The World of Tomorrow

William Gibson is undoubtedly one of the greatest science fiction authors of all time. His bibliography is impressive both for its quality and for its profound effect on the genre as a whole. While Neuromancer may not have actually created cyberpunk, it certainly remains the sub-genre's most recognizable and enduring exemplar. Hell, I can't even look at neon lights and urban sprawl without having flashbacks of blind ninjas, shady tech dealers, rogue AIs, and the Rastafarian navy. If you don't get the references then just read the book already.

Aside from its role in transforming an entire genre by raising its literary and narrative standards, Neuromancer has also been praised for its semi-prescient depiction of the near future; at least, what the near future looked like in the early 1980s. The internet was new and exciting, computers were becoming affordable for regular people, cultures were beginning to mix in novel ways, hybrid musical genres full of synthesizers and sampled tracks were taking over the mainstream, and the late-Cold War political landscape was shifting too fast for most people to follow. Gibson, in classic sci-fi fashion, extrapolated these trends to envision a world of endless urban sprawl, hybridized humans and technology, and a sort of ultra capitalistic free-for-all global economy. Some of his predictions were so prescient as to feel commonplace (the erosion of national identities in the face of a global economy, the incredible availability of cheap technology, internet scammers), while others look decidedly quaint or naive in hindsight (physically connecting yourself to the internet, extensive habitation of outer space, computers that can pass Turing tests). Rather than truly predicting the future, Neuromancer gives us a startling glimpse of what I like to call a "past future"; a future as envisioned by people in the past.

 I think by now we're all pretty comfortable with the idea of past futures. Anyone familiar with post-war North American culture has seen countless depictions of "The World of Tomorrow, Today" that became one of the defining images of early Cold War World Fairs, American theme parks, and even Saturday morning cartoons (leaving The Jetsons aside, it's a particularly common theme on The Simpsons, for example). The innocent belief that modern technology would solve all our problems within a few decades became so common between the mid-1950s and the early-1970s that we have yet to fully expunge it from our collective cultural consciousness. The difference between then and now is that we have become disillusioned enough with our parents` and grandparents` hopeful vision for a perfect future that we can half-joke about being promised hovercrafts and robot butlers that have yet to materialize. The technology-worshiping optimism of past generations has given way to a realization that perfection is for Hollywood, and that technology creates just as many social problems as it solves. While Gibson`s characters are not so starry-eyed as to believe they can achieve some kind of technological paradise, they retain a basic optimism about the potentially limitless freedom for creation and reinvention that technology could possibly provide. So, while it`s not a blindly optimistic depiction of the `wonders of technology`, Neuromancer still appears overly positive and confident to our cynical, post-millennium sensibilities.

What strikes me most about the hopefulness of Gibson's past future is that he intended it to be far more gritty and realistic than earlier futures that science fiction authors had imagined. In a collection of short stories entitled Burning Chrome, Gibson turned his critical eye towards the romantically optimistic past future predicted by many of his predecessors. "The Gernsback Continuum", first published in 1981, follows a photojournalist as he attempts to capture images of self-consciously "futuristic" buildings from the 1930s and 40s. The nostalgia for a simpler, more hopeful, era is suffocating as he photographs run-down monuments to an imagined future, many of which "featured superfluous central towers ringed with those strange radiator flanges that were a signature motif of the style, and made them look as though they might generate potent bursts of raw technological enthusiasm (p. 28)." The protagonist spends so much time trying to capture the forgotten beauty of these buildings that he starts physically slipping in and out of the future envisioned by earlier generations of sci-fi authors. He sees perfect people in white togas driving silver bullet cars, cities built of gold, crystal roads, all the gleaming perfection of a fantasy world made of marble and mercury. His visions, though they lose some substance, never fully disappear, but neither do they supplant the real world of the modern "human near-dystopia" of early 1980s Los Angeles (p. 36). Instead, the narrator is left with the ability to catch glimpses of a past future full of promise and hope, always hiding just behind a thin veil of smog and flaking paint.

