The Stars My Destination

Lorenzo DiBonaventura (producer - Transformers, other things), Raymond Wagner (producer, super-old) and Neal Adams (odd* conceptual designer) are listed on IMDB as developing 'The Stars My Destination' by Alfred Bester, for the screen, since 2007, scheduled to be released 2012.  Nothing seems to be happening on this film.  (Warner bros have some work under way for 'Cristo' or as I think of it:  Space Count of Monte Cristo. A shallow reader might think it similar to TSMD.  It is relatively lame (see below).  Still a great story and should be an awesome film though.)

The Stars My Destination should be made as a film.

  This is a hot, fast-moving book that I think should be an easy adapt, except for the complicated backgrounds that might need exposition.  The novel teeters on the brink of chaos, but somehow he wrestles the whole into shape with structures within structures, interlocking shapes of story that you can only read and marvel at.  I would write it for free if it helped it get made (though I can't imagine anything less likely to succeed than approaching a giant star and director and production company with - "here's the screenplay - it's by another hopeful dickhead you never heard of. You didn't read about it in the trades because it was free - it's literally worthless.").

Themes - why this is an important story for today:
1. Intellectual Property ascendant.  The background is a world of very high technology and a very stratified society, where an aristocracy of intellectual property holders dominates the globalized society.  If you think about how copyright is steadily being extended and patent law is more and more the ground on which inter-corporation wars are fought, this seems to be exactly somewhere we could get to.
2. Inequality. Everyone except the very rich is vulnerable to poverty, violence and crime.
3. Terrorism. The solar system is at war, but it's a fundamentally unequal war in which the tactics are terrifying, asymmetric - attacks on populations, exploitation and internment of refugees.
4.  Globalization. The power of Earth national governments to regulate issues of citizenship is limited, because transport (jaunting - pretty much 'disapparating' from Harry Potter) is very cheap and very fast. The boundaries that now define 'nationalities' are found at spaceports and similar, and Earth has a government and secret police and military.
5.  The body. Surgical intervention to augment and alter the body is available, but most heavily used by criminals, the military and social climbers.
6.  Life. The foregoing sets up a lot of very recognizable vulnerability (and corresponding, prized invulnerability). The story mythos is how to live under this vulnerability.

Synopsis (spoilers - but the book is from the fifties, so for goodness sake):
Gully Foyle is an emotionally shut-down ambitionless lump of a spaceman.  His ship is captured by Outer Satellites privateers, and he ends up in a small airtight locker on a ship drifting aimless out past the asteroid belt.  He lasts about half a year by scavenging air and food and water in desperate adventures in a leaky space suit.  When a ship appears, he thinks he will be rescued, but on seeing it is only him, SS Vorga doesn't stop.  This awakens Gully emotionally and when he tries, he finds he can repair his ship and get the main engine started, although navigation is not possible.  (There are a number of statistically very unlikely conjunctions in space in this story, but we'll just have to deal with it.)

     Gully reaches Earth where he is rehabilitated and learns to jaunt and begins to be a criminal, plotting against the Vorga and sexually assaulting his jaunte instructor Robin to ensure her silence. Then he makes a stupid attempt at revenge which sees him locked up.  At the same time, his story comes to the notice of Presteign of Presteign, a front rank aristocrat with basic patents on a lot of spacefaring.  Gully is imprisoned in the Gouffre Martel, a perfectly dark underground prison, from which jaunting is impossible. There he meets Jizzbella McQueen, a beautiful and brilliant professional criminal. They become dependent on each other - he for her intelligence (and he learns to prize intelligence) and she for his absolutely implacable courage/rage. When Presteign attempts to interrogate him in prison, he escapes with Jizzbella.  During his escape he sees the Burning Man, a grim apparition of a man on fire, for the first time.

    Gully and Jizzbella work out that there was treasure on his ship, steal a sporty spaceship and try to salvage it.  But Presteign turns up and Gully just barely escapes, by abandoning Jizzbella.

