It takes some nerve to take on a scenario written by a science fiction master. It has been done before – off the top of my head, Brin, Benford & Bear did it with Asimov’s Foundation series, (as the Killer B’s!) and Brian Herbert and Kevin Anderson took on Frank Herbert’s Dune series, with varying degrees of success. Even Sir Arthur C Clarke has not been immune to the odd bit of authorial co-working – there’s the Venus Prime series written by Paul Pruess, and the Rama series continued after Rendezvous with Rama (mainly) by Gentry Lee.
The reason for saying this is that The Medusa Chronicles is a sequel (of sorts) to Meeting with Medusa by Arthur C.Clarke, a story with an illustrious past. The original novella was published in Playboy in December 1971. It won the Nebula award in 1972 for Best Novella and the Japanese Seiun Award for Best Foreign Language Short Story in 1974.
The Medusa Chronicles takes place after the events of the novella. Though I re-read the original novella before this novel, the tale is efficiently précised in a few sentences at the beginning of this novel:
“In the 2080’s Howard Falcon is left crippled by the crash of the dirigible Queen Elizabeth IV, of which he was Captain. His life is saved by cyborg surgery.
In the 2090’s Falcon pilots a solo mission in a balloon craft named Kon-Tiki into the upper clouds of Jupiter where he encounters an exotic environment with an ecology dominated by immense ‘herbivorous’ beasts he calls ‘medusae’, which are preyed on by ‘mantas’.
Falcon’s cybernetic surgery has left him with superhuman capabilities but isolated from mankind, for there will be no more such experiments. But Falcon ‘took sombre pride in his unique loneliness – the first immortal midway between two orders of creation. He would be…. an ambassador…between the creatures of carbon and the creatures of metal who must one day supersede them. Both would have need of him in the troubled centuries that lay ahead.’ ”
So: what of this new novel? What surprised me most is that Baxter and Reynolds have managed to achieve something that echoes many of Sir Arthur’s keynotes and then extrapolates from them. So, we have a lot of recognisably ‘Clarkean’ big ideas expounded here – the discovery and emergence of an extra-terrestrial machine society, an expansion of Mankind’s representation into the solar system, for example.
But there’s also a lot of other Clarke reference points here too. There’s his love of the sea and its inhabitants (see also The Deep Range, 1957 and The Ghost from the Grand Banks, 1990), his belief in seeking solutions to crises through peaceful diplomacy, of the importance of ambassadors, presidents and monarchs (eg : Imperial Earth 1975), and his passion for space exploration. Perhaps most of all, the novel shares that idealistic, optimistic idea that in the future Mankind will only become better through negotiation and peaceful co-existence with other intelligences.
As the story begins, it is mere twelve years after the Queen Elizabeth IV incident. Falcon, now existing as a human kept alive by machines, is still clearly angry – especially when he meets other explorers such as Matt Springer, ‘conqueror of Pluto’ who seems to have taken all the fame once accorded Falcon.
When a further accident occurs upon the US naval ship Sam Shore whilst hosting the World President, Falcon finds himself unexpectedly the saviour of the day and unknowingly the originator of the raising of consciousness of the robot Conseil. This has consequences for Falcon and the human race in the future.
As the scale broadens and the passage of time lengthens, the narrative reveals its real purpose – to expand an Olaf Stapledon-ian style view of the future of the human race. We see both the expansion of Humanity into space but also the equally impressive rise of a machine intelligence – one that finally issues to Humans ‘The Jupiter Ultimatum’ – you have five hundred years to leave Earth before we dismantle it ‘for other purposes’.
As Falcon’s lifespan extends into hundreds of years we see, through him, marvellous things – the rise of Humans living on Mercury and Mars, the consequences of the diaspora of Humans forced to leave Earth, huge technological achievements that create that enormous sense of wonder.
We also have, as back story, how Humans got into space in an alternate timeline to our own, reminiscent of Baxter’s own alternative history novels, Voyage & Titan. On this Earth, the US has RFK as President, and unlike our own, much of this space race was due to a grateful world providing money to NASA after a US/USSR joint mission in 1968 deflected an asteroid named Icarus using Apollo rockets to save the Earth. Matt Springer’s grandfather Seth was the spaceman responsible for this, leading to his descendants (and Falcon) being able to travel into space.
In places the books seem very much like Stephen Baxter’s own novels, but as many of these have a Clarkean feel, this isn’t necessarily a bad thing. This can work well but it is different. Falcon’s bitterness at the beginning of the novel, though understandable, is a characteristic I’m not sure Sir Arthur would’ve used. As time goes on though, Falcon settles into a character more in a Clarke-style. He becomes increasingly observational and separated from the goings on of the solar system, following events with that wry sense of amusement that Sir Arthur often seemed to have in his work. That’s not to say that the critics of Clarke will be appeased, though, for there are still characters that are mere outlines, though Baxter and Reynolds do develop them more than Clarke perhaps would.
Towards the end, the book develops into something BIG – not too dissimilar from parts of 2001: A Space Odyssey. Here the book creates that sense of immenseness, that wondrous joy of revealing a realm of possibilities, the sort of thing that Sir Arthur revelled in. It is good that, in my opinion, Baxter and Reynolds skilfully capture that sensa-wunda tone, so recognisably a feature of Clarke’s writing, beautifully.
In summary, The Medusa Chronicles is a good old-fashioned SF tale, strong on big ideas and filled with sensa-wunda and magical moments. There’s even some genuine surprises. It’s an ambitious if not audacious thing to try, and I’ll happily admit that I am a tough critic of anything connected to one of my favourite authors, who inspired me to read science fiction. My main worry before reading was that it would have been a pastiche of one of my heroes, but instead I found a book produced with respect for one of the genre’s most-loved classic authors. I therefore think it fitting if I say that I think that Sir Arthur would be pleased by this.
A great read that made me want to reread more Clarke.
The Medusa Chronicles by Stephen Baxter and Alistair Reynolds
Based on the novella Meeting with Medusa by Arthur C Clarke
Published by Gollancz, May 2016
336 pages
ISBN: 978 147 321 0189
Review by Mark Yon
