The Emerald Forge by Manda Benson #review

Title: The Emerald Forge
Author: Manda Benson
Publisher: Tangentrine Ltd, 2012

Once again, Manda Benson has dragged me back into her world. Having read nearly all of her SF titles by now, it's absolutely fantastic to get to see the "prehistory" of her world-building – all the stuff that gets mentioned in Dark Tempest et al.

Dana is a troubled protagonist, who suffers the brunt of bullies' attention and is socially maladjusted. And she lives a double life. On one hand she's just a kid. On another, she's the result of a scientific experiment that didn't quite go according to plan for her creator, one Ivor Pilgrennon.

This is YA with a difference. You're not going to see a love triangle. Instead you're dropped into the heart of turmoil from the perspective of one very brave girl who's caught on the cusp of young adulthood. She's old enough to reach for bigger things, but is still considered a child. A very frustrating place to be indeed.

As always, Benson's cybernetic creations are fascinating. In The Emerald Forge we encounter fantastical beasts brought to life in unexpected ways. Star of the show is the "wyvern" made up of metal and biological matter. Not so groovy is its opposite, the "griffin". The scarred Pendrick sees through the eyes of his martial eagle. Birds implanted with devices form deadly swarms. We see the first of the horses that were the highlight of Benson's novel Moonsteed.

Benson is unafraid of exploring the sociological implications of unfettered science. Though her characters are not easily likable and are often abrasive, they carry with them a kind of rough charm. Once you step into Benson's world, be prepared to be sucked into a reality as tangible and well realised as those created by the likes of Anne McCaffrey or CJ Cherryh.

Manda Benson and The Emerald Forge #guest

Manda Benson was one of the very first authors I worked with and she's bringing out her special brand of SF or, as she terms them, technothrillers with Tangentrine Limited. Manda explores a possible futures that offer a somewhat dark diversion from our present. I cannot underscore enough how much I love Manda's writing, and I've got The Emerald Forge queued up as a soon-to-be read title on my list. 

But, over to Manda, who's taking over my blog today...

The Emerald Forge is the second book in the four-volume Pilgrennon’s Children series of technothrillers aimed at the YA age group and above. If I had to compare ideas in The Emerald Forge with other books, I suppose I could call it a near-future portmanteau of The Island of Dr Moreau (HG Wells), The Birds (Daphne Du Maurier), and Frankenstein (Mary Shelley). The book’s central plot is driven by the appearance of animals and alarming artificial creatures coming from somewhere to attack people.

In Pilgrennon’s Beacon Dana succeeded in tracking down her genetic parents, Jananin Blake and Ivor Pilgrennon. Ivor went missing at the end of the first book, whereas Jananin, the unwilling donor of the ovum Dana was conceived from, considered the revenge she’d set out to enact complete, and left to rebuild her life. The series sets the characters’ struggles against a backdrop of political upheaval, so the second book needed to continue Dana’s story as well as progressing this setting.

In The Emerald Forge, a year or two has passed since Pilgrennon’s Beacon. As a result of the events in the first book, democracy as we know it has fallen out of favour and a new form of government has risen to power, the Meritocracy. The Meritocracy is rather a complicated concept and I didn’t want irrelevant explanations forced into the book for the sake of it, so The Emerald Forge I suppose comes across as a sort of introduction to the idea via what’s going on in the background. The gist of it is there is no parliament and no politicians, and every law and matter to be decided upon is voted for by the Electorate, and the results handled by massive interconnected supercomputers called ANTs (Arrays of NeuroTechnology), but — and this is the crucial part — some people’s votes have more weight than others, depending on tiers calculated from their qualifications, how much voluntary tax they pay, and other matters used to determine how much they contribute to society.

Dana has been adopted by the foster parents she was living with in the first book, and in them she has a loving and supportive family. However, she’s still having problems due to bullies at school and puberty, and she has no closure on what happened to Ivor, and lives in hope he might still be alive. Jananin, an eminent scientist and Nobel laureate, has been elected as a Spokesman for the Meritocracy (a Spokesman is a prominent public figure chosen for their judgement and opinions by the Electorate to vote on their behalf at times of national emergency, when there’s not time for a referendum to be held on an urgent matter) and because of this, writings and speeches by her frequently appear on the Internet, television, and radio. This false proximity makes Dana’s relationship with and rejection by Jananin even more difficult for her.

