Adam Roberts's Polystom has an outrageous, compellingly implausible premise. Imagine our solar system, except with the space between planets filled not with vacuum but with a thin, freezing but nevertheless breathable atmosphere. In this universe, enormous and mysterious animals known as skywhals cruise the interplanetary atmosphere, half-mile cargo balloons cart their freight between the planets, and a young, brash aristocrat can take an afternoon or two and fly a biplane to the moon for tea with his famous uncle.

That brash aristocrat is Polystom, an earnest, innocent, but beleagured youth who bears all the annoyances of aristocracy (its unconscious disregard for common people, its preening self-obsession) without yet adopting its greatest excesses (to his credit, he blanches at the cruel execution of a saboteur and suffers nightmares for weeks afterward). The novel begins with the story of Polystom's ill-conceived love for a woman who marries him but refuses to love him in return. It is during the course of that story, and many times afterward, that we first meet Polystom's uncle, Cleonicles, a famous scientist who is astonished one day to find a skywhal beached on his estate on the moon. It is through the course of Cleonicles's investigation into the swiftly decaying skywhal that tragedy befalls him (a tragedy that Roberts cunningly hints at in the first line of the book). And it is in Polystom's horrified, impulsive reaction to that tragedy that the entire novel reveals itself to be nothing more than a complete sham--a charmingly written, cleverly premised sham, but a shamelessly deceitful sham nonetheless.

I won't spoil Polystom's disappointing ending for those who like their endings (however frustrating) unknown. But allow me a moment to rant. As with Robert Charles Wilson's Darwinia, the biggest problem with Polystom is that it is fundamentally dishonest. It dangles before the reader an entrancing premise of an entire solar system--nay, an entire universe!--with physical laws radically different from our own. Then it disrespects that premise, almost spits in its face, by copping out of unravelling its full implications. Instead, the book pulls out one of the hoariest and therefore most despised framing devices in the world to explain away Polystom's tantalizing universe--a device that is even more unforgivable here for being completely unexpected and, in its own way, completely peripheral to the main story.

I wanted to hear more about the skywhals, more about the war on Mudworld, more about the incandescent sun flaming implausibly in the interstellar atmosphere and about the genial doubts of aristocratic scientists regarding Cleonicles's radical "vacuum" theory. I wanted to watch Polystom grow up, mature beyond his feckless youth, gain some of the grandeur that is appropriate for his office, and learn that there is more to love than a mere unilateral declaration thereof.

Instead, I get this execrable ending, one that could have been attached to any work of fiction, including those with far less imaginative premises. I'm sure some people will find the book's conclusion deep and thought-provoking--and I suppose that, in its own way, it does present a unique perspective (quite literally) on the framing device that it uses, one that would be of considerable interest to philosophers of mind. As a story device, however, the conclusion is terrible, and it guts what could have been a wonderful, classic work of speculative fiction.

Copyright © 2003 Steven Wu