In Zoo City, it’s impolite to ask.

Zoo City, by Lauren Beukes

The Arthur C. Clarke Award for Science Fiction Literature is one of the very few literary prizes I pay any attention to. In part that’s because I don’t read enough science fiction to otherwise be on top of what’s coming out, but it’s also because it’s a well curated prize that really does tend to catch much of what’s most exciting in the field.

Lauren Beukes’ second novel, Zoo City, won the prize back in 2011. That caused some controversy, with many arguing that it wasn’t science fiction at all but rather a fantasy novel which shouldn’t even have been shortlisted (hardcore genre fans can get very bullish about defending genre boundaries). For me the better view is that the boundaries aren’t the point. The point is that the Clarke Award did its job, by finding a bloody good book and shouting to the world about it.

Zoo City is the Johannesburg ghetto where the “animalled” live. The animalled are people who carry the guilt of another human being’s death in an unusually literal way, manifested in the form of animals which they must keep near them at all times. Zinzi December, the protagonist, used to be a Johannesburg lifestyle journalist until she fell into addiction and got her brother killed. Now she has a sloth which goes with her wherever she goes – a living reminder of her sense of responsibility for her brother’s death.

The animalled are stigmatised. In China, the novel mentions at one point in passing, they’re executed on the assumption that whatever they did to end up with an animal must necessarily be a crime worthy of execution. They’re outcasts, and since few people want to employ a presumed killer who is accompanied everywhere by some bizarre creature (examples in the book include a sparrow, a bear, a mongoose, a vulture and much more) they can’t get regular employment.

Other than the presence of the animalled the world of Zoo City is our world. People started being animalled in the 1980s, the first being an Afghan warlord who manifested a penguin which he promptly issued with a custom-made bullet-proof vest. The phenomenon then quickly spread worldwide (the timeline is similar to the spread of Aids in real life). Some seek explanations in religion, others by reference to dodgy sounding quantum physics, but nobody really knows and from the point of view of the animalled it doesn’t really matter.

Being apart from your animal causes profound psychic stress. If your animal dies, you do too (and in a particularly eerie fashion). The only upside, and it’s not much of one, is that each animalled person gains a small magical power.

Zinzi December’s magical gift is the ability to find lost possessions. That’s a talent you can charge people for, that and her writing ability which makes her particularly good at crafting email scams to lure in unsuspecting first world retirees. The emails apparently come from:

…an old lady with a flooded mansion, desperate to sell her priceless antiques cheap-cheap. A Chechnyan refugee fleeing the latest Russian pogroms with her family’s diamonds in tow. A Somali pirate who has found Jesus and wants to trade in his rocket launcher and ransom millions for absolution” and to make some money while they do so.

What each of them has in common is the need to get a large amount of money out of South Africa, the promise of rich rewards for the kindly stranger who helps with that, and some unfortunate up-front administrative fees that can’t be paid from in-country…

We’re in noir territory then, with Zinzi a down at heels and distinctly morally ambiguous PI. Soon a pair of hired thugs (with poodle and vulture in tow) are pressuring Zinzi to take on a job for a reclusive music producer who’s lost one half of his latest boy-girl pop sensation. Zinzi doesn’t do missing people, but when the money’s right how hard can it be to find one lost teenager? Besides, there are some people it’s very hard to say no to.

The cover for my copy of Zoo City comes with a William Gibson quote, which makes sense because Beukes has a lot in common with Gibson. Neither has any real interest in the how of their world, whether the animalled or Gibson’s Cyberspace could actually happen. What each focuses on instead is the experience, the personal and social impact of change.

Beukes’ first novel, Moxyland (which I reviewed here), was outright cyberpunk in the classic Gibsonian mould. Here she’s writing what could be termed urban fantasy, but with the same outlook. Modern Africa is a mix of the high tech and traditional beliefs (the same could be said of modern Singapore, modern Britain). The animals and the magical gifts they bring allow her to explore the world of muti, African folk beliefs which continue in a world of email scams and disposable mobile phones.

Nyangas and sangomas and faith healers with varying degrees of skill or talent, broadcasting their services on posters stuck up on telephone poles and walls. Some of them are charlatans and shysters, advertising cures for anything from money woes to love-sickness and Aids with muti made from crushed lizard balls and aspirin. Guess which ingredient does all the hard work?

To South Africans the animals are another form of muti, as are the abilities they give their humans. December’s view of the world is a modern South African view, influenced in part by animist tradition surviving into a Christian and increasingly secular age. In truth she doesn’t particularly understand how magic works, but then she probably doesn’t understand how her car works either (since car control systems went largely electronic, few people do).

Object muti is easy, particularly when it’s based on a simple binary. Locked or unlocked. Lost or found. Objects want to have a purpose. They’re happy to be told what to do. People less so. [...] Most magic is more abstract. Capricious. It has a tendency to backfire. And the big stuff they promise, the Aids cures, bigger penises or death spells, are all placebo and nocebo, blessings and curses conjured up in your head. Not unlike glossy magazines, which also promise a better sex life, a better job, a better you. Trust me, I used to write those articles. And just look at me now.

The worldbuilding here is done to an extent by stealth - characters don’t spend time explaining their everyday world to each other (a common fault in much other SF). The result is that you pick up the details as you go along, and Beukes is good enough at her craft to ensure this doesn’t become confusing.

Beukes’ world convinces on its terms then, but that isn’t of itself enough to make a good novel. For me, where Beukes’ fiction really shines is her evocation of contemporary urban South Africa. She’s tremendous at capturing noise, smells, the clash of colours and the sheer energy and chaos of it.

Everything takes on a muted quality fifteen floors up. The traffic is reduced to a flow and stutter, the car horns like the calls of mechanical ducks. The skyline is in crisp focus, the city graded in rusts and coppers by the sinking sun that has streaked the wispy clouds the colour of blood. It’s the dust in the air that makes the Highveld sunsets so spectacular, the fine yellow mineral deposits kicked up from the mine dumps, the carbon-dioxide choke of the traffic. Who says bad things can’t be beautiful?

Though this next quote reminded me more of when I used to live in Earl’s Court, showing perhaps that in some ways major cities are the same the world over.

I catch a taxi into Auckland Park with the late-night cleaners, the nurses and the restaurant dish-washers: the invisible tribe of behind-the-scenes. I get off after Media Park and walk up to 7th Street with its scramble of restaurants, bars and Internet cafés. Outside the Mozambican deli-cum-Internet café, a hawker tries to sell me a star lantern made of wire and paper and, when I decline, offers me marijuana instead.

Beukes also often shows a nice turn of phrase. I liked an email-scam mark having his good sense overwhelmed by the smell of money which “bellows like a vuvuzela, drowning out the whisper of doubt.” Similarly I enjoyed a teenaged boy “pouting like he ordered strippers for his birthday and got clowns instead”, and in terms of imagery when a fatally wounded man “screams like a slaughterhouse pig in a Peta video” it’s vivid and unpleasantly easy to imagine.

What makes Zoo City such an enjoyable read then isn’t the concept itself, clever (and capable of so many allegorical readings) as it is. It’s the writing, the noirish characters, and perhaps most of all that remarkable sense of place. I’ve not read most of the novels Zoo City was up against in 2011, so I can’t say whether it deserved to beat them or not. I’m not at all surprised though that it got shortlisted, because if science fiction (or fantasy if you prefer) was producing many books like this back in 2011 it must have been an exceptionally good year.

Zoo City has been widely reviewed. There’s an excellent (and spoiler free) example at David H’s blog, here (I only just realised David’s blog wasn’t on my blogroll, so I’ve promptly corrected that) and he links in turn to fine reviews from John Clute and Niall Harrison each of which is definitely worth reading. I was happier with the ending than David was as for me the book always had that crime heritage overlapping with the SF and I was therefore expecting a fairly plot-driven ending.

Postscript: Some issues with the Kindle edition

Finally, a note of caution for those who don’t have this and might be thinking of picking it up. Beukes uses different fonts in places, to indicate emails or internet chats, and all that inevitably gets lost in the kindle version. Much worse though the kindle version, in the UK at least, has some truly appalling formatting errors which were so frequent and so bad that they started to genuinely spoil the book for me.

Since I knew the author was on twitter I dropped her a line there asking if there was some way to get the ebook version fixed (the paperback doesn’t have these problems). She put me in touch with her publishers, who asked me to email through the details of the problems I’d found (since they apparently weren’t in all e-editions in all countries).

The publishers offered to send me a cleaned up version, but before they could Lauren Beukes herself very kindly emailed me a word version of the book which was entirely error free (and which was apparently a later version of the book, fixing a plot problem I’d already read past without noticing that her French translator had picked up).

I really can’t praise enough Lauren Beukes’ and her publishers’ response to the problem I had. Given though the formatting issues with the ebook, and the fact that even once fixed you’ll still lose the font choices Beukes makes, this is one you should definitely read in physical copy if at all possible.

Free, strong, safe.

Fugue for a Darkening Island, by Christopher Priest

I have white skin. Light brown hair. Blue eyes. I am tall. I usually dress conservatively: sports jackets, corduroy trousers, knitted ties. I wear spectacles for reading, though they are more an affectation than a necessity. I smoke cigarettes occasionally. Sometimes I drink alcohol. I do not believe in God; I do not go to church; I do not have any objections to other people doing so. When I married my wife, I was in love with her. I am very fond of my daughter Sally. I have no political ambitions. My name is Alan Whitman.

My skin is smudged with dirt. My hair is dry, salt-encrusted and itchy. I have blue eyes. I am tall. I am wearing now what I was wearing six months ago, and I smell awful. I have lost my spectacles, and learned to live without them. I do not smoke at all most of the time, though when cigarettes are available I smoke them continually. I am able to get drunk about once a month. I do not believe in God; I do not go to church. When I last saw my wife, I was cursing her, though I have learned to regret it. I am very fond of my daughter Sally. I do not think I have political ambitions. My name is Alan Whitman.

