Book Review: Space fantasies that spin us right out of orbit

Despite what our detractors believe, science-fiction writers don't generally go into space to get away from it all. This is for the simple reason that space is, to a very significant number of decimal places, empty. Anything we find there can only be something we've brought with us: personal baggage filled with all the things we like best, but also with all the things we can't imagine how to leave behind, whether we like them or not.

When it comes to kitting up for the void, Buzz Aldrin, the man who drove Neil Armstrong to the Moon, has the advantage over most of us that he has actually been there. If he has a disadvantage, it is the same thing. Aldrin knows only too well the infinite inhospitability of space. Several times in Encounter with Tiber he makes the point that an astronaut is effectively a human waldo, a remote-controlled device executing a complex series of commands from Ground Control. A life-support system of millions of intricate devices furnished by millions of taxpayers doesn't leave much room for individuality.

Starting where Aldrin's own experience left off, Encounter with Tiber is the projected history of the rest of the colossal cybernetic enterprise: to send a parcel of human beings to another sun. A radio signal received from Alpha Centauri turns out to be a digitised movie intended for a lost colony. The secrets of interstellar flight may all be here, in a box on the Moon, with a back-up on Mars: if they have survived; if we can get at them.

This is a genial, good-hearted book meant for people fascinated in knowing how things might work, rather than how they might feel.

There is a bit more vitality to the two long excerpts from the Tiberians' story of their perilous initial voyage to Earth, 9,000 years ago (which it is tempting to think might be mainly the work of Aldrin's collaborator, the sci-fi author John Barnes). Tiberians come in two different shapes, evolutionarily and culturally divergent, although their mentality is perfectly familiar. Capable of being not merely dutiful and courageous but also ambivalent, arrogant and cruel, these aliens seem more human, in fact, than most of the humans, and certainly less alien than Communism, which remains, at all times and on all planets, really scary.

About as alien to Nasa as you can get is the Culture invented by Iain M Banks. An interstellar confederacy thousands of years old, it exists to provide perpetual pleasure, individual self-fulfilment and freedom from suffering for all. Its resources are infinite, its capability hardly less so. Nanotechnology, antigravity, matter transmission, bodily transformation and travel through several different types of hyperspace are all freely and instantly available to any of its inhabitants, many of whom live on the gigantic starships, or General Systems Vehicles, whose artificial intelligences are the prime movers of the civilisation, and the principal characters of Banks's latest novel.

Not a whit constrained by the baggage restrictions that Aldrin and Barnes observe, when Banks ships into space he always takes vast quantities of the boldest and most elaborate fantasies of militarism, espionage, romance and baroque technology. Like its predecessors, Excession is about the edge of the Culture, where it rubs up against other galactic tendencies, and where, in the name of the laid-back utopia, the Special Circumstances department of its diplomatic arm routinely and clandestinely betrays all its principles.

There are two major outside forces this time. One is the eponymous Excession, an immense featureless sphere which pops into existence in a well-charted region of space and simply hangs there, impervious to inquiry, defying laws of physics that even the Culture finds itself obliged to observe. The other is the Affront, a marvellously horrible species of technically advanced bloodthirsty tentacled gasbags whose manifest destiny it is to hunt, shoot, gobble and rape their merry way from world to world.

Once again reluctant agents are peremptorily shoe-horned out of comfortable circumstances, called away from wildly enjoyable parties by secretive automata, to be dispatched on equivocal missions to secure the co-operation of other individuals more thoroughly retired from the dirty fray. Needless to say, in Banks as in Le Carre, the mission profiles serve only to conceal what's really going on.

Banks's staggering imaginative energy is matched only by his wry, sceptical humour, his insistence on isolating the political and moral infrastructure of the most bizarre situation. Though he plots with more energy than precision, piling conspiracy upon conspiracy, he never loses sight of the quantum of history that is individual choice. He makes no apology for the fact that his Culturians still prefer the basic human form. Able to back themselves up in data storage, to change sex and to secrete drugs internally at will, they remain perfectly liable to feel and say: "I could use a drink."

Memorable scenes include an Affront regimental dinner, eaten with harpoons on the edge of a pit of fighting animals; and a fateful encounter in a city designed to resemble a gigantic circuitboard, caused by a traffic accident outside the temple of a transcendental cult, involving a dinosaur and a light two-wheeled carriage drawn by a quasi-ostrich and driven by a quasi-chimpanzee, during a hologram enactment of an exaggerated version of a Second World War bombing raid. Only Banks could possibly dream up such a scene and make it funny, frightening, mystifying, exciting, and credible, let alone comprehensible. As with the work of any powerful moral visionary, Philip K Dick or Charles Dickens, to wish such a scene might be fastened more securely to the plot seems the height of ingratitude.