On the Road to Perdition by Max Allan Collins

1. It’s sometimes interesting to see where an author takes their tale in a sequel. These three parts form one story, and are published together, so I’ll use one set of notes for them. This story slides into the last comic between the pages, conceptualized as interludes in the events of the prior book. It is a three-part series, or mini-series—Oasis, Sanctuary, and Detour—with each part about ninety pages long. It deals with a situation that can fit in the timeline of the prior book in multiple places. And that’s kind of cool, that there’s this standalone story within the context of the earlier story, that can kind of slot in anywhere. It’s as if George Martin wrote a number of novels in his Song of Ice and Fire series, each from one character’s point of view, that all fit together like gears, rather than the already interlaced novels ruled by chronology that he has written. To be clear, I like the tactic Martin uses, but I also like this tactic too. Though this tactic could feel like a bit of an afterthought.

2. Here, it appears that Collins and his artists use these sequels trying to humanize Michael, trying to fix my main problem with the last book. But my main problem with it is the same: the characters don’t justify this fan service. Sometimes I read a book and the characters are so fascinating I don’t want it to end, or I want to see more stories about those people. This was not the case with Road to Perdition.
—Michael gets put into three situations that attempt to cause a conflict in his inflexible nature. In Oasis they take a break at a farm belonging to his dead wife’s best friend—but this of course endangers them. In Sanctuary, he lights candles for the men he killed in Oasis, then gets ambushed by the two Jacks while there, then works with the two Jacks against their ambushers—his honor and his need to focus on protecting himself and his son butting against each other. In Detour he tries to rescue his kidnapped friend from Oasis, but is forced to choose between killing Looney’s son and rescuing the damsel in distress.
—These three situations try to wrinkle Michael’s character, but he still doesn’t change. They only illuminate the same boring character that was there before. Despite feeling like it’s trying to branch out, it still relies on violence to move the plot—which is still a good plot—and doesn’t allow Michael to change.

3. The artists are José Luis García-López, Josef Rubinstein, and Steve Lieber. Collectively, they take the varied but detailed work from the last book and simplify it with less line-work. It is more important line-work: because there is less of it, what is there has to say more. But it comes off looking more typical, more like everything else we see. This isn’t a bad thing, it’s just another indicator that we’re dealing with a run-of-the-mill comic book. A pulp fiction comic, and not a great one. It’s always awkward when a comic switches artists, but this switch is less awkward than others.

4. The worst thing about these are that each of the three parts feature a lengthy recap of what came before. I understand a few panels of recap might be felt necessary by the publisher, but he has way too much recap going on. He sets up the story for each chapter, then pauses to recap the earlier book before continuing with the new story. This pulls me out of the new narrative before it even gets going.

5. In all, this is where I am done with these books. I understand from Wikipedia that there are more books to read, dealing with Michael Jr. But I’m just uninterested and even reading these three was a bit of a slog. They’re alright pulp fiction and I know some people who would love this book, but it’s simply not for me. I want characters who change and feel like people, not flat, unchanging, cold killers whose killing never has any affect on them or their child, who witnesses all this.

Road to Perdition by Max Allan Collins

1. From one violent comic book, to another, I guess. Not all comics are violent. But I wanted to compare this one to Scalped, for whatever reason. So here goes. This comic book is not great. I don’t understand why the hand-writing panels are in there, when so much is already voiced over. It seems redundant.

2. This comic gets away from the typical twenty-four page chapter length pacing of comics. Collins does this by writing the whole thing in one go, as a two hundred and eighty-six page piece. This follows a pacing more like a novella’s. And it often works in comics, and it works well here too. It keeps the story moving along nicely while allowing some spaces to breathe. Where Scalped often escapes the tyranny of the last-page reveal, this escapes both that and the twenty-four page pacing. I appreciate that a lot.

