No Kings in Ankh-Morpork

A cabal of small-minded reactionaries summon a creature of pure destruction – a dragon – to overthrow the current political order of their city and contrive a return to a puppet monarchy. But the dragon, a creature of pure ego and willful destructiveness, has nothing but contempt for those that summoned it, and destroys them, and large swathes of the city, in turn.

That's the premise of Guards! Guards! Terry Pratchett's clever and hilarious fantasy thriller, a parody of the police procedural, the hard-boiled crime novel, The Return of the King, and a meditation on authority, politics, and civil society. If it also seems uncomfortably apt to the idiocy and disruption of the disastrous second Trump administration, it's a testament to Pratchett's insight and humanism, tempered by distinctly modern skepticism.

In Guards! Guards!, an ambitious technocrat sets out to overturn the Patrician of Ankh-Morpork, and even he is boggled by the small-mindedness and selective reasoning of the secret society that collectively summons the dragon. Pratchett's startlingly accurate satire shows that these are not evil men, on the whole, only individuals whose petty resentments and willingness to swallow absurd lies as long as they prop up their own sense of privilege are practically self-sustaining.

It was amazing, this mystic business. You tell them a lie, and then when you don't need it any more you tell them another lie and tell them they're progressing along the road to wisdom. Then instead of laughing they follow you even more, hoping that at the heart of all the lies they'll find the truth. And bit by bit they accept the unacceptable. Amazing.

But the dragon doesn't consider violence and greed to be means to a political ends: it is destruction and greed embodied, and the results, as they are with Trumpism, are predictable. The city burns, but the disruption is merely the pretext for a more authoritarian regime to claim primacy.

The resolution is less of an analogy to the current moment, mainly because Pratchett is a writer of comedy, but the healthy cynicism towards the matter of human nature still stands. The scruffy, neglected officers of the Night Watch are not exactly heroes but they are decent and try to do the right thing in their way, and they understand (mostly) that there is no absolute justice, only the endless flexibility and compromise required to navigate the competing interests and diversity of the emergent metropolis.

In this sense, there's no scope for the return of the king, given that kings are at worst brutal despots and at best practiced wielders of violence and rough justice. The unacknowledged king becomes a literal man of the people, a city cop, the watch officer, who enforces the imperfect rules of civil society and tolerance. And through this reflects back on and parodies the familiar fantasy trope (and Tolkien), it's not actually that far from Tolkien's own thoughts on kingship. Compassion, justice, healing, and restraint are the marks of the true king, not political power for it's own sake. Aragorn is the exception and the ideal who earns his kingdom through decades of unseen toil – few kings, in Tolkien or the Discworld, reach the ideal.

On the other hand, because he's a typically compelling Pratchett character, Lord Vetinari, the Patrician of Ankh-Morpork, might seem an almost idealized projection of another ideal, the benign despot. Yet in this case, the Patrician is the least bad of all the bad options, who governs a complex of pluralistic interest groups by balancing one against another, with a direct kind of utilitarianism ("The Patrician didn’t believe in unnecessary cruelty.* While being bang alongside the idea of necessary cruelty, of course.") – a proto-democrat, as such.

The AI is not your friend

There are many types of the AI in fiction: enigmatic Wintermute, the ironical Culture Minds, Asimov's rule-bound robots, but as chance would have it, Philip K Dick's intuition of how such machines would work has landed closest to practice, so far.

In Martian Time-Slip, the teaching robots at the school are automata, in the format of Historical Persons, but represent a single, central AI. Dick couldn't anticipate the technology, but his concept of how the devices work, accessing vast quantities of recorded tapes, switching subtly to respond to input, means that they closely resemble chat-bot agents, drawing on a trained Large Language Model, the current state-of-art of Artificial Intelligence (AI).

But PKD was always probing the gap between the simulation and the subject, the fake and the real. For the latent schizophrenic technician-protagonist the school threatens/triggers an episode, because the 'bots, machines masked as people are both living and inorganic, present and absent, exposing the gap between perception and actuality that the schizophrenic dreads. The teaching robots recycle recordings; they appear present and responsive, but they are only subtle machines, replaying texts based on predetermined reactions to stimuli.

The limited conclusion is that the teaching robots are machines, artifacts, not people or friends, no matter how convincing—and being convincing is part of the reason they are so disturbing. But the bigger question, the deeper problem with the AI is that the model is an archive, a tape, a recording, that selectively repeats our own language back to us with convincing coherence. There is no organic creativity in this process, only reiteration and hence entropy, repetition, gubbish, gubble, gubble, gubble

There's no absolute answer to the problem, except that the work is always to center human creativity, to rigorously trace the slippery line between the real and the fake.

