I’ve had to read The Corporation Wars: Dissidence on-screen as a PDF, which is not a method I usually employ. Having been sufficiently hooked on printed books, reading on a screen takes away a lot of the pleasure, as far as I’m concerned. And yet, for this book’s remorselessly high-tech story-line, it has seemed strangely apt.
As it happens, at the same time I’ve been reading The Medusa Chronicles, by Stephen Baxter and Alastair Reynolds. Arthur C. Clarke’s 1971 novella A Meeting with Medusa introduced Howard Falcon, who is what Anne McCaffrey calls a ‘shell-person’, encased in a machine body after surviving a devastating airship crash, and foreseeing himself, in his growing estrangement from humanity, as a bridge to the machine civilisation to come. Baxter and Reynolds project Falcon’s life over the ‘troubled centuries’ which Clarke foresaw ahead, but although his failing human body is increasingly replaced by prostheses, Falcon’s experiences bring his human values to the fore, advocating them both to the Machines and to off-planet humanity, particularly the ruthlessly pragmatic culture which develops on Mars. (Men, Martians and Machines would be a more apt title, if Eric Frank Russell hadn’t bagged it long before.) As the Machines achieve sentience he teaches them self-respect and independence, but also concealment and duplicity—which comes back to bite us later, as it does with Hal in 2001. In his contribution to my Man and the Planets (1983), the late Chris Boyce thought that the supposed threat from sentient machines was a chimera: in his view, mind-machine interactions would grow ever closer rather than separate. At the end of The Medusa Chronicles it happens to Falcon and the machines which accompany him to the core of Jupiter, but at a higher level akin to spirituality, where they end up in a simulation, not in a computer but within the unknowably vast Jovian mind, and one which reflects and allows interaction with reality, allowing them to reach and explore the planets of other stars. There are echoes of Tibetan Buddhism in that: the Dalai Lama has said that the Berkleian strand in western philosophy, is the one which most appeals to him—that’s the one in which physical reality and our physical bodies have no separate existence and are all ideas within the greater mind of God.
Similarly, after the opening chapter of the novel Ken MacLeod’s characters are maintained within a simulation, set in another solar system. Its Earth-like world is being terraformed and the simulation represents its future, while in ‘real’ time robots are making it habitable and also harnessing the resources of the system’s other planets to sustain it, simultaneously achieving unplanned self-awareness like the robots of The Medusa Chronicles. Macleod’s characters are recurringly uploaded into the computers of war machines to deal with that, animating their machines even more closely than Falcon does his armoured, mobile carapace. But they’re all war machines, and there lies the big difference between the two novels: here, the ‘troubled centuries’ are far from over. The competing corporations at work in this remote system, too far from Earth for direct contact, have exported to it the underlying issues of the conflict on Earth between two major political movements: the Acceleration (shortened to the Axle) and the Reaction (the Rax)—super-capitalism as a transition phase towards the Mind-Machine Net that Chris Boyce envisaged, versus super-reactionary insistence on individual personalities and values, to the extent of restoring outmoded systems like monarchy. The corporations align with either and change sides at will, driven only by profit. In a maze of simulations and computer-generated avatars, the humans and robots caught up in the conflict have understandable confusions about what is real and what is not, the reversals in viewpoint are comparable to Richard Burton’s rapid role shifts in Where Eagles Dare, and at the end of it the major character signs off to think it all through again—for which I can’t blame him. But we’re left in little doubt that the final position is the true one, and it’s not all a simulation after all.
By further chance, April 2016 sees publication of George Monbiot’s How Did We Get into This Mess? (Verso), summarised in his article ‘Neoliberalism: the Ideology at the Root of All Our Problems’, The Guardian, 15th April 2016. Under pressure of a deadline I’m far from sure that I’ve grasped it all, but as I see it his main point is that state capitalism has been subverted by the belief that profit for individuals and corporations is the only good for society, and that competition is the only route to the efficiency that maximises profit. The 1930s term ‘Neoliberalism’ has fallen out of fashion and the ideology no longer has a name, known only by reference to its advocates ‘Reaganism’ and ‘Thatcherism’ as prime examples. The lack of effective opposition to it is due in part to the lack of clear terminology, and its persistence despite its failings, producing an increasingly dystopian society, is due to the fact that the only answers seem to involve reversion to older models which themselves have already been found wanting.
