This sort of thing goes on for page after page of the novel: the anger fresh, the language inevitably too evocative of the rages we have felt for so many decades already, a slightly didactic tone that both dulls and alarms us: because we don't want to be lectured, but at the same time we very deeply want to learn something new. In not flinching from his task of telling us what he knows, Flanagan risks telling us what we all know; but it is a risk worth taking, in the end.
Because you can never know what you know until it is said.
But what do you do with a book like this? Easy to read, goes down like Avernus; but hard to review, because it says what we fear we “know” without ever stretching into epiphany or terminus. A bit like Brian Aldiss's HARM (Interzone 210), but Aldiss's book starts where Flanagan's leaves off, in the poison air of aftermath, and arrows forward from there. So what I do with Flanagan, I put Nick Cave on the player to remind me that not all Australians are gloomy, and sit down to say something that says Read this, because it is important for all of us to keep remembering that we are still humans and that our civil lives are being stolen from us; but do not expect any miracles.
Except for some fairly dire coincidences—coincidences only really work if they look as though they had finally, just now, been noticed—the story of the Doll's doom is cleanly told. The setting is Sydney, New South Wales, in the very near future (maybe a year after the book's first publication). The Doll, whose name is Gina Davis (no connection seemingly intended with Geena Davies), is a 26-year-old pole dancer, hoarding her black earnings until she can make the down payment on a flat, a place where she can survive OK in the daze of consumption of modern Disappointment Management urban Australia, which Flanagan describes with singularly intense loathing. By a series of accidents she spends the night with a man named Tariq, who is almost immediately fingered as a terrorist. That this is a frameup, initiated by a government needing a boost in the ratings, matters not at all. The Doll immediately suffers an ultimately fatal, immensely prolonged panic attack, beautifully rendered by Flanagan, which serves to disguise from the reader an awareness—which Flanagan might legitimately hope we never achieve—that she is supernaturally short of street smarts. Indirectly, The Unknown Terrorist generalises her caught-in-the-headlights helplessness as the natural posture of any citizen focused on by the creatures who run our world; which is all to the good as a long-term Big Think—but a still small voice is almost certain to whisper into most readers’ ears that, hey, all she needs to do in the short term, in order to counter the swarm of media hype, is simply hire some hype of her own: she is sexy, young, Australian, witty; her only child was stillborn; the night before it all explodes in her face, she had actually refused to fuck the media shit who is now stitching her up as a terrorist; etc etc. A different novel would have focused on shame and counter-shame, and have read as just as dark as Flanagan's requiem jeremiad.
But we need to pass this by. The point of The Unknown Terrorist is not that another story could be told, but that any story told about the world we now pollute had might as well be this story, which does get told fast and sharp and immensely sad. All the same, all the same. One of the Doll's sharpest utterances is a counter to the truism that Power Corrupts: maybe, she says, we corrupt power. Too bad for her she is too transfixed by panic to apply the lesson. In the end there is nothing but us.
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Two Notes: It would have been good to have been able to praise Rebecca Ore's Time's Child, but somehow she seems to have skidded her tale right into a vagueish hard-sf limboland, where no character has any more affect than any other character, and worthiness is defined as an ability to work the gears of gear things. Story starts with two characters yanked by time machine out their eras—Benedetta is a peasant warrior who is on good terms with Leonardo da Vinci, and Ivar is a Viking on good terms with Loki—into a quasi-failed utopian America a few centuries hence. The two of them do a Sleeper Awakes routine with the new world, jostling it a bit; and assimilating awfully fast—this is the computer game version of The Sleeper Awakes, H.G. Wells:
"You do know how to reverse the data encryption, don't you?” [Benedetta asks Ivar]
"Of course. You use the roti3'd text of Odin's Prayer in Norse, transliterated by me into the English alphabet as the decryption key. Then you pull out the junk data I put in, which you could do if you transliterated Norse the way I do and knew where the word breaks would have been if I'd put in word breaks. Quick and dirty."
For a second, Benedetta thought that sounded too easy to break...