Among the first books I reviewed when I started this blog was Hari Kunzru’s My Revolutions. After writing the review, I looked online to see what others had thought of it and discovered that I’d liked it more than most. The reason seemed to be because the London Kunzru was writing about was the London of my childhood; I recognised his book as true.

The problem with that of course is that if a novel needs a reader who was there (though I was only a small child in the 1970s) then it will struggle both for longevity and a wider readership. My Revolutions did find a wider audience than just me, but not as appreciative a one as he found for some of his other books.

I grew up in Notting Hill, more specifically North Kensington (near the north end of Ladbroke Grove for anyone reading this who knows London). It wasn’t then as fashionable as it is now; in fact North Kensington (despite what the word Kensington suggests) was one of London’s more deprived areas. It was also an area with large Black British and Afro-Caribbean communities and there were often tensions between them and the older white communities (Sam Selvon’s excellent The Lonely Londoners and his Moses Ascending both explore the area’s immigrant experience, my reviews of both are here).

Sometimes there were riots, and as a child one particular street (All Saints Road, the band All Saints named themselves after it though god knows why) was known as “the front line” because it was seen as a border between black and white neighbourhoods and a no-go zone for police and whites. The no-go bit was a myth incidentally, I walked through it on several occasions without the slightest problem (other than an assumption I was looking to buy drugs).

All of which brings me to Christopher Priest’s 1972 novel Fugue for a Darkening Island. Priest is a writer of what is sometimes called slipstream fiction, a term he invented as far as I know. He provided the foreword for Anna Kavan’s Ice and is a writer who straddles the line between literary and science fiction without recognising the boundaries of either. He can be challenging, and while Fugue is far from his best novel in some ways it’s perhaps the most challenging of all of them.

Racists sometimes talk of immigrants “swamping” Britain; of them “overrunning” the country. Fugue is a novel in which their worst fears are realised, That’s what challenges here: it’s not the fact that the narrative is a mosaic which cuts forward and back among the protagonist’s experiences and memories so that only by the end is the entire story clear; it’s the fact that Priest has written a book which explores racism in a profoundly visceral way.

War has broken out in Africa. Some of the powers involved have got hold of nuclear weapons. They use them, rendering large parts of Africa uninhabitable. The result is a human tidal wave of refugees; millions of them. Many come to the UK; more than the UK can absorb. The result is social breakdown, civil war, the descent of the UK into the sort of hellhole the Africans are fleeing from.

The obvious parallel is with War of the Worlds, in which Britain finds itself on the receiving end of the colonialism that it dishes out elsewhere, thanks to the Martians. Here there are no Martians, but the essence is the same. Priest asks the same question as did Wells, how do we like it when the atrocities happen in the Home Counties, rather than Rwanda or the Congo?

Fugue is written from the perspective of Alan Whitman, but not chronologically. Some sections are from his life before the UK’s collapse, with Alan indulging in meaningless affairs while ignoring both the increasing sham of his marriage and a dangerous drift to the hard right in UK politics. Some are from the period in which society began to break down, with Alan looking for somewhere he and his family can safely wait out the approaching storm. Some are from after that storm has hit, with Alan one refugee among many looking now for his wife and daughter who have been kidnapped by an Afrim militia group.

The Afrim are what the African refugees are called in the novel. It’s never explained why, which lends it a certain verisimilitude as the characters after all would know why. As the novel takes Alan’s perspective though the Afrim are largely faceless; a mass of indistinguishable black aggressors who literally steal his women. It’s a troubling portrayal and it plays directly into racist stereotypes (“Once the Afrims have a street to themselves, they spread through the rest of the district in a few nights”, and later “‘Then you should know that the Afrim command has set up several brothels of white women for its troops.’”). I don’t think this is a racist novel, but it’s definitely capable of a (incorrect) racist interpretation.

Priest describes in the detailed and fascinating foreword how he was in part inspired by the cosy catastrophes of writers such as John Wyndham and John Christopher. He wrote against a backdrop of political violence in Northern Ireland, barricaded streets and paramilitaries driving families from their homes.

We realized we would probably be forced to abandon our house in Southgate the day the barricade was erected at the end of our road. Although terrified by the prospect we did nothing, because for several days we thought we might be able to adjust to the new mode of life.

In Northern Ireland sectarianism led to social cleansing, not that we use that term when it happens in the developed West. Catholics and Protestants often found themselves living in different areas, and entering one group’s territory if you belonged to the other could be dangerous even if you weren’t yourself political. For Catholics and Protestants read Hutus and Tutsis, Serbians and Bosnians, a myriad sectarian squabbles.

The following day we were at home when we heard the noise of the Martins being evicted. They lived almost opposite us. We had not had much to do with them and since the Afrim landings had seen even less of them. Vincent Martin was a highly qualified research technician and worked at an aircraft components factory in Hatfield. His wife stayed at home, looking after their three children. They were West Indians.

Soon Alan is on the road with his wife and daughter, heading to his wife’s parents in Bristol and avoiding “the barricaded Afrim enclaves at Notting Hill and North Kensington”. We know they don’t make it, and Alan becomes a refugee pushing his few belongings across England in a wheelbarrow. The violence spirals out, not just white against black but nationalists against those who sympathise with the plight of the African refugees. Alan finds himself in a warzone, policed by UN troops who do little to help. When he meets combatants it doesn’t really matter much which side they’re on because none of them give a damn about the civilians caught in the middle. At best the various militaries hand out propaganda, then move you along.

He offered me an immediate commission into the Secessionist forces, but I turned it down, explaining that I had to consider Sally. Before we left he handed me a sheet of paper which explained in simple language the long-term aims of the Secessionist cause. These were a restoration of law and order; an immediate amnesty for all Nationalist participants; a return to the parliamentary monarchy that had existed before the civil war; the restitution of the judiciary; an emergency housing programme for displaced civilians; and full British citizenship for all contemporary African immigrants. It reflected exactly what I hoped would happen, but all our recent experiences had underlined the impossibility of a peaceful solution to the present chaotic fighting.

Alan incidentally spends a fair chunk of the novel criticising his wife’s passivity and refusal to recognise what’s going on and so help herself. As the novel progresses though it becomes evident that Alan’s not really that different, that what he hates in her is in part the mirror of his own failings. Fugue is as much an exploration of Alan’s psychology and how he reacts under extreme pressure as it is a bringing home of conflicts we’re used to seeing on the TV, and it’s that dimension which ultimately makes this a better book than many of those which inspired it – Alan is simply more real, more flawed and human, than most protagonists are in this sort of book.

Fugue isn’t without its problems. In the foreword Priest talks about how he thinks that when he wrote it he was too influenced by the coolly distant style of the 1970s new wave movement and by writers such as Brautigan and Vonnegut. Part of the reason he rewrote the book was to change stylistic and language choices which worked in the 1970s but which with the passing of time carried overt political interpretations which hadn’t been intended, but part too was that with hindsight he felt that his influences had resulted in a book the language of which didn’t really suit the subject matter. I’ve not read the original, pre-revision, version, but even here there is at times a conflict between the intentionally flat prose and the horror it describes.

I’ll definitely be reading more Priest, and I’m glad I read this because while it is exceptionally bleak in both tone and outlook, it does humanise the nameless refugees who from time to time populate our news. There used to be a saying in English, there but for the grace of God go I. It’s gone out of fashion, but it expresses an important truth. Given different circumstances, a run of bad luck, political developments beyond our control, those people we perhaps send a little money or a food or old clothes donation to could be us.

In my last review, of Berlin Alexanderplatz, I talked at the end about how that novel continued to have a contemporary resonance. Fugue, despite the unlikely subject matter, does too in its way. I’ll leave you with two final quotes:

The country was in deep recession. We had a government that prided itself on fiscal expertise, but they made one bad decision after another. John Tregarth and his government had first come to power because of their economic policies but the balance of payments was in the red for month after month, public borrowing was at an all-time high, prices continued to rise steeply and an increasing number of people were made unemployed.

and

Meanwhile, democracy was taking its turn, and a General Election was held in Britain. It was a time of economic recession, with many people jobless. Inflation was high, loans were difficult to obtain, many companies were going out of business. A new right-wing party, initially a splinter group from the Conservatives, campaigned successfully on the basis of economic reform and isolationism as a cure for our employment problems.

The cover above is the one I have. I couldn’t resist sharing this one though, which utterly misrepresents the novel on pretty much every front:

Anyone who bought the book on the basis of that cover would have been sadly disappointed.

No machine may contain any moving parts.

The City and the Stars, by Arthur C. Clarke

As a teenager I loved Arthur C. Clarke’s novels. Nobody quite did sense of wonder like he did. I read pretty much all his major works multiple times, and most of the lesser ones too. It’s years though since I revisited any of them.

Laid up recently with my slipped disc I found I couldn’t concentrate on anything too complex; too stylistically dense. I turned therefore to an old friend, one I remembered as having lucid prose and grand visions. I went back to the stars, where in literary terms at least I grew up.

The City and the Stars has always been high among my favourite Clarkes (The Songs of Distant Earth, The City and the Stars, Rendezvous with Rama, 2001, Imperial Earth, Childhood’s End, 2010, not that you asked). That means I’ve read it at least four or five times, though the last time would probably have been around twenty years ago or so. Coming back to Clarke now, fresh from authors such as Proust, Krasznahorkai, Szerb, two things struck me: technically he’s not actually a very good writer, but somehow despite that he remains a good read.

What’s The City and the Stars about? Well, here’s the first paragraph:

Like a glowing jewel, the city lay upon the breast of the desert. Once it had known change and alteration, but now Time passed it by. Night and day fled across the desert’s face, but in the streets of Diaspar it was always afternoon, and darkness never came. The long winter nights might dust the desert with frost, as the last moisture left in the thin air of Earth congealed— but the city knew neither heat nor cold. It had no contact with the outer world; it was a universe itself.