Cooger and Dark's Guide to Writing

"Omit needless words," said Strunk, and a great deal of writing advice hinges on this dictum. This has led to even starker imperatives: never tag speech with a verb other than "said"; eliminate adjectives; prefer simpler words.

But if Strunk's advice was the touchstone for 20th Century writing and every creative writing workshop thereafter, Ray Bradbury never heard that dark whistle-warning sounding over the plains. Consider, for example, the merry-go-round rush, the hall-of-mirrors sentences of Something Wicked This Way Comes:

The surface slit itself further in a wide ripping smile across the entire surface of the gigantic pear, as the blind Witch gabbled, moaned, blistered her lips, shrieked in protest, and Will hung fast, hands gripped to whicker, kicking legs, as the balloon wailed, whiffled, guzzled, mourned its own swift gaseous death, as dungeon air raved out, as dragon breath gushed forth and the bag, thus driven, retreated up.

How many needless words, redundancies, not to mention opaque constructions, metaphors, contradictions?

Reason for the need, however, and the case is clear. Bradbury's cavalcade prose, his carnivalesque expression, his mirror-house language, is the dark carnival, the show, the temptation, and the action that resides within it: the urge to engage, be thrilled, and the fear, the wish to escape. If it subverts the rules, well, doesn't the big show subvert the real, and that's where the terror and the lure of it lie?

Misters Cooger and Dark understand the fear, the temptation of the rules the #writingcommunity and workshops and classes lay down: omit needless words! follow the rules for good writing, and find an agent, impress a publisher, or follow the lonely path of the unpublished.

Consider another rule that sometimes boils up, the proscription from Elmore Leonard: Never use a verb other than “said” to carry dialogue.

Fine. J.K. Rowling abuses dialogue tags to an excessive degree, but compare:

• "I love you," she said.
• "I love you," she whispered.

And ask which verb means more, which has more imaginative potential, given the right scene and context?

No one wants stark prose, boring prose, bland styles, or we all end up writing for the Web, flat and technically correct. The writing challenge is not to excise the needless, but to find the needful in every word and sentence. What does it serve: atmosphere, character, action, plot? 

When the characters in Something Wicked This Way Comes realize there is no perfection in life, as there is no perfection in craft, that's when they find liberation, compassion, joy even. That's not a good reason to stop trying, but a pretty good rule for all rules.

Edwin Drood and the Magician's Hand

 Dickens knew that you would know exactly who killed Edwin Drood, and that doesn't matter, because the magician has already told you you're about to witness a trick, but you can't look away from the hand anyway, even as the other hand steals your watch and conceals the ace.

So forget that The Mystery of Edwin Drood isn't finished—deep down, you know what happens anyway—and remember that Dickens isn't there to found the long line of detective puzzles games, meant to snap together in an instant only when the reading is done, because Drood has already drawn you into a maze of illusions, and the reversal is that the thing you thought you had to figure out is not the mystery before you.

Perhaps no one is what they seem: the genteel choir-master is an opium addict, but that's just the first card. The confident young gentleman-protagonist is a victim, gone with all his flaws. The childish, pretty girl is sensible and compassionate. The staid boarding school mistress is a social butterfly. The dusty lawyer is a closet romantic (of course he was in love with Rosa's mother). The exotic orphans, brother and sister, will swap roles and identities. They're all masters of disguise, except the one person who really is in disguise, right Dick Datchery?

And Cloisterham, the staid, quiet, dusty cathedral town? Well, most of that dust is from monuments and corpses. Seen through Durdles' eyes, Cloisterham is a sepulcher, concealing death as much as the cathedral elevates solid English Christianity. And remote? Perhaps, but the toxic traces of empire are everywhere—tea, china, spices, exotic preserves, opium itself are products of imperial trade. The predictable, conventional racism that Jasper leverages to land suspicion on Neville Landless is itself just a thin cover, a pretext, to deflect from how deeply every part of of old England, the nostalgic version that Cloisterham would seem to celebrate, is compromised and transformed by (and complicit in) Victoria's sprawling empire, from Sri Lanka to Egypt.

Dickens never made it back to London and never finished the manuscript, but every time you go back to it, you're struck by how the structure of the murder is already there; it's the world itself that's a labyrinth of images, every character a mystery.

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. 

