The Red Men
Page 32
‘The world was not built,’ I said to Iona. ‘The world was calculated and it was written. It is a story and it is an equation, which is like a sum, and neither the story nor the sum will ever end.’
And either this answer satisfied her, or she put it with all the other curious things adults say. She moved on to the question of what she would dream about, if she could decide on a good dream before going to sleep, and if the dream would obey her wishes and stay good all through the night.
ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
Thanks to my agent Sarah Such for her advice, wisdom and editorial expertise, and for securing the novel a new lease of life. Thanks to Emma Barnes at Snowbooks for first publishing The Red Men. Thanks also to James Bridle who acquired the novel back when he was working at Snowbooks and whose insight into technology continues to inspire.
The idea of the Great Refusal is taken from Herbert Marcuse’s Eros and Civilisation. Bruno Bougas’ occult consultancy was inspired by Grant Morrison’s essay ‘POP MAGIC!’ reprinted in Book Of Lies: The Disinformation Guide to Magick and the Occult. The section on neurolinguistic programming draws on Douglas Rushkoff’s Coercion: Why We Listen to What ‘They’ Say.
The theory of time as a solid state was put to me in an Italian restaurant in Northampton by Alan Moore.
The Age of Spiritual Machines: When Computers Exceed Human Intelligence by Ray Kurzweil was crucial. V. S. Ramachandran’s A Brief Tour of Human Consciousness suggested the idea of an institute of temporary creativity that closes the novel and Steven Johnson’s Emergence offered one explanation behind the rise of Dr Ezekiel Cantor.
Nelson Millar is described as ‘an overweight brick’, which is a tribute-by-theft from Philip K. Dick’s A Scanner Darkly, and his Valis confirmed my suspicions about Gnosticism.
Bruno Bougas’ observation that ‘the battle has been lost, and all the good people are going crazy’ is the last line of David Denby’s review of I Heart Huckabees in the New Yorker.
Steven Pinker’s How The Mind Works, Susan Blackmore’s The Meme Machine and John R. Searle’s The Mystery of Consciousness were ransacked.
The gelatinous screens are based on work by Angela Belcher and colleagues at the University Of Texas as reported on New Scientist. com 3 May 2002.
Errors and stuff that is just plain wrong belongs to me.
I would like to thank readers of early drafts of The Red Men: Hannah Black, Sheridan Dunkley, Sophie Edwards, Gareth Ellis, Andrew Humphreys and The Idler.
Love and gratitude to my wife Cathy and children, Alice, Alfred and Florence.
NOTE ON THE DIGITAL EDITION
The Red Men was first published in 2007 and was shortlisted for the Arthur C. Clarke Award. I’ve taken the opportunity of digital publication to revise the novel, working from the penultimate set of proofs submitted to the original publisher, Snowbooks. My aim has been to trim commentary from the text, to make sentences more active, and to strike out lyrical flourishes if they were particularly distracting. The revisions were entirely my idea, born of a desire to bring greater precision to the prose.
The novel was conceived as a hybrid of the modes of literary fiction with the ideas and plotting of science fiction. I wanted to use the characters and setting we associate with literary fiction to make the interpolation of futuristic technology more amusingly dissonant, as that was the character of the times as I experienced them. You could unpick this intent any number of ways. But one product of it was over-adorned prose; this edit has been to clear away some of the literary affectations so that the science fiction can be more clearly discerned.
Some of my favourite science fiction novels have gone through numerous versions, having first been published in magazines or collated from pulp editions. Sneakily, I have also taken the opportunity to revise some of the tech to take account of recent advances, mainly in developing the haptic gestures characters use to control screens.
For reasons of pace, the chapter set on Iona has been transplanted to the beginning of the second section of the novel. Across the novel about thirteen thousand words have been cut. For more on this process of revision, see my website www.harrybravado.com.
The novel only got this second bite of the cherry thanks to the adaptation by Shynola of the first chapter into a short film, Dr Easy, produced by Warp Films and Film4. My deepest thanks and highest regard to Shynola for their work on Dr Easy and their initial vision for adapting the novel into a feature film. The production blog for Dr Easy can be found at www.blog.created-to-help-you.com and Shynola’s production diary for the feature film is www.theredmenmovie.com.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Matthew De Abaitua was born in Liverpool in 1971. After graduating from the University of East Anglia Creative Writing MA, he worked as Will Self’s amanuensis in a remote Suffolk cottage. Then he fell into writing and editing for The Idler. He wrote and presented a low-budget documentary series about British science fiction for Channel 4 called SF:UK.
His second book was a non-fiction memoir and history, The Art of Camping: The History and Practice of Sleeping Under the Stars, published in 2011 by Hamish Hamilton and Penguin. The Economist described it as one of the books of the year.
He is currently writing his next novel, ‘IF THEN’, set in a British market town of the near future and in the First World War. It features Dr Easy and a couple of minor characters from The Red Men.
He lectures in Creative Writing at Brunel University and in Writing Science Fiction at the University of Essex.
Copyright
A Gollancz eBook
Copyright © Matthew de Abaitua 2007, 2013
All rights reserved.
The right of Matthew de Abaitua to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted by him in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.
Cover image taken from the short film Dr. Easy, written and directed by Shynola. The image is reproduced with the kind permission of Warp Films Ltd and Film4, a division of Channel Four Television Corporation. All rights reserved.
First published in Great Britain in 2007 by Snowbooks Ltd.
This eBook first published in 2013 by Gollancz.
Gollancz
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A CIP catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.
ISBN 978 1 4732 0071 5
All characters and events in this publication are fictitious and any resemblance to real persons, living or dead, is purely coincidental.
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