   On Earth, he is soon fabulously rich and takes an identity as Geoffrey Fourmyle, a ludicrous spendthrift clown-entrepreneur.  He travels with his Fourmyle circus, a sort of giant Carnivale / Burning Man Festival / royal court in which there are concealed a few terribly serious scientific investigations into the mysterious substance that came with the treasure.  But he is really beginning in earnest his quest to find the captain and crew of the SS Vorga, and he recruits Robin to coach him in civilization.  At the same time, Presteign wants to draw Fourmyle in, at first because of his wealth, and to keep his enemies close.  And Gully falls in love (violently, as he does everything at this stage of moral development) with Olivia Presteign, Presteign's albino daughter, with eyes that see Infra Red.

   Having identifed three former crewmen, Gully sets up an opportunity to interrogate them during a progressive New Years' Ball, in which he takes as an escort the partial telepath, Robin, who taught him to Jaunte. Each of the crewmen dies on trying to say the name of the director of the mission, but Gully gets a new facts: the name of crewman now working as a slave on the Moon's algae farms. The Burning Man appears at each killing, and the Burning Man is recognizable as Gully. He kidnaps him and hooks him up to life support before interrogating him.  Even though the hypnotic kill switch activates and his heart stops, he stays alive long enough to reveal that Lindsey Joyce is in the Skoptsy colony on Mars, having renounced life.

   Gully feels beaten.  Skoptsies are religious who give themselves to total sensory deprivation.  There seems no way to punish Joyce.  But Gully is implacable - he steals a telepath and uses him to intrude on Lindsey Joyce.  He terrifies the young telepath so much that everyone, including Joyce, is affected. Gully is absolutely disgusted by Joyce.  Her detachment is absolute evil in his moral scheme.
  Then Gully finds out the last name.  The director of the voyage, who refused to pick him up was Olivia Presteign. And all the silence was because she was scuttling refugees - taking their money and belongings, then dumping them to die in space.  Gully has the insight of a tragic hero - everything he's done to remake himself for revenge had made him too great to take revenge on her.  He gets captured by Presteign.

   Presteign explains that among the treasure was PyRE - a substance that is the primordial stuff that detonated in the big bang; and PyRE can be detonated any time, by Will and Idea.  Robin is there, and her idea of detonation radiates out - Foyle's lab in the Fourmyle circus had a smudge of Pyre left behind and it explodes.  Fortunately the main mass of PyRE is deeply secured below the lab, and cannot detonate.  Gully negotiates with Presteign for Olivia; he expresses his outrage at the power of PyRE being under the control of just a few people - having mastered all his smallness while remaining himself, he is enraged by the narrow, dirty cheating of the wealthy and powerful. Although drugged, he escapes to Earth, and from there he heads to his laboratory to do something about PyRE.

  His lab is on fire.  His great strength and augmented reflexes and courage lead him to try to go to the PyRE, but he gets stuck in a burning loom of wire, tangled and flailing.  He tries to jaunte, but being drugged is making it difficult to resolve a destination, and then he starts flashing to significant places - the air-tight locker, the cell, the scenes of the deaths of the spacemen, the present, and then the future.  In that future, Robin tells him how to get free.  In doing so he discovers the secret to space-jaunting - thinking through time - he space-jauntes to Arcturus' blue fire, to his old coffin and back to earth.  Presteign helps him.  The fire is coming under control, and Gully recovers and sits up.  He lectures Presteign on living, then distributes PyRE across the world and directs everyone to start living, right now.