"The Gernsback Continuum" is Gibson at his least subtle, but his narrative never loses his trademark complexity and contradictory emotions. He lampoons earlier sci-fi writers for their naivety in predicting a future populated with blonde demi-gods and burnished ziggurats, while simultaneously yearning for the kind of world in which these fantasies are believable. Reality has fallen short of this dream, but Gibson tells us that having dreams is still a crucial part of being human. However, he also feels that our cynicism is justified, maybe even inevitable, in a world where "the rockets on the covers of the Gernsback pulps had fallen on London in the dead of night, screaming." The promise of accessible high-technology has created a place where "everyone had a car - no wings for it- and the promised superhighway to drive it down, so that the sky itself darkened, and the fumes ate the marble and pitted the miracle crystal (p. 28)." Rather than usher in an era of peace and prosperity, the fruits of the 20th-century obsession with technological progress have become the very agents of our misery. It's no wonder, then, that Gibson is critical of a past future that looked so much brighter than our own.

Despite his rejection of the Gernsback past future, Gibson still retains an incredible amount of faith in the power of technology to transform our lives for the better. Neuromancer is never either wholly positive or negative in its depiction of a new future. Instead, it depicts a future in which freedom is near complete, and creativity unchecked, allowing people to be or do just about anything, for good or ill.

I, for one, can't help but feel a crushing nostalgia for the cultural milieu that led to the creation of Neuromancer, much as Gibson must have felt for his own favourite past futures. It feels fresh in its grittiness, comforting in its new-found infatuation with computers, and beautiful in its palette of gray and neon. I just wonder what future generations will think our imagined futures. Will they see us as hopelessly deluded dreamers, or as overly pessimistic worriers? Whichever it is, I hope they treat us with the same dignity that Gibson affords his literary predecessors.

I Got Trolled by Jack McDevitt

Ok, now that I've explored a little bit about the depiction of aliens in sci-fi, I can talk about what got me ranting in the first place. For a little while now I've been a sporadic fan of Jack Mcdevitt's Alex Benedict series. They're not the best books I've ever read, but they're fun and easy to read, so I got through a few of them very quickly and actually enjoyed them despite the formulaic plots and underdeveloped characters. What I liked most was McDevitt's incredibly nuanced and refreshingly novel treatment of aliens. That is, until I read Echo.

Let me back up and summarize the series briefly. Humanity has been in space for thousands of years and has settled numerous planets. Civilizations have risen and fallen all over the place, leaving behind tons of artifacts, from abandoned colonies and space stations to personal diaries and commemorative plates (LOTS of commemorative plates; I wonder how infomercials work in the future). Alex Benedict is a wealthy antiquities dealer/amateur archeologist who, along with his beautiful assistant and pilot Chase Kolpath, travels around the galaxy hunting down rare artifacts whenever the mood takes him. In each novel, which read like a television detective program, Alex and Chase become embroiled in a mystery surrounding some artifact or another. Inevitably, somebody wants to keep something a secret, and attempts are made on their lives (usually someone sabotages their flying car), but in the end their perseverance pays off and they learn or find something really interesting. McDevitt reuses this formula each time, with slight variations, like changing the narrator after the first novel (A Talent for War), or doing the big reveal halfway through so that he can make the book about a disaster evacuation (The Devil's Eye), but overall the structure of each book is pretty much the same. Hell, even certain plot elements, like the sabotaged car, get reused too often. This predictability was getting to me by the time I started reading Echo, the fifth novel, but I still found the series worthwhile if only for McDevitt's fascinating depiction of the Mutes.

For this series, McDevitt has postulated that intelligence is incredibly rare in our galaxy. The Ashiyyur, or Mutes, as humans have nicknamed them, are the only other living alien race that humanity has encountered in their millennia amongst the stars. They are large, grey-skinned, fanged, evil looking monsters, most closely resembling gargoyles or demons. Their very presence makes peoples' skin crawl. Interestingly, they feel the same way about the tiny, hairy, unpredictable dwarf-monsters called humans. Humans refer to the Ashiyyur as Mutes because they don't speak, and actually communicate telepathically with one another. McDevitt spends some time working out how a society would develop if its member were unable to hide thoughts and feeling from one another, and he depicts the Mutes as thoughtful, disciplined, and sensitive with a predilection for philosophy and poetry.