Humanity, which once had the stars, is now restricted to a single city which dwells in Earth’s long twilight. Our empires have fallen, the mountains themselves have crumbled, but humanity continues; carried down the ages in a city which represents our greatest technological achievement. As Clarke goes on to say:

[Humanity] had lived in the same city, had walked the same miraculously unchanging streets, while more than a billion years had worn away.

To put that in perspective, the history of multicellular life on Earth so far is only a billion years old.

The citizens of Diaspar have access to every comfort. Machines create whatever they wish, as they wish it. They have access to a vaster array of art, science, sport and new undreamt of pursuits (well, MMORPGs, but they were pretty undreamt of when this was written) than a million lifetimes could exhaust. They need those distractions – they’re immortal. They never go outside. They don’t even wish to go outside, or at least nobody normal does. Nobody except Alvin, a young man who is the first child in a million years and who through some freak of chance or long-buried design has been born with the desire to explore.

The power of The City and the Stars lies in its elegaic sense of vast oceans of time. Clarke conjures a persuasive image of an exhausted Earth and a humanity retreated to a form of eternal retirement home, its passion spent. In a sense this is a tale of generational conflict, of the only youth in a society of the ancient. Equally it is an exploration of utopia, and of the compromises that utopia requires. More than anything though it’s epic SF and a tremendous piece of storytelling.

It’s also about 250 pages of exposition and leaden dialogue. Here Alvin’s mentor, Jeserac, explains how the society of immortals prevents itself from becoming stale:

“In a little while, Alvin, I shall prepare to leave this life. I shall go back through my memories, editing them and canceling those I do not wish to keep. Then I shall walk into the Hall of Creation, but through a door which you have never seen. This old body will cease to exist, and so will consciousness itself. Nothing will be left of Jeserac but a galaxy of electrons frozen in the heart of a crystal. “I shall sleep, Alvin, and without dreams. Then one day, perhaps a hundred thousand years from now, I shall find myself in a new body, meeting those who have been chosen to be my guardians. They will look after me as Eriston and Etania have guided you, for at first I will know nothing of Diaspar and will have no memories of what I was before. Those memories will slowly return, at the end of my infancy, and I will build upon them as I move forward into my new cycle of existence. “That is the pattern of our lives, Alvin. We have all been here many, many times before, though as the intervals of nonexistence vary according to apparently random laws this present population will never repeat itself again. The new Jeserac will have new and different friends and interests, but the old Jeserac— as much of him as I wish to save— will still exist. “That is not all. At any moment, Alvin, only a hundredth of the citizens of Diaspar live and walk its streets. The vast majority slumber in the Memory Banks, waiting for the signal that will call them forth onto the stage of existence once again. So we have continuity, yet change— immortality, but not stagnation.

It’s fascinating stuff and a marvellous piece of worldbuilding. I could believe in Diaspar; it made sense to me. It’s not though particularly electrifying. Jeserac may be a great tutor, but he ain’t a great conversationalist.

The City and the Stars shares here a fault common to much of Clarke’s fiction. Everyone is essentially decent and sensible. Where Alvin meets opposition in the novel it’s due to encountering conservative thinking; ignorance; fear of the unknown. Alvin faces obstacles in his quest to rediscover what lies beyond Diaspar, but none that can’t be overcome by good sense, a bit of forward planning and reasoned debate. Like most of Clarke’s work this is a novel entirely without violence. It’s a hugely optimistic vision, but it’s not a dramatic one.

None of the characters aspire to more than two dimensions. There is no psychological depth here, but then there isn’t meant to be. The point of the novel is the idea, the vision. Alvin is a delivery mechanism to take us inside Clarke’s imagination, to allow us to see the cathedral of wonder he’s created and in that context rounded characters would be a distraction.

Perhaps too that’s why Clarke’s flat prose isn’t a problem. Clarke is a functional writer – he doesn’t let any hooptedoodle get mixed in with the story. Here’s one more example:

Such unnecessary appurtenances as nails and teeth had vanished. Hair was confined to the head; not a trace was left on the body. The feature that would most have surprised a man of the Dawn Ages was, perhaps, the disappearance of the navel. Its inexplicable absence would have given him much food for thought, and at first sight he would also have been baffled by the problem of distinguishing male from female. He might even have been tempted to assume that there was no longer any difference, which would have been a grave error. In the appropriate circumstances, there was no doubt about the masculinity of any male in Diaspar. It was merely that his equipment was now more neatly packaged when not required; internal stowage had vastly improved upon Nature’s original inelegant and indeed downright hazardous arrangements.

Again, it’s all about the worldbuilding, the idea. From the perspective of understanding Alvin’s future this is important and interesting. As prose it’s dry as the deserts that surround Diaspar. This is why SF shouldn’t be in the Booker. The metrics of what makes great literary fiction aren’t just different to those that make great SF, they’re frequently in direct opposition. Only a tiny handful of writers (M John Harrison say) can successfully write great SF which should also be read for its prose. For most SF novels the characters are a means to explore the imagined world, the language a vehicle to carry the story (and the story ultimately is merely another means to explore the imagined world).

It’s equally incorrect incidentally to think that science fiction is about predicting the future. Occasionally it aims for that, but only occasionally. Here Clarke is imagining not the future, but a future. Much other SF of course isn’t about any future at all, but about our own present seen as through a scanner darkly. A novel about an interstellar war which takes place over periods so long the soldiers find society transformed every time they return home may really be about the Vietnam war. I’m digressing badly though. Exposition is infectious.

It’s not giving too much away to say that Alvin does of course find a way to escape Diaspar. How he does so, and what he finds when he does, well for those you’ll just have to read the novel. I was more conscious of its weaknesses this time than in the past, but the strengths were still there. The vision burns as brightly as it ever did.

One last note. I remember when I first read this book one part seeming just too incredible to me to be believed. It wasn’t the society of immortals, the billion year old city, faster than light travel (actually impossible we know now), telepathy or any of that. It was the existence in the book of machines with no moving parts. How ludicrous, I thought, how could that ever be possible?

Back in the 1950s when he wrote this Clarke thought such machines were in the long distant future. I have an iPhone and an iPad. It turns out they weren’t as far off as he thought, or as impossible as I did. So it goes.

The cover above is pretty much the one I have, but I thought I’d share one other cover with you that I found online. I actually think this fits the book better than any other cover I’ve seen for it. It’s a scene from the book – Alvin, having found a remote air vent, seeing the stars for the first time:

Edit: Tomcat of Tomcat in the red room also wrote about The City and the Stars, contrasting it with Miéville’s The City and the City, here. As ever, his thoughts are well worth reading.

a rat became the unit of currency

Cosmopolis, by Don DeLillo

Cosmopolis is a deeply quotable novel. Perhaps that’s its biggest flaw. It’s full of beautifully realised sentences, arresting slabs of prose, but taken as a whole it’s alienating and distant. It prefers idea to character, concept to situation. It has no interest in realism. It’s my first DeLillo, and apparently one of his weaker novels. If it is a lesser DeLillo that’s impressive, because even flawed it’s more interesting than many author’s at their peak.

The story, such as there is, is wildly improbable both in its overall scope and in its particular details. Eric Packer, software entrepeneur and billionaire, wants to take his limo across town for a haircut. He’s advised that the president’s in town and traffic is expected to be gridlocked. He insists though, and is carried glacially across Manhattan as around him whirl anti-capitalist riots, a Sufi hip-hop star’s funeral and what his security people tell him is a credible threat to his own life.

Packer’s limo is where most of the novel’s action takes place. The year is ostensibly 2000, but it isn’t really. It’s the future, the near future, just around the corner. The future that’s always just around the corner so close that we can see its outlines but not yet quite in view.

Packer’s limo is filled with screens, information, the highest of high technology. When asked why he’s not working in his office it’s evident that the question is a non-sequitur. His office is wherever he is; the concept of office is no longer meaningful. His staff come to him through the day, Packer receiving them like the contemporary royalty that he is. Sherman McCoy has been replaced by the new masters of the universe, born of internet IPOs and pure market speculation.

Packer has bet heavily against the Yen. It should be a good bet, because the Yen is at an unsustainable high. The Yen though, against all expectations, continues to rise. Packer is losing millions, tens of millions, more, amounts so vast they become meaningless. His wealth is beyond spending. It’s virtual, imaginary yet very real. 

I read an article once about the interest Bill Gates earns on his fortune and what he would need to do to spend faster than it accumulates. The answer was that practically he couldn’t. His wealth is now so vast it’s independent of him. It increases regardless of what he does. He is no longer necessary to it.

Conversations in the novel are far from naturalistic; thick with flat statements and answerless questions. This is a novel where the characters largely speak in monologues.

“There’s a rumor it seems involving the finance minister. He’s supposed to resign any time now,” she said. “Some kind of scandal about a misconstrued comment. He made a comment about the economy that may have been misconstrued. The whole country is analyzing the grammar and syntax of this comment. Or it wasn’t even what he said. It was when he paused. They are trying to construe the meaning of the pause. It could be deeper, even, than grammar. It could be breathing.”

Nobody of course speaks like that. That’s really not the point though. This is language as poetry, language as vehicle. Cosmopolis here is capturing that sense of a system become greater than its parts. Vast currents of capital and information eddy and flow around us, shaping our lives in ways that no single person is equipped to comprehend. Capital here is abstract, no longer a factory or farm but an algorithm spitting out trading strategies from a black box (and that’s not hyperbole, google black box trading).

By way of example, a scant few years ago I received an email at work that I didn’t understand. It talked about problems in the money markets, a sector I don’t personally work in and so only have a passing familiarity with. What it meant was unclear, but the sense of panic was palpable. I wouldn’t normally have received emails from that team, we did no business together, but this was firmwide.

