SOCIETY

LAW ENFORCEMENT – Since the construction of the Phase Space Gates, law enforcement has been powerless to stop poverty and crime from skyrocketing throughout the Solar System. Though the ISSP (Inter Solar System Police) was formed to catch interplanetary criminals, it wasn’t enough to bring about law and order. Bounty hunting and volunteer law enforcement have become commonplace.

COWBOY SYSTEM – In a desperate attempt to keep crime under control, the “Cowboy System” was established. After passing a lenient written test, any civilian could apply a bounty hunting license and capture criminals from the ISSP wanted list for reward money. By 2071, over 300,000 registered bounty hunters reside in the Solar System.

ORGANIZED CRIME – Ruthless criminal organizations, such as the “Red Dragon” crime syndicate of Mars, control much of the Solar System. Those who go up against these gangs are either bought out or murdered, a common practice of gangs like the “Blue Snake” crime syndicate.

SPACE TRAVEL

MONO SYSTEM – All space ships are classified as “Monomachines.” MONO is an abbreviation for “Machine Operation Navigation of Outer Space” The “Monosystem” encompasses the airframe control mechanics, the navigation system and the automatic billing system of any given ship. In short, it is a necessity for all outer space activity. Steering capsules called “Monopods,” a standard feature of “Narrow-sense” Monomachines, can be ejected and navigated independent of their ships.

PHASE SPACE GATES – At the dawn of the 21st century, Phase Differential Gates (also known as Phase Space Gates) were constructed across the Solar System. Designed by the famous Chessmaster Hex and funded by the Gate Corporation, the gates enable space craft to enter hyperspace, traveling 240 times faster than in normal space. However, after discovering a flaw in the design, Hex attempted to stop the the gates from being built. He was fired from the corporation and the gates were built without his approval.

GATE INCIDENT – Shortly after Chessmaster Hex was fired by the Gate Public Corporation, a Phase Space Gate between the Earth and its moon exploded, sending moon debris into Earth’s atmosphere. Chunks of the debris constantly strike the surface of the planet rendering it virtually uninhabitable. The gate incident changed the lives of many including Faye Valentine and Wen.

FUTURE TECHNOLOGY

Aside from groundbreaking developments in space travel, there have been major advancements in other technologies.

The universal currency known as the Woolong was established. Though paper money is still in circulation, electronic money cards are more commonly used.

Medical technologies such as artificial organs and cryogenics have been perfected. Using “Alfa Catch” devices, Images from the human brain can be displayed on monitors.

Virtual reality videogaming has become the norm and videocassettes are a relic of the distant past.

The internet, once known as the World Wide Web (WWW), has evolved into the massive Solar System Web (SSW). Although the interface of the SSW is much more chaotic than that of the WWW, common problems such as computer viruses continue to plague the online world.

THE SOLAR SYSTEM

VENUS – Population: 500 Million, Culture: 70% Middle Eastern and African, Travel Time From Earth: 7-13 Hours (via Phase Space Gates), Appears In: SESSION 7, With the addition of oxygen-producing plants in the sky, Venus was terra-formed into a habitable planet. However, the falling spores of the plants cause “Venus Sickness” in a very small percent of people. If untreated, the sickness could cause blindness. The architecture of Venus is predominantly Middle Eastern.

EARTH – Population: 200 Million, Culture: Varied, Appears In: SESSIONS 9, 18, 19 & 24, After the “Gate Incident,” daily bombardment by meteors, devastating the planet’s surface. The only people crazy enough to stay on Earth are hackers, who hone their skills on the many abandoned communications satellites that continue to orbit the planet, eccentrics who are too stubborn to leave and those who can’t afford to leave.

MARS – Population: 300 Million, Culture: 50% Chinese, Travel Time From Earth: 12-24 Hours (via Phase Space Gates), Appears In: SESSIONS 2, 5, 6, 15, 18, 20, 21, 22, 23, 25, 26 & The Movie, Mars is the center of activity in the Solar System. Its many craters have been transformed into vast metropolitan areas.