Culture games: The Player of Games, Use of Weapons — Iain M Banks

 In the last post I argued that Consider Phlebas is mainly concerned with the question of identity, perhaps appropriately for the first major novel that developed into a significant series. In some quarters, ask about the "Culture novels" and you'll be directed to the safer entry-points, the established bases: The Player of Games and Use of Weapons.

Of course both of these books still betray Banks's concern with questions of identity and unreliable narrators  — who plays the bigger, more dangerous game; who is Zakalwe, really; who wields the weapon, and who is the weapon? — and one could well say that these questions are often at the center of Banks's considerable narrative craft. But I think as Banks's understanding of the Culture as protagonist and utopia developed, the other conflict, the clash between the logic of intervention and personal autonomy, also became more pressing.

In PoG the Empire of Azad, perhaps like the Idirans, is authoritarian, regressive, oppressive, elaborately sexist (since Banks gives it three biological sexes to manage). If there is a weakness in the presentation of the empire, it is almost cartoonishly corrupt, an easy stereotype. The nuance is that the empire has also created, and is structured by, Azad, which is elaborate, beautiful, endlessly complex, almost like literature. Naturally, Gurgeh comes to win at Azad, and because the game embodies the empire, he defeats the imperial system itself, initiating its collapse. But Gurgeh only wins because he eventually, in his revulsion at the empire's brutality, plays in the vernacular of the Culture, through soft power, subversion, the finely measured application of force. 

So, at this point, Gurgeh is effectively de-protagonized. Rather than the subject of his own narrative, he is another playing-piece in the long game of the Culture. The Minds, the drones, are the actual players and, we learn, manipulated Gurgeh into play in the first place. Gurgeh is their knife-missile, their perfectly deployed and selected instrument. Hence, for Gurgeh, his victory in the game of Azad is deeply ambivalent, and at the end of the story we find him not triumphant but in tears, perhaps because he understands that his own game has also collapsed, that the real player of games will always be the Culture itself.

The question comes to a fine point in Use of Weapons. Instrumental reasoning is a fine thing if only the objective counts, but the doctrine of utility reduces all individuals to the status of objects, tools, weapons, or game-pieces in the pursuit of the Culture's broader aims. UoW is a complicated read because of its dual strands of flashback and forward narrative, as if narrative technique were also one of the weapons the author wields for maximum effect. The flashbacks, though episodic, are always clearer and more engaging than the present narrative, in which the narrative stakes seem less clear and compelling, as the politics of the Cluster are less meaningful than the odyssey of the younger Zakalwe.

The coincidence of these streams is what shows us that Zakalwe, like Gurgeh, is merely a weapon, talented and useful, but only fully realized when deployed by the Culture. In fact, the text suggests that whenever Zakalwe attempts to break free of the Culture, to act on his own terms, his attempt is a failure. The tragedy of UoW is that at no point can Zakalwe redeem himself from his brutal history or escape his identity. He is the weapon rather than the wielder, and the poet knows that weapons find their full reality only in the moment of destruction.

Consider Phlebas — Iain M. Banks

 I can still recall buying Consider Phlebas on a rainy winter’s afternoon in Christchurch in the very early 90s and reading it entirely in the space of a couple of days. No slight thing, given its comparative length at 467 pages. I was a student at the time, which makes dedicated, compulsive reading feasible. Consider Phlebas was then the first of what became Banks’s sequence of Culture novels, but to my mind it remains one of the most compelling and challenging novels in the sequence, a masterpiece in the sense of being the first and necessary proof of the author’s skill. Over the years, I’ve seen other reviewers relegate Consider Phlebas to the status of an earlier, less accomplished work — the first but not the best, as fantasy literature.com has it — but this seems to me to fundamentally misunderstand its impact and importance.

If you’re inclined to read CP as part of a series, it does offer some challenges, the first of which would be a roughly two-part structure, in which the first part is relatively disjointed, almost picaresque, a sequence of accidents and violent incidents as the protagonist Bora Horza Gobuchel weaves his way towards the location of his main mission. Each of these incidents, from a disastrous raid on a remote temple to a crashing megaship to a gruesome encounter with an apocalyptic cult and its grotesque, cannibalistic leader works exceedingly well as a set-piece. In terms of narrative they are superb and compelling, a combination of action, suspense, and vivid detail. But beyond setting the scene for the novel’s broader conflict between the imperialist, religiously conservative Idirans and the liberal, pan-humanistic but no less expansionist Culture, what do these incidents achieve?

