Bright of the Sky, by Kay Kenyon
The 23rd century: Earth is ruled by a handful of corporations (including a focal one for our plot purposes, named Minerva), and human star colonies are linked by a very unstable network of black hole transit tubes. These tubes occasionally swallow ships entire. One such incident occurred not too long ago to the starship pilot Titus Quinn and his family, wife Johanna and young daughter Sydney, who were lost forever.
But then the strangest thing happened: Inexplicably, Quinn resurfaced alone shortly thereafter on a world where no human starship had visited in months! He had vague tales of living for impossible years in a universe next door. But his memories were fragmentary, and no one believed him. Consequently, back on Earth he's become a bitter recluse.
But now a Minerva research outpost has finally confirmed Quinn's story. Indeed, beyond a "brane" interface, another universe exists. But this universe bears little resemblance to ours. It's an artificial construct, a flat inhabitable surface as big as our entire cosmos, with a kind of fractal edge on one side, a giant wall on the other and at the wall's base a river of exotic matter that permits faster-than-light travel of a sort across the huge territory. Its sky holds no sun but is itself permanently "afire." This immense space is filled with dozens of alien sentient races, including the Chalin, who resemble humans. The Chalin were actually constructed themselves long ago by the Tarig, who are the implacable overlords of the whole universe, which its people call the Entire.
Armed with this knowledge, Stefan Polich, greedy and ruthless head of Minerva, and his super-smart assistant, Helice Maki, conceive the notion of using the Entire to replace the inferior black-hole transit system. They send Titus Quinn back there as explorer and emissary to the Tarig—willingly, since he wants to recover his lost daughter and wife.
But once back in the Entire, where he must masquerade as a humble soldier named Dai Shen, Quinn discovers that his previous stay in the neighboring universe has left behind a legacy of enemies—and that the Tarig are interested only in the conquest of Earth's continuum!
A new hard-SF playground
This is Kay Kenyon's seventh novel (and the first I've had the good fortune to read, although I've been collecting the others right along). Despite nominations for several awards and generally good press, she's been flying, I'd say, under the radar of most readers. I venture to state that this book will boost her profile considerably, for it's a bravura concept bolstered by fine writing; lots of plausible, thrilling action; old-fashioned heroism; and strong emotional hooks.
On the one hand, Kenyon's tale is a kind of planetary romance, a strong subgenre of SF ever since the days of Edgar Rice Burroughs' Barsoom and Edward Hamilton's Star Kings saga, and a mode that has been experiencing a delightful resurgence of late, with such books as Chris Roberson's Paragaea (2006). Like Jack Vance's Big Planet (1957) and Robert Silverberg's Majipoor sequence, Kenyon's conceptual leap provides an environment conducive to prolonged Odysseus-like wanderings among exotic places, cultures and sentient beings. And she has a fertile enough imagination not to disappoint in this regard, conjuring up vivid races, ways of living and sights.
At the same time, Kenyon is working in the Big Dumb Object territory exemplified by such past masters as Larry Niven, Bob Shaw, Greg Bear, Paul McAuley and, more recently, Karl Schroeder. Deftly employing the most recent speculations from 21st-century physics, she conjures up a relationship between the two universes that leaps startlingly into cosmic significance toward the end of this book (the first in a series, by the way).
Kenyon exhibits a clever narrative structural bent as well. With reunion with his daughter as his prime quest, Quinn cannot be allowed by the author to succeed too soon. But having Sydney offstage for the whole volume would render her a cipher. So Kenyon devotes a fair number of chapters to Sydney's harsh, weird life among the horselike Inyx, from the girl's point of view. Then, halfway through the book, to illustrate the time disjunction between the two universes, she stages a scene on Earth that illustrates the point perfectly. Such attention to the structural underpinnings of the story is the mark of a fine writer.
Kenyon can only go on from here to a stature as tall as the Tarig sky city known as the Ascendency.
- by Paul Di Filippo for SciFi Weekly
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