Go Further: Beyond the Threshold in Chris Roberson's New Series

Receiving a copy of something billed as the first book in a new space opera series is not, by my tastes, unqualified good news. I prefer my science fiction a little harder, with protagonists who are a bit darker. In this case, though, the book was Further: Beyond the Threshold, by Chris Roberson, author of iZombie, Paragaea: A Planetary Romance, Cinderella: From Fabletown with Love and Cinderella: Fables Are Forever. When GeekDad's Raymond Masters interviewed Roberson in October about his Star Trek / Legion of Superheroes crossover book, it was clear that Roberson is someone who knows how to bring fresh life to old forms.

It should be admitted that the title is not promising: Further: Beyond the Threshold somehow manages to sound both clichéd and vaguely ungrammatical. And the plot is organized around a pretty shopworn science fiction conceit: Captain Ramachandra Jason Stone, an explorer from the 22nd century awakens from suspended animation, not a few decades after going under as he expected, but 12,000 years later, in the 34th century. He finds himself in a civilization called the Human Entelechy, a post-Singularity network of cultures where anything that can demonstrate sentience is treated as fully human, where consciousness is fully digitizable, and where consciousness can even be shared across multiple bodies. Artificial intelligence has been solved, and scarcity appears to be a problem of the past.

The basic situation of the book is neatly summarized about a third of the way in: "It had been a busy week, to say the least. I had woken up from a slumber of twelve thousand years, toured a dozen worlds, found out that my crew were all dead, only then to discover that one of them had been brought back to life, and finally had been given command of a faster-than-light ship of exploration. Oh, and I'd been completely rejuvenated as well."

Starting from these highly conventional premises, Further is an entertaining book, one that is legitimately interested in the challenges of finding oneself in an advanced civilization, in particular exploring questions of diversity and consciousness, but that doesn't take itself too seriously. One of my favorite cultures in Further is the Anachronists, a group ostensibly devoted to historical re-creation but who turn out to be aptly named:

A woman dressed as a 1920s flapper walked arm in arm with an absolutely convincing Abraham Lincoln, while a short distance away a man dressed as a dowager empress of the Ching Dynasty was in close conversation with a woman wearing an exact replica of the pressure suit worn by Neil Armstrong for his first moonwalk. What appeared to be a bipedal tiger, wearing a green suit coat and pants, was in a heated argument with a heavyset man wearing a skintight scarlet suit, gold sash, and boots, and white cape, with a lightning-bolt emblem on his chest. A woman in a full burka was dancing with a man wearing WWII-era Japanese combat fatigues in an ornate scabbard hanging from his belt.

And when they speak, it's even better: "'Yo!' said the Union soldier, giving me an elaborate salute. 'Our crib is your crib, mine compadre.'" While the Anachronists' presence in the book is consistently played for laughs, their inability to conceive of historical meaning as anything other than style and taste turns out to have real consequences for several characters.

The book is almost engineered to appeal to GeekDads, with extensive reflections on the ways gaming and science-fiction interests tend to get passed down within a family. The very first lines of the book could apply to many of us today: "Watching the restored cut of Star Wars or a new scan of Forbidden Planet was to him a kind of communal activity that brought the family together." And while these moments are clearly important to Stone, Roberson isn't excessively sentimental about them, either: "I'd only known that my father was forever interrupting me when I'd rather be reading my Earth Force Z manga or watching the latest episode of The Adventures of Space Man, so while I myself had inherited a taste for the fantastic visions of science fiction, I resented the obligation."

This concern with handing down culture within families isn't a throwaway issue: Stone is fascinated by the world in which he's awakened, but also mystified by some basic problems of post-Singularity consciousness: Does it even make sense to speak of "inheritance" if your consciousness has simply been transplanted into a new body? How can a creature that buds off a hive mind have memories that precede its existence? How are memories parsed and shared across a distributed personality? Thinking about the books and movies he learned from his own father, or discovering that a fully sentient chimpanzee doctor learned to play Go from his own grandfather, helps orient Stone in this new world.

Further is a pretty quick read, with incredibly short chapters and a clearly-signposted plot. There are some dark moments near the end, when the protagonists get into a dangerous situation, but on balance, this is an accessible, entertaining novel that should appeal to middle-school readers and up.