The Quiet War

The Quiet War, by Paul J McAuley.
This was the book I read over Christmas, and I like McAuley, so that wan't a problem, but do you know what I prefer? For years I'd save books by a particular author for my Christmas book, the one I actually dipped into on Christmas Day, and lay about in front of the fireplace with on Stephen's Day, and that was Kim Newman. Paul McAuley won't mind, they're good mates. But there hasn't been a Kim Newman novel in years! Where's my new Kim Newman novel? Fair enough, there was The Man From The Diogenes Club and Secret Files Of The Diogenes Club, fix-up novels with more than enough new material to justify their purchase, but, frankly, I devoured them as soon as I got them. No will power, me. But where's the show more English Ghost Story book or the new Anno Dracula book? I want them! I want them noooooow! So I can put them aside for eleven months until next Christmas.
McAuley, on the other hand, well, his last two books were relatively poor. Cowboy Angels wasn't up to much and Players was downright mediocre. For heaven's sake, Paul! You wrote Fairyland! FAIRYLAND! One of the best science fiction novels of the nineties! Not to mention White Devils, whch was, amongst other things, a Michael Crichton book by someone who isn't scared shitless of science and who didn't structure their entire book around that fear.
The Quiet War is a return to form, a space opera about the growing schism between a conservative, ruthless Earth-based society and the more adventurous, genetically advanced but fatally complacent settlements scattered throughout the solar system. The book charts the slow buildup to war through the eyes of an ambitious geneticist, a hard-nosed bio-engineer, a gung ho fighter pilot, a genetically engineered sleeper agent and a ruthlessly ambitious diplomat.
McAuley's a reliably good writer, and this stuff is potter's clay in his hands. An entertaining mix of hard science fiction, espionage, social upheaval, political intrigue and high tech warfare, it turned out to be a damned fine Christmas Day book. show less

Some of the best new science-fiction I've read in a long time. McAuley takes us on a sprawling ecological space opera from a post-ecological collapse earth, to the transhuman moons of the outer system. The war of the title is notably quiet, it's a war of subversion and deceit, much like this book inverts the typical action-packed space opera tropes. But it's smart, insightful, full of fantastic images, and best of all, has three capable female main characters.

This is a fabulous, inventive and science-laden tale of competing ideologies and the lead up to war over them. McAuley creates a vivid picture of two societies: that of "Greater Brazil" here on an Earth which is reclaiming and reviving the land and resources after environmental devastation (with such fervor that it has become a religion), and that of the "outers", people (and their descendants) who moved away from earth into the frontier of the outer solar system, creating different and comfortable enclaves for themselves as they went. I particularly enjoyed McAuley's choice in making his two brilliant geneticists, one from each group, women. I've read a fair number of McAuley's novels and if this book isn't his best, it's one of them

The genre of science fiction has a number of problems that work against it. One of them is that if an author is sticking strictly to what we know about a particular environment or setting, their stories might turn out to look very similar to other works that share that setting - and therefore may falsely give the impression (to an inexperienced reader) that the genre only offers a limited range of new experiences. Paul McAuley's The Quiet War suffers from this drawback.

The story is set partly on a future Earth where ecological disaster has resulted in devastation - the "Overturn" - and the growth of Brazil as a new world superpower, holding sway over both North and South America. The rest of the story is set amongst the moons of Jupiter show more and Saturn. For those used to absorbing their science fiction through visual media, we are firmly in the territory of The Expanse, which is unfortunate, as this novel precedes The Expanse by a couple of years. But the resemblances are there: an Earth in recovery from disaster, interplanetary travel via advanced fusion-drive spaceships, colonies on Jovian and Saturnian moons whose inhabitants are thought of as "Outers", and those colonies are dependant on a range of innovative technologies to create habitable environments.

And yet: McAuley's specialism is in botany and biology, and his colonists rely on genetic and bio-engineering to better adapt to their surroundings. This is one of the early issues with the book, as in the first quarter, McAuley does rather go a bit overboard on the info-dumping. Get past that, and there is a reasonable story about interplanetary political intrigue, with high-tech action set pieces to satisfy those who like that sort of thing. Characterisation is adequate, though McAuley introduces two characters in the opening chapters who then disappear for a large section of the book. Perhaps the most interesting of these is Dave 8, a cloned super-soldier created by the Brazilian government - or rather, one of the more important generals from the pre-eminent family in Brazilian politics - for unspecified missions in space. Dave 8's training is delivered in a Catholic seminary, and this setting and the internal doubts and questions of Dave 8 probably form the more interesting character of the book, precisely because a Catholic assassin may well be outside many readers' experience.

Otherwise, the casual reader might think that this was a bog-standard work of "military science fiction", which it is not. And it certainly isn't a fast-paced adventure story. Yet for those willing to engage with this book on a more intellectual level, there is plenty to engage with. show less

In this sweeping novel of conflict between a future Earth where authoritarian governments are still pulling things together after a post-ecological collapse and a "Belter" civilization reaching towards a post-human state; one follows five point-of-view characters: 1. A clone warrior raised from conception to be a military tool. 2. A hot-shot pilot who is remade to cybernetically bond with his ship. 3. An imperious "gene wizard" who seeths over being treated as being little more than the hired help of the aristocratic family she serves. 4. An ecological engineer who finds herself forever on the run due a gut-level unwillingness to play other people's games. 5. An on-the-make diplomat/spy who is driven to distraction over his inability to show more finish off the engineer.

