have. Falcon treats the fact that he never knows just how much more of his organic neurology will have been replaced with computers as a minor annoyance that he sort of comically grumbles about. There are bioconervativist protests going on all over the inhabited solar system against further cyborg experimentation, and since Falcon is the only experimental cyborg that means the protests are all against him.

Erm. Is Falcon still choosing to go through with all these experiments?

...are they even bothering to obtain his consent?

.....does he have permission to die?

I don't know. He definitely doesn't seem enthusiastic about continuing to go through these surgeries. And with all the outside presssure on him to not do so...

...

I'm left to conclude that he's either going on with this purely out of spite for the bioconservatives, or that Dr. Djoni does in fact legally own him. And either hasn't quite destroyed his will to live completely just yet, or has but won't let him act on it.

...

As Djoni brings him online, Falcon gets a look at his current self. A thinner, more flexible columnar body than the last one, this time more bronze than gold in color, with new and much stronger and nimbler robot arms and less organic remains than ever.

The gravity, he also notes, is still slightly too strong for a glorified asteroid like Ceres. When he asks Djoni where they are, she explains that, well...

Mars turned into a major hotbed of bioconservativism, and the young Ceres colony is a political client of Mars. And....it's to the point where there was apparently a big public outcry against moving Falcon to Ceres too. Djoni and her team have literally had him unconscious for multiple years since they were prevented from awakening him there, trying to find a place where they could complete his latest "upgrade" and wake him up.

So. They're sort of on Makemake. It's sort of an iceball. And sort of in the Kuiper belt.

Regarding the political pressures that sent them here, Djoni says that "The psychology is interesting, actually, and complex." No further elaboration for now.

...

I was going to call this Kafkaesque, but no, no I'd say it considerably overshoots that. If I had to compare this to anything else I'm familiar with, well...

So, recently, I've discovered that my (properly medicated) multitasking abilities are up to the task of listening to other things while I work on reviews. For the first time in a long time, I've had the time and attention span able to consume fiction recreationally rather than just professionally, in the form of podcasts. And, since there isn't any more of it in queue, I went ahead and listened through the rest of The Magnus Archives over the course of the last month or so.

Falcon's situation would be right at home in season five.

...

So, why Makemake? Well, there's a problem out here that Earthgov wants solved, and not many people besides Djoni (and Falcon, Hope eagerly assured them) are willing to handle.

Leave aside the implication the chapter ends on, that Djoni is doing something that hurts Falcon. I'm sure that's just business as usual. But, the "children of Conseil?" Machines with a capital M?

As a refresher, Conseil was the name of the robot that saved the ship from sinking in the first arc and then very spontaneously started developing a personality. Apparently, this led to the rise of a race of artificial intelligences. Offscreen. During the timeskip.

And um. Apparently Falcon "played a part" in causing them to be born? As I recall, the sum total of his involvement with Conseil's first spooky self-determination moment was "being in the room when it happened."

Did something else happen right after that scene that we completely skipped over?

...wait a minute.

In the last arc, it turned out that Falcon is a big folk hero for the uplifted chimps because he lost his body trying to save one in the airship crash when no other human tried to. Again, offscreen.

Every type of intelligent being that humanity creates has a hamfisted connection to Howard Falcon.

Who is also the only cyborg.

And who also first discovered alien life.

And who every human in the solar system besides Djoni is frothingly bigoted against, to the point where there are Earthgov security council rulings against him personally.

Book. Are you fucking for real, book?


Short chapter. The next one is also short. Even moreso, in fact.

Chapter 2.9​

Falcon is rolling around the ice fields of Makemake, looking up at the sky. For two full pages. He informs us of exactly how distant from the sun they are, and how many times weaker its light is here than on Earth. And...Falcon apparently feels bad for the sun, being so hard to feel out here.

Daaaaaaw, look at the writers making their best effort to portray neurotypical whimsy and failing miserably.~

There's a little bit of musing about how much bigger than this the cosmos is and how Falcon is still ultimately barely a baby step from Earth in the grand scheme of things that actually does manage to be a little bit poetic and emotional. Then, Falcon watches a spaceship land at one of the meager Makemake hab facilities. It's got the Earthgov logo on it, which means it's here to do something involving Falcon and the Children of Conseil.

End chapter.

No, really, that's the entire chapter. We still don't know what the situation with these robots is. This chapter ends repeating the last chapter ending's reveal. Only in an even more tell-don't-show way.


Is this really what "hard scifi" is like?

Like, there's an entire fucking genre of this?

I'd normally assume that I was just looking at an exceptionally bad example of its kind, but Baxter and Reynolds are supposed to be a big deal in this corner of genre fiction. Even if they're not the bests, they're at least a representative example, right?

Like I said, I haven't read very much Arthur C. Clarke. I have read a little of him, though, and so far I'd say that the existence of this book is an insult to his legacy.


MESSAGE FROM FUTURE ME: Don't worry, it gets much better in a couple more chapters.