by vol 25 no 09
The Hydrogen Sonata (2012), the latest and sadly last Culture novel, continues Banks’s exploration of these concerns and his determination to move readers past our easy expectations of “justice” and “punishment.” As one entire civilization prepares to leave this level of existence and enter the Sublime, the Culture investigates the possibility that the decision may be based on lies. Readers learn that, indeed, the information is false, and we follow the unscrupulous actions of the man who is maintaining the falsehood to enshrine his own glory. And so we expect the deception to be exposed, the rush to the Sublime to be halted, and the villain punished. Again, however, that doesn’t happen. The Culture realizes that entering the Sublime may or may not be desirable but concludes that it doesn’t have the right to interfere with the choice, however misinformed it was. So the villain is allowed to enter the Sublime along with the other members of his civilization, fully aware of his own moral corruption but publically unshamed.
Left behind, however, is Vvr Cossont, the Culture’s chief investigator, who for better or worse is now free to try anything she can imagine without her people’s support but also without the accompanying obligations. Just so, the narrator of The Wasp Factory is left facing an uncertain but less constricted future. And Ledeje Y’breq will get to choose her amusements for herself. All these characters have endured a discomforting moral surprise and survived. So have the readers. Like the characters, we have learned to live with the result. We are left with something potentially “better” than we thought we wanted. The novels’ conclusions are less extravagantly satisfying than we expected, as the people involved have wound up more personally restrained but perhaps less constrained by patterns of anticipation. All of us have learned that patterns are as much barriers as they are guides. That means we should be able to abandon torture, reexamine our need for revenge, and try to determine the purpose and limits of real justice.
If we can believe that individuals can change, we may be able to accept Banks’s assertion that, after the destruction of the virtual Hells that Veppers was storing, the civilizations that still operate Hells realize that their behavior is somehow improper, so that the remaining Hells are shut down. Although this realization appears to be spontaneous, it makes the Culture “very happy” (623). The kind of freedom from systemic dread/hate that the Culture provides doesn’t always and inevitably lead to healthy personal liberation; it’s impossible to imagine Led and Veppers in a group sitting around a campfire, holding hands and singing “Kumbaya.” But the Culture still provides the most likely place for humans to discover their least vicious, most generous tendencies. Readers should share the Culture’s happiness—and wonder why their own lives are less bright.
In one of Banks’s non-sf novels, The Steep Approach to Garbodale (2007), troubled young Alban McGill realizes that he can’t achieve his immature, romantic dream but still reaches some balanced happiness by realizing that “[s]ome hopes and ambitions were manifest only as a direction, not a destination. Maybe the trick was to realize you were involved in a process, not aiming at a completely achievable end result, and accept that, but travel hopefully anyway” (365). People in Banks’s Culture are free to come to the same conclusion. Their actual physical makeup doesn’t matter. Vvr Cossont has four arms, Led and Veppers are potbellied and hunchbacked, and the professor and legislator in Surface Detail are quadrupeds with prehensile trunks. That doesn’t matter; they all are capable of love, hate, and nasty faculty meetings, which means they are essentially human. And Banks insists that humans can sometimes, despite great difficulty and uncertain prospects, learn to change their behavior.
Readers are left, in short, with hope, an invitation to travel hopefully forward.
Anyone who expects more reassurance than that from a science fiction novel has been reading too much science fiction.
Joe Sanders lives in Mentor, Ohio.
Works Cited
Banks, Iain. The Steep Approach to Garbodale. London: Abacus, 2008.
——. Transition. New York: Orbit, 1998.
——. The Wasp Factory (1984). New York: Scribner, 1998.
Banks, Iain M. The Hydrogen Sonata. London: Orbit, 2012.
——. Surface Detail. New York: Orbit, 2010.
Latham, Rob. “Iain Banks.” In British Fantasy and Science Fiction Writers Since 1960. Dictionary of Literary Biography, Volume 261. Detroit: Thompson/Gale. 2002.
