Magazine - The New York Review of Science Fiction - 309 - 2014-05
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Works Cited
Aldiss, Brian. Billion Year Spree. London: Atheneum: 1973.
Clute, John, and Peter Nichols, eds. The Encyclopedia of Science Fiction. Second edition. New York: St. Martin’s Griffin, 1995.
Dick, Philip K. The Exegesis of Philip K. Dick. Pamela Jackson and Jonathan Lethem, eds. Boston: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2011.
Gopnik Adam. “Blows Against the Empire: The Return of Philip K. Dick.” The New Yorker. 20 August, 2007.
Gygax, Gary. “Jack Vance & The D & D Game.” The Excellent Prismatic Spray #2 (2001).
Hoder, Mike. “Hour 25: 1976 Jack Vance radio interview.” KPFK Radio, 12 November, 1976.
Le Guin, Ursula K. “Letter to Jack Vance, 27 April 1967.” The Jack Vance Collection, Howard Gotlieb Archival Research Center at Boston University.
Meredith, Scott. “Letter to Jack Vance, 2 June, 1950.” The Jack Vance Collection, Howard Gotlieb Archival Research Center at Boston University.
——. “Letter to Jack Vance, 4 May, 1951.” The Jack Vance Collection, Howard Gotlieb Archival Research Center at Boston University.
Platt, Charles. “Interview with Jack Vance.” Dream Makers Volume II: The Uncommon Men & Women Who Write Science Fiction: Interviews. New York: Berkley Books, 1983.
Rotella, Carlo. “The Genre Artist.” The New York Times, 15 July 2009.
Smith, Clark Ashton. “The Abominations of Yondo.” Overland Monthly, Vol 84, No. 4. (California: April, 1926).
The Vance Integral Edition.
Vance, Jack. Araminta Station. New York: Tor Books, 1988.
——. The Best of Jack Vance. New York: Pocket Books, 1976.
——. The Eyes of the Overworld (aka Cugel the Clever). New York: Ace Books, 1966.
——. The Houses of Iszm. New York: Ace Books, 1964.
——. “Interview.” Star Ship Sofa, June 8, 2010.
——. “Letter to Scott Meredith, 6 August, 1966.” The Jack Vance Collection, Howard Gotlieb Archival Research Center at Boston University.
——. Madouc (Lyonesse III). London, Grafton Books, 1989.
——. Space Opera. London: Gollancz. 1965.
——. This Is Me, Jack Vance! (Or More Properly, This Is “I”). Burton, Michigan: Subterranean Press, 2009.
——. “The World-Thinker.” Thrilling Wonder Stories. Toronto: March 1945.
Joe Sanders
The Emperor of I Scream: Torture, Revenge, Justice, and Hope in Iain M. Banks’s Surface Detail
More than material comforts, political systems offer their members protection—from outsiders and from themselves. In Monty Python’s Life of Brian, for example, when members of the People’s Front of Judea are nerving themselves to strike a blow against the tyranny of the Roman Empire, their leader, Reg, rhetorically asks what the Romans have ever given them only to have one member reply “the aqueduct,” another suggest “sanitation,” and so on through “roads,” “irrigation,” “medicine,” “education,” “wine”—leading up to one final exchange: “And it’s safe to walk in the streets at night now, Reg.” “Yeah, they certainly know how to keep order. Let’s face it. They’re the only ones who could in a place like this.” Whether it’s the Roman Empire, the Invisible Empire of the Ku Klux Klan, or the Thousand Year Reich, such organizations promise their members safety through violence: Law and Order. People are perversely attracted to seeing themselves as both potential victims and victimizers; they actually believe they need to be defended against themselves. When the members of the People’s Front mention how difficult it is to provide safety “in a place like this,” they really mean “dealing with people like us.” Just so, in Iain M. Banks’s 2010 novel, Surface Detail, an elderly legislator defends the establishment of virtual Hells where the souls of sinners can be punished forever, by bellowing that “We need the Hells! We’re fallen, evil creatures!” (445).
