Lockstep by Karl Schroeder, reviewed by Derek Künsken

New York: Tor Books, 2014; $26.99 hc; 352 pages

Karl Schroeder has written a new YA science opera novel that is being serialized in Analog and will be published by Tor in 2014. With this novel, he has set himself an ambitious goal. From the author’s website:

In Lockstep I’ve reinvented Space Opera, and solved the greatest outstanding problem in Hard Science Fiction writing: how to have a Star Wars–type galactic empire of thousands of worlds and alien species, all available a short flight away, without violating any of the known laws of nature. Star Wars, Star Trek, all those stories of FTL civilizations that you used to devour.... They’re all great, except for one thing: they’re impossible. Each and every one of them ... but not this one. The Lockstep Empire of 70,000 worlds could be real, which means that for the very first time in science fiction, the kind of fantasy future we always dreamed of is no longer just a fantasy, but could be ... an aspiration.

The novel description expands on how Schroeder has attacked this problem:

When seventeen-year-old Toby McGonigal finds himself lost in space ... he expects his next drift into cold sleep to be his last ... when Toby wakes again, he’s surprised to discover a thriving planet, a strange and prosperous galaxy, and ... that he’s been asleep for 14,000 years. Welcome to the Lockstep Empire, where civilization is kept alive by careful hibernation. Here cold sleeps can last decades and waking moments mere weeks. Its citizens survive for millennia, traveling asleep on long voyages between worlds.

Schroeder was already counted among the authors creating a new space opera buzz as far back as 2003 (Letson and Wolfe, 2003), so it is worth examining whether he has succeeded in his goal of reinvention. Has he created a grand innovation in hard sf space opera by creating a slower-than-light civilization of the starless worlds of the Oort clouds?

Before answering, let’s take a look at the slippery concept of space opera. The term has evolved over time for reasons both literary and political, making discussions sometimes difficult. David Hartwell and Kathryn Cramer compiled an excellent review of the definition’s mutability and fuzziness in their essay “How Shit Became Shinola: The Definition and Redefinition of Space Opera” (Hartwell and Cramer, 2003). Space opera carried both complimentary and pejorative meanings, although it may be simpler to leave that earlier debate aside and examine Schroeder’s novel in terms of the positive definitions that have carried the day since the 1980s.

Yet even narrowing the definition to the last decades, one must recognize differences between the old space opera and the new. By the 1980s space opera could be defined as:

colorful, dramatic, large scale science fiction adventure, competently and sometimes beautifully written, usually focused on a sympathetic, heroic central character, and plot action ... and usually set in the relatively distant future and in space or on other worlds, characteristically optimistic in tone. (Hartwell and Cramer, 2003)

Letson and Wolfe add to this definition both scale, “interplanetary or interstellar space ... big and mysterious, a place of extremes, and full of hidden treasures and dangers ... preferably with huge stakes,” and the “eternal adolescent yearning for adventures and gigantic settings and grand gestures ... the romantic” as a feature of old space opera. M. John Harrison seems to agree with these definitions but adds that “one of the absolute driving factors of space opera is the discovery of alien artifacts” (40–41). These definitions in sum give a broad view of what I am calling “old space opera.”

Paul McAuley differentiates between the old and new space operas, noting the addition of “up-to-the-minute science, and ... epic narratives where intimate, human-scale stories are at least as relevant as the widescreen baroque backgrounds ...” (42). Moreover, he noted the heterogeneous political and cultural character of the new space opera:

There are neither empires nor rigid technocracies dominated by a single Big Idea in the new space opera; like cyberpunk, it’s eclectic and pluralistic, and infused with the very twenty-first century sensibility that the center cannot hold, that technology-driven change is continuous and advancing on a thousand fronts.... (ibid)

McAuley’s view of the new space opera mirrors M. John Harrison’s in that “its stories contain a vertiginous sense of deep time; in the new space opera, the Galaxy is not an empty stage on which humans freely strut their stuff, but is instead a kind of junk yard littered with the ruins and abandoned wonders of earlier, more powerful races” (43–44). New space opera does not lose the scale of traditional space opera, but the tone is different. Its “principal characters ... are sometimes radically unsympathetic, [and] economic and social themes ... tend to undermine the classic optimism of the form” (Letson and Wolfe 40).

The question of the tone of new space opera is an intriguing one. The optimism and perhaps even innocence of the old space opera is far behind today’s readers, arguably lost. “You can’t unlearn the lessons of growing up, which means you can’t read space operas (or Westerns or romances or mysteries) with the same lack of knowledge, experience, and empathy (and taste) that you had when you were young” (Letson and Wolfe 41). With the innocence gone, a range of tones evolved within the new space opera “from the new romanticism of Iain M. Banks, Ian McDonald, and Colin Greenland to the hardcore technogoth of Alastair Reynolds and Charles Stross ... the trick is to ... bring the kind of stuff you loved when you were younger and more innocent bang up to date and push it harder and faster and further, and most of all have fun with it” (McAuley 42). These broad commonalities allow the examination of Schroeder’s work within the context of the mission statement he set out.

