Review: Something Coming Through
Something Coming Through by Paul J. McAuley
My rating: [rating=4]
Summary:
The aliens are here. And they want to help. The extraordinary new project from one of the country’s most acclaimed and consistently brilliantly SF novelists of the last 30 years.
Something Coming Through and its sequel Into Everywhere will extend, explore and complete the near future shared by the popular and highly acclaimed short stories in the Jackaroo sequence, including ‘The Choice’, which won the 2012 Theodore Sturgeon Memorial Award. They present new perspectives on one of the central ideas of science and science-fiction – are we alone in the universe? – through two separate narratives.
Something Coming Through is set in a recognisable but significantly different near future London: half-ruined by a nuclear explosion, flooding and climate change; altered by the arrival of aliens who call themselves the Jackaroo.
Into Everywhere moves from a desert world littered with the ruins and enigmatic artifacts of a dozen former clients of the Jackaroo, through a quest across a brutally pragmatic interstellar empire, to a world almost as old as the universe.
Review:
(I got a copy through NetGalley, in exchange for an honest review.)
3.5 to 4 stars.
This novel, while predictable in parts (in a more traditional, “cop-oriented” way), raised some interesting points in terms of what to expect in a near-future, or a parallel present, shaped by the presence of aliens. Namely the mysterious Jackaroo, who showed up some thirteen years prior to the beginning of the story with shuttles and fifteen wormholes leading to just as many new worlds for humans to colonise. Worlds ertswhile inahbited by creatures long gone and forgotten, leaving only behind strange, “Elder Culture” artefacts. Meanwhile, Earth is falling prey to memes, ideas birthed into the mind of people who have been touched by the Vorlons some of those artefacts. And who knows how exactly the Jackaroo were responsible for this? Or their unscrutable associates, the !Cha, story-lovers who use plots to gather information used in turn to woo their mates?
Intersting, because the Jackaroo never revealed their true purpose, and because their gift was definitely a double-edged sword. Sure, it allowed humanity to recover from ongoing problems (crime, pollution), but others developed in turn, and the fifteen worlds turned into mirrors of Earth, with McDonald’s and Starbuck joints popping up on Mangala and, no doubt, other places. Crime developed there just as it did on Earth, and a lot of things and events made it clear that humans basically did to these colonies what they had done to their motherworld—perhaps worse, even, due to the fact they hadn’t had to “work hard” to get to these new places, served on a silver platter. The “benevolent” Jackaroo, in other words, might just be trying to repeat an experiment they did with other planets and will do again, some kind of sick experiment to see what the “lesser” races would do when gifted with space travel they didn’t have to develop themselves.
The name itself is also reminiscent of the Australian word “jackaroo” and its potential etmology: wandering people, watching over cattle. At least, this is how it felt to me, and what I believe the author wanted to achieve: making readers question the purpose behind the Jackaroo’s actions, all the while swathing them under layers of a thriller-and-chase plot mixed with a more typical seasoned-cop-and-rookie-partner murder investigation.
The more typical parts, as I wrote above, were a little predictable, especially Vic’s, whose background is fairly unoriginal in that kind of story. However, I liked how they entwined after a while, and how you have to pay attention to the dates at the beginning of each chapter. This type of narrative can be frustrating, as you keep jumping from Chloe to Vic to Chloe to Vic again, and are left on semi-cliffhangers most of the time… but it’s a style I love, and so I wasn’t disappointed.
On the downside, the characters weren’t that much developed. Vic is moulded on a fairly standard TV-show cop-type (divorced guy, been working for the force for years, somewhat jaded but still trying to make a difference…), Nevers and Harris are also somewhat predictable, and I would have liked to know more about Fahad and his family. Chloe’s background was definitely interesting, yet it also made her somewhat aloof and distanciated—something that stood to logics, considering what happened to her mother, only it made it harder to feel involved in her quest, as she was more carried by the plot than truly active at times. (In her defence, she wasn’t a dumb heroine, and was definitely aware of who was trying to manipulate her, and who intended to off her anyway once she wouldn’t be useful anymore.)
Nevertheless, barring the somewhat weak characterisation, I found the world described here—drop here by drop there, with some info-dumping, but never too much to my liking—intriguing, and I wouldn’t mind knowing more about it in a sequel (or in a prequel).