Surface Detail is one of Banks’s novels set in the interstellar Culture, which is the very opposite of an “empire.” Instead, the Culture is a vast, anarchic cluster of biologic and mechanical individuals drawn together by shared curiosity about exploration and evolution. The Culture has no central, decision-making authority; rather, its consciousness accumulates in conversations between countless mortals and the AI Minds of gigantic Ships with their arrays of avatars and drones that can take almost any physical form. The Culture tries hard not to interfere with how other civilizations express their values, though in this novel it clearly is on the side of those trying to expose and destroy the virtual Hells. This position requires a difficult balancing act, for while the Culture prefers not to limit individuals’ choices, it also realizes the dangerous attraction of “safety” achieved by repressive codes that give the right to inflict pain on transgressors. The attraction is especially great when one doesn’t have to confront the painful results. One purpose of literature, however, is to encourage empathetic recognition. Surface Detail’s description of the suffering going on in the Hells is so brilliantly, viciously appalling that it should encourage people to reject a social system based on bribery and torture. The question then becomes what alternative the Culture could offer that might both restrain and satisfy humans. In his novels, especially in Surface Detail, Banks sets out to show a believable substitute for “justice” that actually is merely revenge expressed through pain.
The novel’s opening focuses on Ledeje Y’Breq, a young woman whose suffering seems to deserve exactly that kind of justice—i.e., revenge administered with as much pain as possible. Because he scammed Led’s father in a business deal, Joiler Veppers acquired legal ownership of her, meaning that he could rape her at will and punish her as he pleased when she tried to escape. During her last attempt to flee, while struggling with him, she tries to sink her teeth into his throat but instead bites off and swallows the tip of his nose, whereupon he stabs her to death. Nothing in the rest of the novel counters readers’ first impression that Veppers is a vicious sociopath who deserves the most severe punishment. Therefore, we are pleased when Led finds herself alive again—her personality and memories (i.e., her soul) downloaded into a physical body thanks to the neural network that was secretly given to her by the avatar of an eccentric Culture spaceship. We also sympathize with her seething determination to return home so that she can slaughter her murderer.
Her mission of revenge involves a frustratingly long journey. The Culture disapproves of cold-blooded killing, even as punishment for murder, and it officiously tries to assign a slap-drone to Led that would interfere with Veppers’s painful execution. Nevertheless, Led somehow manages to make the trip aboard the Special Circumstances warship Falling Outside the Normal Moral Constraints, on what readers eventually learn is the ship’s own quest to help locate and destroy the virtual Hells. She travels in the company of the ship’s avatar, Demeisen. The avatar at first coolly rejects her request for transportation, saying of her story, “‘All very melodramatic. Your feud may inspire a not terribly good screen presentation at some point in the future, hopefully distant. I look forward to missing it’” (206). Although Demeisen relents and interacts with Led in what seems to be friendly dialogue during the voyage to track down Veppers, his presence continues to remind her of a larger perspective in which her painful grievances are insignificant. Getting ready for combat with a fleet of enemy ships, for example, Demesien smilingly rejects her offer to help.
“My dear girl, in Culture history alone it has been about nine thousand years since a huma
n, marvelous though they are in many other ways, could do anything useful in a serious, big-guns space battle other than admire the pretty explosions ... or in some cases contribute to them.”
“Contribute?”
“Chemicals; colors. You know.” (424)
Observing the avatar’s apparent glee at annihilating the attacking ships, Led asks whether there were people on board; the answer is yes, though Demeisen points out that they chose to put themselves in harm’s way, “if I may just leap in front of any nascent and entirely vicarious moral qualms you may be about to suffer from, tiny human” (509). She waits awhile then, as he appears to gloat, “sighing happily and seemingly either ignoring or having forgotten about her,” until she quietly asks to be taken to her home planet now, whereupon he replies: “‘Of course,’ Demeisen said, turning to her with a neutral expression. ‘There’s that man you want to kill, isn’t there?’” (509).
Demeisen does not voice approval of any possible evolution in Led’s attitude toward slaughtering one’s enemies. He seems to dismiss her moral qualms and to restate her purpose with a neutral attitude. He is equally nonjudgmental when she finally expresses her own, new uncertainty about killing Veppers as painfully as possible. Though she admits that she has “fantasized about it a hundred times,” she says that “‘if I can do it, if I do do it, then on one level I’m no better than him, and he’ll have won by making me behave like he does’” (531).