The relationship between humans and Mutes is incredibly nuanced and, to me, realistic. Humans and Mutes are simultaneously friends, enemies, rivals, and allies. No single type of interaction can fully characterize their relations, and factions exist within each species that either loves or hates the other. Maybe we can describe the relationship is one of polite yet strained indifference, sort of like the relationship you may have with your neighbour who is a decent person but whose personal or cultural habits make you uncomfortable. With a bit of effort, humans and Mutes can understand and get along with one another, but that's not exactly a priority for either species. In short, McDevitt's depiction of human-Mute relations is both interestingly complex and realistically mundane; a combination that makes it refreshingly unique. With all this going for him, McDevitt still managed to squander all my good will with his cheap and overly simplistic treatment of a new alien species that Alex and Chase discover in the last half of Echo.

Rather than rehash the plot, I'm going to be really cheap and lazy and let the reviewers from amazon.com do it for me. You can find all the review I will be quoting here and here.

bmills writes "I can't recall reading another book that was as poorly thought out as McDevitt's Echo, and when the resolution is the big part of a story's problems, I think it's fair to include spoilers, so here goes.

The setting: The story is set at least 9,000 years in the future, but except for artificial intelligences and space travel, the characters live pretty much like 21st century people. Neither technology nor society seems to have progressed much in all that time. The characters have a shuttle that can routinely take them from a planet's surface to orbit, but this shuttle doesn't have enough thrust to cope with flying through the storm they encounter (so how does it make it to orbit?), and is shot down by regular old bullets, leaving it to look rather feeble for something that should be built to withstand the rigors of space travel. The entire society in which these characters live is convinced that there can be no such thing as intelligent aliens, even though there already is an intelligent alien race that they encountered many years before the setting of Echo and are still in contact with.

The plot: The protagonists are intrigued to hear about a stone with writing that may have come from an alien civilization after all, but the antagonists strenuously work to keep the heroes from examining this stone. However, when all is revealed at the end of the book, it turns out that the stone and its writing contained no clues whatsoever to the origin of the stone. In other words, there was no reason at all for the antagonists to try to keep this unhelpful thing away from the heroes. In fact, if the antagonists had not stolen the stone out from under the heroes in the first place, the protagonists might never have figured out who the villains of the story were, nor bothered to dig into the mystery at all, leaving the villains of Echo to look like utter idiots who brought their own downfall upon themselves. Along the way, following clues leads the protagonists to an uninhabited planet where they are lured into an ambush by a hostile agent. But the planet is, as I said, uninhabited. Where did the hostile agent come from? Has he been living alone on this planet for who knows how long, just hoping someone will try to investigate the mystery he's been hired to hide? Or are we to assume that he figured out where the heroes were going, somehow got there first, and set up the ambush? That's possible, but McDevitt simply never addresses the question. The protagonists eventually find the planet where the stone originated, but it turns out it's inhabited not by aliens, but is merely a lost human colony. But then in the epilogue, bizarrely enough, the narrator explains that subsequent examination revealed that the natives of this planet really were aliens after all, leaving the reader to conclude that it's mere coincidence that these people look exactly like humans from earth. So the protagonists find an alien intelligence (besides that one they've ALREADY known about for centuries) after all, but despite the fact that seeking aliens was the whole quest the heroes set out upon in the first place, the fact that these other people actually are aliens is tossed off as an afterthought. Not even the protagonists themselves seem impressed that they found the aliens they were hoping for in the first place.

Echo's fictional world is unimaginative, the mystery hinges on a clue that isn't a clue, the characters behave stupidly, and what should be the emotional climax of the story is buried in the epilogue. This book was so bad that I was angry I'd wasted my time reading it."

That pretty much sums it up for me. Whoever bmills is, I owe him or her a beer.

