(Review by Nick Gevers, Ph.D, Cape Town, South Africa)

The fires of the world burn majestically beyond the walls of our perception. And even within those walls we, who thought ourselves omniscient masters of a linear universe, cannot see far for the smoke. Perhaps we can glimpse Reality in dreams, but more likely it dreams us. This seems to be what Tricia Sullivan, in her sly, fast-talking way, is saying to us. For all our hubris, we merely bumble along, she declares: behold this shaped into narrative.

If this is Sullivan’s intention in Dreaming in Smoke (1998) (and we can’t truly be certain, as we, perusing this slippery novel of deceptions, are reading in smoke), she succeeds rather well. Her scenario is standard: some years ago, a human party arrived on the planet T’nane, all set for colonization. A huge terraforming problem has presented itself: what ought to have been a breathable oxygen-rich atmosphere is instead mostly CO2. The apparently non-sentient life-forms swarming in the planet’s Ocean hint at a mysterious alien biochemistry. These enigmas would in orthodox SF be incentives to human ingenuity; the Competent Engineers of the genre’s Edisonian past would march to a bold cognitive resolution. Or, in a spirit of New Age empathy, the emissaries from Earth would achieve communion with the alien World-Soul. But Sullivan will have none of this. Her sense of realism dictates a more plausible outcome: the Mothers who lead the colony are baffled by T’nane. They withdraw into empty nostalgia for Earth, aided by alcohol and the one usable drug to be concocted from T’nane’s organic soup. The male scientist-technicians, known as Grunts (presumably because they are subordinate to the Mothers and speak with monosyllabic practicality), have no answers to the Oxygen Problem either. The young generation that ought to be spreading across T’nane instead is kept champing at the bit in the warren-like complex known as First. Claustrophobic futility and slow extinction seem the colony’s destiny. What is to be done?

Little can be done by the young protagonist, Kalypso Deed. The Mothers have forecast her a genius (a la genre SF’s messianic prodigies), but she has turned out unmotivated, evasive, whimsical. Her interactions with others are a mixture of flippancy and chaos, wittily rendered by Sullivan. She is, in essence, a cyberpunk heroine transplanted to a colonization story, and is thus passively wedded to the settlement’s complex of virtual realities, which are governed by an expanding AI named Ganesh and experienced through interactive Dreams. The general helplessness of the colonists is underlined by this preference for cyberspace over the natural spaces of T’nane. But the Dreams are no refuge for Kalypso and her people; the planet’s biological System, abetted by a madly solitary scientist among the human crew, infiltrates Ganesh with its own logic, and a transformative symbiosis is initiated. The scientist, like the arrogant paragons of traditional SF, has hoped to order T’nane to change; instead, it transforms itself. It will determine the colony’s future environment.

The story of Dreaming in Smoke has not been one of our triumph over physical obstacles, but rather one of endearing human error and of the perverse comfort that Kalypso and the scientist, Azamat Marcsson, find in each other. Effortless mastery over the external spaces of Nature, and even over the internal spaces of the virtual, is not to be had. By employing the confused Kalypso as her sole narrative viewpoint, Sullivan baffles and goads readers and characters alike with cunning hints and devious misperceptions; and we are enlightened as to our true status in the universe: that of near-blind people descrying a vastly complex elephant.

BANTAM SPECTRA (USA). 1998. PAPERBACK.