And writer Paul McAuley says it may be about to happen again:

Sf publishing has always been a chancy, hand-to-mouth affair for most. It imploded again in the early 1980s, and there are signs that it's about to implode again. And because they can't hope for sinecure positions in creative writing in universities (although that's changing, now), sf writers have always been ready to turn their hands and minds to the kind of writing that can be churned out quickly and profitably.... While Silverberg et al were working in the titillation trade in the US, over here in the UK Michael Moorcock was editing New Worlds with one hand and writing Sexton Blake adventures with the other, while many of his contemporaries were writing westerns, biker novels and, yes, sexploitation novels. A little later, Kim Newman and Neil Gaiman worked for the British soft porn magazine Knave. And sf writers today are also working in comics and graphic novels, novels based on role-playing games (Kim Newman and a slew of authors associated with Interzone in the 1990s wrote innovative and highly successful short stories novels for Games Workshop), film tie-ins . . .

The question is, if SF publishing does have another implosion, where will authors go this time? Porn publishing has been even harder hit by the Internet than other genres. Where will the suddenly starving SF authors turn this time around? [Paul McAuley]

If you're wondering what this whole io9 Book Club thing is all about, you can read our inaugural post about it. Or you can read what people had to say in our first meeting, which was held late last week and over the weekend.

Now that we've talked about what we thought of McAuley's book, you can ask the author himself some questions. He'll be popping into the comment thread on this post and answering your questions Tuesday evening GMT (that's Tuesday morning PST).

Once again, check out: io9 Book Club Meeting: The Quiet War

The io9 Book Club will meet about 10 times per year, meaning roughly every 5-6 weeks. So if you didn't have time to participate this time, there's always next time - and the time after that. We're proud to have the io9 Book Club co-sponsored by the science fiction crew Borders.

A couple of ground rules for discussion. I'll start us out with a general question, but this is your book club. You should feel free to talk about what you want, start us off on new topics, criticize/praise the book (without insulting the author or your fellow book club members), and recommend related books for people to read. I'll link back to this post for the next four days, so we can keep discussion going and get as many people as possible involved.

Also, as a special treat, we're going to have Paul McAuley drop in next week to answer some of your questions. Look for a post about that on Monday, Oct. 12, in the morning. You'll be able to post questions for him in comments, and McAuley will pop in on Tuesday to answer the ones he likes!

Without further ado, let's begin.

One of the things I liked the most about this novel was the way McAuley described the geoengineering projects on all the outer planets and their moons. The descriptions were vivid and felt realistic; and I liked watching Macy at work in the lab. What did you guys think about the science in the book? Too much? Too little? Relevant or irrelevant to the plot?

Nominated for this year's Clarke Award, The Quiet War explores the tensions between two factions in the solar system. The Outers, who live on the outer planets and their moons, are post-humanists by default. They're reengineering their bodies and environments to make it possible for human societies to spread far beyond Earth. But the Earth governments of Greater Brazil want to stop the Outers' blasphemy against pure, untrammeled Nature. Of course, the real threat is the Outers' greater productivity, scientific innovation, and success as a society. A series of skirmishes escalate into a war, and that's when things get explosive.

We picked this novel because it's packed with great ideas and fascinating science. Also it's not the kind of novel that gets a lot of marketing hype, and so we're hoping that this book club will expose more people to McAuley's work.

You can read our review of The Quiet War here. Now that Pyr Books has brought out a US edition of the book, it should be no problem for most of you to get a copy of it to read.

Here's how the book club will work. You read The Quiet War. Then we all have our book club meeting on Thursday, October 8. I'll post, and we can discuss the book in comments. And then, as a special treat, author Paul McAuley will join us for a discussion of the book, too. So as you're reading, be thinking about what you want to discuss with your fellow book nerds here at io9 - but also what you're dying to ask McAuley.

Get reading!

The Quiet War via Amazon

What is immediately and consistently engaging about The Quiet War is McAuley's ability to turn the hard sciences of bioengineering and synthetic ecosystems into the stuff of storytelling awesomeness. Reluctant hero Macy is a scrappy soil engineer who has been given a dream assignment on Jupiter's moon Callisto. Brilliant at putting together the perfect combination of bacteria and chemicals to create topsoils, she's been recruited by a crack team of eco-engineers who are building a new domed habitat there.

As we plunge into her geeky work with carbon captures and gene expression, we learn quickly that the novel is set in a future where Earth has suffered a catastrophic environmental collapse. As a result, its governments have become arch conservatives devoted entirely to ecosystem stability. One of the most powerful governments is that of Greater Brazil, where Macy grew up into a political world that resembles a Mafia family more than a democracy. The citizens are ruled by great families who own the people who work for them and offer special privileges to those who are "consanguinous," or connected to the families by blood.

While Earth's culture curdles, its colonies bloom. New developments in synthetic biology have allowed millions of people to relocate offworld, moving outward to the moons of Saturn and Jupiter (Mars has been destroyed in a war). Led by culture hero and "gene wizard" Avernus, the Outers have created perfect biosystems within their domes, breeding vacuum crops that can leech necessary elements from the moons' soils and oceans and ice. They live in Enceladus' underground oceans, plant their crops on the shoulders of asteroid impacts, and grow gardens deep in the clouds of Saturn.

When McAuley is describing the amazing environments where the Outers live, complete with exotic flora, he's at his soaring best. He's created a world that feels scientifically plausible, and infuses it with a sense of genuine wonder. In essence, he's built the perfect setting for a quest narrative which rambles across astonishing lands that lead to something unimaginable. Unfortunately, however, McAuley isn't interested in quests. This novel is about war and espionage.