Python, Monty. The Life of Brian. Handmade Films, 1979. Quoted from
Brendan Byrne
William Gibson and The Anxiety of E-Mail
Cayce Pollard, the protagonist of William Gibson’s Pattern Recognition (2003) as well as the closest thing the post-9/11 creative class has to a Holden Caulfield, is a regular at a small online forum called Fetish:Footage:Forum (F:F:F), “one of the most consistent places in her life, like a familiar cafe that exists somehow outside of geography and beyond time zones.” This, despite the fact that she finds the experience “like sitting in a pitch-dark cellar conversing with people at a distance of about fifteen feet. The hectic speed, and the brevity of the lines in the thread, plus the feeling that everyone is talking at once, at counter-purposes, deter her.” Though over a decade old, these two lines go further toward evoking the experience of contemporary mediated communication than the howling majority of the fiction of the last decade, despite the disparity in tech.
Though Cayce is obsessive in her attention to the anonymous footage which is the impetus for F:F:F’s existence, the only place where the online and offline overlap at the beginning of the novel is her psyche. Employed by a weaponized boutique marketing agency, Cayce seeks the maker of the footage in the real world. As Cayce shifts geographies, interacts in real life with other members of F:F:F, and the mainstream begins to appropriate their shared obsession, the novel describes “the universe of F:F:F ... [m]anifesting physically in the world”.
The footage, and its maker, are another expression of the quintessential Gibson sought-object around which all of his plots circle. This is an anti-MacGuffin, which is the opposite of Adorno’s “something unique that no-one wants to buy”, yet fulfills the same function, being so impossibly new that it, too, “represents, even against [its] will, freedom from exchange.” As Veronica Hollinger observed in “Stories about the Future,” “The ‘typical’ Gibson novel introduces the possibility of profound change ... transformation implied in some radical technological event—and then breaks off as if unable to envisage what comes next ...” (461). In Pattern Recognition, the seeking of this sought-object overlays the real world with the digital. As smartphones were not readily available until 2007 with the launch of the first iPhone (though having a prehistory going back to the 1970s), this is terraforming via eruption: seduction, both physical and corporate, and acts of violence escalating from the defacing of Cayce’s prized vintage jacket, to an attempted mugging, then further.
Lacking smartphone or tablet to access F:F:F, Cayce’s access of the forum is presented as immersive, yet her relationship with e-mail mirrors our own multiplicity of new media. Short, private bursts from fellow denizens of F:F:F are returned almost immediately (and when not, this is commented on). Long missives from a friend on an expedition read like something out of a nineteenth century novel. Relative lack of access to the Internet drives said friend to write so as to convey experience rather than to transmit actionable-information or seek emotional support; a reply is almost unnecessary. Then there is the e-mail from Cayce’s mother titled “HELLO???” which she does not read, despite being “a mouse-click away from opening” it. Gibson doesn’t linger on the episode but allows Cayce’s emotional triaging to color the proceedings. A similarly unconscious Cayce e-mail response, an immediate reply to a business partner, signals a romantic interest she is trying to keep from herself. One of the more trenchant observations on the form comes via a memory of her absent father: “The restraint of pen and tongue that Win always advised i
s difficult to maintain in a medium that involves neither.”
As if fulfilling this warning, it is the act of composing an e-mail that hich shows Cayce most nakedly. Having acquired what might be the footage maker’s e-mail, Cayce has looked up “the person responsible (whatever that might mean) for the domain” and gotten a street address in Cyprus. Beyond this, the recipient is anonymous, yet Cayce almost immediately addresses a topic she has otherwise avoided, writing, “My father disappeared on September 11, 2001, in New York, but we haven’t been able to prove he was killed in the attack.... I can’t tell you why, but [the footage] became very important to me.” The connection between her father’s absence and her obsession with the footage has never been made more explicit. Gibson underscores this with, “All through that winter ... she’d gone to F:F:F—to give herself to the dream.”