Story Structure(s) - why this is a (very) filmable story

Neal Gaiman wrote an introduction to the story that highlighted the sequence of wombs, out of each of which, Gully is reborn more powerful: the air-tight locker; the Gouffre Martel cell and several others, culminating in the burning wire cage.  Each of these forms a sequence with goals, stakes, urgency of their own.  The sequences are basically the seven and a half paragraphs in the synopsis. A lot of detail has been lost to synopsising, but in every sequences, Gully grows and becomes more powerful, and more morally conscious, although he remains cruel and remorseless, beginning with neglect of even himself, through a blunt and aimless cruelty, to a razor-edge relentless predator ranging the solar system.  But you can't grow so much as a person without starting to have your shit together morally speaking.  Gully is genuinely sorry for raping Robin by the middle of the film, and does her only good once he recruits her.  By the conclusion of the film, Gully has transcended everything that made him, as has Robin.

Second, the morality.  There are two layers of morality operating in the story.  The more familiar is the conventional morality in which its wrong to hurt the weak, to be unfair.  The less familiar is straightforwardly Nietzschean 'yes to everything' morality, in which letting other people make you is a regrettable weakness, but evil is refusing life - refusing to make big choices and take big chances. Lindsey Joyce and all the other crew of the Vorga allowed Olivia Presteign to make them, and crushed by guilt, gave up on life.  This is their evil, the evil of weakness dwelling in and clinging to its weakness.  Its what Gully overcame when Vorga abandoned him.


Third, the characters all partake of both moralities, but strongly represent one or the other.  Presteign represents Nietzschean power, but in the end Gully judges him to have taken too much on himself, which is wrong even as a Nietzschean because it preserves his power that should exist by contending, not by secrecy and declining to compete.  Dagenham, Jizzbella and other minor characters operate on skill power - Presteign, though, is most skilled at holding on to his inherited power.  Robin operates entirely without Nietzschean power, and yet by the mid point Gully is begging for her help, and by the end depends on her to save his life.  He is moved into conventional morality by this.  Robin has lived to overcome his assault, to become too great to hold it against him.  Olivia is a pure Nietzschean, willing to do anything to sate her Presteign passions for blood and money - yet she expresses a desire to be overcome to Gully.  Gully was shut down to life until he nearly lost it - perhaps he was trapped in conventional morality, just going along, conforming, until the people really living life showed how little that meant to them.

Everyone has a story - indeed its bewildering how much story is in this short book.

Challenges

• Nietzschean 'yes to everything' morality freaks people out ('Yes Man' notwithstanding):  
• The protagonist is extraordinarily imperious, relentless and cruel - and those are the qualities his character develops.  
• The protagonist rapes a lovely woman who helps him, and then gets her to help him achieve his dreams.  I can't imagine that going over well with women and people who care about them - I would expect protests from feminists.  (I would argue that this is treated as seriously as anything in the story, but I doubt any writer could make it serious enough.)
• Olivia Presteign is the worst mass murderer I can think of in fiction - defrauding and killing the most vulnerable people she can, including Robin's family.  And her punishment is that Gully marries her.  It has a certain logic, but its to see audiences feeling satisfied.
• The protagonist may not be very sympathetic in the opening of the film.  Just getting pushed around and being unwilling to push back is not universally sympathetic.
• The amount that would need to be explained is large.  Jaunting, PyRE, the solar system's warring sides, the existence of telepathy, Gully's progressive identity shifts (Geoffrey Fourmyle, souped up Commando), and the complex webs of relationships, inferences, games and tricks that motivate all the participants.

Come on, guys!  Make this film!


* Neal Adams thinks that all seismic and geological evidence is best explained by his idea that Earth (and other planets) is steadily growing in size.  ?        ???              ?????

I was giving a lift and taking directions

Which took me home by a different route than we had come by. The future, always so clear to me, was like a black highway at night. But I knew what Paul Muad-d'ib would do, and I took the opportunity to be a sort of Ersatz Haderach.

