D.'s work is coolly observed, with a meticulous eye for background detail and subtle nuance. His narrators are usually anonymous, their cynical inspection of organisation and situation infused with a distaste or disdain for their circumstances that some of the other characters find extremely annoying, if not ideologically suspect. The world they find themselves trapped in is a maze of secret histories and occult organisations, entities that overlap with the world we live in, hiding beneath the surface like a freezing cold pond beneath a layer of thin ice. And hovering in the background over it all is a vast grey pall, a nightmare horror of impending Gotterdammerung; for the great game of D.'s protagonists, breezily (or depressively) cynical though they might be, is always played for the ultimate stakes.
D. is, of course Len Deighton, perhaps more commonly regarded as one of the greatest masters of the spy thriller (who, with such works as The Ipcress File, Funeral in Berlin, and Billion Dollar Brain, is considered by some critics to be the equal or even the superior of John Le Carre). And the background to his novels, the world that infused them with tension and provided the stakes for the desperate gambles he described, was the Cold War.
The Cold War came to an abrupt end in 1991 with the Soviet coup that led to the breakup of the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics. Today, just a decade or so after it ended with a whimper instead of a bang, it is increasingly hard to remember just what it was like to live with a face-off of such enormous proportions between two powers that represented the Manichean opposites of industrial civilization. But those of us who grew up during the Cold War have been as permanently scarred by it as any child who watched the events of 9/11 live on CNN; because the Cold War applied a thin varnish of horror atop any fictional exploration of diplomacy, spying, or warfare.
Going back to the origins of the Cold War is a difficult task; its roots grew from a variety of sources in the fertile, blood-drenched soil of the early twentieth century. What is not in question is the fact that, by 1968, the United States of America and the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics had assembled–and pointed at each other on a hair-trigger–arsenals unprecedented in the history of warfare. During the First World War, all combatants combined expended on the order of eleven million tons of explosives. This was equivalent to the payload of a single B-52 bomber or Titan-2 ICBM of the middle period Cold War, before smart weapons and precision guidance systems began to replace the headsman's axe of deterrence with a surgeon's scalpel.
Many of the children of the Cold War era grew up doubting that they'd ever reach adulthood. Annihilation beckoned, in an apocalyptic guise that was nevertheless anatomised far more precisely than the visions of any mediaeval mystic. We knew the serial numbers, megatonnage, accuracy, flight characteristics, and blast effects of our nemesis, lurking sleeplessly beneath the waves or brooding in launcher-erectors scattered across the tundra under a never-setting sun.
One of Len Deighton's skills was that he infused the personal dilemmas and conflicts of his protagonists–little men and women trapped in seedy, poorly paid bureaucratic posts–with the shadow of the apocalypse. Cold War spy fiction was in some respects the ultimate expression of horror fiction, for the nightmare was real. There's no need to hint darkly about forbidden knowledge and elder gods, sleeping in drowned cities, who might inflict unspeakable horrors, when you live in an age where the wrong coded message can leave you blinded with your skin half-burned away in the wreckage of a dead city barely an hour later. The nightmare was very real indeed, and arguably it has never ended; but we have become blasé about it, tap dancing on the edge of the abyss because the great motor of ideological rivalry that powered the Cold War has broken down and we're all business partners in globalisation today and forevermore.
Spy fiction, like horror fiction, relies on the mundanity of the protagonist to draw the reader into proximity with the unnatural and occult horrors of alienation. We are invited to identify with the likes of Harry Palmer (as Deighton named him in the film of The Ipcress File–significantly, he has no name in the original novel), a low-level civil servant whose occasional duties, in between filing paperwork, involve visiting nuclear test sites, shepherding weapons scientists, and hunting agents of the alien power. Slowly sucked into a ghastly plot by the slow revelation of occult, secret knowledge, Palmer is bewildered and confused and forced to confront his worst fears in a world that the novelist slowly discloses to be under a nightmarish threat from beyond the consensus reality imposed by our society.
We've also become blasé about the apocalyptic nightmares of an earlier age.
