Author: Chris

Ancillary Justice by Ann Leckie

Ancillary Justice‘Boy or girl?’ is the first question we ask when we hear about the birth of a baby and, when we hear the answer, we feel that we have begun the process of getting to know the baby as a person. Indeed we have to know the answer in order to be able to refer to the baby as a person at all and stop saying ‘it’, for in English we don’t have a pronoun that denotes personhood without also specifying gender.

Reading Ann Leckie’s Ancillary Justice, and finding that every new character seemed to be referred to as ‘she’, I began by assuming that all the characters were women or girls.  I fairly soon learnt that this wasn’t necessarily the case for the story’s narrator was using a language whose pronouns (as in modern Turkish) didn’t distinguish genders.  (We learn this because the narrator refers to her anxiety about speaking in other languages where pronouns do make gender, and other, distinctions.)  At this point I concluded that all would soon become clear and that I would learn the ‘true’ gender of the various characters who had so far all been referred to as ‘she’.

This assumption, though, was also confounded. We are never told. And this proves to be an interesting and powerful lesson, for it demonstrates that it is in fact possible to get to know a character, identify with a character, like or dislike a character without knowing whether that character has a vagina or a penis.  (Just as we can get to know characters without actually seeing their faces.)

* * *

The choice of narrator is another bold move. Justice of Toren is not a human being but a sentient spaceship. However, as Justice of Toren One Esk, it is also an ancillary, one of an army of captured enemies whose minds have been wiped clean so that their brains and bodies can become adjuncts of Justice of Toren itself. (They are also known as ‘corpse soldiers’).  We have a narrator therefore who is one person and many people all at once, and is capable of being in many different places at the same time.

This is pretty neat from a purely story-telling point of view because it allows the author to exploit the advantages of having a first-person narrator who is part of the action, while simultaneously having many of the benefits of a traditional omniscient narrator. To make this even more clever, Justice of Toren is able to monitor physiological data even from characters not directly under her control, and is therefore able to infer a great deal about what other people are thinking or feeling.

But the fragmented nature of the narrator is more than just a story-telling device, for one of the themes of this book is the split and divided nature of human experience. (Even a single human individual, it is noted at one point, is not much more really than a loose coalition of disparate elements, held together by a convenient narrative.) The narrator/main protagonist (herself reduced, in the most recent strand of the plot, to occupying a single body) finds herself up against a powerful antagonist who has countless bodies but who is radically divided against herself, simultaneously knowing things and denying herself knowledge of them. Civilisation itself, one character suggests, is built on this kind of splitting:

luxury always comes at someone else’s expense. One of the many advantages of civilization is that one doesn’t generally have to see that, if one doesn’t wish.

* * *

Another kind of ‘not knowing’ that this book explores is not knowing the future, not ever really being able to know what the consequences of our actions may be. The Radch civilisation, with which this book principally deals, is one in which people are given to divination by throwing handfuls of special discs and studying the way they fall, and this becomes a recurring metaphor for human action: we have no choice but to make throws, but we cannot ultimately control the way our throws will fall. So where does this leave us when making choices? How do we decide what is right or wrong, when we don’t know what the consequences may be? Is it really possible to base a decision on the rightness or wrongness of an act on calculations as to the likely outcomes, or are some acts simply the right thing or wrong thing to do regardless of their subsequent costs and benefits? The questions are not expressed in the dry language I’ve just used, but they are very much alive throughout a book in which most of the main characters, including the narrator, are in some way complicit in atrocity. Indeed the narrator’s very existence as a corpse soldier is itself the result of atrocity.

There are no straightforward good guys and bad guys in this book and the twists in the story are not simply clever plot tricks, but again and again invite the reader to reconsider the moral categories they have been applying to events.

* * *

The society described in this book is an interstellar civilisation thousands of years in the future. It is not just its language that makes no gender distinctions. As far as I could tell, such distinctions are no more significant in Radch society than, say, hair colour is in ours. I think this is not only interesting but actually realistic. It seems to me that biological differences between men and women are pretty important in pre-modern and pre-technological societies (the empirical evidence for this being the sharp distinctions in gender roles that occur in all such societies) but become progressively less so as technological advance reduces the importance of the human body vis-à-vis the human mind.