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Starship Troopers

Starship Troopers (Paul Verhoeven's film of Robert Heinlein's book) is another nice use of science-fiction.  The tone is lighter than Moon, District 9 or Rise of TPOTApes, but it's only light with ironic distance from quite heavy material. In Heinlein's book, the heaviness of a war with an existential threat is treated without irony, as requiring courage.  In Verhoeven's film, the visual feel is Beverly Hills 90210 meets The Empire from Star Wars, and the ironic distance allows you to see the following:

• globalisation means we are all Americans now.  Jonny Rico, Carmen Ibanez and all are from Rio de Janeiro Buenos Aires, but there is no trace of latin culture to be seen.
• the militarism of Heinlein's book, which draws on his WWII experience and is reasonable given a significant threat, is shown in its fullness - on the one hand, discipline, training, power and career advancement at a young age; on the other a narrowed conception of the possibilities of life and an inability to do anything other than fight.
• 'Violence is the supreme authority, from which all other authority derives.' A perfect, ironic summation of the problem of this culture (and ours). Relating this to Foucault's Knowledge-Power we might say that yes it is, but the technology of such power is becoming overspecialised and will miss opportunities to finesse, or to find new efficiencies.
• The neat fit of 90210-world and the Empire - the same winner-takes-all competitiveness, the same casual commitment of your all in relationships, the same unreflective self-enlargement, the same expense of the destruction of the weak.

What I think is so clever about Verhoeven's film is that it doesn't really do a disservice to Heinlein's book - the reality of the book is there, and its goods are present; but Verhoeven gives us lines to follow that take us outside the frame and show the weakness behind the strength, the narrowness of outlook and the foreshortening of life.

Future Movies

This weekend has been an SF film extravaganza (by my standards) in the Fool household.

We re-watched Moon - an impeccable contained thriller that makes explicit the hidden agenda that motivates cloning - to have a person be equipment.  Brilliant film from front to back - don't miss it.

We watched 'Rise of the Planet of the Apes' - probably the best Planet of the Apes, a rich homage to the others, but a strong film in its own right.  In a world where you can hardly get a film made with a black male lead, the screenwriters sold a concept where the central character is a CGI chimpanzee.

Finally, District 9. Somehow, like Moon, it just flows so effortlessly that it is a first rate film, full of surprises.

When will we see an SF best picture Oscar, I wonder, instead of nostalgic pap?

BattleTech

I read my first BattleTech novel today.  It was a gift from my brother-in-law, who rolled his eyes as he handed it over.  It was not a very good novel, and if anything a closer examination of the world of BattleTech made it seem less convincing. Powerful, machine-mounted laser weapons missing?  At ranges of a few hundred meters?  Interstellar travel is mastered, but nukes and anti-matter and space bombardment and artillery are not effective?

 But, I'm pretty sick and exhausted, and the characters were better than you might expect, and I was reminded that I had quite enjoyed playing MechCommander.

It's always worth Googling things, too, because I was amazed to find Mechcommander 2 was released as an example with source code by Microsoft. It is minus all the supporting video and animation, and I'm not sure about the in-game art.  Unfortunately it was a Windows XP game, I'm not sure I'll be able to get it running on Windows 7.  Maybe Wine?  Or I do still have the windows Me machine...

Update: Full release (which was made available free by the original publishers at the same time that Microsoft used it as an example) allegedly available here. Smaller download too.

Peter F Hamilton

So...  Peter F Hamilton.  He writes big SF books with lots of stuff in them.  I've only read the Night's Dawn series (The Reality Dysfunction, The Neutronium Alchemist, The Naked God), which was pretty good, but not really to my taste.  The interesting thing is that he seems to know his bible because Josh Calvert (J.C.), passes through a nebula and makes a deal with 'the Naked God' (a black hole / singularity of waaaay superhuman power), which makes him say exactly what he wants it to do, how to wield its God-like powers, for all humanity.

Daniel 7:13-14 says:

In my vision at night I looked, and there before me was one like a son of man, coming with the clouds of heaven. He approached the Ancient of Days and was led into his presence. 14He was given authority, glory and sovereign power.