To my reading, the arbitrary violence and random danger are quite the point. War, of course, is chaotic and often absurd. But more than this, Banks’s galaxy of cultures and species, despite its high technology and tiers of civilization, is no utopia. Rather, we observe through the context of Horza’s encounters the persistent strands of hedonism and fanaticism, and the fear of disorder that motivates both the Culture and the Idirans. Horza is fond of accusing the Culture of trying to suppress the “messiness” that is organic life, but the first half of CP illustrates just how violent and precarious that messiness can be.

This would still be simply scene-setting if it were not for its connection to the second significant challenge of CP. Horza, our primary point-of-view character and protagonist is aligned against the Culture and sides with the religious zealotry of the Idirans for his own reasons. From the beginning Horza, a Changer, one of a species of biological weapons designed to infiltrate and impersonate other humanoid species, has been engaged in a struggle for identity. This might seem natural for the doppelgänger, always marginal, always forced to mediate between multiple identities merely to survive. As Banks makes clear, this is the challenge for all intelligent life. Who are we? asks Fal ‘Ngeestra, Culture Referer, whose intuition matches the intelligence of the Minds: Information being passed on... Life is a faster force, reordering, finding new niches, starting to shape; intelligence — consciousness — an order quicker, another new plane. The Idirans, at the apex of their ferocious evolutionary ascent, are driven to assert a fixed identity lodged in their genetics. Even the refugee Mind, quest object, fears the corruption of its information/identity as it shelters in its hiding place.

Understand this about CP, that the framing Culture-Idiran War is really a struggle for identity that consumes and shapes Horza’s path, and you begin to see how compelling and emotionally demanding the ending really is. 

Consider Phlebas...

Who are we? Who do we identify with: the Culture, the Idirans, Horza the Changer, his doomed crew? 

Oh you who look to windward...

Enquire of the Internet what "Look to windward" means and you're likely to find multiple, circular references to CP and the Culture series. But if you treat it as the fragment of poetry it is, to look to windward from a sailing ship suggest looking into the wind, either along the course you have passed, as the wind blows you, or to look out for any object bearing towards you with the wind behind it. The metaphor, then, is an admonishment to consider where you have come from, and the threat that is not before you but follows in your wake. 

Eventually, Horza fails, defeated by the irreconcilable tensions between the fanaticism of the Idirans he has committed to and the technical superiority and perhaps moral superiority of the Culture. Indeed, it is the Culture, and it's "clever" anticipation of all eventualities that prevails. But in his last moments he grasps for and retains that fragmentary expression of identity, a name, a coherent, tragic self. For Fal and the Culture Minds—those who look to windward and prevail—there is a certain validation in this rescue, just as the outcome of the Culture-Idiran War is inevitable. But buried in this moment is another realization, as we learn that the rescued Mind later assumed the name of Bora Harza Gobuchel, the reason for which is a "long story"— indeed, the long story we have in hand.

Deep in the Command System on a Planet of the Dead, a desolate war monument to the mass destruction of an intelligent species with its own weapons, Horza and the hidden Mind both come to recognize the fragility and contingency of consciousness. For Horza, it is a single, all-too-late point of identification with the Culture: "Horza realized that his own obsessive drive never to make a mistake, always to think of everything, was not so unlike the fetishistic urge which he so despised in the Culture: that need to make everything fair and equal, to take the chance out of life."

Last century, when I first read CP, I was inclined to assign Banks’s other motto, the sardonic quote from the Koran, as a reference to the Idirans. But now, I can see another irony at play: the moral calculus of the Culture may indeed be that contained carnage is preferable to idolatry, to religious fixation on absolute ideas. What makes CP so compelling is the nuance of this theme set against the brilliance of the explosive action narrative Banks deploys to deliver it. Eventually we will choose to side with the Culture, and later novels, more contained, mannered even, will focus more and more on the implications of the Culture’s own use of weapons as it expands and consolidates its version of interventionist utilitarianism. But the emotional sub-current is equally relevant: what are the costs, who are we, really, to decide? Consider Phlebas...

Who was once handsome and tall as you.

Worlds within, worlds beneath

Four seasons in one day

Lying in the depths of your imagination
Worlds above and worlds below
The sun shines on the black clouds hanging over the domain

– Crowded House (Lyrics Tim Finn & Neil Finn)

In writing, much of my attention is turned to the craft and creation of fictional worlds. This is not simply a matter of science fiction or fantasy; every fiction instantiates and implies a rich collection of assumptions, designs, guesses, and diegetic facts that form the imagined world: the shadow of the text illuminated by the reader’s imagination.

