Undertow

[sawyl]

Another book from the backlog, this time Elizabeth Bear's Undertow, a planetary romance that plays on questions of identity, capitalist oppression, and quantum mechanics. It's set on Greene's World, a semi-aquatic world and the sole source of the raw materials needed to maintain a limited FTL system, ruled by the ruthless Rim Company, who seem to think nothing of health and safety and who view summary assassination as a handy way of short-circuiting the tedious wheels of mock justice.

The plot begins in earnest when professional assassin André Deschênes is hired by Rim to kill Lucienne Spivak, the leader of an alien rights organisation. Despite this he is taken on as an apprentice by Jean Kroc, Lucienne's partner and a conjurer possessed of the ability to manipulate quantum possibilities, who hopes both to redeem André and to further Lucienne's goal of saving the Greene's World aliens from the oppressive forces of the omelite mines. As the natives start to revolt, Rim becomes increasingly desperate, using their own conjurers to push their probabilities of success to the point where they risk a possibility storm.

The novel features strong world building and, in the native froggies, a convincing cast of aliens — Gourami's gradual changes from a Company worker living in a human-created dome to hir eventual existence as a far swimmer and exoparent is particularly good. The idea of the slide — an FTL device capable of transmitting data and non-sentient cargo — creates a fascinating universe, where physical transport is largely slower than light but virtual and goods transport is instantaneous.

Bear also has a lot of fun with the many worlds interpretation of quantum mechanics — she include a short primer on the subject just before the finale — using it to explain both the slide, the abilities of conjurers like André and Jean, and the unlikeliness of the events that conclude the novel. The idea of parallel lives and existences is also used to explain the identities of some of the characters, who turn out to be quantum copies — clones duplicated from a copy of an original consciousness transmitted across the universe via an FTL slide, who, in a nice twist on the Star Trek transporter, inherit the rights and identity of their progenitor, legally becoming their creator.

Conclusions? Enjoyable, thoughtful, classic early period Bear.