I like this novel a great deal and think it's one of the best hard SF stories I've read in awhile, but that you have so many POV characters running around but all essentially from the same society (Greater Brazil) does seem a little problematic at times. One might like a little more perspective from a character from another of the Terran states, or from the outer-planet society they seek to bring to heel. It's about the only thing that I'm marking this novel down for. show less

There is not much to say about this novel, not because it is bad but because it is extremely good. In fact there is nothing to find fault with. The setting is the solar system, after Earth has been devastated by global warming, and is beginning to rebuild, while thriving colonies have been established on the moons of Saturn and Jupiter.

All sounds idyllic but it is not. Earlier, colonists from the Moon fled to Jupiter and Saturn after the colony on Mars was nuked by China. Earth is now controlled by three power blocs, Greater Brazil, the European Union and the Pacific Community. All are run by powerful families who squabble behind the scenes. The poor live in overcrowded cities, denied access to the regenerating countryside. Science is show more fostered, but mainly to create weapons, sometimes involving brutal biological and psychological re-structuring of people.

In stark contrast, the descendants of the Moon colonists, known as the Outers, live in free communities, run by continuous e-ballots. They delve into the physical and biological sciences, especially genetic engineering, to improve their technologies and bodies and to spread new forms of life by creating new ecosystems on previously sterile moons. The 'Quiet War', a low-intensity conflict with little all out fighting, deliberately engineered by factions in Greater Brazil, breaks out after a reconciliation mission to build an Earth-like habitat on Callisto is sabotaged.

On one hand the novel succeeds as a classic space opera, with a militaristic regime trying to control freedom-loving individualists. There is plenty of action, from a ground assault on a domed city to balletic space battles, using clever weapons and some effective 'dumb' ones, like asteroids used as missiles. Heinlein would be proud. On the other hand, this is very 'modern' science fiction, with subtle insights into politics, very well drawn characters on both sides, awe inspiring new science, like organisms adapted to life in a vacuum on cold, dead moons and beautiful, poetic descriptions of vistas on the various moons and planets. This book is a perfect blend of a mainstream novel with a rigorous approach to science fiction.

I liked it so much I bought the sequel, Gardens of the sun, as soon as it came out, despite being a habitual mass market paperback miser. show less

Paul McAuley has been on my “I really should read something by that guy some time” list for quite a while now, and now I finally got around to it. He’s been around for a while and apparently quite versatile, writing, among other things, alternative history and near future thrillers. The Quiet War (which was on the shortlist for the Arthur C. Clarke award in 2009) is space opera – not so much the pulpy Golden Age variant of E.E. Smith but the contemporary variant that was started off by C.J. Cherryh with her Downbelow Station and that aims for more realism and psychological depth.

Unusual even for the modern version of the genre (and one, although not the only, reason why the book is titled as it is) there is only a single space show more battle in this novel, and even that is very small in scale, involving only three fighters and the automated self defense system of an asteroid. Which does not mean that the “small, quiet war” (as it once called by one of its main instigators) does not cost any lives, quite to the contrary - but those are mostly civilians, acting to defend their homes or even outright executed, and in that sense the novel’s title is a cutting sarcasm.

The war itself is also very brief: It only takes up about the final fifth of the novel, while its main bulk is dedicated to the political shuffling and military intrigue paving the way towards the eventual outbreak of open conflict, attempts to maintain peace becoming more and more desperate as war appears increasingly inevitable. The forces arraigned against each other are an Earth ruled by dictatorships and the grass-root democracies of the Outer Planets of the Solar system. While it is quite clear which faction has the author’s sympathies, McAuley does not paint the Outers of unblemished paragons of all that’s good – among the widely varying societies and their lifestyles colonising the moons of Saturn and Jupiter there are many that are just as repressive and as disregarding of their members’ happiness and wellbeing as any dictatorship, and neither are the Outers in general immune to intolerance.

Nuanced characterisation is generally one of the strong points of The Quiet War, and that applies not just to the various factions but also to individual protagonists. A good example (and my favourite point of view character) is Sri Hong-Owen, a genius scientist who becomes a puppet in the political scheming between factions vying for power in her home nation of Greater Brazil. But while she herself continues to perceive herself as an innocent victim who is only interested in pursuing her science, it gradually is shown to the reader that she is willing to go to absolutely any length to realise her own goals, and that those have a lot more to do with satisfying her own vanity than with furthering science.

The writing, if not brilliant, is at least solid; there are some very impressive vistas of places where humanity has carved out a niche for itself in the Solar system’s moons and McAuley is very good at describing the helplessness of living in a dictatorship where one’s very existence hangs on the whim of the powerful or the atmosphere in a city under siege where slowly but inexorably paranoia and mob rule take over. In general, and that is probably its greatest strength, The Quiet War succeeds very well in making the reader feel what it would be like to live out in space, where the environment is unforgivingly lethal and a small carelessness or a minor freak accident can be fatal, but where humanity rises to the challenge and realises its full potential. Which, everything considered, is a very Golden Age attitude after all. show less