ASTEROID BELT – Population: 80 Million, Culture: Asian, Latin, European, Travel Time From Earth: 2-8 Days (via Phase Space Gates), Appears In: SESSIONS 1, 7 & 14, Larger Asteroids in the region between Mars and Jupiter are colonies, centers of free-trade that have been converted into urban areas or fertile pastures. Tijuana, an asteroid with an excavated center, is famous for its beef.

MOONS OF JUPITER – Population: 350 Million, Culture: European, Travel Time From Earth: 2-3 Days (via Phase Space Gates), Appears In: SESSIONS 4, 10, 12, 13 & 17, Ganymede, Callisto and Io have been terra-formed and colonized. Ganymede is a fishing planet, almost completely surrounded by water. Callisto is frigid, hostile and in a constant state of economic depression with many abandoned construction sites. Io is a dry place with expansive plains similar to Mexico.

SATURN – Population: 30 Million, Travel Time From Earth: 4-7 Days (via Phase Space Gates), Appears In: SESSION 13 & The Movie, Titan, the sixth moon of Saturn, is a sprawling desert. In 2068, it was the stage of a bitter civil war. The economic depression in Callisto is partially attributed to this conflict. The merciless wasteland reshaped the lives of war veterans including Gren and Vincent.

Blood Music is the sort of frightening novel of biological horror that Michael Crichton used to be able to write back in the good old days of The Andromeda Strain, and it helped put Greg Bear on the map in the early years of his career. In its level of sheer visceral involvement perhaps its only peers are the aforementioned Strain and the first third of Stephen King’s The Stand (the speading-of-the-plague sequence before it gets bogged down in its own apocalyptic bloat). However, like The Stand, Blood Music does lose some of its momentum as it nears its finale, becoming at times downright cryptic and trippy. But the net effect is chillingly unlike most hard SF, and Bear admirably succeeds in sounding a cautionary note without lapsing into anti-science hysteria, as so many non-hard SF writers would do.

The novel begins peacefully enough, as we meet Vergil Ulam, a loose cannon researcher working at a southern California firm called Genetron, which is working to perfect the world’s first biochips. These would be the first human-computer interfaces, silicon chips that, when introduced into the body, meld harmoniously and work together with your good old carbon based cells. But Vergil sees all this as being redundant. Since the genetic material in a cell itself is in essence one great computer, why not recombine a little DNA here and there and let the cells do the work themselves? Vergil succeeds, all too well. The human cells he is recombining become individual sentient entities Vergil calls noocytes.

Fired from Genetron for his extracurricular activites (which they don’t necessarily disapprove of; they just want to cover their butts), and ordered to destroy his experiments, Vergil sneaks the cells he has recombined out of the top secret labs the one way he knows how: by injecting them into himself. I bet you think you can see where this is leading, right? Well, don’t be too sure. Bad 50’s B-movie monster clichés are handily avoided as Bear launches us into an almost inconceivably nightmarish scenario where Vergil’s impetuousness affects not only himself, but threatens humanity completely.

The first half of the novel is close to astounding. Bear keeps everything racing along at lightspeed as he hurtles you into the unfolding horror so that you can only respond by shaking your head and saying “Oh no…oh no” over and over to yourself. But then this can be a story liability as well; as the tale races inexorably forward it can feel as if everything is happening too fast for you to catch your breath. The palpable suspense is offset by a feeling that you might want to read the last few paragraphs over again just to see if you might have missed something.

Also, as the book enters its second half, it (like The Stand) introduces us to a number of new supporting players who are among the final survivors of the bio-apocalypse. These story threads, particularly the one featuring the odyssey of a lone teenage girl wandering through a horrifically transformed Manhattan, are often indelibly haunting. But they would have been more effective had Bear introduced these characters at the novel’s beginning, just like Vergil, giving us a greater involvement in their lives before everything hits the fan, and thus drawing even greater sympathy out of us for them. Introducing a slew of new characters over 100 pages in throws off the story’s momentum just slightly, and the subsequent jumping back and forth of the narrative disrupts the excellent pace of the early scenes.

