Natepod The weblog of Nate Cull

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.