Wednesday, 19th of November, 2003

Nearly a year ago I wrote a rave review of Adam Roberts‘ previous novel, Stone.

The lovely Mr Thomas Marchbank Allen & Unwin (Australia’s largest independent publisher - true! They bought themselves out when Penguin bought the rest of the world’s A&U, which became Allen Lane), who distribute Gollancz, asked me what I thought of Polystom in a recent email, so I told him… Seeing how stressful it was writing the previous Justina review months after reading the book, I thought it’d be easier here just to edit my musings to Thom into something workable as a review. Here goes!

I did enjoy Polystom. I thought Stone was absolutely remarkable (see review link above). Fascinating concept with the narrator, and the sfnal aspects weren’t too far gone for my hard sf temperament. Polystom has a similarly unsympathetic set of characters, and a similarly arch tone to Stone. Some of the literary conceits (in both books) are amusing but slightly annoying; in Polystom, bits of the “leaves” of manuscript are missing from the story, to no apparent narrative purpose. Mind you at the end there’s a quite cute fake lit crit bit, with exerpts from scholarly articles speculating on which world is real…

Which world is real? What am I talking about here? Well this is the interesting conceit of Polystom: in the world of the eponymous protagonist (and a rather mollycoddled and stuck-up aristocrat he is) the physical laws are such that a breathable atmosphere stretches between the planets and moons of the system that humanity inhabits. A stratified class system exists, and we gradually become aware of a war being fought on one planet (the “Mudworld”) that has its roots in a servants’ rebellion.

The book is therefore, at least initially, an alternate history, albeit on quite a scale. The society is in most respects no further advanced than, say, Edwardian England. There are petrol-powered aeroplanes - and at the beginning of the book Polystom takes a trip in his plane from the planet of which he is Lord to the moon on which his uncle Cleonicles resides, during which trip we learn not only about Polystom’s character (he’s plagued by boredom and self-doubt, and not least by the deep and poetic self-obsession of his class) but also about the strange fauna that inhabit interplanetary space.
But other than such mechanical devices, there’s no advanced telecommunications, or, seemingly, computing in this world. However, Cleonicles is a famous scientist (indeed, one of his weird ideas is that of an interstellar “vacuum”) and he’s been working on a secret military computer, which becomes central to the very strange events later in the book.

The book has three sections, dubbed “A Love Story” (primarily about Polystom’s bizarre and doomed courting of and marriage to the caged-free-spirit Beeswing), “A Murder Story” (about the events of Cleonicles’ death) and “A Ghost Story” (in which Polystom decides he has to participate more directly in the war effort, and finds some really weird stuff going on when he gets to the Mudworld).
I wasn’t 100% convinced by the book - Roberts seemed to be trying to do a few different things all at once, and the themes of
a) Polystom’s character and relationships,
b) the social aspects of this world (with respect to women, servants and so on, not to mention the vividly depicted, pointless war and the grotesque institutionalised torture shown at one point),
c) the weird physics of his world re vacuum/gravity, and the fun interplanetary fauna,
d) the computational stuff (of course, a computer simulation of (almost) an entire universe is a pretty absurd prospect, but we ignore that within the context of the book…) and finally
e) the “ghosts in the machine”
didn’t quite gel into a cohesive whole.

Still, having read on Roberts’ website about his plan to write stories based around every one of science fiction’s tropes, I like the way he mixes and matches them here. Some “para-material” can be found here, and it’s as archly postmodernist as Roberts gets - I don’t think you need worry too much about spoilers, but at the same time you shouldn’t expect to get any kind of feel for the book itself from this material.
I’m not sure that I could immediately convert someone to sf with this book (interesting fact: purely from reading my review of Stone, one blog-reader went and bought the book and loved it… so there! Oh, the power!) - I think this is one rather for sf cognoscenti, or perhaps for literary readers interested in a very bizarre concept.

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