Soon after the world faced fiscal armageddon. Five years on economies remain mired in recession. Youth unemployment in  Greece and Spain exceeds 50%. What happened? No factories burned down (except in riots, but they were an effect, not a cause). There were no unexpected wars. Instead vast abstract forces failed to operate as they had been expected to, and millions of lives came crashing down.

Returning to Cosmopolis (not that I’ve actually left it of course), it’s noticeable that DeLillo doesn’t care to give Packer much by way of inner life, nor to make him remotely sympathetic. Packer is an emblem, a vision of distant corporate elites, a fantasy rather than a person.  Packer lives in abstracts, reads Einstein’s Special Theory in English and German and poems composed mostly of spaces between the words. “He liked paintings that his guests did not know how to look at. The white paintings were unknowable to many, knife-applied slabs of mucoid color. The work was all the more dangerous for not being new. There’s no more danger in the new.”

Packer leaves the car mostly for sex, with his art-dealer lover, with one of his security team. Through the day he keeps coincidentally encountering his wife, equally rich but of old money (another strand of our new aristocracy, which has subsumed the old aristocracy).

She was in her mid-twenties, with an etched delicacy of feature and large and artless eyes. Her beauty had an element of remoteness. This was intriguing but maybe not. Her head rode slightly forward on a slender length of neck. She had an unexpected laugh, a little weary and experienced, and he liked the way she put a finger to her lips when she wanted to be thoughtful. Her poetry was shit.

Cosmopolis isn’t all high concept. There’s a comic strand running through it where after each of Packer’s extra-marital flings he runs by chance into his wife and has to explain why he smells as if he’s just had sex. The prose is frequently quite lovely as you’d expect of DeLillo,  and while it’s not a true representation of what the world of finance is actually like nor does it set out to be. Like Ballard, DeLillo isn’t trying here to show how things actually are, but rather to show what the experience of them is like.

The concept though is never far away. Cosmopolis is, in a very real sense, a science fiction novel. Not just because it contains items of technology that don’t actually exist yet (a gun with built in voice operated security system is the most obvious example, or Packer’s screens which start showing events before they happen), but because of it’s desire to explore not who but where we are. If only though more science fiction had prose like this:

He saw a police lieutenant carrying a walkie-talkie. What entered his mind when he saw this? He wanted to ask the man why he was still using such a contraption, still calling it what he called it, carrying the nitwit rhyme out of the age of industrial glut into smart spaces built on beams of light.

In the end it’s the traditional elements of Cosmopolis that are it’s weakest (a point made by John Updike in his NYT review, which mostly I think misses the point of the book, but which does have the unnerringly accurate summation of Cosmopolis as “Nouveau roman meets Manhattan geography, under sci-fi moonlight.”).  As the novel draws to its close Packer’s encounter with his would-be assassin gains importance, but of course I don’t care. Packer’s not real, what does it matter if he lives or dies? The book comes to focus on an existential sense of becoming oneself through a flensing away of the extraneous, but other books have said that and said it better. Here it risks becoming trite (“Now he could begin the business of living.”)

Pacing becomes a problem. For such a short novel this is a very slow book, and that’s fine until it comes near its destination. As Packer’s day begins to close there’s a sense that the novel’s already done. A violent encounter between Packer and one of his guards feels almost tacked on, physical violence almost tasteless in this context or in any event irrelevant. The action is abstract, the descent into the real almost trivial (which is likely the point, but even if it is that doesn’t mean it works).

The end result is a book that doesn’t entirely succeed, but one which despite its failures has stuck with me after reading it. It’s provocative not in a cheap way, but because it forces the reader to think. When Packer contemplates the foreign exchange markets he finds “… beauty and precision here, hidden rhythms in the fluctuations of a given currency.” 

There’s a truth in that line about beauty and precision, because in a way the markets are beautiful in their summation of so many patterns of human effort and desire into a number or set of numbers, elegantly expressed. At the same time, it is not a human beauty. DeLillo shows us the language of the markets, which is the language of our time, and if it is alienating it is because the world it depicts is alienated.

“You know what anarchists have always believed.” “Yes.” “Tell me,” she said. “The urge to destroy is a creative urge.” “This is also the hallmark of capitalist thought. Enforced destruction. Old industries have to be harshly eliminated. New markets have to be forcibly claimed. Old markets have to be re-exploited. Destroy the past, make the future.”

I mentioned a John Updike review above, which I didn’t personally particularly like (criticising Cosmopolis for implausibility is a bit like criticising Revolutionary Road for not being funnier, it’s missing the point). A better review to my mind is Blake Morrison’s at The Guardian, which can be found here. I’ve not found reviews of this at my usual blog haunts, but if I’ve missed one please do let me know in the comments. Also, prior to this post I wrote a post about the state of contemporary Anglo-American literature. That post was inspired in part by my thoughts on Cosmopolis, and is here.

Finally, for the curious, the flaws of the film are the flaws of the book. It changes a few details, but by and large it’s incredibly faithful. Perhaps too much so. Robert Pattinson is actually very good as Eric Packer.

Brazil is not a serious country

Brasyl, by Ian McDonald

Sometimes I like to pair books to music. For Ian McDonald’s sprawling celebration of Brazil past, present and future there could only be one choice. Funk-carioca (also sometimes called baile-funk), the music of the Favela.

Funk-carioca is a messy music, bursting with energy and taut rhythms. It makes heavy use of samples, scratching and a hundred borrowed beats and like the hip-hop that’s clearly one of its biggest inspirations it’s filled with sex and violence. Funk-Carioca is trashy, but fun, and it’s deeply danceable. It’s an expression of youth and sheer exuberance that on occasion tips over into being just plain crude and irritating. I’m listening to some as I write this.

Brasyl is a funk-carioca novel.

In 2001 a Goldman Sachs’ economist famously coined the acronym BRIC: Brazil, Russia, India, China. These are the coming superpowers, the developing countries that are overtaking the developed ones. We live in a period of transition, of the passing of wealth and therefore power from the G7 countries (Canada, France, Germany, Italy, Japan, the UK and the USA) to new powerblocs with different traditions and naturally with different national and regional interests.

Although the rise of the BRICs can be overstated (this isn’t an overnight process and in the lifetime of anyone reading this every one of those G7 countries is likely to remain a major player), it is the fundamental story of our age and it’s extraordinary how little our fiction grapples with it. If investment banking can show the world as it is, we should expect no less of art.

If any art form should address this, it should be science fiction. What’s the point of a literature of change if it can’t grapple with the fact that the shape of things to come isn’t what those of us in the West thought it was? In the main though science fiction has ignored this challenge, populating its dreams with versions of ourselves which ultimately comfort by showing us a future in which we still run the world. We don’t even run it today.

Ian McDonald is one of the few writers to recognise this. In his astonishing novel River of Gods McDonald explored a future India and combined currently popular SF concerns (transhumanism, nature of consciousness, deep-time cosmology) with issues much more of this world (water shortages, resource wars, the stresses faced by traditional societies and faiths in the face of modernisation).  River of Gods isn’t a predictive novel (actually very little SF seeks to predict the future, that’s a misunderstanding of its role), rather it’s a mirror which reflects our own world today through an SFnal perspective so that we see it made strange and glorious, which of course our world really is.

Brasyl takes a similar approach to River. Like that earlier novel it pursues multiple narrative threads, which naturally combine near the end into one connected story. In 1732 a Jesuit travels upriver into the heart of darkness in search of a rogue priest who has set up his own empire among the Indians and who must be brought back for judgement, or if necessary killed. In Rio in 2006 an up and coming TV producer pursues an idea for a new reality show, riding just beyond the edge of contemporary popular culture. In Sao Paolo in 2032 a young Favelado dreams of money and a life beyond the slums and may just have the intelligence and business acumen to get both.

Each narrative soon becomes stranger than it first looks. The Brazil of 1732 is afflicted with a plague that is killing off the horses, mules and oxen. That didn’t happen though, so is this actually our 1732?

In 2006 Marcelina Hoffman, the TV producer, thinks her biggest enemies are her rival producers. Soon however she finds herself being stalked by what appears to be herself, a doppelganger that knows her life intimately and is intent on destroying it.

In 2032 Edson, the streetwise fixer and hustler, finds himself in love with a quantum physicist who uses near-voodoo science for petty crime. Through her he learns that the universe and everything in it is just one iteration of a vast number, perhaps an infinite number, of universes. It’s a truth some are prepared to kill to keep secret.

The challenge of course with multiple-narrative fiction is that when the strands are brought together the answer for how they all connect must be satisfying (which is where David Mitchell’s similar Ghostwritten fell down for me), and they must also all be equally interesting. McDonald’s vision of 2032 is glittering, a city filled with commerce and movement and life all looked over by the “Angels of Perpetual Surveillance”:

… balloons the size of city blocks maneuver in the tropopause, holding position over their ground data-transfer stations. Exabits of information chatter between them, the seamless weave of communication that clothes not just Brazil but the planet. Higher still, beyond all sense and thought, and global positioning satelites tumble along their prescribed orbits, tracking movements down to a single footstep, logging every transaction, every real and centavo. Highest of all, God on his stool, looking on Brazil and its three hundred million souls, nostalgic ofr the days when his was the only omniscience.

In this 2032 (as, in fact, today) whole communities live on garbage mountains trading the materials and technology extracted from the refuse of a culture of continuous consumption. It’s exciting and fast moving and most importantly convincing. Ian McDonald is a science fiction writer, and so perhaps it’s not surprising that his imagined future is more interesting than his imagined past and his imagined present.

