Technical metaphors -- A Scanner Darkly

Sometimes, the locus of meaning in science fiction isn't in the "world-building", the broad setting and social and idealogical conditions, but in the specific technologies applied, which can appear almost incidental. 

Consider Philip K Dick's A Scanner Darkly. It's about addiction, of course, and also dissociation and paranoia, but in the glimmer of the scanner we also trace the scramble suit. The scramble suit reads at first like an interesting gadget, a narrative convenience. It encloses the wearer, flashing a blurred sequence of faces and features at high frequency, scrambling the identity of the wearer, making them anonymous, unidentifiable. Convenient, because the identity of the undercover officer is perfectly concealed, even from other police.

But I'm reminded of something I thought of reading this essay, "Philip K. Dick and the Fake Humans", because in the scramble suit you're a fake person because you're concealed, digitized, anonymized, like any number of pseudo-persons who might be online right now generating posts and tweets and instas and reels, pushing copy-and-paste opinions and misinformation that may or may not come from a "real" person or support a real, human agenda. And so, as the cop in the scramble suit can look at the junkie in the scanner and start to forget that they're the same person because they're pretending to be different people all the time, we're not wholly authentic individuals any more; not caught between the real and the fake but increasingly uncertain and paralyzed by not being able to tell the difference.

A Scanner Darkly is much concerned with this dissociation and its corollary, paranoia, and the incoherent patterns of thought that accompany it, but it doesn't spend any time considering the reasons for addiction, only the technical consequences. Substance D, the fictional drug with an unknown source, breaks down the connection between the hemispheres of the brain, bifurcating the individual mind, and so throughout the book we have these mirror-pairs trapped in the darkened scanner: cops and dealers, straights and junkies.

If there's a hint for the reason for Substance D, it lies in the gap between our technological, mediated, scrambled selves and a longing for connection and authenticity we can no longer achieve.

The long journey: Tad William's Memory, Sorrow, and Thorn

When I posted on the doorstopper fantasy over two years ago, the book I had before me was Tad Williams's The Dragonbone Chair, the first book of Memory, Sorrow, and Thorn. Now, I've just finished To Green Angel Tower, the last book of the trilogy. The reading experience says something about the fantasy series, as a genre and a form, and also how reading is itself an undertaking that changes over time.

For the sake of accuracy, I've read plenty of other books since starting MST, and part of the pleasure of a long series is setting each volume aside, then beginning again, reprising the synopsis, leaving and then returning to the fictional world, observing the changes in characters, speculating on the long threads of plot that are held over. But as MST progresses, the pace slackens, and reading TGAT in particular was a plodding business, sometimes only a few pages a night. When I was younger, I was bolder about skimming long books, but as a consequence my recollection of first reading TGAT was somewhat sketchy and incomplete. This time, I took the time—but the time, as it were, also took something out of me. There was more to learn reading at a measured pace, but it was also obvious how much of the text was filler, spacing, incidents that replicated previous incidents, not to mention the sheer spatial requirement of journeying out and back across the map of Osten Ard.

The slower read gives us more time to reflect on the themes as well as the action—and though Williams is a fine writer of action, there is too much of it. First time round, MST can be read as a classic bildungsroman, tracing the journey of its younger characters from late childhood through to adulthood, and indeed challenging some of the conventions, since sex as well as romance arise, as well as the usual responsibilities and the adult need to confront and overcome grief and anger. But the other theme that becomes evident, woven into and reprised throughout the long journey outwards and back to the beginning, the Green Angel Tower overlooking the very castle that Simon and Miriamele set out from, is the theme of recurrence and nostalgia, of the longing for and critical loss of the past.

[mild spoilers to follow]

This, of course, has informed fantasy fiction since the Old English elegy, and is defines the distinct mood of the elvish exodus from Middle-earth. Williams centers MST on the cycle of invasion and dispossession, and the deep and exceptional resonance of this theme is that while Simon and his companions strive to correct a world that is severely and devastatingly out of balance, trapped in a supernatural winter, restoring the elder world of Sithi domination, before the violent arrival of the human conquerers, is the mission of the tragic and evil Storm King. To some degree, they are both on the same quest, but from very different points. 