Fictional worlds, their potential and danger, haunt two quite different recent works: M. John Harrison’s startling and unsettling The Sunken Land Begins to Rise Again and Susanna Clarke’s lucid and compelling Piranasi. Each one considers, in quite different ways, the temptations and traps of the many worlds harbored in the imagination.

One knows, by now, what to expect of M. John Harrison. His technique is extraordinary; his worlds are indistinct, oblique, out of reach. The Sunken Land Begins to Rise Again is set in England, but it is the profoundly alienated and drifting nation of the Brexit era. Beneath the surface lies the deep history of the land: geology, geography, the sediment of millennia of human occupation and industry, marked in the spiritual and material landscape. But the characters are detached from this, often both physically and emotionally isolated, in a post-industrial economy focused on gigs and temporary lodgings. One senses the movement to reconnect with the sunken lands, inherent in the fictional interest in the themes of spiritual renewal and transformation expressed in the sentimental Victorian tract The Water Babies. But the fixation on a lost sense of "English-ness" also evokes the toxic isolationism of Brexit. 

Harrison's technique focuses on exact, evocative description paired with inexact, oblique narrative. His work is often described as unsettling, and it is the way his precise, writerly skill with detail and landscape positions itself across an incomplete story that unsettles one’s sense of narrative and coherent action. Harrison’s characters, likewise, are drawn to the unspoken network of aspiration and conspiracy that informs the story but refuses to cohere.

Clarke's Piranesi is no less painstaking, but the narrative that begins as a mystery eventually becomes clear, as the protagonist's fractured memory is reconstructed, if not restored. Yet the fictional world, the structure inspired by the work of the historical Piranesi, in particular the astonishing Carceri d'invenzione or Imaginary Prisons series of prints, is the primary setting of the novel. The "World" of Piranesi — it is a proper noun, a character — is an archetypal labyrinth, a fictional construct, and a prison. The fantasy that begins as a dream of transcendence, an experiment in magic, becomes a trap, an exercise in manipulation and cruelty. What first appears as a consistent, even beautiful exercise in baroque classicism also has corrosive effects on the mind and memory. And although compassion and rescue are possible, it is only from outside the fictional world that we begin to understand its dangers as well as its potential.

There is a measure of peace and resolution at the end of Piranesi that The Sunken Land Begins to Rise Again does not offer, but both works shape themselves around the potential and dangers of the other world, the imaginary, and the dangerous journey between the real and unreal, and what we may discover, recover and lose in the transition.

The doorstopper fantasy

 The Lord of the Rings is no doubt a long read and well worth the time, but compared to the “doorstopper” multi-volume fantasies that followed it, it’s positively compact. Indeed, LOTR was drafted as a single long novel, and then published in three volumes, a choice with a strong tradition in the case of the triple-decker novels of earlier Victorian publishing. But, at some point in the 70s and 80s the trilogy became the pattern, and then commercial fantasy developed the even more substantial series format, which gave us behemoths like The Wheel of Time and Game of Thrones. These doorstopper fantasies, of significant mass and length, well exceed LOTR in word-counts and represent several intriguing challenges and questions.

I’m minded of this because my shelter-in-place COVID-19 reading has included Tad William’s Memory, Sorrow, and Thorn, both a trilogy and one of the better exemplars of the doorstopper series. William’s certainly wrote at length, introducing multiple character threads and alternately cultivating and subtly defying genre conventions, but at least MS&T came to a satisfying ending. I still remember overhearing Robert Jordan being pressed as to when The Wheel of Time would end by a Christchurch bookstore owner during a visit. As I recall, he gave a firm “we’ll see” in answer, and sadly died before his series was finished. George R. R. Martin, on the other hand, has attracted the scorn and concern of fans for not yet completing Game of Thrones, and yet I think the more interesting question is how will he finish his own sequence when the script writers of the TV series have already preempted his choices.

The trilogy format certainly offers some advantages. The three book sequence frames and encourages a beginning, middle, and end structure, offering the clarity of exposition, development, and conclusion, rising tension, and similar desiderata. And a wide range of authors have made good use of the scope of multiple story threads to develop tension and suspense. And perhaps the more complex the fantasy, and more complex the fictional world, the more need for development and explanation.

But issues of completion aside, the doorstopper has encouraged and even enabled some weaknesses, perhaps the worst of which was bloated storylines with more long-winded development for development’s sake and seemingly interminable politicking and journeying. Even Memory, Sorrow, and Thorn drags in the middle volume, shifting and transferring characters back and forth across Osten Ard like an over-cautious chess player advancing and retreating pieces in the mid-game before the end-game becomes apparent. But worse than pacing, I think, was the proliferation of shallow minor characters and ancillary story-lines. The main reason I dropped GoT and the sprawling, interminable Malazan Book of the Fallen was the ever expanding cast of characters, which made a focal point, much less a protagonist, impossible to settle on. 