With some SF readers, that last point will strike a chord. The late John W. Campbell argued in Analog that there had been three stages in social evolution to date: the tribesman, the barbarian and the citizen. To the tribesman, ‘everything that isn’t compulsory is forbidden’, and he is no match for the barbarian who recognises no law but his own, helping himself to whatever the tribesman has painstakingly accumulated. When the state evolves, to the barbarian the citizen seems like just another kind of tribesman who can be easily defeated; but the citizens can organise, can form or hire specialists to defend them, and the barbarian horde is no match for a dedicated and trained army. But the state’s weakness is its insistence on conformity, and Campbell predicted that the next phase in social evolution would put new emphases on individual values, to the extent that it would look like selfishness or even a return to barbarism, which led him to coin the term ‘parabarb’ for the New Man to come. I’ve noticed over the years that it seems to be right-wing acquaintances who identify themselves with that most readily.
Between them, perhaps MacLeod and Campbell have supplied the terminology for which Monbiot believes we are groping. If Acceleration, or Axle if you will, stands for Neoliberalism, and Reaction (Rax) for the older systems, and the Thatcherites and Reaganites are parabarbs whose ethos has also been found wanting... what comes next? If Campbell is right, to its critics it will look like a reversion to the Welfare State or even to communism, but it will be better and stronger than either. We must live in hope of it.
Central Station
Lavie Tidhar
Tachyon, 290 pages
Review: Elsa Bouet
“Life wasn’t like that neat classification system,” is perhaps the sentence that encapsulates this whole novel. Lavie Tidhar’s Central Station creates a world in which lines are blurred, boundaries crossed, and new identities are created and evolve rapidly. Reflectively, the story blends different genres; from ‘everyday life’, a genre that chronicles the lives of people as they are lived, cyberpunk, the detective narrative, gothic and horror, and perhaps even fairy tales. It is a novel reminiscent of the science fiction by Philip K. Dick, William Gibson, Octavia Butler or more recently China Miéville, and it makes for an interesting and intelligent read.
Tidhar’s narrative explores the ways in which humans and digital intelligence coexist as both the physical and digital worlds overlap. Humans have been physically modified with a node, a body augmentation which allows them to connect to the ‘Conversation’. This is the network of the thoughts and memories of all humans and of the Others—digital bodiless entities who have been left to evolve in cyberspace. The story is set in the centre of a futuristic Tel Aviv, where Central Station is located. It is a hub for earthlings to travel to space, to escape Earth and its past, thereby leaving refugees behind to tend to the travellers’ needs. It is also a place where evolution takes its course and new possibilities can be created. The story explores how people form unlikely families, rekindle old flames, become friends, and how they forgive, resent, and forget. We learn of their pasts, what shaped their identities and their relation to the Conversation, and how this technology affects their everyday routine. The story provides a multitude of hybrid voices: the mixed race refugees; the part-cyborg Israeli soldiers now derelict, abandoned by the state and left to suffer silently from PTSD; people immersed in cyberspace games; the artist creating gods in the virtual and giving them physicality; oracles part-human part-Other; people returning to Earth after a long journey, or those arriving there for the first time; and on rare instances, we even hear from the Others themselves.
What appears to be a banal depiction of life in Central Station is soon disrupted as evolution takes its course at a fast pace. Children manufactured in ‘Breeding Grounds’ are seen to possess new abilities: they can tap into the Conversation and read people’s thoughts without being connected, perceived by citizens of the station as black magic. But more worryingly for the inhabitants of Central Station is the arrival of a Strigoi, Carmen. Carmen is an off-world human, infected with a virus which has turned her into a vampire-esque creature who feeds off data from humans. Sucking on their node, she harvests their memories and their identity. Carmen and the children develop a strange connection which marks the start of the changes to come in Central Station.