This recognition makes Simon's choice at the very moment the Storm King's return is near complete an act of maturity and compassion. Choosing to perhaps to fear but not to hate, he seems to rob Ineluki of the last quantum of rage and spite he needs to complete his ritual. But outside the moment, this is also problematic. For if we accept that the Sithi are in a real sense the indigenous peoples of Osten Ard, brutally displaced, then admitting that fear of the other is only a first step towards justice and reconciliation.

MST gains great traction and interest in playing with many of the tropes of earlier fantasies, particularly The Lord of the Rings. But where the wisdom of Frodo Baggins lies not simply in his destruction of the ring but his pity and compassion—a weapon that the fallen Saruman acknowledges is formidable indeed—Simon here seems to gain the power to acknowledge fear and even look past hatred, but not to overcome it. 

Perhaps this is a necessary change, a more realistic balancing of the fears and compromises, as well as insight and regret, that the hero accumulates, and the cost of the return of the king. But one can't but feel that the moment is not quite satisfying, after so much effort is expended reaching it. Perhaps this is even the trap of the doorstopper, which always suggests more text, more sequels, another novel just in development.

On the other hand, investment in the characters and their world, the very sense of challenge and effort, would be lesser if it were not for their weight and detail of the trilogy. The danger for the doorstopper is that the nostalgia for the world, the desire to deepen immersion and multiply characters into sprawling stories, eventually became its own end. The problem with Game of Thrones is that the player can no longer see the end. But I do believe there are ways back into the form, that the formal structure of the trilogy and can nourish engagement, but also find ways to shift expectations, compress, adapt. The wonderment of fantasy is that the world is whole but also deep, and somewhere always remains beyond reach.

Use case scenarios: Look to Windward — Iain M Banks

Look to Windward is a mid-sequence novel for Iain M Banks’s Culture series, but also, in its fashion, a retrospective and a conclusion. It has all the usual Culture novel tropes (by now): an elusive unreliable narrator parked somewhere in the narrative frame, an structure of flashbacks and piecemeal reveals, a self-reflective concern with unpicking the nature and character of the Culture, and a good many characters who are either drones, non-humans, or Minds.

But despite the title—for the most telling line in the novel finally confirms that "look to windward" is an exhortation to scan the horizon of possibility for oncoming threats—the novel is almost entirely about looking back, and inwards, not forward. Framed by the observation from a Culture orbital of the light from two supernova events, acts of grandiose destruction from the Idiran-Culture war, the novel is primarily looking back in time: to the war that framed Consider Phlebas, and to the later conflicts and failed interventions that propel the Chelgrian protagonist to a monstrous act of revenge. In between lie some lengthy set-pieces and impressive landscape tourism about the orbital, mainly concerned with sketching out the lifestyle and unpacking the utopian society of the Culture in peace-time, but these are interspersed with darker accounts of warfare, personal loss, and the unfolding of a conspiracy to mass murder. 

Unlike Consider Phlebas, with its quest plot and visceral narrative momentum, or even The Player of Games with its unfolding victories, Look to Windward frequently reverts to losses, failures, even regret, as if these are the counter-cases and exceptions to the use of weapons, the points where the Culture misses or fails and the moral cost falls due.

Dedicated to the Gulf War Veterans (a war, by the way, that demonstrated the terrifying potential of advanced weapons and technologies against an ill-equipped, out-dated, and poorly led conscript army), Look to Windward could well serve as a study in post-traumatic stress disorder, the price of efficient slaughter for both the winners and the losers. But in the case of Major Quilan, the survivor of a brutal civil war that was precipitated by the meddling of the Culture, it's also a study in the grooming of terrorists, the subtle and dreadful conversion of trauma into nihilism, and nihilism into vengeance.

One of Horza's critiques of the Culture in Consider Phlebas was that the Culture was too safe, too tidy, that without risk the life it nurtured was ultimately without meaning either, and indeed, parts of Look to Windward suggests that for the majority of the Culture all risks have become trivial, illusionary even—evidence of the reification of spiritual value in an utterly materialist society. However, as the final threat is contained, there's a sense that some losses are irrevocable, that some war damages can't be mitigated. At its most thoughtful, and moving, Look to Windward redeems its relatively static passages to bear witness to this fact.