Love After The Nanocaust
Play it again, Sam… If you’ve seen Casablanca and heard As Time Goes By, you’re ready for the future; Alastair Reynolds’ future, that is.
His 2004 novel Century Rain is a post-apocalyptic love story in a science-fiction-murder-mystery setting. Wanting to leave their places but being trapped, the main characters compromise just about everything they care for, but not necessarily in the bad sense of the word…
Some millions of years or so back, an ancient Alien race froze time, made a copy of Earth, and put it into a galaxy-sized bubble somewhere in the space-time continuum. Now, that’s us – a duplicate Earth to be preserved for some obscure reasons.
Then, something even more obscure happened – the copy ‘unfroze’ and continued its existence. It’s the year 1959, and no one here is aware of this event, and kept on living as if nothing happened. Just World War II didn’t happen, France is to be ruled by Nazis, and technology is still pre-nuclear.
Meanwhile, the original Earth has reached the 23rd century and is a wasteland, rendered a frozen rock by man-made nano-robots that were actually created to fix Global Warming. Needless to say, this version of Earth isn’t exactly inhabitable anymore…
Therefore, when people from one Earth meet people from the other, it’s a little like encounters of the third kind. And when this is played out in Paris, you find yourself in the middle of an impossible love story to be.
Wendell Floyd, expat American, jazz musician and private detective on the side, is an inhabitant of the Earth copy, whose heart is heavy with memories of Greta, his ex-girlfriend. She’s a musician as well but touring with another jazz band around the ‘world’.
Verity Auger is an archaeologist from the space around the ’future’ Earth, victim of a political conspiracy and left with no choice but to take on a mission that eventually takes her, via an Alien transit system, to Wendell Floyd, who is investigating an alleged suicide.
As this case involves a missing agent from Verity’s world, the two of them get to know each other as you’d expect in those cases. However, Wendell’s ex, Greta has come back to Paris as well to look after her terminally ill aunt, and she‘d like nothing more than Wendell coming with her and touring the world.
If this looks just like another version of a basic plot to you, you’re right – and wrong. By the time you finish reading, you’re likely to have more questions than answers.
This novel is over five years old but it seems rather topical. How much should we be relying on technology? Is war a necessity for technological progress? What are we doing with our knowledge? Are there alternate worlds… and, is love indeed the only universal thing that exists – beyond space and time?
At the end of the day, Century Rain offers a single fundamental suggestion, that nothing in life really matters unless you make it matter. This is a recurring vibe in Reynolds’ stories, and reading his books you stop feeling bad about the fact that everything, including yourself, is going to end (’The dead ship was a thing of obscene beauty’ – first sentence in Redemption Ark, another Reynolds novel).
Reynolds’ novels, including Century Rain, are hard science in an easy to follow language. Even if you’re not familiar with E=mc2 and don’t know the first 100 digits of Pi, it’s still a ride worth joining as you’d stretch your ‘event horizon’.
As for the love story, the references to 1942’s Casablanca are more than apparent. Then again, Century Rain has a strong Hitchcockian touch as well. In both cases, however, this doesn’t come off as cheesy but supports a charged ‘End Of The World’ atmosphere.
After a thrill ride through space-time and an extremely emotional intermezzo with 23rd century Verity, Wendell Floyd has yet to make his toughest decision. He’s got a dose of life saving nanomedicine from the ‘original‘ Earth, which he could give to Greta’s dying aunt.
An impossibility in 1959 Paris ‘hoax’ where the Police are fighting Vinyl record pirates? Or would that be just too ‘nano’ a detail in a world that is incapable of comprehending that all things thinkable have consequences once they have been thought?