Now, my biggest problem is with the treatment of this new alien species. Let me summarize it for you. 1-Alex and Chase land on a planet with an old but unknown human colony. It's been there so long that the people actually claim to have been created there in prehistoric times. Unfortunately, their civilization was largely destroyed by an asteroid, and the last few survivors are just living out the end of days in a monastery-type place in the wilderness. 2-Chase and Alex live with these people for quite a while, and at no point do they ever even remotely suspect that they're not human. 3-In the epilogue McDevitt reveals that they actually are aliens, so...yay? The exact line from the novel is "The inhabitants, it turns out, were not human after all. They only have forty-two chromosomes." Yeah...that's it. Can you see my problem?

Now, my first reaction to this twist was that it must be a joke, but there is nothing in the book that would substantiate this idea. My conclusion, then, is that I've been trolled by an author. Does he really expect me to believe that these beings are so identical to humans that his main characters were fooled after living in very close quarters with them for days (or weeks, I don't remember)? Does he really expect me to believe that he forgot how to write about aliens? Look at how great the Mutes are. What the hell happened? Furthermore, is he trying to say that people with more or less chromosomes than "normal" aren't human anymore? Or is his biology just so woefully bad that he assumes he's being clever? To be honest, I'm so disappointed that I'm having trouble putting into words just how angry I am over this ending. Again, I'm going to let some other people say it for me.

jiminnyc writes, "My mother use to make meatloaf a lot when we were kids. We didn't have a lot of money so the meatloaf was usually more bread than meat. This book is a lot like that meatloaf. But unlike this book, my mother's meatloaf, God rest her soul, was good. Jack McDevitt's Echo, not so much. There is not enough real material in this book to make a short novella. Shame on you Ace Books for publishing this. There are lots of young, gifted writers out there that are so much more deserving to be published but are never seen because a publishers like Ace will go with a known author, even if his work is horrible, than someone who is truly deserving."

thepinkone writes, "The ending is so pathetic. NOTHING new happens. Recycled trash. If Jack McDevitt actually wrote this himself, he should be ashamed. I wonder if he even READ it. I seriously want my money back."

D. C Smith writes, "You make us read almost the whole book for nothing. It's like expecting a good dessert at the end of your fancy, high-priced meal, and instead getting a lump of sour yogurt. Oh well, at least I didn't pay for this book."

Finally, Avid Reader writes, "In this case, the alien idea was utterly absurd - nearly identical "humans" developed on another world but for some reason they had 42 chromosomes - lol."

All of these people had the same reaction that I did. Disappointment, maybe even anger, and shock at being treated like fools by an author that we had all sort of liked. It's really disconcerting, and I'm reacting by never buying or recommending another one of McDevitt's novels. As I mentioned above, he has squandered all the good will I had towards him, and he can never get it back.

So where does this long, negative rant leave us? Frankly, I don't know. I started out wanting to say something about narrative consistency or maybe about treating your readers as if they're intelligent enough to see through your hand-waving, but I don't really think that I can say anything halfway interesting anymore. I guess I'm just venting on the interwebs.

Thanks for reading, maybe, and come back soon when I've decided to write about a book I like. Until then, don't read Echo. Go watch Columbo instead.

Ordo Xenos

Today I wanted to explain why I was so mad at a book I recently read, but in order to properly explain my reaction I would have had to include a big info dump on aliens in sci-fi. Rather than put that in the middle of the other post, I figured I could cheat and get two posts out of it by talking about aliens separately. That way I stretch my material and feel like I'm accomplishing something.

            

 Science Fiction deals with aliens so often that they've become something of a signifier for the genre as a whole (like robots and ray-guns). As soon as you see aliens, you know you've got some sci-fi on your hands. It's no surprise, then, that the depiction of alien species in fiction has taken on certain iconic forms that we can make generalizations about. I've decided, from my own experience, that there are four major categories of aliens in sci-fi, and I'm just going to talk about my observations as briefly as I can. These categories are by no means exhaustive, nor are they meant to be exclusive. Some depictions can be included in a number of these groups, or none. They're just some generalizations I've made to help me think about plot elements, characters, and other aspects of this genre that I read so much.

