This complex SF series of stories is a challenging read,
starting with a being from elsewhere crashlanding in
Antarctica and, as in the Alien films, using up any life it
meets. This being needs a living host and tries to control
a person to get it to safety and wait until it can get off
the planet again. BEYOND THE RIFT describes the events from
the visitor's point of view, and its contempt for the
native beings.
The next story tells of deep space explorers who come
across a red dwarf star surrounded by a Dyson sphere
(though that term is not used) made out of thin living
tissue which soaks up all the energy emitted by the small
star. The membrane is considered to have nerve cells and
some kind of intelligence. Given how little regard the
explorers have for other forms of intelligence however, is
this a good thing?
A common theme is biological advances or differences, so
that a mother carries around a tube of liquid skin instead
of sticking plasters for her child's cuts, while
neuroimplants enable a game player to touch the game
world. Stationed in a submerged habitat down in the ocean
rift, divers make observations of always-hungry giant fish
which are attracted to light.
Author Peter Watts writes about himself and his works at
the end, telling us that most critics find his material
dark, depressing and dystopian. He begs to disagree and
does come across as having a sense of humour.
Unfortunately he declares that a ravaged environment is the
only possible outcome for our future at this time, and upon
this world he has to build his stories. A Canadian, he
describes the summary arrest of over a thousand
environmental protestors during the G20 summit, from which
few charges were brought and no convictions resulted. To
understand the background from which Watts writes is
perhaps to understand the stories better, and to see
allegory in the first two stories described above -
colonists from across the sea meeting native peoples in
Earth's past, with no guarantee that the future will hold
better attitudes. BEYOND THE RIFT is certainly food for
thought.
Combining complex science with skillfully executed prose,
these edgy, award-winning tales explore the shifting border
between the known and the alien. The beauty and peril of
technology and the passion and penalties of conviction merge
in narratives that are by turns dark, satiric, and
introspective. Among these bold storylines: a seemingly
humanized monster from John Carpenter’s The Thing reveals
the true villains in an Antarctic showdown; an artificial
intelligence shields a biologically enhanced prodigy from
her overwhelmed parents; a deep-sea diver discovers her true
nature lies not within the confines of her mission but in
the depths of her psyche; a court psychologist analyzes a
psychotic graduate student who has learned to reprogram
reality itself; and a father tries to hold his broken family
together in the wake of an ongoing assault by sentient
rainstorms. Gorgeously saturnine and exceptionally powerful,
these collected fictions are both intensely thought-
provoking and impossible to forget.
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