Tales of a Fourth Grade Nothing

Set fifty years after the events of Chill the largely restored Ladder is approaching its final destination, a world the Jacobeans have dubbed Grail. But Grail is already inhabited by a group of hyper-rational humans who practice rightminding — "...a combination of microsurgery, chiefly to the temporal lobe, and therapeutic normalization of the neurochemistry" — and whose ethics and attitudes are appear to be completely antithetical to the transhumanism of the Jacobeans.

But when two emissaries from Grail, Amanda and Danilaw, join the Jacob's Ladder for the last part of its journey, the better to decide how to handle the sudden arrival of extra colonists, they find their attitudes challenged by the intensity and passion and sheer strangeness of the ship-dwellers. Surveying their culture in the light of their new experiences, they start to realise that for all that their rightminding has stabilised their society, it has also ossified and homogenised it; instead of creating new and significant works of art, they have increasingly fallen back on the music and dramas of the last few centuries before rightminding became universal, trading imagination for greater rationalism.

Ands if all that wasn't enough to make it very clear that rightminding is only a kissing cousin to brainwashing, Amanda talks about the fate that befell an autistic friend who didn't match up to the norms of their rightminded society:

He was very... literal. But I still don't see what's wrong with that. Rightminding him made him more like other people, easier for them to deal with. It may have made it easier for him to navigate among them. It certainly lessened conflict. But did it make him happier or more useful to society? I mean, dealing with sophipathology is one thing, forcing people to think instead of believing, but when do we take it too far?

Grail sometimes seems like a modern vision of Huxley's Brave New World. A place so sophisticated that it no longer needs to ship Bernard Marx off to an island to think his heretical thoughts, but can instead offer him a handful of pills and some quick brain surgery that will stop him from thinking thoughts that cause him to standout and start thinking thoughts that cause him to blend in, turning Bernard Marx into Benito Hoover.

The same rightminded attitude carries over to nature where, Danilaw argues, the now-rational humanity has, having out-competed every other organism, an obligation to "leave the world better — healthier, more complete, more diverse — than you found it." This contrasts with the Darwinian, transhumanist philosophy of the Jacobeans who see this as a form of human exceptionalism that denies the autonomy of living world:

"Doesn't that deny the agency of the non-sentient? Doesn't it argue that we are somehow responsible for them?"
"When we became more able to compete," Danilaw said, uncomfortably, "we became responsible. We become responsible to protect the natural world. When we become stronger, we become stewards."
"The world does not reward timidity," Cynric said... "Does your philosophy not set humankind apart from nature?" she said. "You speak of protecting the natural world, but nature protects nothing. Nature does not believe in a fair fight. For every mouse, there is an owl. For every spider, there is a wasp. The world destroys to feed itself; it is a zero-sum game, and life consumes life. There is only so much carbon in any given carbon cycle... Who the hell set you up in loco parentis to the natural world?"

Essentially, then, the argument is between a eco-liberal society that supports personal autonomy of everything from humans down to talking orchids at the cost of political dissent and occasional coups and a society where the collective interest is favoured ahead of the personal, in order to improve stability or, more precisely, to improve rationalism with stability as a byproduct.

It also feels a bit like the early Red-Green debates between Claybourne and Russell in Kim Stanley Robinson's epic Mars Trilogy: what duties do colonists have to the original environment of a planet and to what extent can any moral changes be justified. The ironic pay-off of all this, in Grail at least, is that colonists do, in fact, do the right thing but lack the imagination and perspective to know why they've done the right thing.

So lots of philosophy to catch hold of but also a good cast of characters, an interesting backdrop and a page-turning plot. Of the characters, I particularly enjoyed the return of Percival Conn, who'd only really been present in Chill as a vast and grieving absence, unable to come to terms with her new role as Captain and traumatised by the creation of the new angel, Nova. Given a half-century to grieve and heal, the Percival of Grail is confident and assured in her power, comfortable in her symbiotic relationship with Nova, able to take firm decisions when required, but also able to exercise compassion. Of the others Tristan was excellent as ever, Danilaw and Amanda were good, plausible additions to the cast, while Benedick and Mallory had smaller supporting roles.

I thought that the sudden collision of cultures between the Jacob's Ladder and Grail was particularly nicely done, especially the way that the outside perspectives of the two emissaries emphasized the sheer weirdness of the Jacobeans' culture with its factions, casual resurrections and knightly chivalry. I also thought the sections in which the two different sets of emissaries explore their new worlds were a delight: Danilaw and Amanda being amazed by the vast, plant-lined interiors of the ship; Percival being dazzled by her first experience of a thunderstorm; Tristan struggling to run in planetary gravity.

Although I realise that the Jacob's Ladder novels might not be the very finest Bear has to offer — the superb Stratford Man wins on points — it's still damn good, and it's probably my favourite series, the one that I've enjoyed most. Perhaps because I adore Percival Conn, perhaps I'm a sucker for vast, gothic, semi-derelict starships haunted by ghostly AIs and uploads — Nostalgia for Infinity, I'm looking at you here — perhaps because I like the echoes of Chronicles of Amber, perhaps because I like the philosophy, perhaps it's just because it's such a wonderfully engrossing tale. Or perhaps it's just love, and who knows how that works...