Permanence Review

Science fiction is often said to come in two forms, hard and soft, but there is another, more unfortunate division: hard science fiction with little or no characterization, and soft science fiction with compelling characters but rather light on the science.  I suspect this has much to do with the authors and their motives for writing the stories in the first place.  I thoroughly enjoy the idea-heavy, character-light version of hard science fiction, but such stories are inevitably somewhat niche.  There are occasional exceptions, like Foundation (which someone somehow decided should be a television series – of all the science fiction stories to adapt to television, I would have put that one last, but the first season (which is all I’ve watched of it) was actually decent, though quite different from the book), but I doubt if Rocheworld or All of an Instant will ever be common cultural touchstones.  There are exceptions, though, hard science fiction stories which also have compelling plots and characters.  Certain Star Trek episodes make good examples, as does The Martian, and maybe Ender’s Game.  Schroeder’s Permanence is another.

It gets off to a bit of a slow start, and, since I was looking for an idea-heavy read, I wasn’t sure I would enjoy it.  For the first couple chapters, while the science fiction set dressing is good, and the plot is fast-paced with plenty of action and tension, the story reads as a somewhat predictable asteroid-miner, poor-girl-escaping-to-civilization type story.  I’m sure there’s a more literary name for that story archetype, but it’s a pattern I’ve seen several times in other books and other formats, so if that’s all Permanence proved to be, I would have been disappointed.  Fortunately, it rapidly becomes much more, weaving in such a variety of ideas and concepts at different scales that, before I reached the end, I already knew I would be thinking about it long after I finished it.

Evolution.  It’s not general relativity, quantum chromodynamics, inflationary cosmology, or any other more science fiction-sounding theory.  Thermodynamics is technically older, but still feels more appropriate to the science fiction genre, somehow.  When it comes to scientific ideas I think about inspiring science fiction stories, evolution is not the one to which I turn, except perhaps in how aliens might develop under different conditions, such as those in Blindsight or Inherit the Stars.  In Permanence, evolution is at the core of the story, though it is understated, shown rather than told, and it isn’t until about a third into the book that its prominence becomes apparent.  Evolution of both species and societies is the thread running underneath the whole text, and not in the simplistic view suggested by the famous human evolution images, with the silhouettes of various hominids gradually standing more upright.

If an exploration of an interpretation of the implications of the theory of evolution on intelligent, sentient life’s fate in the universe is the core of the book, it is surrounding by layers of other ideas and notions.  Technology isn’t really one of them, independently, but the impact of different technologies on societies forms several of the book’s layers.  Permanence has FTL, which is never fully explained save that it in some way requires massive gravity wells, because one of the book’s major conflicts is between civilizations which can be connected and reached by FTL, and those which cannot, an older civilization from the days before humanity could travel between the stars, and instead built colonies around brown dwarfs and other orphaned worlds.  In Schroeder’s universe, there are brown dwarfs and hot Jupiters littering the voids between the main sequence stars, and these formed the basis for humanity’s first interstellar civilization, before FTL made travel between main sequence stars viable.  “Inspace,” a kind of neural-interface-based augmented reality technology, is another technological layer, and the way its manipulation, both by individuals and governments, can affect people and societies forms another conflict.  In another author’s hands, each of these might be the subject of their own book, but Schroeder masterfully weaves them into the overall context of his world, characters, and plot.

If you spend much time reading science fiction or about the search for extraterrestrial life, you’ve doubtless come upon the Fermi paradox, the notion that, based on our observations of the conditions in the universe, there ought to be a lot more life out there than we’ve seen evidence for thus far.  This has led to all kinds of speculation, both in serious scientific literature and through the medium of science fiction, about what the limiting factor might be.  Schlock Mercenary engages with this premise, essentially proposing that intelligent life eventually determines active galaxies are too dangerously unstable and therefore migrates into self-sustained extra-galactic habitats with minimal signatures.  Schroeder engages with the premise, too, and the ultimate “solution” to the paradox in Permanence is both a compelling climax to the evolutionary considerations built up throughout the book’s course, and a clever callback to the discovery which forms the book’s opening sequence.

In a sense, there are two stories being told in Permanence, although they are so woven together that neither would stand as an independent novel.  The more direct of the two is the story of a network of far-future human civilizations, comprising three main societies: the Cycler Compact, which lives mostly on the orphan and rogue worlds mentioned previously, and which does not possess FTL; the Rights Economy, a dominant, FTL-capable civilization which merges the pervasive, invasive surveillance of Orwell’s 1984 with an extreme take on capitalism and ownership; and the rebels, who also have FTL, and who object to the Rights Economy (precisely why, what aspects, and their own positions is never made quite clear, one of the few aspects which Schroeder does not build out as much as I would have wished).  We’re told this story primarily via the first perspective character we meet, Rue, and it is the more predictable of the two.  If it stood alone, it would be a decent, fairly predictable, quite familiar science fiction plot.  Its intersection with the second story makes it far more interesting.

The second story is delivered primarily through Mike, a disillusioned priest of a banned religion, and a research assistant to the preeminent expert on past alien civilizations.  Past, because Mike’s disillusionment comes primarily from a lifetime of exploring the ruins of alien civilizations without finding cooperative, living ones.  This is where Permanence distinguishes itself from standard science fiction fair as something more imaginative, exploratory, and challenging in its ideas.  It sets up a premise that intelligent alien civilizations tend not to endure, and that most of them are so fundamentally unlike humans that cooperation, even basic dialogue, is impossible.  If his story stood alone, it would be a fascinating, idea-heavy science fiction story with the typical dearth of engaging plot.  By twisting Mike’s and Rue’s stories together, Schroeder patches the weaknesses of each and abets each thread’s strengths.

Schoeder’s writing is not magnificent, glorious prose; it is serviceable, straightforward, largely plain and unornamented.  His characters are somewhat understated despite their interest and conflicts, or at least held at a remove from the reader; aside from Mike Bequith, the book does not convey a rich internal life for any of them, even Rue.  To do otherwise would, perhaps, distract from the plot and ideas Schroeder sets out to explore, ideas which I could continue waxing eloquent about, except that doing so would spoil the book for you, and I want you to experience its twists, turns, and mind-expanding notions for yourself.  So, you should go read Permanence, and then we can have a proper discussion about the potential evolution of cooperative aliens and whether or not sentience is really the pinnacle of evolutionary accomplishment we egotistically assume it to be.