Over the last few years, with stories like 'The Waters of Meribah' and 'The Sixth VNM' appearing on a regular basis in Interzone, Tony Ballantyne has proven himself a good and interesting short story writer. When I heard his debut novel was due out in 2004, I had high expectations, and it immediately became one of the books I was most looking forward to reading. Now that I've read it, I can happily report that those expectations were mostly fulfilled. Recursion is good, with some moments of brilliance.

The novel is divided, for most of its length, into three plot threads. In 2051, Eva Rye is living in the ultimate direct-marketing nanny state. Eva wants out; in fact, she wants to kill herself. However, when They not only know what you want but They also know what's best for you and They have the technology to make sure that you get it, well, that's something that's easier said than done.

In 2119, Constantine Storey arrives in Stonebreak. The great city in the Australian desert was the first to be built by Von Neumann Machines - autonomously replicating robots; the technology that, along with the development of artificial intelligence, has changed the world. He's a ghost, one of those who can move through the world undetected. He's come for a meeting that will decide the fate of a conspiracy, and he's got four other personalities in his head, along for the ride.

Last but not least, in 2210, Henry Jeremiah Kirkham - Herb, to his friends - has made a mistake of planetary proportions. Literally: the VNMs he'd set to build him a city have chewed up an entire planet, and the Environment Agency, as represented by one Robert Johnston, are not happy about it. Johnston offers a choice. Herb can serve out his time, or he can help in the struggle against the enigmatic Enemy Domain, an empire built on VNMs that is expanding, unchecked, in the direction of Earth.

Were you to break it down, then, the recipe for Recursion would look something like this: Mix equal parts black comedy, social satire, Dickian paranoia and interstellar battles; season with a generous dose of the ubiquitous VNMs, and garnish with a sprinkling of AI. This means that there's a lot going on, but Ballantyne juggles his stories deftly. Though the strands don't truly intersect until very close to the end of the book, thematically they are neatly woven together; and despite a couple of periods of the narrative doldrums, mostly in the Eva thread, on the whole the book is highly readable, with plot points rather satisfyingly becoming apparent just when the reader needs to know them, without things ever feeling contrived. As for the writing itself, Ballantyne's prose tends towards the clean and spare, rather than the lush and vivid. This helps to make it a fairly easy read. There are a couple of words that crop up so often as to be distracting (notably, one character seems to say everything 'softly'), but for the most part the effect is a deadpan tone that serves the story, particularly the nearer-future parts of it, well.

More importantly, though, Ballantyne uses his material to discuss some fairly heavyweight themes. The big one is responsibility: why to take it, when to take it, how to take it, and who should take it. If you give it away, is it ever possible to take it back? Where is the balance-point between self-determination, guidance and dictatorship? The main fulcrum for this debate is (of course) the relationship between humanity and AI, but to a greater or lesser extent every thread deals with a confrontation with authority, and a decision about how to relate to it. As one character bitterly comments, 'each lie calls for another lie. How far do we have to go until the final deception is revealed?' (p.103) Some of Ballantyne's answers are cold and hard; some suggest that there is no more than an infinite regression of schemes and lies upon which you must try to build a life. None, however, are definitive. The situations of Eva, Constantine and Herb are the result of carefully layered ambiguities that challenge the reader to find his or her own answers, and compare them to those of the author.

Recursion is serious science fiction; the ideas here have weight to them, and are not thrown off lightly. Tony Ballantyne may be one of the last of David Pringle's Interzone generation but, on this evidence, he will certainly not be the least.