           

 My list of categories is: 1) The Unknowable Intelligence; 2) The Anthropogenic Lesson; 3) The Implacable Foe; 4) The Thought Experiment. If you think I missed something, let me know. I'd be interested to hear your take on it.

1) The Unknowable Intelligence is a species that has progressed so far beyond us that we can never truly understand their motives, thoughts, or abilities. Think of the planet from Solaris, Q from Star Trek, or the monolith makers from 2001. These kinds of aliens are usually used either to explore the limits of human abilities and intelligence, or to make some kind of point about communication or incommensurability. Sometimes they're godlike and remote; other times they're meddlesome and contradictory. Either way, there's always something fundamental about them that humans find it impossible to come to terms with or to comprehend. I think my favourite from this category, though it's not an "intelligence" per se, really more of a force of nature, is the Shrike from Dan Simmons' Hyperion series. It's a terrifying being that attacks people, seemingly at random, impaling them on a gigantic tree of thorns while guided by some unknown logic or plan. It may not even really be an alien, but I'm going to include it here anyways since it's such a compelling character.

2) The Anthropogenic Lesson is a kind of alien that is more or less obviously meant to represent a specific, real-life, human group, race, religion, or organization. Aliens like this are usually used to instantly clue-in readers to the author's agenda. By representing a group that readers are already familiar with, the author can play on any number of inbuilt assumptions that the reader may already hold. Really simplistic versions of this kind of alien can be seen week after week on Star Trek, but many authors are far more skilled at making them meaningful and complex. Just look at the Oankali from Octavia Butler's Xenogenesis trilogy; they deftly reflect the kind of cultural assumptions that European slave owners had about African people, and treat humans with the same sort of paternalistic disdain (well, most of them do). By using an alien species to represent a specific group of real people, sci-fi authors are able to endow controversial and emotionally charged ideas with enough distance to explore them without resorting to polemic. When done right (like the Oankali) the results can be spectacular.

3) The Implacable Foe is the alien from any number of war or action based books and movies. Think Wells' Martians or Niven'sKzinti. Some of these aliens do nothing more than drive the plot along, while others are intentionally simplistic in order to help focus the story on the "good guys" and the ways in which they deal with conflict. Romero's zombies are a good example of this second type of alien (despite not being aliens) since they are inherently uncharacterizable, allowing Romero to spend most of his efforts providing us with excellent character explorations of his human protagonists. Other times, these aliens are far more terrifying and insidious. My favourite of all is the Xenomorph from the Alien franchise, though I'll probably discuss what I think about its meaning and cultural significance another time. Essentially, Implacable Foes can be either really silly or really useful, and which of these they are is dependent on the author.

4) The Thought Experiment is the kind of alien that harks back to the Golden Age of sci-fi, when the literature as a whole was defined as a literature of ideas. These are the "what if" aliens that let authors exercise their imaginations in creating new, yet believable, species based on a different set of initial conditions. Some of the very best alien species fit into this category, as do some of the strangest. Larry Niven seems to really like this kind of alien, constantly asking himself what a species would be like if they had a different biochemistry, or if herd-living herbivores developed intelligence, or maybe if they could control other sentient beings through telepathy (The last one is great. Niven's Thrint can control other beings with their minds, resulting in a society of aliens who can do nothing for themselves, and never really evolved to be very smart at all. Imagine what a race would be like if they never did a single practical thing for themselves.). Orson Scott Card's Piggies fit into this category, as do Ursula Le Guin's Gethenians, even though they're sort of humanish (maybe). One of my favourite in this category is Mary Doria Russell's Runa and Jana'ata from The Sparrow. Here she describes an intelligent herbivore and an intelligent carnivore that feeds on them, and does it way, way better than Wells did with his Morlocks and Eloi. Thought experiment aliens can be incredibly, and really highlight some of the very best aspects of the literature as a whole.

           

 Anyways, those are my categories, and they're totally based on my own individual experience of reading science fiction. Let me know if you have ideas, new categories, or even just want to talk about some of your favourites.

And don't forget, the true journey is a return.