Gardens of the Sun.. Paul McAuley

My first sci-fi in a long time. Gardens of the Sun... For life to exist you need the basic stuff - food, air, shelter. And central to this equation is the role of plants! So Gardens of the Sun... brought me to an imaginary world that was simply quite awesome! My own imagination was also sent slightly into an overdrive 8)

This novel stokes imaginations of every conceivable kind... gene wizardry, space exploration and its colonization, the different branches of human beings, the wars, human quest for wealth, power and even immortality. Also on friendship, family and hope.... somehow epics will never be complete without hope.

Gardens of the Sun is one of those books I find difficult to put down; that despite it being long... I Googled and one of the book sites says it's 890-pages long. I can't tell the thickness on the Ipod, all you see is that 'progress line' which serves as an indicator how much of the book has been read.

In the novel another war had ended but persecution for the Outers (these are people who had been genetically tweaked to have special abilities to function better in different worlds) continue. The super power was The Greater Brazil. On the other end is The Pacific Community. Democracy is dead. Rule is by autocracy. And they have another pool of genetically tampered humans called the Outers. The Outers were being chased into the fringes of the Solar System due to a couple of reasons. But they are resourceful and have great abilities to adapt and rebuild.

I guess you could label this a current model of sci-fi for this generation... we've the Human Genome Project completed sometime ago, we now have research into GM food. Our existing technology can manipulate microorganisms like the bacteria to become nanorobots to build nanostructures. Space tourism might herald an age of space exploration by private entities... who knows what might lie ahead?

So, in the novel, the author invites us to immerse ourselves into a world where it is possible to draw resources from the library of gene pool, knowledge to start all these gardens to support human life. The obsession with the creation of such gardens (and also the central importance of plants to human life) as represented by 2 characters, Prof Dr Sri Owen-Hong and Avernus probably is the reason for the title of the novel.

The gardens are the biomes where life continues. And these gardens are constructed on Saturns, Uranus, Jupiter... and their moons and other far flung planets. When the settlers move into all those inhospitable and arid landscapes, the first thing they'd do would be to create those gardens... and the role of fullerenes are also highlighted. Fullerenes as in buckyballs; another one of the carbon allotropes. I read about its discovery over 2 decades ago in Popular Science... and then waited for the Chemistry textbooks to be updated.... I think if you check, they've not updated yet. That's just the science part.

In the study of a society there is always the social political aspect that makes us so human. The intrigues of politics are there; very similar to what has been and is still. The social aspect which I enjoy is how the writer weaves the complexities of human greed into those things we desire. And how in reading it, I am reminded of the explorations that took place in our written history of the early discoveries of new lands in the far east and west. How the gung-ho(ness) of those early travelers and settlers romanticized the chaos and lawlessness; also the roles of organized crime... remember how the early Chinese settlers had to bow to the Ghee Hin and the Hai San? In colonizing the asteroids, planets, the same traits are seen in the novel.... interesting parellelism. This is one book which would make good discussion material for students.

Reading this book is like reading into our past, a past which I do not belong to but only read from books, with a future scenario as the main setting. The storyline is the same though. It's quite a marvel to perceive the universe through the imagination (with lots of research definitely) of the author. Another weekend of lots of waiting for my kids for this and that... hence the time to read on time which otherwise would have been so wasted staring and counting molecules in the car. And so, I've reached No 10 for the year!!!!