Despite this increased uncertainty about her own motives, however, Led still realizes that killing Veppers will not only satisfy her but also keep him from raping and murdering more people. In any event, momentum still is carrying her toward completing her revenge while disguised by a new tattoo, a gift from the avatar that has insinuated itself onto her body. But Demeisen spoils her attempt to sneak up on her intended victim. Instead, he introduces the two: “‘Doll, this is your rapist and murderer. Veppers, you ghastly cunt, this is Lededje Y’breq, back from the dead’” (567–8). Her physical attack thwarted, Ledeje is distraught by this apparent betrayal when Veppers walks away unharmed, but Demeisen comes very close to lecturing her directly: “Snap out of it babe. It’s not about your little revenge trip; we’re getting Hells destroyed. For free! Not even on your conscience! Seriously: who do you really think matters most, here? You, or a trillion people suffering? Fucking get grown-up about it, won’t you?” (575).
As a matter of fact, Veppers does not escape justice, and Led is responsible for his death. Before we see how that thread of the plot is tied up, however, we need to consider what and how she might be learning while she is being given a chance to grow up.
The first time Led meets the avatar of the ship, Falling Outside The Normal Moral Constraints, it is occupying the body of a young man who had won a “competition to replace a ship’s avatar” (207) for a brief time. Demeisen has been damaging the host body in minor ways; also, since the fellow “is quite defiantly heterosexual with a fear of bodily violation that borders on outright homophobia” (207), the avatar is arranging a homosexual tryst while he brusquely dismisses Led. This cruel behavior could be seen as teaching “the poor fool” (207) a lesson. In fact, when Demeisen releases his control, the young man is aghast because his body has been repaired and he has no recollection of all the time when he was being hurt and violated: “‘But I wanted memories! Something to remember!’” (233). Wiping the slate clean could be seen as another way of teaching the young would-be voyeur a lesson, except that he disappears from the novel, so readers never see whether he learned anything from his experience or from the gap in his memories of experience. He might have learned that he is responsible for choosing his own experiences and for reflecting on them later. Or he might not. The avatar, representing the values of the Culture, leaves the matter entirely up to him.
For that matter, the comfortable cliché that someone “needs to be taught a lesson” contains a negative judgment that usually goes along with approving harsh administration of the lesson. Since readers are encouraged to identify with Led and to accept the righteousness of her quest for revenge, Surface Detail does not set her up as a poor fool who needs/deserves to be taught a lesson. But the book does show her and other characters being exposed to experience from which they might be able to learn lessons.
One lesson that Led learns is to look more dispassionately at herself as she compares her behavior to Veppers’s. In the Life of Brian scene referred to earlier, the People’s Front of Judea is planning to kidnap Pontius Pilate’s wife and send severed pieces of her back on the hour, every hour, until Pilate agrees “to dismantle the entire apparatus of the Roman Imperialist State” within two days. Reg points out that the Romans “bear full responsibility when we chop her up, and that we will not submit to blackmail!” Monty Python’s satirically exaggerated characters represent us normal folk who cannot recognize how self-contradictory our beliefs and plans are. But art can help members of an audience see themselves more clearly. In much the same way, in Surface Detail, Banks shows the confrontation between a university professor and an elderly legislator. The professor has let his soul briefly be inserted into one of the virtual Hells so he later could describe them to an appalled public; the legislator believes that the Hells are necessary and will do anything to protect their existence, as he blurts,
You live on your fucking campuses with your heads in the fucking clouds and think everything’s as nice as it is there and everybody is as civilized and reasonable and polite and noble and intellectual and cooperative as they are there and you think that’s the way it is everywhere and how everybody is! You’ve no fucking idea what would happen if we didn’t have the threat of Hell to hold people back! (445–6)
Inwardly, the professor reflects that the speaker evidently has not attended many faculty meetings. He replies that the other is “‘typical of those with ethical myopia, who feel only for those nearest them. You would save a friend or loved one and feel a glow of self-satisfaction at the act, no matter to what torment that same act condemned countless others’” (446). In other words, both the gloating creation of the Hells and the verbal frenzy with which they are defended demonstrate the degenerate cruelty that results from a lack of fundamental interest in, let alone understanding of, other individuals. Such people, as Led observes, tend to become like the awful people they condemn.