In the new testament, when Jesus calls himself ''son of man', he is probably citing this scene; and he cites it at his trial.

It's the nebula = clouds that struck me as a deliberate choice to create this likeness.  They traverse a nebula in their search and it seems otherwise quite unnecessary and lame, as I recall.

The Fifth Head of Cerberus

I re-read the Fifth Head of Cerberus.  That is the only way to read it, and in truth, the only way to read a lot of what Gene Wolfe has given us.  The first reading gives you the overall shape, but leaves a lot of strangeness. As you re-read, the strangeness becomes familiar and eventually the myriad of hints and allusions begin to take on an overall shape.  The laws of perspective appropriate to this reality become clear.

M.T. Anderson

I can't recommend M.T. 'Tobin' Anderson highly enough. Young adults seem to be a readership that hold on to literary quality well into the pleasures of 'genre' fiction, and Anderson is a very fine example of the type.  I first read his dyad 'The Astonishing Life of Octavian Nothing: Traitor to the Nation', the narrative of a boy growing up through the American War of Independence, and seeing the moral hollowness behind the great declarations of independence and equality.

More recently I have been reading his book 'Feed', a stylish science fiction, perhaps best-shorthanded as an update to 'Brave New World' for the internet age.  The 'Feed' is the whispering of advertising, augmenting reality all day, every day, everywhere you go.  The protagonist is a young man, Titus (like the biblical Titus, in a gluttonous world & like Titus Groan, in a world that wants you for a component not a whole), who is mentally alive in ways that his friends are not, in a culture which is not. The language is mostly the ugly, lazy, slangy language you can hear on the train or anywhere young people are typical.

Having gone to the moon for kicks, Titus and his friends Link and Marty have gone to a zero-grav funhouse, failed to have fun and are now preparing to eat.  Titus has been watching, attracted, a blond girl in grey who has watchful eyes. His friends arrive:

... they came in and immediately Link and Marty started doing these gymnastics, and they got in trouble, so I could stay watching her without them being a mob on me.  This guy, he was from the club, he was yelling at them because they wouldn't stay out of the snack bar, which was off-bounds for still bouncing.
  Behind the girl in grey was a big window and you could see we were in a bubble way high up over the moon.  Down on the ground, tourists were riding big proteins across the craters.  All the stars were out.
  The guy was still yelling at the others over by the valve. He was all 'da da da be removed from the premises, da da da express instructions, da da.'  I lowered my head and turned it toward the girl in gray.
  When she thought no one was looking, she opened her mouth. Something trembled there.  Juice.  She had filled her mouth with juice.
  Da da da, liability, da da da, think you're doing.  I shifted. I watched the juice. For her own amusement she was letting it go, gentle and sexy.
 
She just opened her mouth and pushed it out gently with her tongue.  The juice came out of her lips as if it was being extracted real careful by a rock-star dentist who she loved.

The contrast between the way Titus thinks and narrates what his life is about when with his friends and the feed, and the way he is when with the girl in grey, Violet, is the engine of the story.

I can't think of many writers who I regard as highly for being both writerly and real.

Reflections I

Gene Wolfe creates a most interesting character in Father Inire, a cacogen (alien) who has devoted himself to furthering human destiny.  He is an adviser to the Autarch, and a keeper of mirrors.

How foolish to call them mirrors.  They are to mirrors as the enveloping firmament  is to a child's balloon. They reflect light indeed; but that, I think, is no part of their true function.  They reflect reality, the metaphysical substance that underlies the material world.

The mirrors are transport, communication and more.  As conventional mirrors can reflect each other indefinitely, perfectly aligned these mirrors access the infinite.

Singularity University

Futurist Ray Kurzweil has founded an institution dedicated to the exponential tendencies of growing human knowledge  which is known as Singularity University - at present it offers a few short courses and some grad student programs, aiming to prepare business people to remain functional five minutes longer than the rest of us - just long enough to be well ahead when its all over.