At the start of the book, Dana and a boy are attacked by a construct — half beast, half machine — designed to resemble a wyvern, a creature from mythology. Dana succeeds in defeating the wyvern, and discovers it was being controlled by a remote signal. She needs somewhere safe to hide the wyvern, and tries to contact Jananin, hoping in addition she will get help finding out who made the wyvern and why it was sent to attack her. Unfortunately, this doesn’t go quite as she hopes, and she ends up trying to work out the mystery without Jananin. Dana’s biggest concern is that it was Ivor who made the wyvern and sent it after her, and the thought of this being evidence that he is still alive is worrying to her, although she longs to find out he isn’t dead. Around the same time, she’s also started being troubled by disturbing dreams about someone trapped in an abusive psychiatric hospital. She deduces that the wyvern came from the east, and travels that way to eventually come across an abandoned foundry, the ‘Emerald Forge’ where someone is carrying out very unethical experiments. Dana has to stop what’s going on in the Forge and find out why it is happening.

One of the major themes I’m trying to develop in this series, as it is aimed at young people, is putting across controversial topics and trying to give a balanced perspective. I’m concerned that extremist ideologies tend to target the young, people who don’t have a great deal of experience or theory to defend themselves with. The first book concerned itself in this respect with nanotechnology and genetic engineering. These scientific fields are frequently reviled as being wrong and dangerous by people with no real understanding of what they actually involve. Dana as a character was in an unique position as these technologies are an innate part of her and are the reason for her existing at all. A lot of tension in the book stemmed from Jananin and Ivor’s disagreement over what was unethical and what was permissible for the greater good, and I hope that encouraged readers to research these topics and develop more informed opinions.

In The Emerald Forge, the theme this time is animal experimentation. On the one side are ruthless people who will inflict all manner of suffering on animals that could be avoided, and use them as weapons for their own ends. On the other side are terrorists who think animals are better than humans, and that no person has the right to do anything that affects an animal, including owning pets as well as killing animals to eat or using them to test medicines and surgical procedures on. In the middle are people who want to know their dinner was reared and slaughtered humanely, and people like the police who use dogs and horses to help them do their job, and people who believe some animal testing is necessary for the greater good, as long as the animals are treated humanely. I hope this gets people thinking about aspects of this argument they might not have considered, and encourages people who might have already developed an opinion to perhaps re-examine it.

Significantly to me, The Emerald Forge was published on 12/12/12. This running joke started out with The Weatherman’s Niece on 10/10/10, mainly because the month and the day are the same, so people don’t get confused because of date-writing conventions, which vary internationally. Sadly, this is the last date of this format we’re likely to see in our lifetimes (the next will be 01/01/2101) so the joke ends with The Emerald Forge. As with the first book, I’d originally intended to include bonus material in the electronic version and had an idea for a piece of short fiction, but unfortunately there wasn’t time. The e-edition does have an ‘Easter egg’ not included in the paperback, though, and I may include more bonus material in a later updated edition.

I’m taking a break from this series for now to catch up on some other projects I write under different names. I hope to publish the third book in the Pilgrennon’s Children tetralogy, The Lambton Worm, some time in late 2014 or early 2015.

The first two books of the Pilgrennon’s Children series, Pilgrennon’s Beacon (978-0-9566080-2-4) and The Emerald Forge (978-0-9566080-7-9), are published by Tangentrine Ltd in paperback and electronic format.

The mind behind the Dark Tempest

Science Fiction may not be everyone's cup of tea, but sometimes one encounters an author who is able to blend the right amount of speculative future, science and human relationships to bring forth a story that not only engages your imagination but fires up your emotions.

I am both honoured and privileged to have worked on Manda Benson's writing, an author who will, I'm sure, is going to make waves with her writing. Dark Tempest will be released through Lyrical Press, Inc. on February 15, and if you enjoyed reading works in the scope of the likes of David Brin, CJ Cherryh and Mary Gentle, I can say with authority that you'll most likely enjoy Manda's writing.

See: http://www.lyricalpress.com/dark_tempest

Manda, thank you for agreeing to join me here in my world. You have a background in science. Care to tell us a little about it and how it has influenced your writing?

I have an MChem and a PhD in Chemistry. I worked mainly in the areas of natural products and organic synthesis, which included biofuels, drugs design and coming up with ways to make novel polymers. I’ve also messed about with science teaching in its various forms, at secondary and undergraduate level.

I remember the thing that first got me interested in science, when I was very young, was seeing photographs of the sky at high magnification, and realising these amazing images were of galaxies, supernova remnants, clouds of gas and things so big I couldn’t possibly get my head around them. There is an awful lot out there, and I’d love to see it. Unfortunately I can’t, so I write books about it instead.

When working on Dark Tempest, one of my favourite characters was the morran, Rh'Ahrrol, who often saw a situation in a clearer light than the others.

Where do your morrans come from?

The morran species has quite a detailed backstory, none of which ended up being revealed in Dark Tempest. My idea for them came from thinking about how we have sea urchins and land urchins, and wondering what a "space urchin" might be like.

Morrans evolved on a volcanic moon orbiting a brown dwarf (a brown dwarf is an object larger than a big planet such as Jupiter and yet not big enough to start full fusion and become a sun, which emits heat but no light).

