This is the second Smythe 2014 title I've reviewed here; and although my rapture about the first was muted just a tad, I'm much more impressed by this second. Altogether a more solidly rendered, more subtle, complex and resonant tale. It is, in point of fact, the sequel to 2012's The Explorer, and Book 2 in a planned foursome modelled, of course with all necessary sciencefictional mutati mutandibus, on Eliot's Four Quartets. This is a very good thing. SFF needs more grand structural ambition of this sort; and a quaternionic sequence like this makes a refreshing change from those endless herds of trilogies that sweep across miles and miles of golden genre, silently and very fast.
The Echo plays intriguing games with the doubleness of its sequel status. It is both a retread of The Explorer and, somehow, completely different. Story is set twenty years after the events of the first vol., when the Ishiguro disappeared into the strange deep-space 'anomaly'. A new mission is readied, developed by two brilliant scientists, both fascinated by space travel since their young days: the identical twins Tomas and Mirakel Hyvönen. Smythe is as interested in the 'echo' implied in genetic twinship, not a million miles away conceptually (although literally a million miles away in distance) from Bruce Chatwin's uncanny little 1982 novel, On The Black Hill. The closeness and rivalry of these two is exceptionally well realised, through unobtrustive telling and deftly interpolated flashbacks. It's a bold step by Smythe to walk his plot through the same steps as The Explorer: the expedition through space, the anomaly, things getting weirdly tangled and fucked-up. It's hard to discuss the specifics without spoilerization. Suffice to say it's beautifully paced, really eerie and gripping.
Not that I'd say it's quite perfect: Smythe's scientists (the most talented scientists in the whole world, we're told) don't at all have the vibe of actual scientists, and don't do any of the things one might expect actual scientists to do. They 'ping' the anomaly (what, like a submarine?), even though the 'pings' 'disappear into it'. The launch of the Lära is a bit screwy: they all have to be protected, within sealed units that 'create their own pressure level inside them' (eh?) since 'the speeds that the ship will reach as it pushes off from the NISS...' (eh? Newton's equal-and-opposite, though, yeah? Won't this shove the NISS out into deep space?) ' ... free of the trappings of any real gravitational pull ...' (eh? still in the Earth's gravitational well, though, yeah?) '...are so ridiculously powerful that they could -- or would -- damage the human body' [32]. But, OK: I'm not one to be a Hard Physics pedant. This isn't a Hard Physics book. All I'd say is: The Echo manages, intermittently but potently, to generate some of the sense of human frailty in a profoundly hostile environment that made the Gravity movie so memorable; but Gravity was scrupulous about getting the science right, which only increased the potency of the film; whereas you get the impression Smythe is simply less scrupulous about such things. He's more interested in the interpersonal than the interplanetary, in the psychological than the physics-logical. And in those areas, Smythe is absolutely second-to-none amongst contemporary writers of SF.
In these End Times of ours there are as we know rumours of things going astray, and amongst those rumours is one that intimates the year-by-year schedule for the publication of Smythe's Anomaly Quartet might be going astray. If these rumours are true, then I may have to start a petition. Or organise a march. One thing that reading The Echo makes clear, that a reading of The Explorer alone does not, is that it won't be possible properly to judge the success with which Smythe achieves his impressive ambition until all four books are out. The sooner that this happens the better.
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