3. And what a story. This is a plot many writers would love to use. Collins found some loose threads in the history around the Capone and Looney crime families, and decided a single character could tie them all up nicely. And boy did it ever. This story fits perfectly within that context and what is known about the history of the times and characters. I want to emphasize here that the story is really something special, as is his tactic of expanding upon the known by speculation—and not wild or overly complex speculation, but concise, effective, this-could-actually-be speculation. Scalped does a similar thing, and does it well too.
—But the story here isn’t allowed to do anything. It’s so caught up with telling that wonderful, small tale well, with fitting all the known pieces from history together, that it feels chained, like too much of a railroad, predictable. We know that Michael does two things—kill and love his family. And he doesn’t do anything else throughout the whole comic. Nothing changes. Some violence to his wife and youngest son means the eldest son and his dad go on the run, but the loving relationship of the family was set up to be too perfect, so you know it’s going to fall. Scalped is predictable only in its unpredictability. This is a story we’ve heard before, and it changes nobody.

4. Mainly, I don’t think this is a great comic book because the characters are not well-developed. They’re flat, unconflicted, and never changing. The strong-silent type protagonist doesn’t really engage me. He’s just not conflicted at all. There’s no development. He goes on his warpath, murders a bunch of guys, and dies. End of story. Michael is just as impassive before and after his wife and youngest are murdered by his boss’ son. He’s just as emotionally neutral and efficient. Any humanity he shows to his son is hidden behind all the violence they are perpetrating and running from. Michael is not a character, he’s an archetype and nothing more. An interesting move could have been his conversion to this cold-blooded killer, but that is glossed over by simply stating he is a war hero from WWI who wanted to keep on killing when he got home. That’s not engaging. Scalped also has a murderous veteran, but Dash is conflicted in a couple of different ways. And that, to me, makes all the difference.

5. Where Scalped is sensationalist for a reason, and that’s a credit to it, this is violent and sensationalizes violence in a useless way because nothing ever changes. This is a big detriment to this comic. Michael never doubts, never questions. It’s all black and white for him. The dead men are unnamed. They don’t matter. They’re redshirts. They’re just impediments to his ultimate goal of killing Looney’s son. This is sensationalized violence because it’s pointless, or because the point is only violence and the violence never changes anything meaningful.

6. The writing is functional. It communicates what is happening in the book and the characters, such as they are, but doesn’t ever really sing well. It’s not a comic I would read for the writing, but the writing isn’t so bad it distracts.

7. Like Scalped, this is violent.Like Scalped, this comic speculates wonderfully upon some historical knowns. Like Scalped, this comic gets away from some of the comic tropes and shows that other paths are effective. But unlike Scalped, the theme here is violence for revenge’s sake alone, not for saying anything about humanity. This is fine pulp fiction, but it’s not a great comic.

Scalped by Jason Aaron and RM Guera

1. This is the most emotionally affecting comic book I’ve ever read. It relies upon tragedy throughout, rather than the Shakespearean strategy of setting up a happy situation and then tearing it apart piece by piece. It also does some things with comic tropes that really work well. These notes result from my second read-through of the whole thing.

2. The single most amazing thing this book does here is in showing the evils and virtues of all sides of this complex, desperate situation. Pine Ridge Indian Reservation, in the Badlands of South Dakota, is a place with 80% unemployment, rampant substance abuse problems, per capita income of less than $6,500 a year, diabetes and infant mortality higher than the national average, police and government corruption, organized crime, the horrible ecological effects of uranium mining, and a life expectancy of 50. Jason Aaron’s fictionalized Pine Rose reservation reflects these numbers and discusses these issues, but throughout the sixty issue arc, he shows a bunch of sides of this extremely complex issue, and delves into the history of the Pine Ridge Shootout, the Wounded Knee Incident, the Wounded Knee Massacre, scalping bounty hunters, Custer, the battle for Whiteclay, the American Indian Movement, et cetera. There are a lot of parts to this story and they are all fictionalized to varying depths to fit the narrative arc. What results is an extremely multifaceted approach to this complex issue, and Aaron shows the evils and virtues of each side that he portrays: tribal council, meth labs, liquor sellers, air force, tribal police, tribal activists, young people trying to survive, old people trying to get by, crime gangs, adjacent county police, the FBI, casino workers, doctors, et cetera. What astounds me is how he successfully shows so many angles that he never dismisses anybody outright, except maybe Rath and Nitz. But even they are humanized to some extent and allowed to be characters that are somewhat sympathetic. This is a masterful job of research, even-handedness, and writing. There are no perfect characters, none either wholly evil or wholly good. And it’s so stinking engaging and fascinating.