Circuit boards book on coal griddles, release their lead solder like fat from pig-meat. Mercury baths grab gold from plated plugs and sockets. Homemade stills vaporize the liquid metal, depositing their heavy treasure. Two boys stir a stream of sand-sized processors into a plastic vat of reagent, dissolving the carbon nanotubes from their matrix. Two eight-year-olds sitting cross-legged on a sy bean sack test plastic from the heap besidethem by heating it over a cigarette lighter and sniffing the fumes. Younger children rush handcarts of e-junk down from the central dump. This is the circle of the slaves, sold into debt indenture by parents crushed by 5,000 percent interest.

The 1732 strand was bogged down for me by it’s liberal borrowing (sampling you might say) from Conrad, and by the over-the-top nature of its characters (the Jesuit is also a master linguist and expert swordsman, and is accompanied on his expedition by a Parisian rationalist and scientist who also happens to be an expert swordsman and who is working on an 18th century version of the computer*). It’s a sort of boys-own adventure tale, but steeped in suffocating heat, fever and madness. Despite it’s flaws though this strand moves along pacily enough, and the mid-book payoff when the expedition finds the rogue priest’s attempt at a holy city modelled after his own philosophies is chilling and impressive.

By contrast the 2006 section starts well, but lags towards the middle of the book. Again the central character isn’t wholly persuasive. She’s a fast-living TV executive which is fine, but also an expert at Capoeira (Brazil’s native martial art). The book shows her competing successfully in Capoeira matches, but I couldn’t begin to imagine where she found time to train given her demanding career and drink and drug-fuelled lifestyle. I just didn’t believe it (I run three times a week, and I struggle to fit even that in let alone getting to competition level in a martial art).

The other problem with the 2006 strand is that it doesn’t really add up. Marcelina is trying to make a new reality show in which the goalkeeper for the 1966 Brazil national team will be put on trial for his part in a famous footballing defeat. To get to him she has to win the trust of his friends, by lying to them and misrepresenting the kind of program she plans to make.

That’s great stuff, and McDonald makes her glossily amoral world of trash television and high-disposable income colliding with older values both alluring and repulsive (so mimicing reality TV within the fiction). The doppelganger starts to destroy all this, working for a shadowy conspiracy to which she may be a threat, but she’s only a threat because she’s made into one. It’s hard to avoid the conclusion that if they’d left her alone in the first place they’d never have needed to worry about her.

As Marcelina’s life unravels she turns into a kind of action hero kicking ass to save the day. It’s ludicrous, but that’s clearly intentional as in the 2006 strand McDonald is crafting a story that Marcelina herself would approve of. It’s a telenovela in which avarice and ambition meet nemesis and a character turns rapidly from villain to hero as the plot demands. I see what he’s doing, and I can see why it’s an interesting thing to try, but that doesn’t change the fact that it doesn’t really persuade. More serious though is that McDonald finds as so many writers writing outside their field have found that it’s not as easy as it looks. Writing plots that zip past so fast you barely notice how unlikely they are is a definite skill, and while McDonald writes some great action scenes it’s not really one that he has. Unforgiveably, Marcelina’s story gets a little dull.

That’s a lot of criticism, and given worlds enough and time I’d have more. The last third, as so often with multi-strand novels, isn’t as interesting in tying things together as the first two were in setting things up. Some entire sections could probably be lost without too much harm to the whole – there’s an episode near the end for example where the Jesuit duels the man he’s pursued across the book, who turns out to be yet another master swordsman for apparently no better reason than it allows a dramatic fight scene (admittedly a good fight scene, but one that doesn’t actually add anything of consequence to the book).

Marcelina’s plot is necessary because the book needs a contemporary strand, but doesn’t feel justified on its own terms and could arguably have been excised entirely without impacting the other narratives too much. I’m not suggesting that it should actually have been excised, but it could have been better integrated.

In a sense I’m being harsh because McDonald is good enough to deserve that. For most SF writers, hell for most writers, this would be a potentially career defining work. Yes, bits of it don’t work, at times it’s even overwritten which is particularly painful for anyone who also reads literary fiction, but McDonald ties together mind-blowing ideas at the outer limits of modern science, brings the sheer motion and vitality of Brazil to life in a way which is extraordinary for someone who’s not a native writer and keeps it all rattling along with an exuberant flair that just about comes off. 

Brasyl is nearly a great novel. Art however isn’t linear (which is one of the reasons why I don’t give star ratings to books). Just short of great doesn’t necessarily mean good. Often it just means patchy. Brasyl won an SF award. The back of the book carries a blurb from a review from the Financial Times. McDonald deserves high praise and he deserves that kind of attention from outside SF fandom, but this simply isn’t his best book.

For an alternate view, this review by author Adam Roberts at Strange Horizons is definitely worth reading.

*As appears to be obligatory for every historical scientist in an SF novel. SF authors should just put down their copies of The Difference Engine and leave them alone. It’s been done.

The hallucination of one moment did not fit the reality of the next.

Ice, by Anna Kavan

I’ve written before of how sometimes work, life generally, can wreck my reading of a book. A busy period, a week passes without a page turned, and suddenly a great book has become a chore. I don’t remember what’s going on or who the characters are or why the plot involves a chihuaha*. The book becomes staccato and dissolves into incoherence.

 

Ice got interrupted. It’s just over a 150 pages and took me over a month to read, which is not good going by any standard. Fortunately Ice embraces incoherence – the narrative is already fractured. Reading it when tired, reading it when the previous passages are only half-remembered, if anything works to its advantage.

 

 

In terms of plot and character Ice is both extremely easy and unusually difficult to describe. A man, some kind of spy or security operative, drives through an unnamed country. He’s seeking a woman with whom he used to have a relationship. He describes the woman throughout as the “girl”, but that says more about him than we ever learn about her. She is now with another man, and the protagonist wishes to take her from that other man.

 

So far so simple. Problems soon multiply though. In the opening chapter the woman is an old love of the narrator’s. The other man is her husband, a painter. The narrator visits them against a backdrop of unseasonal cold, cold he knows will only get worse until it blankets and kills the earth. His relationship with the woman, the other man, is ambiguous. Does she welcome the narrator’s presence? The husband is at first friendly, but soon appears vaguely threatening. Who is really at risk though, the narrator or the woman?

 

In what becomes a template for the rest of the novel the narrator loses contact with the couple, but determines to pursue the woman, to rescue her. He finds her on a ship leaving the country, but arrives too late to board. He desperately hires passage on the next ship out. They arrive at the next port, but suddenly they’re on the same ship. I stopped reading. I backtracked. Had he changed vessel? No. Did I misread it previously? No. Were they then on entirely separate ships, but now the same one and always have been on the same one? Yes.

 

That’s why this novel is both easy to describe and yet difficult too. Each section makes sense in its own terms, but the whole refuses to be pinned down to any single reality (“I was aware of an uncertainty of the real, in my surroundings and in myself.”). The logic here is that of dreams. He is following her on a separate ship. Scene. He is now on a ship with her, but on a different deck looking towards her. Scene. The transition is as unexplained as the transitions in dreams, which make sense when one is in the dream but none once one awakens.

 

Soon nothing is fixed. At this new town, this new country, the woman’s husband is waiting. He’s no longer her husband though, or even a painter. Now he’s the Warden. A military warlord. His relationship with the woman has become crueller, more abusive, but it’s recognisably the same relationship. They’re the same people, but their relationship to each other, to the world, has somehow slipped out of joint.

 

I described the narrative here as fractured. That’s one example, but the fracture lines run right through the text. The narrator has visions, remembers scenes at which he wasn’t present (“I had not seen all the things I remembered about her”). Sometimes the perspective shifts and we see him through the eyes of the other man or the woman, or perhaps we just see how he imagines them seeing him. The protagonist suffers from insomnia and is taking drugs that give him “terrible dreams”, but it would be facile (worse, boring) to ascribe all this to hallucination or fantasy.

 

Here, early on, the narrator is driving through steadily and rapidly worsening driving conditions:

 

For a moment, my lights picked out like searchlights the girl’s naked body, slight as a child’s, ivory white against the dead white of the snow, her hair bright as spun glass. She did not look in my direction. Motionless, she kept her eyes fixed on the walls moving slowly towards her, a glassy, glittering circle of solid ice, of which she was the centre. Dazzling flashes came from the ice-cliffs far over her head; below, the outermost fringes of ice had already reached her, immobilised her, set hard as concrete over her feet and ankles. I watched the ice climb higher, covering knees and thighs, saw her mouth open, a black hole in the white face, heard her thin agonised scream. I felt no pity for her. On the contrary, I derived an indescribable pleasure from seeing her suffer. I disapproved of my own callousness, but there it was.

At the end of his drive the narrator finds the woman at home with her husband. Plainly that episode didn’t happen then. She wasn’t naked in the snow. She wasn’t entombed by rapacious ice. It didn’t happen. Within the narrative though it’s as real, as unreal, as anything else. He’s driving. He sees her and she’s devoured by ice. He’s driving and finds her at her home. Scene. Scene. Scene.

 

What then is consistent? What makes this a novel and not just a random collection of incidents that don’t hang together? When you have no plot and no reliable narrative what else is there but character and writing?

 

The narrator sees himself as the woman’s rescuer. He sees her as threatened, by the Warden, by the ice which gets ever closer and which is a harbinger of an ambiguous but not uncertain apocalypse, by her own innate victimhood. He sees himself as wanting to protect her, give her safety in a world which it is increasingly clear is literally ending. He sees the Warden as mistreating her, clutching her thin wrists with such force that they bruise, imprisoning her, raping her even.

 

As the quote above shows though, like everything else here it’s not that simple. In his fantasies the narrator sees her beaten, abused. Does the Warden treat her as the narrator thinks, or does he just picture him doing so? Is the narrator a rescuer, or is his image of the Warden in fact a reflection of his own reality? Possessive, jealous, obsessive. Is the narrator trying to save the woman, or to control her? At times it’s not even certan that the Warden and the narrator are different people. From the woman’s perspective they might as well not be.  Either way she’s reduced to property.