Don't get me wrong - I love war and espionage. And I think the political backdrop for The Quiet War makes good kindling for a system-wide blowup when an authoritarian Earth grows wary of the libertarian Outers. But despite intriguing characters like Macy, and a tragic bio-engineered terrorist named Dave, McAuley just isn't able to convince us that his war makes sense.

To be fair, this is partly because his message is that war is absurd. When Greater Brazil starts sending warships into orbit around key moons of Jupiter and Saturn as a kind of warning to the Outers, the Outer groups go nuts (especially a city named Paris - allegory much?). They become paranoid and issue threats. But then Brazil, which seems to want war really badly for reasons that are never truly explained beyond "those Outers just seem plumb different from us," responds with assassinations and more warships. At the bottom of the anti-Outer hatred is nothing more than ideology: People from Earth worship nature, and abhor the idea that the Outers are mutating nature and their own bodies in order to adapt to their new environments. Again, I think McAuley's point is well-taken: Many wars are begun over ideological differences even more daft than these.

When key personnel on her Callisto dome project are killed, Macy becomes a suspect amid growing tensions and has to flee from one weird moon city to another. Here, again, McAuley shows off his strengths: He offers pitch-perfect vignettes of small, isolated communities devoted to weird, Burning Man-style ideals like new age therapy or YouTube art. Everywhere Macy goes, she's startled by people who are recording her every move on video and posting it to the crazy, ubiquitous net the Outers adore (back on Earth, where the governments are more authoritarian, there is no social media - only top-down propaganda). She meets separatists who believe they are carrying out orders from their future selves, and a cute adventurer with a pink spaceship called Elephant.

No matter where she winds up, however, Macy manages to find work as a soil engineer, helping to build new habitats on the moons where humanity is evolving into something new - and yet something very familiar. Dogged by a petty Brazilian bureaucrat, and aided by the mysterious Avernus, Macy manages to survive the worst of the conflict.

It sounds odd to say this about such a long novel, but The Quiet War leaves you wishing for more. Not more story as in "give me twenty sequels," but just more of Macy's human side to the story in this war that has swept her up against her will. Intead, McAuley tries to give us the big perspective, bringing in politicians and spies and counter-spies as well as an evil foil to the gene wizard Avernus - a woman called Sri whose cruelty and motivations are never satisfactorily explained.

Though flawed, The Quiet War makes you want more precisely because there's so much promise in its primary characters and settings. McAuley makes science incredibly exciting, and you'll have his weird images and ideas in your brain for days after you put the book down. War may not have been the best plot device to get this story in motion, but the vacuum organisms and communes on Uranus make this a novel well worth your time.

If you're in the States and want to get your mitts on this book, don't fret. Pyr is bringing out a US edition later this year.

The Quiet War via Amazon

Novels written in the aftermath of the Second World War tend to show war as a straightforward conflict between the forces of good and evil, monumental armies clashing upon resonant battlefields. The Cold War, and particularly the nuclear dread associated with it, changed all that. Now one mighty battle was unlikely to provide a conclusion (if it happened at all), but rather there was a weary sense of endless conflict; and the concentration was more likely to be on civilian casualties than brave warriors... We are just now beginning to get a war fiction born from the aftermath of the Iraq War." — Paul Kincaid, in his latest Science Fiction Skeptic Column over at Bookslut.

DeNiro's review starts out by asserting that space opera hasn't crossed over to the mainstream as much as other subgenres of science fiction have. Cormac McCarthy may have made the post-apocalyptic dystopia story respectable with The Road, but nobody's writing literary epics about "hyperactive starships."

And then DeNiro launches into his actual critique of The New Space Opera: most of the stories are actually about posthuman characters who have been modified to survive in deep space. They've given up so much of their humanity to become spaceworthy, it's made them emotionally inacessible to readers. And they're tiny, against the massive scale of galaxy-wide intrigues and thousand-year wars. (I definitely found this to be a problem with some of the stories in the volume as well, when I read it last year.) Contrast this with old-school space opera, which was comfortable putting regular old humans in charge of its starships.

But the stories fail to engage with the fact of their characters' emotional dissociation as part of the narrative. And if you're going to write alienating mini-sagas about transhumanism, DeNiro suggests, you need masterful prose instead of the merely serviceable writing in this anthology. Most of all, the anthology promises "fun," but delivers careful, hide-bound stories instead. DeNiro does pick out a few exceptions, including James Patrick Kelly's "Dividing The Sustain" and Tony Daniel's "The Valley Of The Gardens."

DeNiro's bracing critique gave rise to an interesting roundtable discussion, which he participated in, over at SF Signal, which mostly dealt with the meta-question he raised: why hasn't space opera crossed over to the mainstream the way other SF sub-genres have? Authors from the anthology tried to answer, or refute, DeNiro's question.

Kage Baker asks why space opera needs to be relevant anyway. Paul McAuley attempts to claim that Doris Lessing's Canopus In Argos series was mainstream. (It's probably the least mainstream of all her works.) Tobias Buckell cites the popularity of Star Wars as proof that space opera really is mainstream. Anthology co-editor Jonathan Strahan argues that you shouldn't think of space-opera as entrenched within the science fiction field, but rather as at the center of the SF field. Gwyneth Jones says space-opera is more versatile than people give it credit for, and it's a good vehicle for asking questions about statecraft.

In the end, though, none of them addressed DeNiro's question of whether "new" space opera has to gain its newness by jettisoning the humanity of its characters. And whether that might be part of the reason why it's not relatable for readers who aren't die-hard science fiction fans. [Rain Taxi] and [SF Signal]