What is missing here is not a failure of technical plausibility, because after all Ivar is just hitting keys and stuff, I guess; what is really missing is any sense that familiarising the whole inner grammar of consciousness to an entirely new life is really any different from memorising a keyboard.
In any case, Time's Child soon sinks itself deep in Changewar riffs, with dozens of futures vying to win the time track game, and the novel ends in a tedious unwatered peneplain of untold worlds, junk data indeed.
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Ted Chiang's The Merchant and the Alchemist's Gate is hardly more than a novelette, but packs into its story-within-story structure a most meticulous lesson. What the narrator learns—what the long story he tells the traditional “mighty Calif” is meant to teach—is not simply the traditional Arabian Nights lesson that you cannot sting the gods. What he finds out by passing through the Alchemist's Gate—which is essentially a time machine set to a twenty year interval—is a lot more than that. Nobody can change the universe by going back to a terrible moment and tweaking it right, the Merchant tells the Caliph. All one can do, by the grace of the god who fixes the world, is learn better what it is that happened. All one can do is come to terms. Chiang could have conveyed this lesson as a terrible prison irony (others have); the miracle of this small wise jewel of a tale is that to come to terms with the world may have more to do with repentance, atonement, and forgiveness. Those three words are the attar of the tale, and fill its final paragraph. “That is all, but that is enough."
Copyright © 2007 John Clute
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[Back to Table of Contents]
RICHARD MORGAN—Talks About Black Man with Andrew Hedgecock
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Much has been made of the coy US title of Richard Morgan's fifth novel, and its failure to set out the book's political stall with the same clarity as its UK equivalent. But Morgan's intention to explore the tangled nexus of technology, politics and mass psychology will be apparent to any reader who dips into the book's preliminary acknowledgements, or skims its introductory quotations from political philosopher John Gray and evolutionary biologist Richard Dawkins.
The themes and ideas in Black Man intersect with those presented in Adam Curtis's recent documentary series, The Trap, which dissected the ruinous impact of distorted models of freedom and social justice on human nature in the years following World War II. But the world into which Morgan extrapolates these concerns is the early 22nd Century, an era in which Earth is striving to establish a colony on Mars and in which a new stability has been achieved with China as the dominant economic power. Meanwhile, America has been balkanised into three states—one of which is the ultra right-wing and deeply religious Jesusland.
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Morgan on the resurgence of faith and superstition in the 21st Century:
It's a terrifying trend, not least for how rapidly the tables have turned. I recently watched the BBC adaptation of Iain Banks's Crow Road, and Uncle Rory says, without a shred of irony, “Who cares about religion in this day and age?” That was an honest sentiment in 1996—only ten years ago. The story also mentions the Salman Rushdie fatwa, but that is seen as a laughable barbarism, an aberration in a world of bright secular promise. Contrast that with the bullshit we have to put up with these days. It's not just religion per se—you get the same kind of thing from otherwise apparently intellig
ent people who believe in rubbish like homeopathy, the power of crystals and the Gaia hypothesis (these people include the Prince of Wales and, apparently, John Gray, for fuck's sake). I guess there's more potential for rank stupidity in the human genome than we ever imagined. It's one thing to be ignorant: that's a circumstance that those who suffer are often powerless to change. But it's quite another to emerge from ignorance, and then choose of your own free will to sink back into the slime. Why? Because enlightenment is just to complicated for your poor ickle head?
The tendency to seek comfort in ignorance can be fought: it requires clear-sighted commitment to a set of secular humane values but everyone seems too bloody cowed or post modern to take a stand. Our very own Tony Blair, the (then) leader of a supposedly modern European state, stood up and argued schools should have a right to teach children evolution is “just a theory” and no more respectable than the oxymoron known as “creationist thought.” What's next? Re-instate prosecution for witchcraft? NHS checks to make sure your baby is not a faerie changeling? A ban on keeping black dogs as pets? Give me a fucking break!