Still, this is one bloodcurdling book…literally! It has a cinematic immediacy that holds you fast despite its occasional unevenness, and it’s just unpredictable enough in its narrative twists and turns to let you feel genuine awe for Bear’s imagination. Blood Music may not be the best hard SF biothriller ever written, but it inspires a sense of wonder even in light of the frightening concepts it explores. With a little more depth of character, the novel could have made some timeless music indeed. But as it is, it’s got a great beat, and you can dance to it.

When the first compact discs arrived on the Australian market in 1983, they ranged in price from $900-$1800. The price didn’t hold back the rapid adoption of the technology.

These books are ready for their close-up.

A charming tidbit about Booklovers in Lower Lonsdale: When owner Dalyce Ayton isn’t stocking her used bookstore on Third Street with a varied cornucopia of tomes, classic magazines, and other memorabilia that harken back to a more tactile, more analog moment, she’s renting them out for guest appearances on the big screen.

“I just think it’s really neat,” Ayton says when asked what it’s like seeing her books sharing screentime in productions like Santa Buddies, The X-Files, or The Good Doctor.

“Sometimes I rent out 100 linear feet – well that’s like 33 three-foot shelves. Smaller bookstores wouldn’t be able to lose that kind of stock, sometimes I rent them for two or three weeks.”

When Ayton purchased the long-standing used bookstore 10 years ago it was the realization of her lifelong dream, she notes.

“I always wanted to own a used bookstore,” she explains, relaying a story about how as a child she visited one to buy magazines to cut up for a school project only to become enamoured with the splendour of seeing walls and walls covered with books, magazines, and literature for all ages.

“I just fell in love with the whole concept of piles of books and all shapes and all sizes and types,” she says. “I just love it, I just thought it was magical.”

Ayton worked as a wholesale buyer in the food industry for more than 30 years before pulling the trigger and realizing her dream with Booklovers.

At almost 2,000 square feet, the store provides ample space for readers to get lost in words as they peruse row after row of Ayton’s tightly organized stock.

“I have a lot right now because of what’s going on on the North Shore with everybody selling and downsizing,” she admits. “A lot of people are getting rid of their books because they don’t have the space in their new place.”

During the past decade, however, Ayton has gotten creative when it comes to managing her high volume of stock and renting or selling books to film or TV productions that need them for certain scenes, either as one-offs or recurring segments.

Things can get especially hectic, she says, during pilot season – when hordes of productions hope to cross the threshold of mere concept into the golden realm of reality: being picked up for syndication.

It’s during this time where it might be common for set decorators to be among the loyal and devoted customers who pay regular visits to Booklovers.

“They phone me and say: ‘I need 10 linear feet. I’m doing a house, I need three feet of children’s books ages six to eight, I need two feet of cookbooks, I need four feet of contemporary novels hardcover, dust jackets on or off,” she explains, adding that productions like the epic fantasy shows The Magicians and Once Upon a Time rank among shows that have tasked her with providing libraries for use on their productions.

Ten years ago, when the keys to Booklovers were first handed over to Ayton, she wasn’t aware that such a seemingly eccentric task could be part of her business. She was in the book business after all – the television and film industry was something else entirely.

But a year into owning and operating the store, a set decorator walked in and asked her to put some books together for a production they were working on.

“I’ve been doing it ever since, I do more and more all the time,” she says.

Ayton stresses, however, that while renting/selling books to the film industry is the gravy to her business, the bread and butter — the bulk of it – comes from her regular everyday customers, the people who make it all worthwhile.

“You think: ‘Where’s it been? Has it been around the world? Who owned it? Who touched this book?’” she ponders about the books that line her shelves.

Regarding her customers, some of whom grace her store every week, some of whom she’s known for the better part of a generation: “If next year all the shows don’t need books, I’ve got my customers,” she says. “It’s the people. … The best part is the people, for sure.”