The major characters, then, all begin as citizens of Greater Brazil. All end up, in very different ways and with differing levels of success, searching for redemption, and essentially opposing the interests of their homeland. So, the characters. Dave #8 is a cloned spy who in the first book fell in love with a woman of Paris, Dione, the city he was assigned to disrupt in the war effort. In this book, he uses his skills as a spy to look for the woman he loves, and eventually goes on a sort of quest to finally see Earth, at the same time working against the police state system of Greater Brazil. Macy Minnot is an ecological specialist who defected to the Outer Planets in the first book, after she discovered a sabotage plot that undermined a peace initiative prior to the war. In this book, she is happily married and part of a rump group of Outers who have fled Saturn for various points farther out -- we get to see Uranus, Neptune, Pluto and other exotic locations in following her, while she ends up a reluctant diplomat in an effort to negotiate an end to the TPA occupation. Macy's long term enemy is Loc Ifrahim, a slimy opportunist in the Greater Brazil diplomatic service, who, as he keeps looking out for number one, finds himself subtly maneuvered (by fate as much as anything) into a situation where his interests oppose those of his country, and where he is unexpectedly (to him, certainly), a tragic lover and something of a hero. Cash Baker is a singleship pilot from Texas, injured in the Quiet War. Unable to fly anymore, he spends some time as a tame war hero, before realizing the cynical motivations of his masters, and he drifts back home where he encounters, and eventually joins, the local resistance effort. And finally the creepy gene wizard Sri Hong-Owen, obsessed with meeting the Outer Planets' master gene wizard Avernus, ends up losing the affection of her two quite different sons and pursuing her ever stranger obsessions in seclusion on a moon of Saturn.

As I hope the above character sketches hint, the action here is fairly complex and convoluted. However there is an overarching plot that is, in reality, fairly simple. It concerns what is presented as the eventually inevitable collapse of Greater Brazilian politics, as that nation proves unable to adapt to the reality of Outer Planet conditions, nor to its own internal stresses. A combination of the above, and of their rivalry with the other Earth powers, leads to a reversal of sorts of the state of play at the end of the first novel. And then a slingshot to the real theme of the books -- the future.

This is in a way a very traditional SF tale, concerned in a fairly comprehensive way with a fairly standard SFnal future: one in which we control our ecological damage to the home planet, colonize the rest of the Solar System, and take steps to the stars. At the same time humanity must change, and in a wide variety of differing ways. Ultimately it's an optimistic book, a sort of reaffirmation of the purest of SF's dreams, while certainly it acknowledges at least some of the difficulty of realizing those dreams, and the general cussedness of humans when faced with progress.

I'd like to briefly address the relationship of these books to McAuley's previous Quiet War stories. A note at the end of Gardens of the Sun says "Parts of this novel are based on heavily modified characters and situations" of such stories as "The Gardens of Saturn" (1998), "The Assassination of Faustino Malarte" (2002), "The Passenger" (2002), and "Dead Man Walking" (2006). That is true, and indeed we meet such characters as Cash Baker, Vera Jackson, Sri Hong-Owen and her two sons, Avernus, and Faustino Malarte in those stories. And we meet other characters under different names. And we see some similar events. But looking at the original stories (and the several other Quiet War stories McAuley has published, such as "Second Skin" (1997), "Sea Change, with Monsters" (1998), and "Making History" (2000)), we see an excellent example of the differences between the short form and the long form, and of the evolution of a general idea for a future over time. The stories are excellent work, and all worth reading on their own. I hope McAuley can collect them separately sometime. And they don't spoil the novels, nor are they spoiled by them. Different things happen. The characters come to different fates. The "future history" works out in different ways. Technology changes. The stories are perhaps viewable as "beta versions" of the eventual future of the novel, but that's unfair. They are successes in their own right. What McAuley has done here is quite similar to what we saw Kim Stanley Robinson do with his Martian novels and with the stories collected in The Martians.

I enthusiastically recommend this diptych. I enjoyed both novels immensely, and I think they are among the best hard SF novels of recent years. One of the ways to enjoy SF is to see the continual reimagination of certain consensus futures by different writers, and as our "real" history (and technology) continue to change. The Quiet War and Gardens of the Sun are an excellent, fascinating, moving, and thought-provoking reimagination of one of my favorite futures: in short, the colonization of the Solar System.