In other respects, though, Radch society has made rather less progress in shaking off the past. Thousands of years into the future it may be, interstellar gateways and sentient starships it may have, but with its powerful ‘houses’, its ruthless absolute ruler, its polytheistic idols and its aggressive expansionism, it resembles ancient Rome. Indeed, preoccupied as it is with status and territory (high/low, us/them), Radch society is not so very different, in its essence, from a troop of chimpanzees. I fear this may be realistic too though I certainly hope not. The book itself includes reformers and rebels, but does not hold out very much hope of truly radical change in the structure of society. The impulse to modify and reform and the impulse to maintain, control and expand, the book seems to argue, are just two the opposite sides of one those discs that the citizens of Radch use for divination.

* * *

The nature of the plot makes it hard to say much about the story without immediately introducing spoilers. Suffice to say that this book isn’t just full of clever ideas, but also makes you want to keep turning the pages. The characters are interesting and multi-dimensional, the unexpected events frequent.  As a general rule, I’m not a great enthusiast for the space opera form of SF, but this is the best new SF book I’ve read in quite a long time.

New cover for The Holy Machine

New Holy Machine cover

This is the striking new cover for a reissue of The Holy Machine which will be available from early December from Corvus.   Corvus hope, as I do, that it will draw the attention of people who enjoyed Dark Eden, but haven’t yet come across this, my first novel.  There’s more information about the book here, and some thoughts on its history here.

As well as paperback and ebook, The Holy Machine is also available as an audiobook, narrated by John Banks.

Rings and mead halls

I enjoyed hearing the late Seamus Heaney reading his translation of Beowulf on the radio the other week.  There’s something wonderfully taut and muscular about the language of this epic poem.

One phrase stuck in my mind.  A good king is described as a ‘ring giver’.   As to where the rings come from the authors of Beowulf are completely unabashed.  A good king wrecks the mead halls of other kings and extracts tribute from their people.

Nothing very much has changed.  Political leaders are still judged by whether or not they have made us better off, and, though we’re a lot more squeamish  these days about where wealth comes from, it still has to come from somewhere.  As a character observes in Ann Leckie’s excellent novel Ancillary Justice, ‘luxury always comes at someone else’s expense.   One of the many advantages of civilization is that one doesn’t generally have to see that, if one doesn’t wish.’

Other people’s mead halls are still being wrecked to provide rings for the supporters of the powerful, but recent news items remind me that there are always additional options: stealing from the poor, stealing from previous generations (which is what is really happening when publicly owned resources are sold off at prices far below their real value) and of course stealing from our descendants, which is what is being done when efforts at mitigating climate change are dismissed as being too costly.

The infinite ocean

“I was like a boy playing on the sea-shore and diverting myself now and then finding a smoother pebble or a prettier shell than ordinary,” Newton said, “whilst the great ocean of truth lay all undiscovered before me.”

The thought that has been striking me lately is that it will always be so, no matter how fast or how far our human knowledge expands.

The rapidity of that expansion might deceive us into thinking that we are crossing the ocean and will some day come to its far edge.  But isn’t that like believing that, with a powerful enough computer, we could reach the end of the Mandelbrot set, and come to a place where, no matter how high the magnification was turned up, those new forms wouldn’t keep emerging from around the margins of the old ones?

Free audio version of ‘Our Land’

A free audio version of my story ‘Our Land’ here, really beautifully narrated by Scott Barclay (accents and everything) in Dark Fiction magazine.

Also free stories by Hal Duncan, Chloe Yates and Den Patrick.

‘Our Land’ is included in the short story collection The Peacock Cloak, published earlier this year.

There is such a thing as grey

Nice piece by Tom Holland here reviewing ‘An Atheist’s history of belief’.

I find the black and white way in which religion is currently discussed really depressing. (For instances of what I mean see some of the comments below the piece).