And yet the fantasy trilogy trilogy, with its open horizons, its richness of texture, its sustained evocation of a world, remains compelling. Perhaps there are ways to adapt and develop the three part structure; to make the long journey an adventure, to provide authentic scope for characters to emerge, and to make the imaginary world dense and strange again. 

The politics of stupidity, reprise

1. Choose a stupid leader, someone who will bark stupid lies with enough conviction that they seem authentic (they aren't).

2. Enact stupid and destructive policy. Ignore serious, important, long term solutions for stupid immediate appearances. If the policies are also cruel, so much the better. To the stupid, this looks like toughness.

3. Bark stupid lies about your failures, the opposition, anything really. The point is not to be right; the point is to make so much stupid noise that no adequate response can cut through.

4. It's now harder and harder to maintain a lucid argument, or to identify stupidity and name it directly.
If you can get ostensibly smart people, like judges or the Hoover Institute, to cover for your stupidity, that's even better.

6. Stupidly blunder back to 1 and 2, because the only solution to the current, stupid mess will look like more stupidity.

What happened in the end

Pandemic reading has led me to two quite different authors and two quite different formation of one of the crucial challenges of writing in the long form: the stakes and satisfaction of an ending. 

We take it for granted, of course, that novels end. If they simple finished, terminated arbitrarily, we would recognize immediately that we possess a fragment, not a whole. And even fragments, like The Mystery of Edwin Drood, suggest their own missing structure. If we were to come across half of a broken boat, we will still see in the broken beams and keel the shape of the whole.

Here, then, is a study in contrasts.

M. John Harrison's Empty Space is the last volume in the loosely federated Kefahuchi Tract series, but it rigorously resists any disclosure that could be taken as a resolution to the complex of unsettling questions of character and causality that the sequence raises. There's a remark about a control room instrument: "Everything was processed to look 'real', arriving preassembled as a narrative from selected points of view," which taken in reverse suggests Harrison's method. From separate, selected points of view, narrative is disassembled, the structural illusion of reality is unravelled to reveal the contradictions, incoherencies, and dissonance of a future poised on the shockwave between the unfathomable physics of chaos and quantum indeterminacy and the unbearable nostalgia of submerged human identities.

But, also on my e-reading device is the first volume of the Penguin series of Georges Simenon's Inspector Maigret novels—French detective fiction from the 30s, almost as far from contemporary science fiction as you could get. And, of course, what happens at the end of any Maigret is that the crime is solved, the guilty are discovered, the selected points of view, clues, plot points, are assembled into the narrative of the crime and its solution.

And yet—I'm not sure anymore whether Empty Space can be called an "open" ending and Pietr the Latvian, for instance, a "closed" one. Because however the inspector exposes the material logic of the crime, the human problem, Maigret's point of entry into the solution, with all its paradoxes and contradictions, remains. And isn't that the point of Harrison's radical uncertainties and unresolved threads, and inchoate nostalgia, that the human problem persists, a struggle to assert a sense of reality and identity against the shimmering chaos of an unknowable universe?

Whether SF or police procedural, perhaps the distinction lies in what is settled and unsettled, the points that are decided and undecided. In this sense, Harrison's project is to disrupt the confident teleology of technological progress, where Maigret's detective can close the case but leave open, and subtly unstated, the implications of character and the ironies of morality, guilt and deviation. In any case, what happened in the end counts, but we are left with something beyond the ending that haunts our reading still.

Ubik - Philip K. Dick

One of the most compelling scenes in Philip K. Dick's Ubik is a struggle simply to walk upstairs, to find a place of rest: a fight against inertia, fatigue, the pure malice of entropy. Reading this scene during the pandemic, after seeing harrowing accounts of the fever and weakness that COVID-19 inflicts, the scene gains a terrible resonance.

At other times, Ubik might seems  prescient for its distillation of routine capitalism into endless payment for trivial services, such as the coin-operated doors and coffee-makers, presaging the economy of micro-transactions and in-app payments. But this, like the plot that sets emergent “psi” powers against their natural, effect limiting counterparts or “anti-psi” operations is simply part of the scaffolding, the incidental background for a more profound and deliberate consideration of how worlds are made and unmade, and what happens when our physical, moral, and even temporal realities begin to unravel. 