Howard Phillips Lovecraft was one of the great pioneers of the spy thriller. Born in 1890, in Providence, Rhode Island, he was the child of well-off parents. However, when Lovecraft was three years old, his father was institutionalized, and Lovecraft suffered a variety of psychosomatic ailments that prevented him attending school. Despite these problems he was self-educated, taking an interest in science as well as literature. After a nervous breakdown in 1908, Lovecraft lived at home with his increasingly deranged mother. Writing rapidly, he became a self-published amateur journalist, and in the late nineteen-teens began to send out his stories for publication.
Lovecraft brought a cool, analytical eye to the pursuit of espionage. In his writings we frequently encounter the archetype of the scholar as spy, digging feverishly through libraries and colossal archives in search of the lost key to the cryptic puzzle. In At the Mountains of Madness Lovecraft prefigures the late twentieth-century techno-thriller brilliantly, with his tale of highly trained agents of an imperial power infiltrating a forbidden icy continent–not a million miles from the brooding ice plateaux of Siberia–in search of secret knowledge, at peril of death at the hands of the vigilant defenders of the new order should they come to their attention. Echoes of Lovecraft's obsessions abound in the more developed thrillers of the Cold War, from Alistair MacLean's Ice Station Zebra to the fervidly luscious garden of biological horrors in Ian Fleming's You Only Live Twice (the book, not the film).
Are we confused yet? Just in case, I'll summarise. Len Deighton was not an author of spy thrillers but of horror, because all Cold War–era spy thrillers rely on the existential horror of nuclear annihilation to supply a frisson of terror that raises the stakes of the games their otherwise mundane characters play. And in contrast, H. P. Lovecraft was not an author of horror stories–or not entirely–for many of his preoccupations, from the obsessive collection of secret information to the infiltration and mapping of territories controlled by the alien, are at heart the obsessions of the thriller writer.
(Before I stretch this analogy to breaking point, I am compelled to admit that there is a difference between the function and purpose of horror and spy fiction. Horror fiction allows us to confront and sublimate our fears of an uncontrollable universe, but the threat verges on the overwhelming and may indeed carry the protagonists away. Spy fiction in contrast allows us to believe for a while that the little people can, by obtaining secret knowledge, acquire some leverage over the overwhelming threats that permeate their universe. So, although the basic dynamics of both horror and spy fiction rely on the same sense of huge, impersonal forces outside the control of the protagonists, who might initially be ignorant of them, the outcome is often different.)
The Game of Spy and Dagon
The fictional spy is very unlike the spy in real life.
Every so often, Western intelligence agencies advertise in public for recruits. The profile of the professional agent is that of a government employee: quiet, diligent, punctilious about filling out forms and obeying procedures. Far from having a mysterious past, prospective employees of secret agencies have to provide a complete and exhaustive list of everywhere they've ever lived, and their background will be picked over in detail before the appointment is approved. Far from being men of action, the majority of intelligence community staff are office workers, a narrow majority of them female, and they almost certainly never handle weapons in the line of duty.
The picture changes when you contemplate non-Western organisations such as the Iraqi Mukhabarat, agencies of states that contemplate internal subversion with the cold eye of totalitarian zeal. It changes in time of open warfare, and it changes again when you examine Western agencies concerned with counter-terrorism and organised crime duties, such as the FBI. But the key insight to bear in mind is that in reality, the James Bond of the movie series (and, to a lesser extent, Ian Fleming's original literary wishfulfillment vehicle) is an almost perfect photographic negative of the real intelligence agent. He is everything that a real spy cannot afford to be–flashy, violent, high-rolling, glamorous, the centre of attention.
So why are spies such fascinating targets of fiction?
Answer: because they know (or want to know) what's really going on.
We live in an age of uncertainty, complexity, and paranoia. Uncertainty because, for the past few centuries, there has simply been far too much knowledge out there for any one human being to get their brains around; we are all ignorant, if you dig far enough. Complexity multiplies because our areas of ignorance and our blind spots intersect in unpredictable ways–the most benign projects have unforeseen side effects. And paranoia is the emergent spawn of those side effects; the world is not as it seems, and indeed we may never be able to comprehend the world-as-it-is, without the comforting filter lenses of our preconceptions and our mass media.