There are so many more options, for Christ’s sake*, than ‘It’s all complete bollocks’ and ‘It’s all literally true’.  And both of those two are so dull.

*Or for Dawkin’s sake, if you prefer to swear by a new messiah.

Climate Wars by Gwynne Dyer

Dyer Climate Wars coverWhile the political class still appear to give a very low priority to the problems that will be caused by climate change, the military are already planning for them.  The following quotation, cited in this book, is from a federally funded study called National Security and Climate Change, published in 2007.  Retired generals and admirals from all four of America’s armed services were invited to comment on the the security aspects of climate change.   This observation is from a Marine Corps general:

We will pay for this one way or another.  We will pay to reduce greenhouse-gas emissions today, and we’ll have to take an economic hit of some kind.  Or we will pay the price later in military terms.  And that will involve human lives.

Conflicts occur when different groups of people are competing for scarce resources.   As climate change plays out, areas of the world that can now feed themselves will no longer be able to do so, in some cases because of flooding (for example Bangladesh) in others  because of low rainfall (southern Europe and much of Africa, China and central America), in some cases because the loss of mountain glaciers mean that rivers will run dry in the summer (Pakistan and California are both dependant on glacial meltwater to irrigate their farms.)   This will lead to pressure on land (China, for instance, might resurrect land claims in Siberia), and disputes over water. (What would Egypt do if countries upstream were to divert the waters of the Nile?  What would happen if India diverted more water from the Indus, on which Pakistan depends?)  It will also lead to huge migrations across the world in which the still relatively viable countries will either have to seal off their borders, or face an influx of climate refugges.  (How will the people of Africa react when they are starving and the North won’t let them in, even though it caused the problem in the first place?)

One of the strengths of Dyer’s book (the second book with this same title that I’ve recently read) is that he offers scenarios set at various dates in the twentieth century that illustrate the kinds of conflicts that would occur.   Another is the clear, bold way it’s written, interspersed with interview material that is woven into the overall narrative.   It is a fairly grim read but a very engaging one nevertheless.

Dyer makes a number of arresting points.   One of these is that as conflict increases, the chances of collective global action to address the underlying cause  will dwindle to zero.  Another is that climate change is itself only one of a series of global challenges that lie ahead of us for the forseeable future: the size of the human population, and its expectations, are pushing the planet’s resources to their limits, and there’s no longer any slack.

Dyer’s concluding message, one that he knows is controversial, is that we aren’t going to be able to cut carbon emissions in time – we’ve simply left it too late – and that, in the short term at least, there are going to have to be some technical fixes which will either extract carbon dioxide from the atmosphere, or reduce the amount of sunlight reaching the surface of the Earth.

There are two reasons why this is controversial.  One is that it involves tinkering with some very fundamental things that we don’t fully understand.   (Dyer’s answer is that it’s a bit late to start worrying about that now.  We’ve already tinkered massively, and we’ve long since passed the point where we can simply hand the controls of spaceship Earth back to Mother Nature.)  The other is that it presents a moral hazard: as soon as we get a whiff of a technical fix we’ll stop even trying to address the real underlying problem.  Dyer acknowledges this danger – he’s already argued earlier in the book that human beings always push things to their limits – but what he seems to be saying is that, if we want to avoid the tipping point where negative feedback loops will send global warming spiralling upwards, we really don’t have much choice.

The Darwinian evolution of true stories

I very much enjoyed the documentary film Searching for Sugar Man.  It’s about a Detroit singer-songwriter called called Sixto Rodriguez who records a couple of albums which fail to sell, and moves onto other things, completely unaware that within a strange cultural bubble on another continent, young white liberalish apartheid-era South Africans have come to regard him as an iconic musical figure.

Within that bubble everyone has his records, everyone plays his music at parties, everyone knows his name, and, just as he is unaware of them, they themselves are unaware that their enthusiasm is a purely local thing and assume that he is up there with Bob Dylan, James Taylor or Joni Mitchell.   As to why he only made two records, his South African fans  believe that he committed suicide in a very spectacular way, in front of a concert audience.