Before signing off with the confused old media/new media combination of “Sincerely yours,/ Cayce Pollard” and “(CayceP)”, Cayce ends with a series of questions:
What I want to ask you is
Who are you?
Where are you?
Are you dreaming?
Cayce has preemptively answered her own questions by opening with, “My name is Cayce Pollard. I’m sitting on the grass in a park in London.” and later implying that she might agree with fellow footage-head Parkaboy’s assertion that the maker is “[d]reaming for us.”
Then a final question:
Are you there? The way I’m here?
This question cuts across the histories of metaphysics and media and is defiantly unanswerable. Cayce would previously end the letters her therapist had her write with questions. Though her therapist “had thought the letters Cayce most needed to write wouldn’t end in question marks,” this final question seems to access a submerged part of Cayce, the part which is drawn to the footage beyond sheerly a reaction to trauma.
Cayce types in the address “as though she would actually send it.... And of course she doesn’t. And watches as it sends.” Controlled briefly by a “[c]onvergence of something ... in some part of herself she can’t access,” Cayce has performed an action which, because of the medium, is impossible to reverse.
Then:
Automatically, she checks for mail.
Timing out, empty.
A woman jogs past, crunching gravel, breathing like a piston.
The ubiquitous reflexive, anxious check of e-mail creates disappointment, and so Cayce is released back into the world of physicality: the motion of the jogger, the distinct sounds she generates. The real world is still there, empty, waiting to be filled.
Brendan Byrne lives in Queens, New York.
Works Cited
Hollinger, Veronica. “Stories about the Future: From Patterns of Expectation to Pattern Recognition.” Science Fiction Studies, Vol. 33, No. 3 (Nov. 2006).
In the Company of Thieves by Kage Baker
reviewed by Michael Levy
San Francisco: Tachyon Publications, 2013; $15.95 tpb; 336 pages
When Kage Baker died from uterine cancer at the age of 57 on January 31, 2010, she left behind a large number of heartbroken fans along with a legacy of some twenty novels and novellas, two published short story collections, and a number of unfinished pieces which are now being completed by her sister and life-long (though never bylined) collaborator, Kathleen Bartholomew. Baker’s third collection, In the Company of Thieves, brings together one short story, two novelettes, and three novellas (perhaps her favorite length), including the Nebula Award–winning “The Women of Nell Gwynne’s,” which is also the inspiration for the book’s beautiful Tom Canty cover.
The first piece in the collection, the oddly named short story “The Carpet Beds of Sutro Park,” made its initial, posthumous appearance in 2012. It’s part of Baker’s long-running Company series about immortal cyborgs, some of them thousands of years old, who work for Dr. Zeus, a far-future company that preserves valuable works of art and other rare items in order to save them from destruction and also sell them for a tidy profit in the future. The story is narrated by Ezra, who, as a child in mid-nineteenth century San Francisco, underwent the cyborg process with unfortunate results. Although now immortal, he has an affliction very much like autism, which makes it almost impossible for him to interact with other people. Since he can’t do the work cyborgs normally do, Dr. Zeus’s operatives consider putting him in “storage” but instead set him up as a sort of biological camera, recording the gradual changes in the city’s architecture and landscape as the decades pass. Ezra is particularly drawn to the beautiful (and quite real, though now largely destroyed) Sutro Park, which was created by Adolph Sutro, an eccentric nineteenth-century philanthropist and mayor. While still alive, Sutro opened the park to the public so everyone could enjoy the elaborately designed flower beds (which look like tapestries or carpets) as well as the statuary and other landscaping. Ezra is also attracted to a mortal woman who seems obsessed by the park and paints her repeatedly over the course of her lifetime. She is politically involved in preserving the park and for her actions eventually gains a reputation as a crank with San Francisco’s city planners. Although he never speaks to the woman (he isn’t capable of that), Ezra records her entire life in the park and, eventually, when she dies there of cancer, creates a sort of virtual reality memorial to her in which she, or at least Ezra’s version of her, is able to live forever in a sort of highlights version of the gardens. This is a beautifully written tale, Baker at her most literary.
