Robert Charles Wilson's new planetary exploration novel, Bios, is a slim throwback to the days when authors packed a big story into seventy thousand words. Like the classic books of those days, it's rich in imagination, with enough surprises to entertain jaded veteran fans.
The book begins with an act of sabotage and liberation. Zoe Fisher is the perfect explorer, groomed from birth to explore Isis, a dangerous world where humanity has established its first tenuous extrasolar foothold. Only an unscheduled act of pity saves her from being the perfect servant as well, as a rebellious doctor secretly removes the mood-regulating "thymostat" implanted in Zoe's body shortly before she begins her mission.
It's an act that allows Zoe to discover her own dormant emotional life, setting up a plot that science fiction has adopted as one of its favorites.
However, while traditional SF books of this type lead up to a climactic showdown between unchained servant and the repressive government that created her, Wilson pulls off an audacious trick of misdirection. He gives the reader the showdown -- in this case, conveniently personifying the government in the body of Zoe's manipulative mentor -- but then smoothly reverses himself, tying together a web of seemingly minor plot threads to create a subtle and oddly satisfying resolution.
A lot of life left in Isis - and in the genre
Most of the plot threads concern the secrets of the planet Isis. Wilson walks a fine line describing the world's beauty and danger, balancing the difficulties of exploration with its attractions. He's imagined a world a billion years older than Earth, a world that, due to local astronomical conditions, has never suffered the mass extinctions that lead to the frantic creation of new species to fill new niches. It's a tropical hothouse, bursting with life.
Evolution on Isis has been driven by predation and the constant refining of new offenses and defenses in the struggle for survival. Individual consciousness has never evolved, but life on Isis is incredibly vigorous -- so much so that Earth life can't survive exposure to it. A single spore adapts and multiplies so furiously that it will kill a human exposed to it in less than a day.
That makes exploring Isis an incredibly hazardous enterprise, one that requires heavy life support equipment, constant decontamination, and obsessive attention to maintenance and repairs. It also makes Isis a biological and pharmacological treasure house, a potential center of profit so huge that the rulers of Earth -- a bureaucratic aristocracy -- feels justified in spending years creating an explorer like Zoe Fisher.
Wilson unveils the details of this world with care, always providing just enough information to keep things interesting without overloading our senses. His descriptions of how the characters explore and protect themselves are colorful and realistic, and he's ready to demonstrate how dangerous this world by killing major characters in sudden and unpleasant ways.
His sure touch extends to the world behind the explorers. There's a constant mix of the practical and the political in their work, and the orders the characters receive let us follow a bureaucratic power play happening in the background. In one bravura scene, a character settles down with a popular novel, and we learn as much about her society from her reactions to the book as from the summary of the book itself.
Of course, all these details are just window dressing if the novel can't provide an effective payoff, especially when so many planetary exploration stories have staked out similar narrative territory. Although Wilson falls back on a tried-and-true revelation here, he makes it fresh by throwing in some major twists. Between these surprises and Wilson's distinct sense of irony, he keeps his readers guessing right up to the last page.
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