It is therefore both an attractive proposition (and a frightening one) to believe that someone, somewhere, knows the score. It's attractive when we think they're on our side, defenders of our values and our lives, fighting in the great and secret wars to ensure that our cosy creature comforts survive undisturbed. And it's terrifying when we fear that maybe, just maybe, someone out there who doesn't like us, or even doesn't think like us, has got their hands on the control yoke of an airliner and is aiming dead for the twin towers of our Weltanschauung.
That's not just a tasteless metaphor, by the way. One comment that surfaced a lot in the second half of September 2001 was, "I thought at first it was like something out of a Tom Clancy novel." Tom Clancy is one of the leading exponents of the mega-scale techno-thriller, the bigger-is-better offshoot of the spy novel and its obsession with gadgets and tools of the trade. For an instant, the fabric of the real world seemed to have been ripped aside and replaced with a terrible fiction–and indeed, the 9/11 hijackers thought that they were sending a message to the hated West. It was a message that shocked and horrified (and maimed and murdered); and part of the reason it was so painful was that it struck at our assumption that we knew the score, that we knew what was going on and that our defenders were awake and on the ball.
Sometimes the paranoia can strike too close to home: writing in the near future is a perilous proposition. I began writing "The Atrocity Archive" in 1999. For Bob's trip to California and his run-in with some frighteningly out-of-their-depth terrorists, I went digging and came back with an appropriately obscure but fanatical and unpleasant gang who might, conceivably, be planning an atrocity on American soil. But by the time the novel first came into print in the pages of the Scottish magazine Spectrum SF, it was late 2001–and editor Paul Fraser quite sensibly suggested I replace Osama bin Laden and al-Qaida with something slightly more obscure on the grounds that, with USAF bombers already pounding the hills of Afghanistan, bin Laden didn't appear to have much of a future. (In retrospect, I got off lightly. Who can forget the wave of late-eighties cold war thrillers set in the USSR in the mid-nineties?)
As for the war in Iraq, I make no apologies. The novel was written in 1999–2000, and should be taken as set in 2001, before the events of 9/11.
On the other side of the narrative fence from our friend the spy stands our enemy, the destructive Other. The Other comes in a variety of guises, but always means us ill in one form or another. It might be that the Other wants to conquer and subjugate us, enforce our obedience to a religion, ideology, or monarch. Or the Other might simply want to eat our brains, or crack our bones and suck our marrow. Whatever the goal, it is defined in terms profoundly incompatible with our comfort and safety. Sometimes ideology and alienation overlap in allegory; the 1950s classic Invasion of the Body Snatchers was superficially about invading aliens, but also served as a close metaphor for Cold War paranoia about Communist infiltrators. Meanwhile, The Stepford Wives tore away the mask of an outwardly utopian vision of a conformist community with everyone in their place to reveal a toe-curlingly unpleasant process of alienation worming its way beneath the skin.
There is this about horror: it allows us to confront our fears, dragging the bogeyman out of the closet to loom over us in his most intimidating guise. (The outcome of the confrontation depends on whether the horror is a classical tragedy–in which the protagonist suffers their downfall because of a flawed character and hubris–or a comedy–in which they are redeemed; but the protagonist is still tainted with the brush of horror.)
And there is this about spy fiction: it allows us to confront our ignorance, by groping warily around the elephant of politics until it blows its trumpet, or perhaps stamps one gigantic foot on the protagonist's head. (Again, the outcome depends on the tragicomic roots of the narrative–but it still all hinges on ignorance and revelation.)
And now for something completely different.
HAX0R DUD35
The fictional hacker is not a real computer geek but a four-thousand-year-old archetype.
