Christopher Evans was one of a number of British science fiction writers whose careers began in the late 1970s and early 1980s, bridging the gap between the New Wave writers of the 1960s/early 1970s and the British sf renaissance writers of the late 1980s/early 1990s. Their careers mostly survived into the twenty-first century, although several then dropped from sight. While Gwyneth Jones, Mary Gentle and Geoff Ryman (Canadian, but resident in the UK and part of the British scene) continue to produce work, albeit at increasingly longer intervals, Colin Greenland’s last book was Finding Helen (2002, UK), and Christopher Evans’s was Omega (2008, UK). Robert Holdstock, on the other hand, crossed to fantasy, and was very successful until his death in 2009. Andrew M Stephenson, however, published only two novels in the late 1970s. There are likely other authors in the same cohort.
At the time Mortal Remains (1995, UK) appeared, Christopher Evans was best known for co-editing a trio of anthologies, Other Edens I to III (1987–1989, UK), with Robert Holdstock, and winning the BSFA Award for best novel the year previously with Aztec Century (1993, UK). I remember Mortal Remains being reviewed approvingly on publication, but it didn’t make any award shortlists. Rereading it now, more than twenty-five years after its publication — and my previous read of the book — Mortal Remains holds up really well. It has dated not at all, and reads like it might have been published any time in the last five years.
Mortal Remains opens with a woman on her way to work. She lives on Mars, and has two husbands, one of whom is pregnant. Her house is a living creature. As she leaves her village, she witnesses the crash of a spaceship. It too is organic, as is all of the technology in Noospace, this Solar System of the future. In the wreckage, the woman finds an artificial womb. Unusually, it is self-sufficient. It also contains something. She decides to pass the womb onto a contact of hers from Venus, who happens to be on Mars. He takes it to Venus, but sells it to a black-marketeer in one of the space stations orbiting Venus…
From this point on, everyone who comes into contact with the womb suffers misfortune. The woman who found the womb: her husbands and house are killed, and she is sent to a penal colony on a moon of Jupiter. The man from Venus goes on the run, and hides out under an assumed identity on Mars. The womb is carried out to Pluto, but the woman who took it is murdered on Charon’s surface.
Running alongside this story is the first-person narrative of a man who has woken on the Moon with no memories. He is told that he and the woman with him are the sole survivors of a recently-discovered cryogenic crypt. Their brains were badly decayed, hence the amnesia. The pair, Nathan and Nina, are introduced to the Noosphere, which sort of governs Noospace. But not Earth. It was so poisoned it has been left to recover on its own. In Noospace, when people reach the age of one hundred, they euthanise and their personalities are uploaded into the Noosphere, where they can be consulted by their living relatives and descendants. The Noosphere also allows everyone to vote on everything related to governing Noospace. The state, such as it is, is represented by a pair of Advocates, who swan about like royalty.
This is no utopia, however. While most people lead happy, fulfilling lives, societies and conditions differ from planet to planet and moon to moon. There are penal colonies, and a military. And there are the Augmentors, confined to the Outer Planets, who, against Noospace law and custom, believe in engineering the human form. Also, in recent years, outbreaks of “Dementia”, an unexplained suicidal madness, have occurred in the Outer Planets, with increasing frequency.
The narrative follows the womb around Noospace, introducing the reader to the various worlds and moons. It soon becomes clear the Advocates have spent too long in office and have, in fact, over-stayed their one hundred years. Everything else is a consequence of their madness, and their madness is a consequence of too much exposure to the Noosphere.
Mortal Remains then moves into its endgame, as the various narratives all meet up in order to take on the forces of the Advocates. Unfortunately, this makes the resolution feel somewhat easy. Further, the central puzzles of the contents of the womb, and the identity of Nathan and Nina, are not difficult to fathom. But then Mortal Remains’ plot is as much a travelogue as it is a conspiracy thriller.
In 1980, Robert Holdstock, Evans’s co-editor on the Other Edens anthologies, co-wrote, with Gollancz editor Malcolm Edwards, a science fiction coffee-table book, Tour of the Universe (1980, UK). Such books were popular at the time — oversized hardbacks which re-purposed cover art from science fiction paperbacks, wrapped in some sort of pseudo-factual narrative. Perhaps the best-known of these are Stewart Cowley’s Terran Trade Authority books, such as Spacecraft: 2000 to 2100AD (1978, UK) and Starliner: Commercial Spacetravel in 2200AD (1980, UK).
There is something in Mortal Remains which reminds me of these books. Yes, it does in part feel like a tour of Noospace — and, it must be said, it’s a fascinating place, and Evans’s inventiveness is impressive. Some years ago, Adam Roberts, one of the UK’s sharpest science fiction critics, and an excellent sf writer to boot, coined the term “world-bling”, in reference I seem to recall to a novel by Neal Stephenson. That novel was published much later than Mortal Remains, but something similar I feel is at work here: a guided tour of an invented world or universe that successfully disguises the simplicity of the book’s plot. One of the features of “world-bling”, as I see it, is that the world-building is not actually all that deep — cf William Barton’s Venusworld in Crimson Darkness, about which I posted a few weeks ago.
Noospace is very cleverly done, but it does feel in places a little like Disneyworld — ie, an artificial façade, with workers busy running around behind the scenes to maintain the illusion. Evans waves his hands and intones “biotech”, and everything in the story is credible. And yet… the trip from Venus to Pluto takes a matter of weeks, and not months or years. The Noosphere is apparently ubiquitous, with no signal lag from its centre on Earth’s Moon. The Advocates have very little actual political power, yet somehow muster the resources to create the conspiracy which drives the plot…
It’s a testament to Evans’s writing that all this sleight of hand is unnoticeable. Mortal Remains is a quick and engrossing read. And if its take-away is, “power corrupts, absolute power corrupts absolutely”, that’s hardly controversial. It’s a good novel, just as relevant two decades into the twenty-first century as it was in 1995. In fact, amusingly, several aspects of Mortal Remains might be a little too relevant in 2021: not just the Advocates as royals-off-the-rails…
But also Brexit as a national outbreak of “Dementia”.
