THE ETERNAL OBSERVER

An android battles a robot cult that wants to wipe out humankind in Griffin’s SF adventure.

The narrative unfolds in a future where space-mining companies have accidentally destroyed Earth, forcing humans, robots, and artificial intelligences to disperse to other planets. Piloting his space freighter, the Red Dwarf, Cpt. Sam Stonewell travels to the planet Oregon 4 to pick up a passenger called Kingsley, a slight, boyish android with blond hair, a royal blue coat, and loads of good-hearted charm who’s trying to find his missing castle. The search takes the Red Dwarf to offbeat locales, including a hippie planet whose atmosphere contains high percentages of pot smoke and hallucinogenic mushroom spores, and New Descartes, headquarters of the Church of the Holy Androids Order of the Singularity, which believes that the universe will disintegrate if there are no humans alive to observe it. Kingsley is significant to the Church, which regards him as the one nonhuman who qualifies as a conscious Observer of the universe. Kingsley gets wind of a plot by CHAOS, a sinister offshoot of the Church that’s planning to create the Singularity, an artificial superintelligence that will impose perfect order on the universe after spreading a virus that will sterilize humankind so as to eliminate messy human free will. Kingsley and the Red Dwarf crew set out to thwart CHAOS with the help of a Catholic nun who doubles as a hit woman, a hotshot fighter pilot, and a mysterious old woman who sits in her wheelchair and knits.

Griffin’s yarn creates a richly detailed fictive future world that has a familiar, lived-in feel as it satirizes present-day discontents: Earth-vintage cigarettes are collectors’ items worth their weight in gold, people struggle to pay off 250-year mortgages, bureaucracy is still maddening, and ambient holo-ads are annoying (“SmileBoost! Now in mango! Side effects may include the sudden return of childhood dread and teeth that glow in the dark!”). The technology is inventive and aesthetic, like the electric guitars that spaceship pilots use as instrument panels. The book is in part a crackerjack space opera that features engrossing action scenes in which intricate tech deals out vigorous mayhem: “Twin streams of superheated tungsten lanced across the chamber, striking the wall-mounted weapons with surgical precision. The first emplacement simply vaporized…The second managed to return fire for exactly 1.3 seconds before Boombot’s superior targeting algorithms reduced it to molten slag.” But the story also has philosophical and emotional substance, especially regarding Kingsley’s predicament; he’s doomed to suffer agonizing foreknowledge of loss and defeat (“Imagine knowing exactly how you’ll die, when everyone you care about will leave, how every good thing ends”) and freighted with a burden of memory that Griffin renders in darkly lyrical prose: “Watched the moon crack from a rooftop in Manhattan. Beautiful and terrible, like a sunset made of apocalypse. The sky rained debris for weeks afterward. Killed millions, of course, but very prettily. Humans always did have a talent for aesthetic destruction.” The result is a tech-drenched fantasy that still has plenty of heart.

A boldly imaginative SF epic that mixes rousing action with plangent psychological depth.