Natepod The weblog of Nate Cull

Trillions

The name fitted perfectly. It had the right hard, bright sound to it - and Trillions were hard and bright. It suggests millions upon millions - and the Trillions were everywhere, sprinkling roads and gardens and roofs and even the firesides of people's homes with a glittery dusting of tiny jewels (but Trillions were not jewels).

And the name Trillions had a foreign sound to it - a suggestion of other worlds, star-studded skies, the cold emptiness of space. That was right, too. For wherever Trillions came from, it was not this world.

I finally read a book which haunted my childhood: Nicholas Fisk's 1971 young adult novel Trillions.

Whatever age I was when I first glanced at it (ten? twelve?), it scared the willies out of me, so much that I never plucked up the courage to read the whole thing. Reading the book now, it both amuses and startles me that I picked up entirely the wrong idea from the snippets of text I saw then. The Trillions of my imagination were extremely nasty space-Triffids; the ones in the book are the opposite. The story reads like a rather tame Doctor Who episode with an antiwar and ecological message: masses of tiny alien nanobot-creatures fall from the sky, a suspicious military attempt to use nuclear weapons to destroy them, a group of children make psychic contact with the tiny critters, discover that they are ecological repair robots and eventually use their newfound control to save them from the army. Somehow I both reversed the sense of it and created my own monsters (which still make me shiver today). That's kind of cool, actually.

The book does have several scary passages, but what I missed at that age is the context:

Scott suddenly saw a vision, like a photograph appearing in his mind, of the solitary figure in the space capsule. The figure was like a huge, elaborate, insect-like toy. It had a glinting, glassy, bulbous head. Its skin was of metallic silver material. Outside its body were veins - tubes and pipes and wires. But inside the glass-globe head there was a human face, in pain. And from one of the silvery arm-tubes there dangled a human hand with hairs on the back of it, nails on each finger tip and human warmth inside it. The hand moved uneasily and blood dripped from one finger.

The protagonist is talking to an astronaut about an Apollo-13 style space accident, and emphasising the loneliness and alienness of space; it is meant to be a little disturbing, but it's largely a fake-scare. What I picked up from this at age ten-something instead was a vision of alien Trillions somehow infecting and transforming humans into alien creatures. Where I got that, I'm not sure. But it sure freaked me out, and I could probably write a really scary ur-Trillion horror story if I wanted to.

(My Trillions were tiny virus-like diamondoids, each with a little 'sting', indestructible, with a hard cold alien intelligence which only wanted to consume, replicate, and possibly reconstruct the world into an alien ecosystem. They would eat the Terminator-1000 for breakfast, literally. It is difficult for me to convey the cold terror they conjured up in my brain - and I'm wondering now, where that came from.)

The Trillions are fascinating to me because they are an early nanobot story - long before Eric Drexler's 1986 'Engines of Creation', they have most of the pieces in place. They are little cogwork/lego type machines with a collective swarm intelligence, built like robots to serve long-departed 'Masters' and preserve their planet. Plausibly enough, they do not function as atomic assemblers but at a macro-scale: they can build mountains and large-scale structures, but not 'real' matter.

What I also missed was the flash of Christianity, in the dream-scene where Scott psychically contacts the ghosts of the aliens:

'We must serve the Master', said the Masters. 'The Master of everything. The Master of all planets, all lives, all of us, each single Trillion.'
'And the Trillions?'
'Through us, they serve the Master too.'
The mesh hummed gently. The Trillions that made the walls of the cavern shifted, twinkling and changing colour. Now the walls glowed purple, tinged with gold. The mesh vibrated, pleased. A veil of colour rose from it like a mist to thank them.

The ironic thing to me is that for a story which centres on the power of love and understanding of the alien versus fear, and the triumph of childlike trust versus adult incomprehension, it was the child me who was afraid, and the adult me who understands.

Rynemonn

Not shatterwrack. Not breaklight.
Just broken glass at sunset.

Those words end the first magazine-published science fiction short story I think I ever read: Terry Dowling's haunting cyberpunkish Shatterwrack at Breaklight in Omni, 1985. The story (a sand-ship sailor encounters the holographic projection of a woman grieving a long-ago car accident in a future Australian city) got under my skin and left me dazzled and confused in a bewilderingly changed world, struggling to find my breath. It was a long time before I forgave Dowling for what he pulled on me.

(There are a few other SF writers who have had a similar effect: William Gibson's Burning Chrome from the same era stamped cyberspace and the BAMA Sprawl on my brain, but much later; Greg Egan, another Australian, with his infinitely bleak Transition Dreams; Kim Stanley Robinson's Red Mars. But Dowling for me was the first.)

What I didn't realise at the time is that Shatterwrack was to be just the first of a long cycle of short stories all centering around Tom Tyson, the Blue Captain of the sandship Rynosseros, in Dowling's far-future romanticised post-spiritual-apocalypse Australia where Aboriginal Tribes rule the planet with laser satellites, artificial intelligence, genetic engineering and psionic powers, while white-skinned Nationals are exiled to the crumbling coastal cities. The stories - collected in three books in the early 1990s (Rynosseros, Blue Tyson, and Twilight Beach) - are a love song to the Australian outback and the Aboriginal Dreamtime, filtered through a cocktail of 1980s high-tech cyberpunk and a sort of space-opera-steampunk retro-escapism, dashed with tense and elliptical political intrigue. William Gibson meets Cordwainer Smith by way of Frank Herbert. And they remain probably my favourite science fiction works of all time.

But the stories never ended, they just stopped; they never resolved the mystery of just who Tom Tyson was, why he spent years in the Madhouse, what his three dream-signs (a ship, a star, a woman's face) meant, why ID-5982-J, the old rogue Iseult-Darrian belltree AI, had given Colours to the Seven National Captains in defiance of the Haldanian Order themselves...

Well, that's over now, because the fourth and final Tom Tyson volume, Rynemonn, is out. And it's everything I had hoped for. Eleven short, mostly standalone, stories linked by a framing narrative, and resolving in a glorious, bittersweet, ambiguous battle royale that answers the basic questions of Tom's existence but leaves so much - everything, really - open to the reader's imagination.

If you've never read these stories (and the books are hard to come by, printed by a small press and possibly out of print, I had to get most of mine second-hand), but you love thoughtful, swashbuckling sci-fi (robots! aerostats! kite-powered sandships! mindwar! deathlamps! politics! genetic assassins! laser strikes from orbit for breaking tribal law!) - do your best to get hold of these.

Yes, there's probably also a lot wrong with the Rynosseros universe too, starting with a sort of reverse Western orientalism that both glamourises and fears native people's 'inherent spirituality', and a view of religion as little more than a form of mental warfare, so I'm not sure I could write these myself - but there's also a poetry and warmth that is missing from a lot of fiction today, speculative or otherwise.

One day I'd like to write something as good as these. It's just one of the unattainable goals I have that make me cry.