Title:
The Cassini Division
Author:
Ken Macleod
Publisher:
Tor Books, 1999
ISBN
0-312-87044-2
Life is a process of breaking down and using other matter, and if need be, other life. Therefore, life is aggression, and successful life is successful aggression. Life is the scum of matter, and people are the scum of life. There is nothing but matter, forces, space and time, which together make power. Nothing matters, except what matters to you. Might makes right, and power makes freedom. You are free to do whatever is in your power, and if you want to survive and thrive you had better do whatever is in your interests. If your interests conflict with those of others, let the others pit their power against yours, everyone for theirselves [sic]. If your interests coincide with those of others, let them work together with you, and against the rest. We are what we eat, and we eat everything.
Ken Macleod, The Cassini Division

The Cassini Division was the sort of book that has me carrying on mental arguments with the author one moment, and forgetting everything around me the next. The sentiments expressed in the cite, the True Knowledge, are the central ethic of the world of Macleod's future, a truly brave new world. Macleod uses sketchy flashbacks and vivid brushstrokes of action to create the backdrop against which Helen, his heroine, a two-hundred year old beauty kept alive by nanotechnology and gene engineering, is the champion of these sentiments.

Helen's greatest fear is that the Jovians, artificial superhuman intelligences who used to be human, may some day break out of their giant gravity well and conquer humanity. To forstall this, she is working towards an act of genocide.

It is a pretty horrific story. In the end, Macleod arranges things so that Helen turns out to be correct, and probably saves humanity. He could just as easily have altered the course of events to paint Helen as the worst mass murderer in history. It isn't until then that I realized that the point of Macleod's story was never to be another Atlas Shrugged, but to illustrate how ethics are often judged in hindsight. (It may not have been Macleod's point, of course.)

The book can be read as a straight adventure yarn. In that sense it also succeeds admirably. The passages where Helen must explain what she believes, and why, are short and efficient. Younger readers may easily be seduced by the "True Knowledge", especially since various forms of rational self interest are invariably seductive to them, but more experienced readers are sure to enjoy Macleod's skilled story telling, with the additional thrill of seeing the world through entirely new eyes.