 

Kavan is doing something genuinely interesting here. Ice is a story of male sexual obsession. The woman, the girl as she’s referred to, is the only constant point in the book. She remains unchanged, while reality itself slides around her. As a reader though we never see her directly. We see instead the narrator’s idea of her. Perhaps she doesn’t change because she isn’t herself real. She’s unreal not in the sense that there isn’t a woman within the narrative, but in the sense that the narrator never sees that woman. He only sees his construct of her. Fragile, defenceless, vulnerable, dependent.

 

Ice then for me was an exploration of male desire and female objectification, but that’s far from the only possible reading. Anna Kavan, famously, was a heroin addict and the novel is run through with apocalyptic imagery of snow smothering towns and ice clogging up seas and harbours. The ice can be seen as a metaphor for heroin deadening experience, crushing down all feeling except the obsessive quest for something that even when attained soon slips away and must be chased all over again. On another reading the apocalypse is, as all apocalypses are, personal. An apocalypse is after all death, death for the individual and for the world, but every death is of course its own apocalpyse.

 

Kavan’s descriptions of a world slowly choking in ice are marvellous. She conjures scenes of panicked evacuation, of lifeboats capsising as ill-prepared middle-class refugees desperately try and find some safety on ships that flee before the relentless glaciers. She portrays towns locked in snow and bloody civil-war, only for the narrator to look back and see the whole town intact, bathed in sunshine, no perception reliable. This is a grim and paranoid book.

 

I should have to start searching for her all over again. The repetition was like a curse. I thought of placid blue seas, tranquil islands, far away from war. I thought of the Indris, those happy creatures, symbols of life in peace, on a higher plane. I could clear out, go to them. No, that was impossible. I was tied to her. I thought of the ice moving across the world, casting its shadow of creeping death. Ice cliffs boomed in my dreams, indescribable explosions thundered and boomed, icebergs crashed, hurled huge boulders into the sky like rockets. Dazzling ice stars bombarded the world with rays, which splintered and penetrated the earth, filling earth’s core with their deadly coldness, reinforcing the cold of the advancing ice. And always, on the surface, the indestructible ice-mass was moving forward, implacably destroying all life. I felt a fearful sense of pressure and urgency, there was no time to lose, I was wasting time; it was a race between me and the ice. Her albino hair illuminated my dreams, shining brighter than moonlight. I saw the dead moon dance over the icebergs, as it would at the end of the world, while she watched from the tent of her glittering hair.

The Indris mentioned there are a lemur-like species that the narrator spent time with on a pacific island. The Indris sing to each other, forming a harmony of life and warmth. The narrator constantly dreams of returning to them, but his search for the girl won’t permit that. He fantasises about a pre-lapsarian world, an escape from a colourless present, but however fast he drives the ice is never far behind and the girl never fully in grasp.

 

In a very real sense this is a work of science fiction, one in a recognisable tradition even. That’s not because it takes place in an unspecified future in the face of a wintry armageddon. It’s because it breaks reailty to explore concepts through metaphor and image. The most obvious comparators are Ballard and Christopher Priest (who writes an excellent foreword), perhaps Dick at a slight push, but also for me M John Harrison with his marvellous and strange Viriconium stories. There too reality shifts, follows mood rather than logic.

 

Priest categorises fiction of this kind as slipstream, and it’s a good word for it. He argues that “Slipstream literature is a response to science (and scientific effects), an exercise of human feelings about science, if not an understanding of it, but it is not an allegory.” That’s where Ballard comes in. Ballard’s apocalypses were never meant literally, rather they are psychogeographic. Kavan reflects her characters’ (perhaps her character’s) inner world in his outer one. The narrative is inconsistent because the narrator himself is. It makes as much sense as we do.

 

John Self of The Asylum first alerted me to Anna Kavan’s Ice, and he later reviewed it himself. That review is here and, as ever, is worth reading.

 

* Ice’s plot does not actually involve a chihuaha.

The Locusts

This didn’t fit into my recent review of Ray Bradbury’s The Martian Chronicles. It’s probably the shortest story in that book, but it gives a good feel for Bradbury’s style. I repeat it here in its entirety (it’s short enough that I think I can do so and still remain within fair use):

February 2002: THE LOCUSTS

The rockets set the bony meadows afire, turned rock to lava, turned wood to charcoal, transmitted water to steam, made sand and silica into green glass which lay like shattered mirrors reflecting the invasion, all about. The rockets came like drums, beating in the night. The rockets came like locusts, swarming and settling in blooms of rosy smoke. And from the rockets ran men with hammers in their hands to beat the strange world into a shape that was familiar to the eye, to bludgeon away all the strangeness, their mouths fringed with nails so they resembled steel-toothed carnivores, spitting them into their swift hands as they hammered up frame cottages and scuttled over roofs with shingles to blot out the eerie stars, and fit green shades to pull against the night. And when the carpenters had hurried on, the women came in with flowerpots and chintz and pans and set up a kitchen clamor to cover the silence that Mars made waiting outside the door and the shaded window. In six months a dozen small towns had been laid down upon the naked planet, filled with sizzling neon tubes and yellow electric bulbs. In all, some ninety thousand people came to Mars, and more, on Earth, were packing their grips …

Afternoons, when the fossil sea was warm and motionless, and the wine trees stood stiff in the yard

The Martian Chronicles, by Ray Bradbury

When I read Ray Bradbury’s The Martian Chronicles as a teenager I thought it was a novel about Mars. Reading it as an adult it was obvious that it’s really a novel about postwar America.

Bradbury is one of the greats of American science fiction. If you read him though you’ll quickly notice that there’s almost no science in any of his stories. That’s because what Bradbury wrote about was people. He wrote about them using science fiction, horror, fantasy, and sometimes using no genre trappings at all but his interest was always firmly in us rather than in imaginary places that we might one day discover.

The Martian Chronicles is a melancholy collection of linked short stories which collectively show the history of the human colonisation of Mars. It opens with our first ill-fated expeditions, each slain by the native Martians, and builds in a macabre retelling of the American West as we wipe them out by sheer force of demographics. As we populace Mars with hot dog stands back home on Earth nuclear tensions build.

For Bradbury our tragedy is our lack of imagination. A few of those who come to Mars do so with the desire to understand. They want to know how the natives lived before the humans came. They want to live free of assumptions about how life should be lived. Most though just want the same as they had at home but with more elbow room. First come the explorers. Then the builders. Then soon afterwards the bureaucrats tidying a new world into old routines. As one early explorer reflects:

“When I was a kid my folks took me to visit Mexico City. I’ll always remember the way my father acted—loud and big. And my mother didn’t like the people because they were dark and didn’t wash enough. And my sister wouldn’t talk to most of them. I was the only one really liked it. And I can see my mother and father coming to Mars and acting the same way here.

Soon after one of his fellow crew-members is doing “target practice in one of the dead cities, shooting out the crystal windows and blowing the tops off the fragile towers.”

The enemies here are fear and conformity. Bradbury’s sympathy is always with those seeking to escape. One of the later tales is set in the American South. The African-Americans are leaving. They’ve pooled their money to buy rocket ships. They’re giving each other lifts to the launchpads in their few cars.

As they make their great progression down the streets of dusty towns the bewildered whites they’re leaving behind look on puzzled and offended. The whites try to stop them, calling on debts and obligations, but where one African-American owes a white man money the rest chip in to pay it. They have cleaned the pans, bathed the children, swept the houses and now they’re going.

As they leave one white man tries to keep at least one from reaching the rockets. He fails, and as the boy he sought to stop departs that boy calls back asking what the man will do with his evenings now. The man is one of the KKK, his evenings will feature no more lynchings to break the tedium of his small existence.

He looked at the silent, empty road. “We’ll never catch them now, never, never.” As far as he could see there was nothing but bundles and stacks and more bundles neatly placed like little abandoned shrines in the late day, in the warm-blowing wind.

Bradbury has a marvellous turn of phrase. His tone here is elegaic. The stories are shot through with compassion but at the same time there’s a dark undercurrent. The early tales show that the Martians are really no better than we are. Not that different at all in fact. They fear us when we arrive, hate us for not being them.

Once they’re safely dead we make myths of them:

The captain shook his head. “There’s no hatred here.” He listened to the wind. “From the look of their cities they were a graceful, beautiful, and philosophical people. They accepted what came to them. They acceded to racial death, that much we know, and without a last-moment war of frustration to tumble down their cities. Every town we’ve seen so far has been flawlessly intact. They probably don’t mind us being here any more than they’d mind children playing on the lawn, knowing and understanding children for what they are. And, anyway, perhaps all this will change us for the better.

What I love about Bradbury is his poetry. Poetry of language and of concept. In one tale a man driving down a deserted desert road late at night meets a Martian driving a strange vehicle the other way. The Martians though are long dead, and this one seems to have no knowledge of what a human is.

They find they can talk, but where the man sees ruins in the distance the Martian sees vibrant cities. Time has come unstuck and for a moment these two travellers have overlapped. The man tells the Martian that it is from the past, that it’s people and cities are gone, but it doesn’t believe him. It knows that when it gets to its destination there will be life and laughter and passion and wine.

Perhaps the man is from the past the Martian argues. What sense does it make to say the Martians are dead when it has family waiting for it just down the road?

No sense at all. They each pass on their way. Both are right. The Martians are gone, but in their own time what mattered was not that one day they wouldn’t be but that while they were they lived. It’s the living that matters. Not the long absence that follows.

