Sister Alice

Multiple people have recommended Robert Reed’s books over the years. I started to read his Greatship stories many years ago, but got distracted and never made it back. Recently I came across a recommendation for his book, Sister Alice, as an example of hard science fiction space opera, and decided to check it out. Published in 2003, it’s a fix-up novel, composed of five stories which were originally published in Asimov’s Science Fiction magazine in the 1990s.

The setting is several million years in the future. Humans have colonized the galaxy, and there has been peace for ten million years. Before the peace, widespread availability of god-like technologies led to existential wars that threatened to destroy the entire species. To preserve humanity, it was decided that only a few individuals would have these powers.

These individuals were selected from the population for their innate disposition not to abuse their power. In order to ensure their genetics remain pure, they only reproduce by cloning, although the clones can be of both sexes. This has led to one thousand “family” dynasties who rule the galaxy. They are the rulers, warriors, and terraformers, among many other powerful roles.

This isn’t to say that regular humanity isn’t heavily improved. Death by old age or disease appears to have been eliminated, with people living for millions of years. Regular people can heal from devastating injuries and only experience limited pain due to built in analgesics. However, aside from this, they are restricted to something resembling the standard human form, although there are modified body plans on many different planets.

Ord is the youngest clone in the Chamberlain family, which is known for its terraforming prowess, making worlds and other environments habitable, such as floating continents on the rings of Saturn. Ord is only a few decades old, too young to take any posthuman forms. He learns from an elder brother that their sister, Alice, is coming to Earth. Alice is the family’s “Twelve”, meaning she is only the twelfth clone produced in the family, which has over twenty-four thousand by the start of the story. So she is a very senior member of the family, and the reasons for her visit are mysterious.

When Alice arrives, her actions are enigmatic and, for some reason, alarming to the family. She seems to take a liking to Ord, having private conversations with him, and helping in the wargames he’s currently participating in with his peers from other families.

Eventually it’s revealed that Alice and many of her peers attempted to create a baby universe at the core of the galaxy. They wanted to leave open an “umbilical cord” to access it. However this caused the energies from the baby universe to flow back into this one, creating a massive explosion which over hundreds of thousands of years lays waste to huge numbers of worlds toward the center of the galaxy, killing billions and displacing trillions.

For her crime, Alice is imprisoned. And the Chamberlains, along with all the other families who participated, are disgraced and, eventually, disbanded. Ord finds himself caught up in a plan he doesn’t understand, suddenly endowed with Alice’s talents, her posthuman powers. What follows is a tale told through tens of thousands of years, with chases and battles across interstellar space and on scales both unimaginably vast and at times unimaginably small.

Reed often describes the various encounters in terms of human interactions, but it’s clear that these are frequently just virtual interfaces for events happening between vast posthuman entities, often in the form of interstellar spacecraft, or maybe even fleets of ships. There’s a feeling that things are happening we could only dimly comprehend, and that maybe the human aspects of the characters only comprehend through the user interfaces they work though.

I mentioned above that this was cited as hard science fiction. There’s generally no FTL (faster than light) travel in the book. The galactic scale of the story is possible because everyone is immortal and events can take millenia to play out. But Reed helps himself to a lot of magical concepts, like inertialess drives. And he posits vast worlds and technologies built with dark matter, which may have been conceivable based on what was known about dark matter in the 1990s. But he’s often vague enough to allow the reader to conceptualize different ways the events might still be possible within known physics.

This is a book with a wealth of ideas. Most of Reed’s career has been as a prolific short story writer, where ideas tend to dominate, so it makes sense that would be his strength, and that it would show in this fix-up of multiple novellas. It’s not unusual in idea stories for character development to be lacking, and that’s true here. But I also found the storytelling problematic.

The story seems to take a long time to get going, to the point I nearly stopped reading in the first part when Ord has little to no agency. There’s a lot more movement from the second part on. But we often don’t understand what’s happening, a popular suspense strategy in short stories I’m personally not fond of. On a novel scale it leads to long stretches of not knowing why we should care about what’s happening. One Amazon or Goodreads reviewer said they found the book tedious, and I suspect this is why.

To be fair, this is one of Reed’s earlier novels, and the faults aren’t that unusual for a fix-up. The ideas were enough to make me enjoy and recommend it, just with a caveat so people know what they’re getting into. In many ways, it reminds me of Alastair Reynolds’ House of Suns, with enough similarities to make me wonder whether Reynolds’ tale was inspired by Reed’s book. It was good enough that I definitely plan to get back to Reed’s other books in the Greatship series.

Have you read it? If so, what did you think? Any recommendations on similar books?