It’s striking that the forces of entropy are yoked to malice and cruelty in Ubik, just at a time now when reactionary politics in the US are also heedlessly erasing or countermanding progressive reforms in an attempt to wind the clock back to an era of “greatness” that never applied. In contrast, the cure-all “Ubik” seems to come from a humanizing impulse to heal and restore, an almost spiritual impulse to resist the death urge: “watching, wise, physical ghosts from the full-life.”

And yet, as in most of Dick’s work, for every action there is a reaction, for every reality a counter-reality, and the tension between life and half-life is never wholly decided. Perhaps this is why Ubik is both fascinating and unsettling — we’ll never quite know where our world stands; the only valid choice is what we’ll fight for, what we need to resist.

8:46

The Last Battle

Beginnings are tentative, difficult, subtle. Few parts of your work face as much revision, as much rewriting, than beginnings. 

Endings, on the other side, roar in and seem to compose themselves, inevitable, like the cresting of a wave.

This is how endings should be. Lay the ground, set the pieces in motion, the end game will play out itself. 

As I've grown older, as a reader I've found it harder and harder just to finish a book I like, not through dislike of the task, but because the pleasure of reading, discovery, is something I want to sustain. 

As a writer, the agony of ending a piece is the constant stream of distractions that break the whole into fragments of work, and the awareness that the measured end-game also requires its own patience, its own pacing. But of course, the ending is never the end of the writing task, only the point where you go back to review and revise again.

When Bilbo gets to the end of The Hobbit, he has his share of the treasure. All he has to do is get it back across the Mirkwood, the Misty Mountains, and the wilds of Eriador again. 

What have other found at the end?

Childish Audacity - The Secret Agent

I've mentioned elsewhere Conrad's masterwork of urban terror, political agitation, anarchism and authority, The Secret Agent. His portrait of the the shabby. monstrous Professor, the essential suicide bomber, is both relevant and terrifyingly familiar to us today. But The Secret Agent is also a domestic tragedy played out as a bitter farce, with deep insights that continue to cut against contemporary conditions.

One phrase, among many, struck me as notable: "Barefaced audacity amounting to childishness of a particular sort". Anyone who has had to witness the absurd contortions about the Ukraine scandal, the unforgivable betrayal of the Kurds, or the pointless provocation of Iran, will recognize this phrase as eerily applicable. On one level it means that malice and folly are never far apart – "Oft evil will shall evil mar" as Tolkien would have it – and there is, in our current discourse, a dangerous tendency to ascribe deeper motives or at least clarity of purpose to what is in fact mere lying, blundering, and cruelty when the liars have the power to frighten and appall us.

But beyond that, every character in The Secret Agent is locked into a form of childishness. For like Stevie, the man-child and first victim of the misguided terror-attack, every character is trapped in their own perceptions, their own circle of thoughts and fears and illusions, and none of them, not even the policeman, has the clear insight to regard another human being with accuracy. This is, of course, the basis of the novel's dramatic irony — we are all secret agents, operating only to ourselves, opaque to others.

The Book of the New Sun – Gene Wolfe

Where to begin with even preliminary notes on Gene Wolfe's dizzying, monumental sequence The Book of the New Sun? The death of Gene Wolfe earlier this year prompted me to return to the sequence starting with The Shadow of the Torturer to give the whole series its second (and in some volumes third) reading, but the whole remains a staggering and sometimes frustrating work, frequently brilliant and occasionally baffling.

At one point in The Sword of the Lictor, the narrator-torturer Severian climbs down a mountain cliff that is composed not only of natural materials but human-made elements, strata of artificial structures, metals, made objects: "the buildings and mechanisms of humanity," layered in geological sediment. As Tolkien created a sense of the mythic past of Middle-Earth by building ages of imaginary history, Wolfe creates a sense of an ancient world illuminated by a dying sun by generating these accumulated layers of future history. But this history is also so vast that it is mostly unknowable, at once so compressed and remote that there is little to be gleaned from it. This scene is something of a touchstone for my reading of the whole work.

You might say that Severian's eidetic memory, able to record a mass of episodic detail but rarely able to draw back far enough to show the implications of what he witnesses, enacts this kind of layering. Severian is often described as an unreliable narrator, despite the precision of his recall. In fact, the text itself is like this, layering allusions, metaphors, stories, histories, and forms of meaning. One of Wolfe's most effective conceits is to conceal high technologies behind antiquarian terminology by way of "translation", such that energy weapons are described as lances, grounded spacecraft as citadels, and often the apparent significance of an item conceals and transcends its material nature, as the Claw of the Conciliator, the healing relic of the messiah, is eventually whittled down from jewel to claw, and eventually shown to be a thorn from a wild rosebush.

