Book Review: Lockstep
/
by Karl Schroeder
Tor, 2014
The fact that one of prolific author Karl Schroeder's writing credits is something called The Complete Idiot's Guide to Writing Science Fiction is obviously worrying, since it sounds like the set-up to a joke to which there's no comeback. But the fact that he co-wrote the work with Cory Doctorow restores hope: that's some mighty talented company. And so it goes throughout Schroeder's resume: for every deadline-paycheck piece of pap, there's something utterly arresting like 2005's Lady of Mazes, or his latest book, Lockstep, now out from Tor. This is an author who's what an old Boston book-critic used to refer to as "profitably unpredictable."
Certainly the basic premise of Lockstep is something most sci-fi fans won't see coming; in fact, to die-hard Star Trek fans (and is there any other kind?) it'll seem downright surreal. In the world of Schroeder's lean and hugely engaging new book, there's no such thing as faster-than-light space travel. That staple of science fiction doesn't exist; Einstein still rules. And yet, when the book's teen hero Toby McGonigal awakens in a spacecraft at the book's outset, he gradually discovers a galaxy thriving with interstellar civilizations, which hardly seems possible if everybody's still crawling along at 186,000 miles per second. It's long been an axiom of science fiction that in order to have a Federation, you've got to have warp speed.
Schroeder's book is being billed as "hard" sci-fi in large part because it doesn't simply invent a warp speed/foldspace/tach-drive work-around to that physics limitation. Instead, it tries to elaborate a viable alternative. But that's tricky. Drama requires characters, but without Captain Kirk's warp speed, you need generations of characters to live out the natural span of their lives one after another, grow old, and die in the hundreds or even thousands of years it would take a sub-light vessel to reach some distant solar system, and with all due respect to the various authors of the Old Testament, simple genealogy can't ever substitute for storytelling. Suspended animation is almost necessarily also suspended drama.
Every once in a while, a really good science fiction novel comes along telling the story of a suspended-animation generation-ship where things go wrong en route (Frank Robinson's splendid 1992 novel The Dark Beyond the Stars is a fine example, maybe the finest). But by far the more popular approach is to pick up the story once the generation-ship voyage is safely docked where it's going.
Schroeder's novel is firmly, even spectacularly, in the second camp, thanks to the science of locksteps, which keep all the galaxy's various inhabited worlds on a more or less even footing. Our author has worked out the technicalities to a virtually obsessive length, because those technicalities are vital to young Toby, who wakes up 14,000 years after he last closed his eyes. Readers get most of their exposition from the mental scrabbling Toby does in order to make sense of the brave new galaxy where he finds himself. This can be helpful, of course:
Locksteps were a kind of network - specifically, something called a synchronous network, where every node in the mesh sent and received messages at the same time. All the worlds shipped out cargo and passenger ships at the same intervals, and doing this put them all on equal footing. If a couple of worlds doubled or tripled their frequency, they could grow faster than their neighbors. Lockstep worlds were always tempted to do this, and worlds that did often made out very well indeed.
Young Toby encounters plenty of discrepancies like these as he realizes that the unguessable new galaxy where he now finds himself is all but entirely ruled by his own brother, who's used the loopholes of lockstep in order to become a tyrant. Indeed, the entire McGonigal clan is now revered as far more than human, and Toby himself is a kind of messiah-figure in the epic poems, songs, and mythology that's sprung up in the intervening millennia.
This being borderline-YA science fiction, he also encounters a feisty young woman, Corva, who's grown up in a world entirely and accidentally shaped by Toby and his family. The interactions between Corva and Toby form the best bits of Lockstep, some very neat juxtapositions between a wildly wide-angle world-view and its down-grade non-relativistic counterpart, as when Corva at one point halts and stares with undisguised dismay at the simple phenomenon of night-time:
Except for the occasional crackle from the fire, there was no sound at all. It was as if they were standing at the border to the land of Death, nothing ahead of them but perfected stillness.Corva shivered. "Is this why we did it? she turned to nod in the direction of the town they'd left. "Did we have a million years of being faced with ... with this every night, and did we invent fire and weapons and clothes and culture and art and houses just so we wouldn't have to look into it? -- That awful emptiness?"
Schroeder handles these radically different encounters - and Toby's inevitable showdown with his family members - with an easy, practiced skill. The aforementioned 'hard' science in this science fiction sometimes got too woolly for this layman, but the story itself barrels forward wonderfully. The resulting novel is indeed profitably unpredictable - and highly recommended.