Because the closest sun is far away and the moon spends long periods facing away from it, life cannot depend on photosynthesis and instead plants use geothermal energy from the moon’s crust and radiation from the brown dwarf to grow, similar to some ecosystems that have been discovered in volcanic trenches in the ocean.

Like the deep sea, life on this dark world is bioluminescent. Morrans, an intelligent species, have evolved large eyes to allow them to see well in twilight, sonar so they can hunt effectively in pitch darkness and navigate around caves, and luminous quills and voices with which to communicate using colour and sounds.

Their genetic material is different to DNA on Earth, but their biochemistry is pretty much the same, so they can eat the same food as us. Unlike animals on Earth, which mostly have two copies of each chromosome, morrans have sixfold redundancy and thus have six sexes in the ratio 10:10:87:87:227:227. Yes, I have a spreadsheet with a table in it on my hard drive showing how I calculated that, and yes it is a very nerdy thing to do. :-)

There’s a cartoon of a morran at http://tangentrine.com/content/artwork in the aliens section if anyone wants to know what they look like. I like trying to think outside the box when I make aliens, and I like reading about aliens by other writers who’ve done some research and come up with something clever and imaginative.

Tell us more about your Archers. How did this idea first appear to you?

In Dark Tempest, star Archers are the very top caste of the genetic dynasty, and their purpose is to hunt "chimaera" – organometallic Alcubierre organisms needed to build craft for galactic travel. Their minds are connected permanently and intimately to the computers that control their complex and powerful ships.

Star Archers are heterozygous for what’s called the "Blood" genes. Because some of these genes are on the X chromosome, all Archers are female. I was doing recurve archery years ago and I got thinking about how projectiles such as guns (which are effectively just an explosion in a tube) aren’t necessarily better or more accurate than bows, and that got me on to thinking about how new technology could make bows more powerful and more accurate. I came up with the idea of having powered limbs on the bow made of a material that can contract using a chemical reaction, like muscle, and shoot an arrow with far more force than it’s drawn with.

The other thing that ended up being a significant part of it was the Archers’ sense of discipline and philosophy. I liked an anecdote someone told me, that Korean archers are trained to shoot between heartbeats to minimise error. I’ve no idea if it’s true, but it sounds cool and it ended up in the book.

What are some of the developments you think will become more important in present technology? Where would you like to see further development?

Subjects close to my heart are genetic engineering and bionic augmentation. For as long as I can remember I’ve been obsessed with the idea of being able to control things (asides from my own body) with my mind, and this facet has appeared in almost everything I’ve written of novella-length or longer.

Space exploration (using robots, telescopes, and probes; no need to send humans unless there’s a habitat ready for them to move in) is also important to me. Although I’ve yet to hear of anything useful come out of nanotechnology, I predict big strides eventually coming from this area in terms of medicine and computing.

If you were made an all-powerful dictator on Earth, how would you exercise your power?

I honestly wouldn’t know where to start. There is that much wrong with the world, and unfortunately there are no simple solutions. However, I think it’s of utmost importance that science keeps moving forward. I’d put high value on developing the technology to terraform other worlds and build habitats for humans away from Earth, and we need to make full use of technology such as genetic engineering and tide/wind power and photovoltaics to feed people and power our industry rather than importing food and oil.

A few people in high places are making a lot of noise at the moment to do with carbon footprints, and making life difficult for motorists, and ruining the countryside by building eco slums all over it. With the population growing the way it is, that’s not going to make a blind bit of difference. It’s like trying to prevent a dam from bursting by bailing it out with a teacup. Short of annihilating the human race, climate change is not going to be undone, so we need to use our science to deal with it instead of hiding in a cave with no toilet and no Wi-Fi and hoping it will go away.

Can we expect other works set in the same universe as Dark Tempest?

Yes! Dark Tempest shares its setting, which I call Galactic Legacy, with a number of other pieces of fiction I have planned. While Dark Tempest explored the world of the star Archers and introduced morrans and the way halfBlood people are treated, there are other aspects of this universe and other castes, such as the merchants, the castellans, and the inquisitors. My next novella in this setting, which I’m currently working on, is called In the Shadow of Lazarus and it’s about ship whose crew get infected with a contagious disease that’s evolved the next step up from a snotty nose and a sore throat.

Galactic Legacy also fits into a "superuniverse" in that it’s set in a particular era of an envisioned future. There are three settings in total, the first being a near-future series of technothrillers set mainly on Earth; the second being set about 100 years after this, in a Solar system in the process of being colonised by humans; and with Galactic Legacy being the final one, set about 4,000 years after the first era.

Some useful links.
Manda Benson’s official website: http://tangentrine.com
Hubble astrophotography website: http://hubblesite.org/gallery
Critters online writing workshop: http://critters.org