In the stone galleries the people were gathered in clusters and groups filtering up into shadows among the blue hills. A soft evening light shone over them from the stars and the luminous double moons of Mars. Beyond the marble amphitheater, in darkness and distances, lay little towns and villas; pools of silver water stood motionless and canals glittered from horizon to horizon. It was an evening in summer upon the placid and temperate planet Mars. Up and down green wine canals, boats as delicate as bronze flowers drifted. In the long and endless dwellings that curved like tranquil snakes across the hills, lovers lay idly whispering in cool night beds. The last children ran in torchlit alleys, gold spiders in their hands throwing out films of web. Here or there a late supper was prepared in tables where lava bubbled silvery and hushed. In the amphitheaters of a hundred towns on the night side of Mars the brown Martian people with gold coin eyes were leisurely met to fix their attention upon stages where musicians made a serene music flow up like blossom scent on the still air.

Later stories are less optimistic (if a story featuring a dead civilisation can be called optimistic). They include for example the originally separately published tale There Will Come Soft Rains which tells of the last day of an automated house continuing to operate long after its human owners have been left as nothing but a nuclear-burnt outline against one of its walls.

It’s a long time since I’ve read Ray Bradbury. As a teenager he was among my favourite authors (a fact I’d long forgotten). The story of his I’d best remembered doesn’t appear here. It was titled The Wonderful Ice Cream Suit and wasn’t science fiction at all. It featured six poor Mexican-Americans who see a beautiful suit that none of them can afford and who put all their savings together to buy it as a group.

Each day one of them wears the suit, and that night tells the others what he did in it. As the sixth day approaches though the first five worry, because the man who has it next is a notorious slob.

I won’t say where that story goes, but it’s full of affection and quotidian miracle. Bradbury could find wonder in dead Martian cities, but he could find it too in the joy a poor man finds wearing a good suit. Bradbury cared for those who found joy in life rather than those who sought to control it. I have a huge fondness for him and for his work. The Martian Chronicles is science fiction, but it’s not about the future. It’s about his present and about human frailty and failure. That’s why it’s still in print after 61 years.

This is the best we’ve had it

Moxyland, by Lauren Beukes

Lauren Beukes is a South African science fiction writer. The South African bit is interesting, but not that important. What’s important is that she’s a good science fiction writer.

Moxyland was her first novel. Her second, Zoo City, recently won the Arthur C. Clarke award (SF’s answer to the Booker). I read Moxyland first for the very simple reason that Amazon had it on sale at 99p. What can I say? I’m a cheap date.

Anyway. Moxyland is set in South Africa in the very near future. It features four twentysomething viewpoint characters, none of whom are sympathetic and none of whom has anything like the control of their lives they think they do. It’s a novel of youth in rebellion, and of a society which anticipated and co-opted that rebellion long before the youth in question ever thought of it.

Kendra is a hip street-photographer taking corporate sponsorship from a soft drinks company. She agrees to a deal which involves having her DNA altered so that the corporate logo will appear embedded and glowing under the skin of her wrist. There are benefits – a boosted immune system – but she doesn’t read the fine print. She’s valuable intellectual property now, and she has a new found craving for a certain delicious fizzy drink.

Toby is a blogger from a wealthy upper-class family who’s now living a self-consciously street lifestyle. He’s promiscuous, vacuous and thoroughly unlikeable complaining about his “motherbitch” and her demands on his time. He only sees her because his comments section indicates she’s a popular character on his blog, and because she gives him his extremely generous allowance.

Lerata is a successful programmer working for a large corporation. In the new South Africa there’s still an Apartheid, but now it’s between the corporate elite and the masses (referred to by the corporate insiders as “civilians”. Colour no longer matters, but society is still as stratified as it ever was. Lerata is probably the book’s least succesful character being a fairly stereotyped ruthless executive (contrast Richard Morgan’s protagonist in Market Forces who’s far more ambiguous).

Finally there’s Tendeka. He’s a wannabe revolutionary who runs unsuccessful rehabilitation programs for street kids while railing furiously against injustice and inequality. He also organises pointless acts of anti-corporate vandalism: defacing billboards and crashing an art gallery event (where his act of protest is initially misunderstood as an attempt at performance art). Naturally he’s from a nice middle class family.

All four think of themselves in various ways as outsiders, but for each of them it’s more pose than real. Kendra differentiates her art by using archaic and unreliable print film rather than digital, but her work is subsidised by her wealthy lover. Toby’s blog is titled “Diary of a Cunt” but his lifestyle is paid for by his mother. Tendeka is a classic middle-class perma-protestor fighting for people he’s not actually one of (however much he’d like to be). Lerata carries out minor acts of corporate sabotage without ever threatening her own privileges.

Of them all it’s noticeable that only Lerata comes from a background that’s remotely disadvantaged (she grew up an aids orphan). That’s long behind her, and now like all of them she’s living a life that’s actually pretty comfortable. This is alienation as lifestyle choice.

Beukes’ future is in many ways much like our present (in more ways than you’d imagine, as an afterword makes clear). A key development is that mobile phones are used for access to government services and for making payments, which means that disconnection is now a criminal sanction and permanent disconnection an effective exclusion from functioning in society. The phones even have built in taser-like features which the police can activate so stunning the owner. You carry your own corporal punishment in your pocket.

I thought that last point far fetched. In the afterword Beukes mentions hearing after she wrote it of a police officer independently musing with a friend whether such a thing would be possible one day and how convenient it would be.

Otherwise the characters spend their time at bars and galleries, online in complex virtual realities or in multi-player computer games (the games and virtual realities already exist – not the specific ones of the novel but ones almost exactly like them). The novel slyly mocks its own characters here. From their perspective they’re living edgy lives and pushing boundaries. Here’s Tendeka though on PlusLife, his own preferred online hangout:

I spent more time on doing up my place. It’s pretty humble, designed to be bio-friendly, all recyclable materials, solar panels on the ceiling, a wind farm in the garden. Not that you need to generate energy in-world, but it’s the principle. It’s a shining example to throw into contrast the kind of excesses the neighbourhood attracts, which is why I chose this location specifically.

…

There’s a flickering on the horizon, and at first I think it’s some bug in the software, but as it spreads, multi-coloured, I figure that someone has hacked the sky. It’s doing a northern lights thing. And that’s the beauty of Pluslife. That here you can actually have an influence on the world.

There he is, sitting at a computer designing an online house with solar panels and wind farm in a virtual world with neither a real sun nor real wind. Meanwhile Toby, short of money, logs on to a children-only multi-player game under an assumed identity so that he can steal in-game objects for out-of-game payment (that’s something else that’s already here in the real world). At one point he goes massively out of his way to crush the online avatar of an 8-year old girl who beat him up in-game. Fight the power…

As Moxyland develops the different characters’ stories start to intertwine (sometimes too much so – there are times here where Beukes relies a bit too heavily on coincidence). Tendeka get involved in a genuine criminal conspiracy organised by someone he’s only met online. He brings Toby on board, who gets help from his old friend Lerata who likes to hang out with Toby to prove to herself that she’s not just another suit. Kendra flits around their peripheries.

This then is a novel that’s working at two levels. On the one hand there’s a fast moving cyberpunk drama where outsiders fighting the system are drawn together as the fight against corporate totalitarianism leads to possible terrorist outrage.

The other level though is much more subversive. Yes, there are cyberpunk trappings but most of the more disturbing elements of the novel already exist today. The characters think they’re outsiders and seem like protagonists, but really they’re neither. The only thing that’s real is that people do actually get hurt. The revolution may be here, but it turns out it will be televised after all.

Moxyland is not a novel driven by literary style. Beukes can write, but she’s not about the finely hewn sentence. There are a few small infodumps, but generally the setting detail is nicely woven in as natural background to the characters. Here’s Toby in one of the books more classically cyberpunk moments:

I take a shortcut through Little Angola, which I only realise is a terrible mistake when I’m hit a double blow by the smell of assorted loxion delicacies and the chatter of warez in the overbridge tunnel market. The warez are outmode. It’s not just that they’re cheap useless, cos who really needs a tube of bondglue or six, except for the street kids, and there are better highs for less, but cos they’re all fucking chipped. This is non-reg, but the cops have better shit to worry about, especially when it doesn’t impact the corporati. The whole audio chipping thing was outlawed almost as soon as it hit. I mean, it was bigtime initially, with cereal boxes and toys and freeware and fucking appliances all chirping their own self-importance, jingles, promos, sound-effects, celeb endorsements, so that house spouses had to wear ear blanks to get through the supermarket. It was only a matter of time before the multinationals made it illegal, or specialised use only, but then notions of illegal don’t extend to the developing. Most of the stuff now comes down from Asia or central Africa, so the chips in here aren’t even speaking English or Xhosa or any of the other eleven nationals; it’s all Cantonese and Portuguese and Kinyarwanda.

What makes this novel rewarding though isn’t those standard SF motifs. It’s the undermining of its own characters credibility and in a way of the credibility of these sorts of characters in the genre more generally. Their ideas are sold to them. Their rebellions change nothing that wasn’t planned to change anyway. They’re consumers who’ve purchased hip outlaw lifestyle options.

In an interesting afterword Beukes flags how much of the novel is based on real life. Even the corporate sponsorship is essentially true. Nobody’s having their DNA tweaked (yet), but tobacco companies used comparable techniques in South Africa after cigarette advertising was banned. Here’s Beukes on the reality underlying the fiction:

They seduced hip young things to be brand ambassadors for the price of free cigarettes. They staged provocative theatre at bars and restaurants like a faked srip poker game with models. And they dropped milllions on the most outrageous events, from Peter Stuyvesant’s swanky mansion pool parties to Lucky Strike’s private concerts, flying out international rock acts and house DJs for one night only. The height of the debauchery was a million Rand party train with multiple dancefloors and five different bars, snaking through the Cape winelands on its way to a secret destination for a luxury picnic. If you’d missed the ARG-style clues, subtly disguised as a Lucky Strike target with only a phone number stuck up at the back of a bar, you missed out.