This mirroring (mirrors can also transcend space and time in the New Sun) can be both dazzling and perplexing. For instance, after two or three readings I'm still at a loss as to describe precisely how the far future messiah boot-straps himself into temporal existence, or precisely how and where and for what function he comes by the Claw. It's suggested by the end of the sequence that Severian is destined to travel in the corridors of time, and thereby somehow guide his own apotheosis, but where Severian intrudes in his own story, or his precise relationship with menacing, distant figures such as the abyssal giants, is not apparent after this reading any more, I expect, than the next.

The dying earth genre, from The Night Land to Viriconium, is by implication an elegy, located at the point of entropy where the fictional world is ossified and decayed. The Book of the New Sun certainly partakes of this moment and its dizzying perspectives. But perhaps Wolfe's most profound piece of misdirection is that his work ends not on the edge of dissolution but of renewal. This theme, the movement from executioner to broader moral consciousness to redemption, is one Dickens deployed and I've used myself, most clearly in the figure of Gabriel Carver. There is always a tendency, from Tolkien to Wolfe, to chase after deliberate allegories, in this case between Catholicism and the cult of the Increate and the New Sun, but for me it is Severian's meandering journey, sometimes impressive, sometimes perplexing, in the labyrinths of the far future that hold the greatest satisfaction and interest.

Promotion - The Raven's Seal in August

For readers who may have discovered my work with A Hangman for Ghosts, there's a chance to snap up The Raven's Seal ebook here on Bookbub for a limited time.

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After Christchurch, March 15, 2019

One of the comforts of mystery and detective fiction is that there is an effort to discover motive and make it knowable. Greed, jealousy, fear, revenge, desire are all intelligible to the detective's eye. But we are sometimes confronted by events in which the motive is not merely lacking, but vacant, horrific.

I write this in reference to the mass murder in Christchurch on March 15, and because I was born and lived a large part of my adult life in Christchurch, and so it is the city I still regard as home, familiar ground, before all others. The Christchurch where I grew up, the city on the plain in the shadow of the sun-browned Port Hills, with its green, fragrant parks and quiet, windblown streets and patches of Neo-gothic stonework, has been altered and scarred by inevitable change and two severe earthquakes, but these are natural events as opposed to willful slaughter.

Shaun Yeo

Faced with a crime, we seek the motive in the first instance of shock and dismay. However, I no more mean to read or reference the shooter's "manifesto" than I mean to grant him the presence of mentioning his name. It's enough to read the summaries by those familiar with acts of terrorism and hate-crimes to realize that the same tired lies and malformed justifications repeat themselves again. In any case, the slaughter of innocent persons utterly vacates even the pretence of a reason. The shooter has no just cause to defend.

So, what remains? Jordan Peterson, for one, in the context of school shootings holds that: "“They make a display of their hatred for Being by massacring the innocent. That’s what’s happening — and they write that,” but this is generalizing to the point of uselessness. Mass murderers of this sort may indeed express a hatred for Being, but the beings they murder are, by their own choice, highly specific. Indeed, as Sri Lanka shows, the hatred is always targeted, rooted in bigotry and paranoia, from whichever side. Conrad, as usual, had the better sense of it, as in the end of The Secret Agent:

And the incorruptible Professor walked too, averting his eyes from the odious multitude of mankind.  He had no future.  He disdained it.  He was a force.  His thoughts caressed the images of ruin and destruction.  He walked frail, insignificant, shabby, miserable—and terrible in the simplicity of his idea calling madness and despair to the regeneration of the world.  Nobody looked at him.  He passed on unsuspected and deadly, like a pest in the street full of men.

The terrorist is not lost, nor does he lack purpose, but he measures his own worth by the ruin and destruction his fixed and futile ideas entail. He does not lack self-worth, but revels in his contempt for others. It is only that his self-aggrandizement is fixated on the power to negate other lives.

Conrad's concluding simile is apt. Terrorism is an infection. It is possible to identify the toxic ideologies that drive and support white nationalism. It's possible, as New Zealand shows, to restrict access to weapons that have no purpose in civil society, It's possible to call out the Internet trolls and the politicians, the pseudo-thinkers and the networks that lend tacit support to hate and bigotry. We can police the crime. And, in the long-term, we can plan to overcome the inequality and injustice in which hatred festers. But what we cannot do is lend a moment's credence to the supposed grievances and agendas of fanatics. Faced with this crime, the motive is void; only the pathology matters.