Paul Di Filippo reviews my pal Peter Watts's new novel, Maelstrom on Sci-Fi.com. Maelstrom is the sequel to Starfish, a gutsy heller of a book. Can't wait to get a copy of Maelstrom!
Like the endlessly mutating and recombinant digital/wetware entities that live in Peter Watts' online Maelstrom, his fiction itself exhibits a wonderful Darwinian adaptability. Internalizing the lessons and modes taught by cyberpunk and fusing them with the Bear/Benford pedigree of hard SF, Watts has bred a robust, streamlined, snarling kind of science fiction which achieves both a sharp-edged verisimilitude and visionary exuberance. From such innovative, catchy neologisms as "head cheese" (the term for gel-based AIs) to the scrupulous research on a dozen fronts which Watts, a marine biologist himself, catalogs in an appendix, these two novels are state-of-the art SF. And best of all, Maelstrom does not merely repeat the successes of Starfish but extends them into new territory, thus giving hope that Watts is no mere one-hit wonder.
