Wheelers (novel)


Wheelers is a hard science fiction novel written by English mathematician Ian Stewart and reproductive biologist Jack Cohen. The book was originally released in hardcover form in the year 2000, and a more common paperback printing was begun in 2001. It has enjoyed modest commercial success and is perhaps best known for its conceptions of alien zoology and intelligence—hallmarks of Cohen's work as a consultant on exobiology for books, movies, and television.
Though this is the first time the pair has written a fictional narrative of their own, both Stewart and Cohen have worked continually with friend and fantasy author Terry Pratchett on his best-selling Discworld series.

Plot summary

Wheelers chronicles mankind's first contact with an alien intelligence, a meeting which takes place out of necessity when a rogue asteroid enters the Solar System and is set on a collision course with Earth by an advanced and hitherto unknown Jovian species as a way of avoiding a devastating impact to their own world.
The story opens with a feeling of anachronism, as two of the novel's central characters work in the year 2194 to interpret and preserve artifacts found in the vicinity of the Great Sphinx, which is being disassembled to save it from the advancing waters of a clogged and flooding Nile River after the collapse of the Aswan Dam. A lover's quarrel between the two sends Prudence off in a blind rage, and leaves Dunsmoore the sole caretaker of an important discovery—a position which catapults his career and sets the tension for the novel's second half.
Professionally and personally embittered by the success of Dunsmoore, Prudence begins a life of semi-legal interplanetary exploration and makes a living selling cosmic oddities to the highest black market bidder. This dangerous and profitable lifestyle acquaints her with legal authorities as well as the Belters—a group of Zen Buddhists who have populated and mined both Earth's Moon and the asteroid belt that lies between the terrestrial planets and the Jovian worlds of the outer Solar System. Her smuggling career culminates with the discovery of a trove of buried, wheeled, and presumably alien artefacts on Callisto. She takes these 'wheelers' to Earth intending to sell them, but a government investigation headed by Dunsmoore concludes them to be inauthentic.
As the story progresses, another main character materialises in the form of the aptly named Moses Odingo, son of Prudence's sister Charity and animal-handler extraordinaire. His life becomes one of the novel's several core plots, circumstance and apparent fate conspiring to send him on a worldwide journey of hardship and tribulation.
During this time, both Earth-bound scientists and the Belters notice that the innermost moons of Jupiter have mysteriously realigned, altering the trajectory of a once unimportant comet and setting in motion a direct collision with Earth. This is courtesy of the stuffily bureaucratic blimps—intelligent extraterrestrials living in the turbulence of Jupiter's upper atmosphere whose advanced gravity technology allows them to alter the orbital plane of the planet's moons and thereby avoid the type of cometary impact which, obliquely, precipitated their exodus from an unknown 'Firsthome' to Jupiter itself.
Left with twelve years until impact and now convinced of the wheelers' authenticity, Earth's governmental authorities speed a mission to the Jovian satellites in hopes of contacting the as yet unseen alien lifeforms. Dunsmoore is selected to lead the group, with the assumption that his experience with decrypting anthropological artefacts on earth will aid in establishing communiqué with the Jovians. The years tick by without consequence as Dunsmoore and his team search in vain for evidence of alien life on Jupiter's moons, convinced by terrestrial scientists that the planet itself is entirely inhospitable to life.
As the tension on Earth grows unbearable, Prudence Odingo flies her personal craft out to give Dunsmoore's team a push in what she believes to be the correct direction. Hacking into one of the probes that Dunsmoore's been carefully bobbing around the lifeless stratosphere of Jupiter, Odingo's team sends the RCV into the lower atmosphere, immediately encountering alien lifeforms both advanced and simplistic.
Through a quirk of fate and timing, her team manages to save a blimp by the name of Bright Halfholder of the Violent Foam, part of a 'skydiving' rebel faction known as The Instrumentality. Odingo encourages Moses, now a young man, to make a harrowing high-speed journey out to the moons, hoping to use his uncanny knack for animal communication to establish a rapport with Halfholder.
The ploy works, but the Jovians—who live for millions of years and rely on an arcane and tedious system of legal councils—spend too long arguing and contemplating to successfully redirect the comet. The Instrumentality stages a successful coup, but in the end it is Dunsmoore who hijacks the alien gravity technology and pilots Io into a diversionary orbit around the comet itself, barely saving Earth from total annihilation—though millions die as the remnants of the comet and the sulphurous outgassing of ruined Io cascade into Earth.

Government in the novel

The book pits the earth and its inhabitants against a universe of diplomatic but equally narcissistic alien lifeforms.

Human

Wheelers, which begins in the year 2210, is set over a backdrop of future technologies which play a role—though not an especially defining one—in the story.

Human technology

Due to The Pause, there is a mix of far-flung futurism and relatively mundane tech.

Personal communication

Blimp technology is organic in nature, and is constructed biologically using pheremones and other chemical tools.

Cities

A portion of Wheelers' fiction is based on current theories that the presence of gas giants may actually be a necessary factor in the formation of habitable terrestrial planets, as their mass deflects and breaks up potentially devastating threats. Earth-bound comets from outside the Solar System tend to either slingshot past Jupiter and launch into hyperbolic orbits that take them far from the terrestrial planets, or may lose momentum and drift peaceably into the Sun. Without the incredible gravitational presence of Jupiter, it's possible that our planet would experience so many impacts and close calls as to prevent advanced evolution or even the formation of life.
All the same, Jupiter also pulls many objects from the Kuiper Belt and Oort Cloud, sending them into the inner Solar System.