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It is 2107 and Karl Marsalis, the black man of the title, is a Variant 13—a bioengineered soldier-assassin genetically enhanced to possess the characteristics of hunter-gatherer alpha males, the fighting ability, physical strength and aggression that have been washed away by the tides of evolution. The Thirteens (known derisively as ‘twists') were created to fight the war of the mid-21st Century, but in a period of comparative stability they are feared and detested. Marsalis avoids internment and exile to Mars by tracking down rogue Thirteens for the UN, but the cost is isolation and alienation.
The central thread of Morgan's multi-layered plot is Marsalis's hunt for a serial killer on behalf of the corporation managing the colonisation of Mars—a task he accepts as a means to liberate himself from a period of imprisonment without trial. And, as he tracks the killer through a maze of deception and manipulation, he comes to a deeper understanding of his identity and struggles against its limitations.
Morgan's portrayal of a near-future society's ambivalent attitudes to the ‘twists'—once useful, now treated with suspicion—will have clear resonances in the UK and US—two societies soon to face the challenge of reintegrating men and women ‘redesigned’ for military combat in Iraq and Afghanistan.
The narrative of Black Man is built on a foundation of intersecting themes relating to politics, power, identity and control. The book is crammed with social, political and technological speculation, but—in spite of a clear determination to provoke reflection on issues of social justice, empowerment and social cohesion—Morgan resists the urge to lecture.
He tackles race; social class; the tension between genetic determinism and learning; the blurred lines between co-operation and control; and the costs and benefit of ‘male’ and ‘female’ modes of thought and behaviour. But the issue addressed with a degree of clarity that would put the vast majority of political essayists to shame is the tension between individualism and conformity.
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Morgan on progress, power, cooperation, and conformity:
The rank arrogance of our leaders and the rank stupidity of the people who follow them—that dynamic never ceases to appall me, and I guess to some extent, all my writing reflects this; my central characters tend to be people who have little or no faith in systems of government, and whose acts are largely destructive of already existing power structures. But at the same time—because I'm not stupid—I can see that practically everything of value in human society has been built on the back of co-operative endeavour and submission to some system of authority or another.
Simply put, conformity works. It sure ain't pretty to watch, in fact until very recently it was almost always mind numbingly brutal in application—but it's the best trick we know as a species, and it has been the making of us. Black Man/Thirteen is really an attempt to plumb the depths of that contradiction, in myself and in the society I'm lucky enough to find myself a part of.
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Sometimes the themes are tackled head-on in the dialogue: "Here we are, standing in the roof garden of the cudlip success story and you're telling me no, no, you didn't take the elevator or the stairs, you just fucking flew up here all on your own, all with your own two fucking wings." [Cudlip = co-operative humans who have evolved away from the alpha male, hunter-gatherer model.]
But Morgan is too subtle to cram his ideas into a heavy-handed pseudo-Platonic dialogue. Like Stefano Benni in Margherita Dolce Vita and Janne Teller in Odin's Island, he tackles complex political ideas through the gaudy action and exhilarating unfamiliarity of fantasy genres. This is one of the characteristics Morgan admires in the work of Thomas Pynchon, a writer held in sufficient esteem to merit a name-check in the narrative. Morgan resists the temptation to speculate whether Pynchon will have given an interview by 2107.
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Morgan on Thomas Pynchon:
What runs through Pynchon's work above all else is a passionate concern for humanity as it intersects with the modern world—he examines, almost obsessively, the impact of modern technology and modern political systems ('modern’ here meaning post-Enlightenment and post-Industrial Revolution) on the human condition.
An awful lot of modern mainstream writers (and genre hacks too, come to that—think Hollywood SF) choose to view science queasily through the goggles that Mary Shelley provided us so long ago, but Pynchon is an unashamed technophile. He sees the potential of science as clearly as the inherent risks, and his viewpoint is always forward, scanning for the future.
