The Quiet War is my first experience with Paul McAuley, and it’s been an interesting and thought-provoking one, for a variety of reasons. Set in a far-future where an Earth ravaged by the effects of global warming is being painstakingly put back together through the use of advanced bio-engineering, and where the human colonists on the moons of Jupiter and Saturn are taking a divergent political and even evolutionary path, it amply fulfils SF’s traditional job of speculating about the future role of technologies in our lives and mankind’s place in the universe.

We follow a diverse group of key characters, spending more time with some than others: Cash Baker, crash-hot space fighter pilot; Sri-Hong Owen, a geneticist on Earth who owes her allegiance to the ruling family of Greater Brazil, one of the three main powers in the world; Loc Ibhrahim, a shifty diplomat also in the service of Greater Brazil; Dave 8, one of a series of cloned supersoldiers pioneered by Sri-Hong Owen; and Macy Minnot, a scientist on an Earth-based clean-up crew who specialises in regenerating lakes and rivers through the use of organically rich mud (which to his credit McAuley, biologist that he is, manages to make sound quite interesting).

The powers that be in Greater Brazil are preparing for a war with the people of the colonies – known as Outers, they have pioneered a new lifestyle in a variety of forbidding and hostile environments. Everything about the Outers and the ecology-obsessed people of Earth is different: it’s greens (Earth) vs genes (the Outers); the dictatorships of Earth vs the passionate and messy democracy of the Outers; the centralisation of three great powers (Greater Brazil, the European Union and the Pacific Community) vs the decentralisation of thousands of self-determining but mutually dependent habitats and biomes.

Macy Minnot finds herself, along with Loc Ibrahim, on an ill-fated peace mission to set up a biome on one of the Outer moons; when she is framed for murder, she has to go on the run and is effectively forced to become an Outer – given that the core characters are all on the Earth’s side, she is our main opportunity for a perspective on their lives and outlooks. Meanwhile, Dave 8 and Cash Baker are both, in their own ways, at the sharp end of the gathering tensions, and Sri-Hong Owen is right in the thick of the politics. The outbreak of the war that has been inevitable from the start of the book pitches them all in to situations outside their comfort zones.

The Quiet War is a cleverly plotted book, laced with compelling science, and McAuley’s scientific background shines through. That’s not to say it doesn’t have any problems: it’s overlong, with some detours in to scientific details that are not central to the plot, and some sections in the middle of the book where things seem to move rather sluggishly, although the pace of the last quarter is far from slow. Most challenging for me is the dialogue, which apart from the occasional profanity, puts me in mind of a previous generation of (undoubtedly brilliant) SF writers: like Isaac Asimov, who of course wrote magnificent speculative fiction, and James Blish, whose Cities in Flight I discovered for the first time last year, McAuley’s dialogue is stilted and somewhat mannered, with disappointingly little characterisation. For me, despite the cutting edge scientific speculations, it made The Quiet War feel a wee bit dated, which is a shame, because it contained some brilliant ideas held together with a well-engineered plot. If you read it for the science, rather than the dialogue, though, it’s certainly a book to consider checking out.

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