Somehow, whenever I hear that name it makes me think of Bovine University from Troy McClure's short film on why its OK to eat meat.  The abbatoir is Bovine University.  I guess in my mind, the Singularity shows up we walking meatbags and confronts us with what else we might be.

Alfred Bester

I'm about four stories into Virtual Unrealities, a compendium of Alfred Bester's short stories, and I'm not sure if they are putting the best first, but they've been:

• Disappearing Act: the story of America's relentless war, evolution and specialisation toward finally establishing the American Dream, which is thrown into jeopardy when a small proportion of the walking wounded start walking right out of reality and into their heroic interventions in fantasy histories. For a science fiction short story that works well, its pretty message-heavy.
• Oddy and Id: A boy with a strange power over reality sets out to bring peace with surprising results. An amusement about the likely behaviour of a brain that can satisfy itself.
• Star Light, Star Bright: A boy at the center of a circle of powerful child savants is hunted by a doomed man - doomed because he sees only the upside of new powers. (The least arresting of the four.)
• 5,271,009: An evil old man puts a juvenile artist through the wringer to rescue him from flight into madness. Very Neitzschean - eternal return.

This Immortal

Roger Zelazny's 'This Immortal' made it into a list of the top hundred science fiction novels of all time.  It concerns the adventures of Conrad Nomikos, head of the Earth's department of Antiquities.  Of Greek background, Conrad is fiercely strong and something of a mutant - admitting quite early that he stopped aging between 30 and 40.  He still lives very largely in Greece.

But it is Greece post-Apocalypse - the world's great cities are now Hot Zones, peopled with fierce mutants and monsters. Vegans (striking blue folk from Vega) have intervened to take humans into their civilisation so that our kind might not disappear, and to marvel in horror at the  price of foolhardiness.  An important Vegan is to tour Earth, and Conrad acts as his escort. They have many adventures on the tour (which often reiterate ancient Greek myth) and Conrad has his hands full keeping the Vegan and himself alive.

This is a well constructed and enjoyable novel, but a pure entertainment.  A few light lessons in principles and possibilities, and a relatively interesting resolution, but no fundamental revisions.  It is a conservative story, a celebration of the long history of human being on the planet and a hope for long perseverance even after ecological catastrophe. Worth a look.

Surface Detail

Iain M Banks* writes so engagingly that reading his novels is always a pleasure.  Surface Detail returns to the Culture, one of a small number of Level 8 (referring to a top degree of technical accomplishment) civilisations in the galaxy. The galaxy is not short of less developed civilisations and has its own meta-civilisation with strict social rules about technology transfer and comportment.  The Culture is perhaps defined by it's willingness to go all out at 'being' - engineering Minds (vast machine intelligences that are worth billions of human lives) that long since took over the running the show, extending the powers of matter to its limits in this universe - while usually remaining very laid back about 'doing' anything in particular, and having as little as possible in the way of 'tending'.  But somehow, the Minds and the humans and the drones all seem to get along pretty well, and if you can't get along, well you have as many options as you can think of, money being no object, literally.

Relations with other civilisations are more complicated, are regulated through a Culture organisation called Contact, and are usually where the story-worthy material uccurs.  Within Contact, the usual heroes of these novels, the ships, drones and humans of Special Circumstances.  In Surface Detail, the trouble arises around the widespread galactic practice of preserving the minds of people after death in simulations.  Once discovered, the possibility of condemning the images of sentient minds captured in their 'soulkeeper' to eternal punishment seems attractive to many societies.  Many civilisations maintain large and expanding Hells of a very medieval sort, in Matrix-style worlds in processing substrate. For some reason, there is debate about this obscenity, and the debate has reached such a pitch that the Hells themselves have been declared appropriate space for the war to a finish on the issue.  The war has gone on for thirty years.