He has a great sense of humour and isn't afraid to let it out to play. This sets him apart from most of the modern literary canon. Humour can be sadly lacking in ‘literature’ these days and reading Pynchon is a great antidote to all the po-faced angst and introspection. I'm also drawn to a political world view which pretty clearly chimes with my own, and a similar lack of inhibition about making unsubtle political points in the narrative. Last but not least, Pynchon cherishes a pulpish love of eventfulness for its own sake—in contrast to the anaemic lack of dynamic action in the novels of so many of his peers, his work overflows with chases, escapes, gun-battles, covert incursions, otherworldly visitations and lots of edgy sex. Who, with a pulse and blood that's still warm, wouldn't be drawn to all that?
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Black Man is a huge book in every sense. Some readers may balk at the density of the narrative—there are inundations of ideas, complex plot twists, fragmented narrative threads and exhausting bursts of violent action. But Richard Morgan's complex story is more than worthy of the effort it demands. Provocative, observant and irrepressibly imaginative, Black Man remixes so many genre tropes it's impossible to define it in terms of traditional labels. There were echoes of Chandler, Gibson and Ridley Scott in the mix, but there are other—more understated—harmonies too. And if the author shows a refreshing disregard for genre conventions and a flair for utterly believable extrapolation of dystopian trends, he also shows a rare and energizing belief in the ultimate potential of people and their technologies.
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Morgan on cooking with additives:
Like any decent writer, as opposed to those who were only ever in it for the money, I always wrote for myself. I was trying to produce what I wanted to read—hardboiled SF, future noir, whatever you want to call it. I was reading a lot of American crime fiction as well, which I loved, but couldn't see myself writing. I thought the real pay-off had always been in Gibson's mix of low-life, hi-tech and weary sense that whatever wonders science could come up with, humans would still see their way to fucking it up with their chimpanzee ways.
But by then Gibson had given up on hard-boiled and was moving steadily towards a sort of west coast metropolitan media cool ethos, and evidently no one was ever going to make Bladerunner 2. That left me at a bit of a loose end, entertainment-wise. Cyberpunk was becoming increasingly self-referential and coy, the average ag
e of its protagonists locked in a dizzying tail-spin down towards pubescence—nothing for me there. I just wasn't interested in the gosh-wow innocence and powerlessness it implied. So I grabbed the original noir kit off the shelf and started cooking up with additives from all the old school SF I'd grown up reading. In some senses, the technological side of Altered Carbon owes as much to old school writers like Robert Sheckley, Poul Anderson and Bob Shaw as it ever did to cyberpunk.
Copyright © 2007 Andrew Hedgecock
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[Back to Table of Contents]
BOOKZONE—More of the Latest Books Reviewed
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The Prefect
Alastair Reynolds
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A surprising amount of hard SF is essentially structured as a mystery: something has disturbed the familiar ordering of the universe and in the course of the novel we are presented with a series of questions and answers that eventually build into the answer to the central puzzle. It makes sense, therefore, to use the machinery of the crime story to tell us about the hard SF mystery, which is exactly what Alastair Reynolds has done in his latest venture into the universe he first visited in Revelation Space. There is a murder; there is a policeman who doggedly investigates despite the obstructions of his superiors; there is the patient working out of means and motive; there is the way that one set of investigations uncovers a bigger threat; there are the murky political machinations of a shadowy super-criminal; and there is the way that the plot resolves into a race against time to prevent further murders.
The whole noir alphabet is here, but of course, this is hard SF so the scale has to be different. The small and personal issue of a moral man in an immoral world cannot bear the freight of epic vision and technological grandeur that hard SF demands. So, for instance, the murder that starts this plot on its inexorable course is not of one person but of a habitat, several hundred souls dead in an instant. And our policeman is not some rough-and-ready local cop but a Prefect in a highly sophisticated force charged primarily with ensuring the smooth political running of the myriad of independent habitats that constitute the Glitter Band. (Parenthetically, let me pause to note if not decry the habit of inserting contemporary in-jokes into far-future epics. It's hard enough to have the band of habitats encircling the planet Yellowstone named after Gary Glitter's backing group, but to then find that a policeman, Prefect Tom Dreyfus's right-hand man, is literally a transformed pig is just a little too much.)
Interzone Science Fiction and Fantasy Magazine #211 Page 17