The most interesting concept in Schroeder’s work is an interstellar civilization existing in a universe that is Einsteinian and slower-than-light. This isn’t completely new. Iain Banks’s The Algebraist (2004) knits his civilization with wormhole networks, despite the fact that the villain of the work can effectively attack using a slower-than-light fleet. Dan Simmons creates a similar wormhole-based civilization in Hyperion (1989), although slower-than-light enemies also pose significant military threats. The civilizations of Stephen Baxter’s Xeelee sequence similarly depend on webs of wormholes as do too many movies, television series, and comic books to list. Civilizations capable of faster-than-light travel can be modelled economically and politically on models that exist in human history. Diverging from the majority, Alastair Reynolds has created slower-than-light civilizations subject to relativity in his Revelation Space universe (2000). The civilizations and economics are more distant, with twenty years or more between some destinations, meaning that all trips are essentially one-way and all beings who travel live a dark, isolated existence, and those who do not travel live stiflingly local existences.

Schroeder has created a space opera civilization that respects the speed limit set by relativity yet remains cohesive and travelable. Journeys between outposts and planets take up to 30 years, and the travelers sleep for those 30 years as they do in Reynolds’s universe, but so does everyone else in the Lockstep civilization. The gulfs of distance found in space opera become gulfs of time in Lockstep, and the role of ftl propulsion is occupied by hibernation technology.

The synchronization of hibernation sleeps does several things. First, a traveler can return to those left behind. Second, the Lockstep technology is necessarily synchronized creating a codependent union of politics and economics. Next, ecological niches are defined by how much energy is available and how much energy is needed for those living there. It is eay to argue that the dark dwarf worlds of the Oort Cloud do not possess enough energy to sustain human colonies. However, if humans sleep for thirty years at a time and are only awake and metabolizing for a month, the energy cost is 360 times less. While humans sleep, automated systems conduct all the industrial work to sustain the population for the next waking month. This sleeping empire also has a better claim to the types of economic exchanges that happen today. Natural resources and processed goods travelling between worlds would not be a ludicrous prospect as ships would not need to carry as much life-support weight. To be sure, human civilizations exist outside of Lockstep, but they live 360 times faster than the Lockstep civilization in the high-energy spaces around stars. In some ways, the hibernation technology fits McAuley’s concept of “up-to-the-minute science” in that hibernation does not violate physical laws, but many other parts of Lockstep are actually quite limited in their technology, showing none of the technological and biological augmentation so common in the new space opera exemplified by Reynolds.

So Schroeder has preserved the interesting bits of the space opera setting, the light-year-spanning civilization, without jettisoning respect for known physics. This is an impressive addition to the canon. How does Lockstep’s version of space opera measure up against others?

It seems that Schroeder has in fact written an “old space opera” tale. Schroeder starts with the classic idea of political unity, and although it evolves throughout the course of the novel from benevolent dictatorship to democracy, it retains its monolithic unity as in more classic space opera stories. Contrary to McAuley’s description of new space opera, the center does hold. Furthermore, unlike McAuley’s new space opera description of humanity walking through the junkyard of extinct, powerful species who came before us, Schroeder’s Lockstep universe is bereft of aliens. Some are alluded to, but, like the non-Lockstep cultures, they are as offstage and as distant as Istanbul might have been to Americans at the beginning of the nineteenth century. These comparisons suggest that Schroeder is not writing new space opera.

This idea is supported by the tone of the novel. It is not a giant epic with half a dozen major viewpoint characters but is instead a close family tale with a single point of view. Schroeder does not undermine, as Letson and Wolfe noted for writers of new space opera, the optimism present in the classic space opera form—quite the opposite. Lockstep is a novel overflowing with the optimism of a simpler time, fully embracing in its tone the adolescent yearning for the adventure, grand gestures, and romance of the classic space opera. Lockstep asserts thematically that it is possible to go back, to recover that innocence of an earlier age. Although the novel could be easily marketed to adults, it is perhaps no accident that Schroeder is characterizing his work as YA. This story of the teenaged protagonist is attempting to seduce not only the jaded readers of new space opera but also the new readers who are looking, without knowing they are doing so, for their own Cordwainer Smith and Jack Williamson. To feed this, Schroeder offers the reader fluorescent atmospheres, dizzying voyages as hobos riding the space rails, videogame worlds, as well as the teenage hero wish-fulfillment of a fated, returning Prince Charming and the princess he seeks, in all chastity, to win—heady, powerful, classical elements.

Did Schroeder create something new and reinvented? A synchronized hibernating interstellar civilization is certainly intriguingly fresh, but the above comparisons suggest that he did not create a new branch of the space opera genre. He instead transported a small part of space opera back in time, resurrecting something considered dead. He created conditions under which the charm and wonder of classic space opera could live again. This is an equally valuable feat.

Derek Künsken lives in Gatineau, Quebec.

Works Cited

• Banks, Iain M. The Algebraist. London: Orbit, 2005.
• Harrison, M. John. “Why I Write Space Opera.” Locus, August 2003. Also available at <www.locusmag.com/2003/Issue12/Harrison.html>.
• Hartwell, David G. & Kathryn Cramer. “How Shit Became Shinola: Definition and Redefinition of Space Opera.” SFRevu.com, August 2003, <www.sfrevu.com/ISSUES/2003/0308/Space%20Opera%20Redefined/Review.htm>. In The Space Opera Renaissance. Ed. David G. Hartwell & Kathryn Cramer. Tor Books, 2003.
• Letson, Russell and Gary K. Wolfe. “Duet, With No Fat Lady.” Locus, August 2003.
• Paul McAuley. “Junk Yard Universes.” Locus, August 2003. Also available at <www.omegacom.demon.co.uk/opera.htm>.
• Schroeder, Karl. <www.kschroeder.com>. Accessed December 12, 2013.
• Simmons, Dan. Hyperion. New York: Bantam Doubleday, 1989.