The losing side, the one that has been aiming to shut down Hell, has become desperate and attempts action in the Real, with the help of Veppers, a corrupt corporate Tyrant from a Level 3 or 4, a couple of Level 8 civilisations and a Level 6 civilisation that is modeling itself on the Culture, trying to do what it thinks the Culture wants - in fact, offering the sincerest form of flattery.  While the Culture is against the Hells, it is careful about imposing values on other civilisations, and more than careful because there are a bunch of other Level 8s and they all have to agree on how to proceed.  The heroine, Lededje Y'breq, begins as an intagliated prize of Veppers - tattooed inside and out, her very DNA altered to imprint her flesh as the property of Veppers thanks to his betrayal of his oldest friend, her father.  Her native Sichult is a place that believes in punishment.

The themes Banks is playing with here are crime, revenge and punishment. Alongside these is 'surface detail' - and its significance is still a question for me.  Given the interest in simulation and reality throughout, surface detail makes sense as an issue is of interest to conscious beings looking to understand their world - it is repeated in the tattoo, the quality of simulation. The cover design is a fractal, the Mandelbrot set - defined in a simple algorithm, yet the most complicated possible 2D shape. Is the idea here that the Hells are an organising principle, a fractal algorithm for the societies that need them?  That abusive power is the final texture in those societies - that no relationship occurs without tincture of power?

Two confrontations stand out - Veppers confronts the Culture ambassador and the worlds collide: his world of abusive power, and her world of contentment and peace. This moment is small enough, but pivotal, providing insight into all the major players.

The second is Lededje confronting an old lover who tells her gently that Love is not Enough. I think the way this rankles expresses the secret essence of the Culture, hidden behind all the surface detail: that the Culture is founded on the idea that Love is Enough.  The Minds of the Culture enjoy themselves in their immense fashion, but they also make great sacrifices to remain engaged with humans, sometimes ultimate sacrifices. This is belied by the relish with which Banks has all his Culture people & Minds squabble with each other, and his interest in the fringe, the Contact section, in which the people are a bit edgier than the Culture mainstream. But I think the secret constitution of the Culture must be Love.

The problem he raises but cheats in resolving is that some people do deserve punishment and the Real can't be relied on to administer justice - indeed the opposite is probably true for most of us (those who read and write blogs). Sometime its not even just people, its the entire civilisation.  The point of the Hells is to torture, and the point I expected him to be making is that Torture is Wrong - it isn't made significantly worse when applied to the weak or the moral, or carried out by the immoral, because in its face all are weak but relatively righteous, ad beyond its practice no one can remain righteous.  He went to some pains to set up a range of problems and to narrate the awful reality of Hell, but in the end the Culture wins thanks to the strength of an Abominator class vessel with psychopathy on tap.  The Hells become an object of disgust to most of the civilisations that used to operate them once they have the chance to try their civilisation without that threat, but the Abominator doesn't mind administering punishment. Apparently Culture principles of merciful treatment of fellow sentients are not Enough in the Real.

For Banks trainspotters (he invites it) look out for the return of a long lost SC agent. This may be a habit - certainly there was another one in Matter.  There are also major subplots that apparently come to nothing, just carrying a variety of interesting exposition - the treacheries of the SC agent in question, the involvement of the Bulbitians with the sublimed, and the Nauptre Reliquaria as a potential nemesis of the Culture.  I would like to think that these extraneous bits will one day add up to something, perhaps the revelation of the cause of the eventual demise of the Culture revealed in Look to Windward.  While this might be satisfying, I fear it may be too much to ask - these overconstrained plots, with too many players, have happened up before (in Excession, for example).  For all the annoyance of structural redundancy, Banks' writing is so smooth and pleasurable, and his idyllic world of the Culture so pleasant, that I will certainly be lining up again.

*probably the second best M Banks, after Rosy, but well ahead of the others.