The use of everyday life as a key genre for the novel leaves it up to the reader to assess the benefits and drawback of what it means to lead a dual—physical as well as virtual—life. On the one hand the Communication has brought people closer together; everyone is hybrid in one way or another—mixed race, physically remade, or living in the virtual. On the other hand, there are hints to the fact that people are still othered, classified, rejected because of who they are. While the Israeli-Palestinian conflict seems to be a thing of the past, division still exists between them: the Muslims live in Jaffa to the south and the Jews live in the more affluent northern part of the city. History also seems to fade into oblivion as personal memories and historical facts, such as the names of wars, are forgotten because of the immediacy of the experience of the Conversation, while the Others seem to be able to have some control over the people’s bodies. Through these elements, the novels hints to the fact that the Conversation is not such a beneficial artefact as it first appeared to be: people are perhaps not as well connected as they initially seem, their identity and feelings slowly slip and fade into cyberspace, and reality and virtual-reality become blurred and undistinguishable. But why and how were the Others created? Are they helping? Can these characters remain human when relinquishing so much of their memories, their feelings and awareness to virtual entities they do not understand? The answer lies in paying attention to the story of Achimwene, the only character who is not connected to the Conversation.
Ninefox Gambit
Yoon Ha Lee
Solaris, 384 pages.
Review by Iain Maloney
Ninefox Gambit, the first in Yoon Ha Lee’s Machineries of Empire trilogy, grew out of his short story The Battle of Candle Arc (published in Clarkesworld October 2012) and is a military space opera on the kind of canvas fans of Iain M Banks will appreciate. Captain Kel Cheris is chosen to lead an assault on the Fortress of Scattered Needles which has fallen to heretics. She is accompanied by the uncorporeal Shuos Jedao, a brutal but tactical genius who went mad and massacred two armies—the enemy and his own—a crime for which his body was executed while his spirit was kept alive in the ‘black cradle’, making him an immortal prisoner. Every once in a while, when circumstances demand his undeniable talents, he is resurrected and tasked with leading the Kel to victory. Understandably no one trusts Jedao, but the hexarchate—the society they belong to—feel they have no choice. Heresy can undermine the structures of society and bring the edifice crashing down.
This is a tale of wheels within wheels, of secrets, hidden agendas, ulterior motives and plans which take centuries to reach fruition. It’s intricately plotted in a way that is frustrating for a reviewer who wishes to avoid spoilers; but the central question of the novel is whether you can ever truly trust another person—even one who you share a skull with.
Lee makes good use of the concept of anchoring, exploring the two-minds-in-one-body from both humorous and sinister angles. Cheris and Jedao don’t have access to each other’s thoughts but a certain amount of ‘bleeding’ occurs affecting Cheris’s accent and body language, and rather than proximity breeding contempt, a bond forms between the two that might prove ultimately unbreakable.
Ninefox Gambit is a brilliant introduction to a trilogy, unfortunately it is let down by a difficult opening that may put off readers.
Science fiction and fantasy world builders face a difficult choice. You’ve created your setting—anything from a city to a galactic empire—and filled notebooks with Tolkein-esque maps; raided dictionaries of, say, ancient Norse and adapted vocabulary from dynastic China for place names, government ministries and military ranks; blurred the lines between, for example, Shinto, Buddhism and Taoism to create an underlying religion; and even stretched current socio-political trends to their logical breaking point. You could fill several Silmarillions with encyclopedic breakdowns of climate, geology, market forces and fashions—but you have a novel to write, characters to introduce, stories to tell. As much as we all love coherent, imaginative brave new worlds, they are the background. They are the stage upon which the story plays out, not the story itself. So you’re faced with a choice: how do you introduce your readers to your Creation?
There are two main options. There’s Asimov’s Encyclopedia Galactica approach. You step outside the story and explain things directly to the reader. While these passages tend to be dry and boring they have the benefit of getting it all out of the way in a few paragraphs. A brief interlude and then the action begins. (However, Douglas Adams pretty much ruined this approach for the rest of us.)
The second option is to drop your readers in at the deep end with a few floatation aids and let them sink or swim. This is much more difficult to pull off but when it works—see China Mieville’s The City and the City for example—it enhances the reader’s enjoyment and understanding—knowledge earned is sweeter than knowledge tossed in your path—and gives the book a more pleasing shape.