There have been trickster-gods running around administering wedgies to authority figures ever since the first adolescent apprentice took the piss out of his elder shaman. From Anansi the spider god through to the Norse trickster-god Loki, the trickster has been the expression of whimsy, curiosity, and occasional malice. Our first detailed knowledge of polytheistic religions comes from the first agricultural civilizations to leave written records behind. Early agricultural societies were conservative to a degree that seems bizarrely alien to us today: they balanced on a Malthusian knife-edge between productive plenitude and the starvation of famine. Change was deeply suspicious because it meant, as often as not, crop failure and starvation. The trickster-god is the one who makes a constant out of change; stealing fire, stealing language, stealing just about anything that isn't nailed down and quite a lot that is, he brought our ancestors most of their innovations.
Let's fast-forward to the present day, where a bewildering rate of change is actually a norm that can be counted upon to continue for decades or centuries. While we don't have trickster-gods and death-gods and crop-gods anymore, we do have narratives that serve the purpose of accustoming us to the idea of almost magical social dislocation.
The hot core of recent technological innovation–"recent" meaning since 1970–has been the computer industry. Driven by the inevitable progression of Moore's law, we've seen enormous breakthroughs, the likes of which haven't been seen since the rapid development of aviation between 1910 and 1950. Computers are a pervasive technology, and wherever they go they leave a sluglike trail of connectedness, information-dense and meaning-rich with the distillate of our minds. Unlike earlier technologies computers are general-purpose tools that can be reconfigured to do different tasks at the press of a button: one moment it's a dessert topping, the next it's a floor wax (or a spreadsheet, or an immersive game).
Hackers, in fiction, are the trickster-gods of the realm of computing. They go where they're not supposed to, steal anything that isn't nailed down (or rather, written down in ink on parchment with a quill plucked from a white goose), and boast about it. There is a refreshing immediacy to their activities because they move at the speed of light, cropping up anywhere they wish.
In reality, nothing could be further from the truth. Real hackers–computer programmers in the sense that the word was coined at MIT in the 1960s–are meticulous, intelligent, mathematically and linguistically inclined obsessives. Far from diving in and out of your bank account details, they're more likely to spend months working on a mathematical model of an abstraction that only
another hacker would understand, or realise was an elaborate intellectual joke. All engineering disciplines generate a shared culture and jargon. The computing field has generated a remarkably rich jargon, and a shared culture to go with it. In some cases the sense of tradition is astonishingly strong; there are clubs and mutual support groups, for instance, for those people who choose to lovingly nurse along the twenty-year-old minicomputers they rescued from scrapheaps, rather than abandon them and move what software they can to a new generation of hardware.
At the other end of the spectrum are the script kiddies and warez dudes, the orcish adolescent otaku who trash other people's work machines and try to take over chat networks in a fit of asocial misspelled pique. These are the real and mildly destructive hackers who generate most of the newspaper headlines and outrage–tweaking the codebase of moronic email viruses, hanging out online and moaning endlessly, swallowing the image reflected back at them by the magic mirror of the tabloid press.
But if we return for a moment to the fictional hacker, not only do we discover the archetype of the trickster-god lurking just round the corner, but we also discern the outline of our spy/horror protagonist hunched over their keyboard, trying to dig down into the network of dreams and fears to understand what's really going on.
Every science-fictional depiction of a hacker at work seems to be about pulling away the rug to reveal a squirming mass of icky truths hiding beneath the carpet of reality. From John M. Ford's Web of Angels onward, we've had hackers exploiting networks to find the truth about what's really going on. Sometimes the hacker archetype overlaps with the guy-with-a-gun (as in Ken MacLeod's The Star Fraction or William Gibson's Johnny Mnemonic), or the gamer-with-a-virtual-gun (in film, Mamoru Oshii's Avalon), or even both (Hiro Protagonist, in Neal Stephenson's Snow Crash). Mao remarked, "power grows from the barrel of a gun"–both in real life and in fiction–and if guns are about power, then hacking is about secret knowledge, and knowledge is also power. In fact, when you get down to it, what the fictional hacker has come to symbolize is not that far away from the fictional spy–or the nameless narrator of one of H. P. Lovecraft's strange tales of exploration and alienation.
The Atrocity Archives Page 33