Gene Wolfe

Gene Wolfe is a reputable engineer who helped design the special oven that Pringles are baked in (or something - see wikipedia for the exact fact).  He is also the author of some of the most profound fantasy and sci-fi.  Ursula  Le Guin is often quoted on his book jackets saying 'He is our Melville' and she's right.  The theological riches in his best books are amazing. If you haven't read any, I recommend you don't start with the Book of the New Sun - it is a magnificent series, but it is hard to get it all first time through. Re-reading is almost essential.

In addition to the usual sci-fi strangeness, Wolfe very often works through a memoirist, who may liken things to events which are yet to happen in the narration, and often an unreliable memoirist.

The Fifth Head of Cerberus is brief enough and representative enough to be a good starting place for those who are patient with literary novels. Alternatively Soldier of the Mist is a good starting place for someone who usually reads fantasy.  The Wizard-Knight (two books, The Knight and The Wizard) is Wolfe putting his own spin on the western fantasy world, with a fully worked out cosmology of seven realms from the heaven of the Most High God, to the hell of the Most Low God, and the hero, Sir Able of the High Heart, is like Axecop in armour.  There is even a thread back to our own world and what Sir Able achieves for us from his world.

Wolfe's faults.  Sometimes the narrators are so unreliable that you wonder if GW is really in control.  Sometimes the story structure is just confusing or under-developed around a great world.  Free Live Free is extraordinary in some ways, but I'm not racing to re-read it, because the meat of the story is the repetitiveness of the faults of the characters. Castleview seemed like just a mess to me. The Book of the Long Sun seems to end with a whimper, although its continuation in another series may resolve all that.

For all that, Gene Wolfe is the only fiction author that has reconfigurative power for me, who re-orders my thoughts, who sows reality with latent epiphanies which land when you read other books, or in conversation, or in deep thought. I will read a bad book of his before a good book of someone competent but predictable like Iain M Banks.

Rump Humanity

There is a trope in science fiction that technological developments, having grown exponentially, will soon be growing too fast for almost any humans to contribute. Beyond this point there won't be any meaningful economic value you can assign to human life, because a very smart person and a programmable factory and an army of robots, nanomachines and what have you will easily outcompete human labour.  I believe Facebook employs about 1000 people, Twitter a few hundred. How many people work on Intel's design staff? Add in AMD and NVidia - and you still won't have 100,000. People are constantly being laid off from automotive manufacturing, but there are more cars every year.

This nerdy future is sometimes called the Singularity - the point at which technological development relative to human life span and learning capacity is effectively vertical, an infinite rate of growth.  This is the rapture for Nerds, when all-powerful computers and the few humans intelligent enough to remain useful shake off all the bonds of scarcity of time and space.

And those of us who are not that useful will be stuck as Rump Humanity, the non-contributing 99%. I know one, maybe two people who might escape being Rump Humanity, but the rest of us, alas will soon have little to offer the productive ones but what Homer Simpson has to offer Marge - 'complete and utter dependence.'

<frown>  Mmmmm....  That's not a good thing, Homer. <frown/>

Reading list

A photo of the books I need to read - philosophy, sci-fi, politics, and malcolm gladwell, who can consider himself lucky.  From left to right:

Iain M. Banks                 Surface Detail
Hajime Tanabe               Philosophy as Metanoetics  (2 chapters down)
Alfred Bester                  Who he?
Alfred Bester                  Virtual Unrealities (short stories)
Gillian Rose                    Hegel Contra Sociology
Zizek & Milbank            The Monstrosity of Christ (very nearly finished)
Cavalier                         Power Crisis
Sam R Delaney              The Fall of the Towers
Malcolm Gladwell          Outliers
H.G. Wells                    The World Set Free
Wittgenstein                   Philosophical Investigations
Kierkegaard                   Either/Or part I
Dan Dennet                    The Intentional Stance
Kierkegaard                   Purity of Heart is to Will One Thing*

This is a LOT of reading, some of it quite hard.

*  I suppose I could advance this up the reading order and save myself some time, and maybe challenge the tragic bent of this blog.