Steampunk Opera

“And Earth is but a star, that once had shone.”
The Golden Journey to Samarkand, James Elroy Flecker

Sooner or later we will see a movie that is based on or at least inspired by an Alastair Reynolds novel, and it is rather remarkable no filmmaker has picked up one of his stories yet. Though most of them are heavy Science Fiction with all the bells and whistles, they wouldn’t necessarily need a huge budget to be realised. What they would need however is a writer and director with an ingenious imagination and the willingness to let go of simple space gimmickery and gadget clichés.

Ultimately, Reynolds’ universe is filled with a sense of wonder and serene desperation. On a galactic scale, mankind is not much more than a nano-sized coincidence doomed to end and with no meaning per se whatsoever.

Yet for Reynolds this doesn’t seem to make life worthless or meaningless, for that matter, although on the outset, his Terminal World appears to be the last place in the Universe where anyone would want to live voluntarily.

The story begins in Spearpoint, a vast spire with city-states clinging to its skin. For a while, Spearpoint appears to be the only inhabitable place on this far-future Earth, and up to the end I couldn’t shake off the feeling this mega city is a parable on the Tower of Babel.

Spearpoint is divided into isolated zones, each with a different state of technology, if not reality. Horses and ploughs at the bottom, post-human high tech at the top. This is where the angels live, literally. One of them, Dr Quillon, is the main character of Terminal World. He is actually an ex-angel, genetically modified to look like, and to live, as a human in one of the lower-state zones.

The fact that you can’t survive in a zone other than you were born into is maybe the most confusing aspect of the story. It drives the characters and events but remains somewhat unexplained. Reynolds could have easily topped the brave complexity of The Matrix but leaves us stuck with simplified assumptions.

This way, Quillon’s story is half as compelling as it could have been. Still, Reynolds’ powerful storytelling makes us forget about this blind spot, and we follow his hero when we learn Quillon is a fugitive most wanted for his ability to survive in a zone he does not belong to, and has become an invaluable asset when a major zone shift is predicted, which would be a fatal debacle for almost all of Spearpoint’s inhabitants.

Therefore Quillon has to leave for the hostile territories beyond Spearpoint. His exile turns into a crazy journey with Skullboys, Vorgs and Tectomancers, a fantasy which is Western, Steampunk, grand romance and classic science fiction all in one. It lines up the usual suspects in an unusual way, and serves up truth, guilt, redemption and hope in a way that maybe only an Astrophysicist is capable of.

I enjoyed travelling along, pulled in by vivid descriptions, strong characters and fierce conflicts. At the end though something was missing, a sense of closure or at least enough substance to make up all the alternate endings an intelligent reader can imagine. It felt more like a real cliffhanger, waiting to be resolved by the next book.