Not that some people don’t deserve condemnation—Veppers, for example. He values other people only as they can be exploited, and he cleverly manipulates his society’s moral restraints. He conceals his murder of Led, for example, not because he is afraid of a legal penalty but because it would reflect badly on his image of perfect self-control. In fact, Veppers turns out to be the landlord of 70 percent of the virtual Hells, since they are hidden in storage units in the substrata surrounding his country estate. Throughout the novel he has been plotting to invite an attack from an outside force that would destroy the increasingly inconvenient Hells while leaving him with even more power. In short, he is intelligent, uncontrollable, unredeemable, and dangerous. For the sake of preventative maintenance—and justice—he should die.
And so he does, though not as Led has fantasized killing him. After her aborted assault, Veppers races to his estate to salvage some valuable possessions before everything is destroyed, warning his employees only then since some casualties are necessary to add verisimilitude to his pretense of innocent suffering. Led pursues him and they grapple—until he is immobilized by the slap-drone (disguised as her new tattoo) that Led had unknowingly transferred to his body when she struggled briefly with him after Demeisen foiled her plan. Now he is at her mercy. This is the moment when Ledeje could make Veppers’s death as agonizing and protracted as she wishes. Demeisen tells her so, mentioning only in passing that “‘Conscience can be a terrible thing.... So I hear’” (615). Instead of living out her fantasies of revenge, she says “Quickly,”
“What?” the avatar said.
“Quickly,” she said. “Don’t draw it out. Just—”
&nbs
p; The avatar gazed into Veppers’s eyes and nodded down at the girl. “See?” he said. “Good kid, really.” (616)
Veppers does die painfully, so Led’s vengeance is accomplished. However, that does not provide the easily satisfying catharsis that readers have been encouraged to expect. The novel began with Led suffering extreme physical violence, so naturally readers expect retribution in the same terms. We aren’t exactly shortchanged, but we are encouraged to see Veppers’s execution as something that should be just finished quickly, not savored. Led has learned that the worst part of an execution is its effect on the executioner. Demeisen knows as much—at least in theory; however, he endorses her decision after the fact, only after she has figured it out for herself.
That’s how the Culture operates. Other organizations demand that their members fear and hate the worst in themselves; the Culture invites people to discover the best in themselves. That’s how Banks operates too. Typically, his fiction sets up reader expectations that dreadfulness will be resoundingly destroyed then actually reaches a more moderate, believable yet somehow anticlimactic conclusion. This disconnect between what readers expect and what we get encourages us to reexamine our extreme and self-contradictory attitudes toward what we hate.
Banks has been doing this for quite some time. The Wasp Factory (1984), his first published novel, features a narrator who has murdered two cousins and a younger brother, remarking now that “It was just a stage I was going through” (42). Observing how he has gone on to torture animals and insects, readers are repelled, but we have read enough fiction to know what to expect. Surely the narrator deserves to be severely punished! Obviously, his brother, Eric, making his way home after escaping from a mental hospital, will be the righteous agent of vengeance! Then, instead of teaching the narrator the lesson that readers are waiting for, the plot makes a daring, dizzying turn that does not excuse the narrator’s behavior but does force readers to see her differently. Instead of being able to say “good riddance,” readers must remain in the narrator’s disturbing company. This left some early readers not only uncomfortable but outraged. Rob Latham’s Dictionary of Literary Biography essay on Banks quotes reviews that called the novel an “‘elaboration of cruel fantasy’” and “‘the literary equivalent of the nastiest brand of juvenile delinquency’” (66). Evidently some critics do believe that we need the threat of punishment of keep us in line. As a philosophical interrogator smugly remarks in Banks’s later novel, Transition (2009), for example, “Fear of being tortured can be a highly effective technique for maintaining law and order in a society and I believe that we would be in dereliction of our duty if we did not do our bit” (80).