Assuming it’s true that he really had no idea of his South African following, Rodriguez must have been badly ripped off.   I sometimes find out that my stories have been translated and printed without my permission in various small magazines, and that’s annoying, but I’d be very angry indeed if I discovered that my actual books were selling well in a country where I didn’t even know they’d been published.   Rodriguez, however, came over as untroubled by this side of things and seemed unwilling to express any regret at all about the life that he’d actually lived, not as a famous musician but a worker in the construction industry.

When finally put in touch with his South African fans, he was clearly pleased to have large audiences filling up concert halls for him across South Africa, but what came over was pleasure that people wanted to listen to him, rather than excitement at stardom and fame.   As a writer I know that need to be heard – I think it’s quite distinct from the  desire to be lauded – and I found this part of the film extremely moving.

But I found it interesting too to think about what this movie told us, partly intentionally and partly not, about how ‘true stories’ are made.   One ‘true story’, the lurid story about Rodrigues’ on-stage suicide, was clearly completely false – the man is alive to this day – but why did it gain currency in the first place?  A Darwinian process must surely occur in which many rumours are generated and a few take root and become accepted as true when they meet some kind of need – in this case a need to resolve a puzzle – rather as some new variant of finch might find itself occupying some as-yet unfilled niche.

The other ‘true story’ is the film itself.  I see (from Wikipedia, which will probably prevent  a story quite like this from ever happening again) that some quite important facts were missed out of it.  Rodriguez was actually also popular in Australia and he did two tours of the country in 1979 and 1981.  I can see why this wasn’t included.  Something must be left out in order to make a 2 hour movie out of a life, and to fit that life into some more universal story (in this case the one where we imagine we are alone and then find we are loved and cared about) which a movie audience will enjoy and relate to.

But justifiable though it may be, its ommission represents another manifestation of the same Darwinian process whereby stories are shaped and changed to meet the needs of their listeners and their tellers.

Burgerisation

I’m always troubled by the music videos I have to watch on my annual visit to the gym.  They seem to be simultaneously pornographic and narcissistic: ‘I am an object of immense desire,’ the performers seem to pout, ‘and that single fact utterly absorbs and obsesses me’.   This is true of the semi-naked female performers, but it’s true in another way of the supercool male gangster types with their impassive faces, so sure of their own power that nothing can move or impress them.

This article speaks of ‘pornification’ in connection with music videos, and it’s a good word for it (in my novel Marcher I actually invented a musical genre called pornopop to try and capture the same phenomenon), but I suggest pornification is a part of an even wider process which you might call burgerisation.

A McDonalds-type burger, it seems to me, is a food from which everything has been stripped except the things that we actively crave for.  Never mind subtle flavour or variety, the burger homes ruthlessly in on the basic ingredients which our evolutionary history has wired us up to find irrestistible, notably salt and fat.  For why bother with the irrelevant detail?  Not only will it put up the production costs but it will dangerously delay the moment of gratification for fickle consumers, who are always in danger of wandering off to other less challenging sources of pleasure.

And so with the music videos.  Stories of tenderness and romance have been stripped away and the message pared down until it as close as possible to the primitive templates of desire – desire for sex and for control – that are hardwired into our brains.  Why bother with anything that actually has to be listened to?  Why bother with anything that deals with the messiness of actual human relationships?

Even the gym itself, in a way, represents a kind of burgerisation, for it provides pure exercise from which everything else has been clinically removed: the pleasures of productive physical work, the joys of the open air, the sights and sounds you experience when you go for a run, or a walk, or ride a bike.  My son once pointed out to me a glass-fronted gym where the exercise machines on the first floor (with their dials and heart rate monitors) were accessed via an escalator, presumably to save the few seconds of unscheduled exercise that would be involved in using stairs.

That really is the essence of burgerisation.  Like a call centre which has refined all possible queries to just six options, a burgerised product is quite deliberately isolated from the world’s richness, and from its own origins, in order to meet a few basic core objectives with the maximum efficiency and the minimum of unnecessary cost.

No wonder I stay away from that gym.

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