Yoon Ha Lee chose the second option for Ninefox Gambit but doesn’t quite manage to find the balance between allowing the world to unfold on its own terms and not baffling the reader. The first two chapters are too full of unexplained terms, confusing social conventions and an underlying system that remains frustratingly vague even after two readings. It is as much a weakness of editing as it is of writing—the author is often too immersed in their own universe to see it from the outside and this is where an editor should step in. It’s a huge shame because the universe Lee has created and the story he tells are both thrilling, but it takes effort to get beyond the opening and into the guts of the book.
Once it gets going the plot rattles along with electrifying tension and pace, leading to a climax that manages to achieve the often impossible task of giving a satisfying ending to this story arc while setting up the sequel. The interplay of espionage, treachery and tactical inventiveness make this much more enjoyable and varied than a lot of military science fiction, though the set-piece battles are suitably dramatic and bloody.
Lee is clearly building somewhere he intends to inhabit for some time—as well as the initial short story and the promised trilogy, another short story is forthcoming in the anthology An Alphabet of Embers. Perhaps volume two, or a further short story, will help us better understand the hexarchate and their hazy calendrical system.
Children of Earth and Sky
Guy Gavriel Kay
Hodder & Staughton, 592 pages
Review: Benjamin Thomas
Game of Thrones shoving epic fantasy into everyone’s lives has provided both positives and negatives for writers of the genre. On the plus side, epic fantasy is what people want; the taste is on their tongues and they’re salivating for more. Flip this though, and as a writer there comes the challenge of differentiating your work from the others in the sudden influx. How do you achieve this? Ask Guy Gavriel Kay, because he does it with ease in his novel Children of Earth and Sky.
The story follows a diverse cast of characters driven by a myriad of intentions, not all (not even close to all) being honorable. From the less-than-reputable city Senjan comes a female raider, Danica. She is deadly with a bow and even deadlier with a pair of knives. Driven by the desire for revenge and under the guidance of her deceased grandfather, she boards a merchant vessel that has set off from the glorious city of Seressa. Unbeknownst to her, on board the ship is a spy masquerading as a doctor’s wife, and a young artist on his way to paint the portrait of a violent, terrifying ruler (who struck me as Kay’s rendition of Machiavelli). In fact, there is much in this novel that draws from our own world—but I will touch upon that later.
Shortly into the raid the doctor is slain, and in turn the pirate who killed him is also killed—only the pirate dies not by the hand of a crew member, but by Danica herself. Her actions, while noble, thrust her into turmoil. She cannot return home: the pirate’s family will slaughter her. Instead, she is forced to travel with the vessel and plead her case to the courts. Amidst all of this, through her grandfather’s counsel, she learns that her young brother is in fact still alive when she thought he had been cut down like the rest of her family in a brutal onslaught. Once on land, deception and corruption take center stage. Numerous plots unfold, the end result never anything other than death, though not always for whom it was originally intended.
These events unfold through multiple perspectives. But rather than devote entire chapters to each character, Kay jumps in and out of their heads. He leaves the reader with a flavour of what each character is thinking and then seamlessly transitions across the ship, the room or the fight. While this may seem like it would be distracting, it is in fact one of the best uses of third person omniscient narration I have ever read.
As we travel with these characters across seas and into different cities and countrysides, we learn about the land and the political climate. It is evident that a chunk of that world has been taken from our own historical timeline—the Byzantine and Roman Empires— Kay adds enough of his own magic to the realm to allow us to get lost in the fantasy. Unfortunately, this can sometimes happen through pages and pages of backstory that can often read like information-dumps. Thankfully, this is only the case a handful of times. I thought this interesting; that the background of the world was laid on thick and heavy at times while little or no explanation is given to the subtle uses of magic or supernatural occurrences. Kay makes this work. He describes and utilizes these abilities with such ease that as a reader you take them as truth with no question. This, coupled with his complex cast of characters, adds immense depth to his novel.
Children of Earth and Sky was an enjoyable read throughout. I recommend it not only for anyone who is hungering for more epic fantasy, but for anyone who is intrigued by multi-layered worlds, wide casts of characters, and political intrigue.
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Rob Boffard