She notes other elements of the novel also already exist, from cellphone wallets to corporate-funded private universities to transgenic dogs with glow-in-the-dark genes. Even the death of a bio-engineered artwork which forms one of the novel’s central scenes is based on a similar event that already happened in New York. As with so much science fiction, this isn’t really a book about the future. It’s a book about the present.

For those who’re interested there’s an excellent review of Moxyland here by an old friend of mine. He’s very good on the book, and his points on the role of evolution as metaphor are absolutely spot on (as is his citing of Avril Lavigne as a real world example of the corporatisation of dissent that Moxyland skewers so well).

The joys of trickledown

Woken Furies, by Richard Morgan

I noticed recently that I don’t read much science fiction any more. I don’t seem to enjoy it as much as I used to. There are always exceptions though, and for me Richard Morgan made ideal Christmas reading. If Christmas isn’t about bloody tales of vengeance and left-wing politics after all, what is it about?

Woken Furies is Morgan’s fourth novel and the third (and so far final) in his Takeshi Kovacs sequence. I’ve written up his previous books here, here and here.

Altered Carbon shook up the dead genre of cyberpunk and reinvigorated it. It went back and drew on the same sources of inspiration Gibson had – hardboiled and noir fiction – and used them to craft a genuinely exciting story that mixed crime, politics and hard sf.

Broken Angels also drew on Gibson, but was much more inspired by the traditions of military sf than cyberpunk. It was good and I thoroughly enjoyed it, but it wasn’t as original as Altered Carbon. What was most surprising about Broken Angels was how different it was to its predecessor. Morgan wrote a novel set in the same world, but arguably not quite in the same genre.

After that Morgan wrote Market Forces – his satire on contemporary neoliberal politics and market philosophies. I almost didn’t read it, but when I did although I had criticisms I found a lot in it to like and much in it that I recognised from my own life working in the City.

With Woken Furies Morgan returns to his Takeshi Kovacs character. The action takes place on Kovacs’ homeworld, Harlan’s World. It’s a planet ruled by its equivalent of the Founding Fathers and their families. The nobility here, the first families, are of course immortal because in Kovacs’ universe everyone has digital stacks implanted in them which record a person’s thoughts and experiences. On death, anyone with the money (or decent health insurance) can be resleeved – their stack excised and placed in a new and youthful body.

If you have the resources or someone else is willing to pay you can also be resleeved while alive. You can trade in your existing body for one better suited to your lifestyle. The poor though live with the bodies they’re born with and when they get old they just die. For the poor the future is not that different to all the long centuries that have gone before it.

Morgan has always been a political writer, and this is a highly political book. 300 years previously Harlan’s World saw a revolution. A Che Guevara-like figure named Quellcrist Falconer led an uprising against the first families. She lost, and was destroyed along with her datastack leaving no possibility of her return.

As the book opens, Kovacs is back on Harlan’s World. He’s temporarily sleeved in a cheap body which he’s using to carry out what are essentially acts of terrorism against a local fundamentalist religious movement. Why he’s doing this is unclear, but what is clear is how much trouble he’s in when after slaughtering several priests he finds the body he’d planned to go back into has become unavailable. Worse, he falls foul of the local Yakuza which leaves both the church and the mob looking to kill him. He needs to get out of town, and fast.

Here’s Kovacs in action, intervening in a bar fight that’s got out of hand:

She’d killed the one on the floor, let the others alone for time you could measure. The nearest priest got in close, lashed out with power knuckles and down she went, twisting, onto the ruined corpse of the officiator. The others closed in, steel-capped boots stomping down out of robes the colour of dried blood. Someone back at the tables started cheering.
I reached in, yanked back a beard and sliced the throat beneath it, back to the spine. Shoved the body aside. Slashed low through a robe and felt the blade bury itself in flesh. Twist and withdraw. Blood sluiced warm over my hand. The Tebbit knife sprayed droplets as it came clear. I reached again, dreamlike. Root and grab, brace and stab, kick aside. The others were turning, but they weren’t fighters. I laid open a cheek down to the bone, parted an outflung palm from middle finger to the wrist, drove them back off the woman on the floor, grinning, all the time grinning like a reef demon.

Kovacs falls in with a team of deComs. These are technologically augmented mercenaries fighting a war of aggression to reclaim a continent abandoned by humanity after that centuries-old revolution and which is now inhabited by the intelligent war machines of that era. The deComs use their skills and technological edge to wipe out the machines. The morality of this is, to put it mildly, questionable.

Static Hiss. The general channel was wide open.
‘Look,’ said the scorpion gun reasonably. ‘There’s no call for this. Why don’t you just leave us alone?.’
I sighed and shifted cramped limbs slightly in the confines of the overhang. A cold polar wind hooted in the eroded bluffs, chilling my face and hands. The sky overhead was a standard New Hok grey, the miserly northern winter daylight already past its best. Thirty meters below the rock face I was clinging to, a long trail of scree ran out to the valley floor proper, the river bend and the small cluster of archaic rectangular prefabs that formed the abandoned Quellist listening post. Where we’d been an hour ago. Smoke was still rising from one smashed structure where the self-propelled gun had lobbed its last smart shell. So much for programming parameters.
‘Leave us alone,’ it repeated. ‘And we’ll do you the same favour.’
‘Can’t do that,’ Sylvie murmured, voice gentle and detached as she ran the crew link-up at combat standby and probed for chinks in the artillery’s co-op system. Mind cast out in a gossamer net of awareness that settled over the surrounding landscape like a silk slip to the floor. ‘You know that. You’re too dangerous. Your whole system of life is inimical to ours.’
‘Yeah.’ Jadwiga’s new laugh was taking some getting used to. ‘And besides which , we want the fucking land.’

The Sylvie mentioned there is the leader of the deCom group. She has a new form of software interface technology embedded in her head. It goes wrong and she starts manifesting a second personality. A personality that appears to be Quellcrist Falconer. One theory is that Sylvie’s been infected with an ancient computer virus designed to sow confusion and programmed to believe it’s Falconer. There’s always the possibility though that somehow, impossibly, it really is Falconer’s personality and a recording of her somehow survived after all.

Kovacs takes Sylvie/Falconer to friends of his some of whom are old enough that they were part of that 300 year old revolution. They don’t necessarily care whether she’s really Falconer or not. For them she’s their revolution reborn. Their desire to believe is enough and events start moving towards a new insurrection.

All this and someone has got hold of an illegal backup of an earlier version of Kovacs himself. It’s illegal to have two versions of the same person alive. That earlier Kovacs has been well paid to hunt down his later self, and has the added incentive that legally only one of them can exist at a time. Kovacs isn’t just fighting the yakuza, a militant priesthood and the government of a planet. He’s fighting himself.

It’s high octane stuff. Morgan fills the book with his usual blend of hyperviolence, explicit sex and solid sf worldbuilding. The plot is twisty and complex, but not so much so that it can’t be followed. As a story it’s very enjoyable though it’s straight sf and so unlikely to appeal to those who haven’t already some interest in that genre.

Along the way Morgan takes diversions into a surfers’ community populaced by retirees who’ve bought themselves surfing-adapted bodies and who spend the long centuries seeking the perfect wave. He explores Kovacs’ abused childhood and adolescence as a petty criminal and what it was that made Kovacs into what he is (essentially a monster). He brings the deComs to life and stops off for an exciting battle among some alien ruins where an unarmed Kovacs takes down a party of mercenaries trying to kill him. There’s an awful lot of rock climbing. It’s fun stuff.

The key though is the politics. The revolution 300 years previously happened because the conditions of the poor were genuinely appalling. Afterwards things improved. The first families spread their wealth around a little more and conditions for the working classes became much more comfortable. As time’s gone on though the balance has shifted back and while things aren’t too bad there are signs that the gains won by the failed insurgency may not stick.

Falconer may be back and the revolution may be back with her. Will that make any difference though? The live Falconer seems in some ways quite different to the myth of her and is prepared to use methods that according to history she would never have countenanced. The question arises again, is it really her at all? Does anyone care? If the revolution finally happens will it just change one set of rulers for another?

This is a novel in which some characters make a defence of tyranny and it’s not clear that they’re wrong. Living standards are reasonable. People mostly are doing ok. Does it matter that they have little say in how they are governed? The revolutionaries are prepared to kill to free the people, but they’re not particularly inclined to ask the people if that’s actually what they want. The defence of tyranny is ultimately self-serving, but then here what isn’t?

Politics here is just something else to get people killed. Another means by which the few take power over the many. The personal though isn’t much better. Kovac’s campaign against the fundamentalists gets explained, but it’s deranged in its savagery and cruelty. Kovacs wants to rescue Sylvie from those who would use her for the personality she carries, but does she even want rescuing? Everyone here acts for others, but really everyone is acting for themselves.

I enjoyed Woken Furies, but I wasn’t sorry to know that it’s Kovacs’ last outing (at least for the moment anyway, Morgan hasn’t ruled out returning to him). All the Kovacs novels contain references to William Gibson’s Sprawl trilogy (Neuromancer, Count Zero, Mona Lisa Overdrive) and though they’re less obvious here they’re still present (mostly in ways I can’t discuss without spoiling this and MLO). In that sense there’s nowhere further for it to go but also I thought Morgan had made his points. The essence of Kovacs’ universe for me is technological immortality and what its implementation tells us about ourselves.

The people of this future have access to science we can only dream of. They have settled alien worlds and conquered death. For all that though nothing has really changed. Those in charge rule through control of force. The poor distract themselves with drink, religion and cheap entertainment. The existence of immortality just means that when people are murdered care is taken to destroy their datastacks so that they can’t be brought back.

This is a society that could build a heaven for everyone. They could build a utopia in which nobody need ever die. Instead they use their wealth and brilliance to benefit a handful while the majority live in squalor. The parallels with our own world are all too obvious.

Woken Furies