The second story, the relatively minor novelette, “The Unfortunate Gytt,” from 2005 is one of only two non-Company pieces in the book, and is set in the steampunk alternate nineteenth-century England of the Gentlemen’s Speculative Society, a much smaller-scale secret operation than Dr. Zeus, but one that, in Baker’s hands, finds plenty of room for both adventure and zany technology. It is told from the viewpoint of a supercilious metallurgist, Mr. Marsh, who is inducted into the group in an elaborate and rather melodramatic secret ceremony that borders, as Baker’s stories occasionally do, on parody. March, who doesn’t see the humor at all, then discovers that the members of the Gentlemen’s Speculative Society are in deadly earnest. Their purpose is to work together outside the restraints imposed by law and business concerns, to create new and valuable technology, and then to channel that technology and historical events in general in ways that are in fact good for both England and the world. This is far from a new idea, of course; many writers, most notably James Blaylock, have done similar things, but Baker nonetheless brings her mildly steampunk world to vibrant life. Although Marsh is the viewpoint character, the actual hero of the story is Edward Alton Bell-Fairfax, a super-competent but gentlemanly secret agent, and much of the story takes place in and around Rosslyn Chapel, that mysterious and absolutely wonderful church on the outskirts of Edinburgh which has been connected to the Knights Templar, the Holy Grail, and a zillion conspiracy theories even before its appearance in The Da Vinci Code.
Next comes Baker’s 2009 classic, “The Women of Nell Gwynne’s.” The tale, set in England in 1844, centers on an educated and intelligent woman known only as Lady Beatrice, who, on her own and without prospects, finds herself recruited to become an upscale whore at the eponymous brothel located on Birdcage Walk in Westminster, just off of St. James Park. Nell Gwynne’s is a very ritzy and very confidential place with only the most skilled and beautiful prostitutes, many of whom seem to specialize in various forms of BDSM, and its primary clientele are Members of Parliament, upper-level government officials, and the like. Unbeknownst to most of that clientele, however, the women of Nell Gwynne’s, led by their intrepid, ostensibly blind proprietress, Mrs. Corvey, secretly work for the Gentlemen’s Speculative Society, using their access to important men when they are most off guard to wheedle out state secrets and take daguerreotypes of anyone the Society feels may eventually need blackmailing—always for the greater good of the Empire, of course. Examples of the Society’s technological prowess were on display in “The
Unfortunate Gytt” but particularly notable in “Nell Gwynne’s” are Mrs. Corvey’s mechanical eyes, a Society product built from tiny lenses, wires, and gears, which have not only given her back her sight but also allow her to see in the dark and at a great distance.
The first part of the novella concerns Lady Beatrice’s getting to know the other prostitutes at Nell Gwyne’s while proving herself to be both a talented whore and a resourceful spy. Eventually she, Mrs. Corvey, and three sisters, the Misses Devere, are sent by the Society to be the primary entertainment at the ancestral country estate of the rather decadent Lord Basmond, who is about to sell a secret invention (an antigravity machine, as it turns out) to the highest international bidder. The women must stop the sale, recover the invention, and look into the whereabouts of the Society’s own secret agent, who has gone missing on the estate and is presumed dead or captured. It is also assumed that Lady Beatrice and the others will screw, fellate, dominate, or murder the Lord and as many of his guests as is necessary to succeed in their mission. There’s obviously a lot of sex in the story, but it isn’t all that specific, and the women’s rather off-handed, ho-hum attitude towards that part of their jobs intentionally robs it of any real erotic excitement. Indeed, the entire story is told in a delicately arch manner that subtly makes fun of all of the male characters, even the members of the Society itself. I’m not entirely sure how this story would have been received if it had been written by a male writer, but in Baker’s hands it is a resounding success.