3. But I want to talk about sensationalism again. On one hand, you pick up almost any single issue and the comic will seem sensational: sex, drugs, and murder fill the pages of this long book. But if you read five or ten issues, you also start to notice the virtues and good intentions of these characters. The sensationalism is at times off-hand, but even that serves to establish a character like Brass or Red Crow. Aaron never loses sight of why he is writing the killing of a thirteen year old boy by the man who strangled his prostitute mother to death during sex in the next room, or the tribal cop who watches his wife bleed out before arresting the drunk driver who killed her, or the air force pilot who crashes in a snowstorm and demolishes the house of a dying old couple. So it is filled with things that are typically sensationalized—boobs, heroin, gunfights, robbery—but they’re used in order to set up the plot and story and characters. And not in the typical way, where a writer usually uses a gun to escape a corner he's written himself into. I can’t quite say the book is sensational, but I also have a hard time recommending this book to people because it is bloody, there is a lot of nudity, and it discusses tragic situations and circumstances that are clearly uncomfortable for a lot of people.

4. The writing is good. I could’ve written down a hundred quotes from this, but I was too busy reading. He does a great job of writing in a way that seems honest to how people talk, while still creating characters. Too often in comic books, the drawing is not worthy of being relied upon to communicate the action, but RM Guera has keyed each character to a set of accessories that really shows who is who at all times. Tattoos, necklaces, distinctive facial structures, and dialogue all align to communicate characters and what they’re struggling with inside without delving too often into interior monologue. Though when Aaron does use interior monologue, it never conflicts with the actions of the characters.

5. The theme here is coming to terms with mistakes. Everybody makes mistakes, even from their own points of view, and it’s how they respond that defines them. This theme is played out through endless examples, and influences the overarching investigation of life on this fictional reservation. When I was done the first time, and I did some research on the Pine Ridge reservation, I was blown away by this story and deeply saddened. It’s a poignant part of a greater mistake the US government and people made regarding Native Americans. And the characters within this book play this whole thing out fully. It’s a clear case of theme and plot matching perfectly, told like a detective story. It ends on yet another tragic note, but a slightly more optimistic one. In some areas, things are looking up by the end. But not up towards utopia, up towards better. And it’s not saying much to say better than what came before.

6. The plot is paced very well. There are two main time periods being shown: the 1970s with the scalping of the two FBI agents, and now, trying to live with the repercussions of that incident. The earlier time is handled largely in flashbacks. But once the present story really gains momentum, Aaron is able to do a bunch of comics in the middle that deal with specific characters and their stories within the larger context, leaving the main plot almost aside for a time. Then, once the characters all get their moment in the spotlight, he gets back to the main arc and finishes the tale This is an interesting structural move for me. It's like he gets sixty percent of the plot done in the first twenty-five books, then progresses the plot ten percent over the next twenty-five books, then finishes the last thirty percent of the plot in the last ten. It's a good plot structure for this story because it allows him to explore the tangents necessary when looking at an issue as complex as this one.
—This structure is supported by Aaron's reluctance to adhere to the ridiculous last-page-reveal/cliff-hanger structure of almost every comic book—"Tune in next issue for the thrilling conclusion of—". I understand that's how the big two sell comics, but because Aaron has so many of these little one-off pieces that explore a single character or two, the last page is tying up a thread or plot more often than not. It may hint at something more to come, like at the end of issue forty-seven when Aaron lets slip that the character or characters passing each other on the road at night will engage in "All the killin'. Well... That'll all come later." That's not a literal cliffhanger, they're just walking down the road. There's no bullet stuck in midair, no knife swinging through the night sky, and by this point in the series I had better already know that there's a bunch of killing still to come. The way Aaron treats the last page supports the overarching plot of the series as a whole and I hope it's the way forward for comics because the last page reveal is played out.
—The flashbacks are generally short and tend to build on each other—for instance, it’s quite a while before we learn who killed those FBI agents, but flashbacks keep showing small aspects of that event, showing more and more every time it repeats. I'm really enjoying this type of repetition right now, and it works brilliantly here.
—The one thread that is a little discongruous is the Hmong thread. Though it ties into the crime and racial aspects of the tale, it distracts the focus somewhat from the Reservation and I’m not sure what all it is intended to add.

7. In short, this is one of the best comic books I’ve ever read. It’s a difficult book in terms of context, content, and emotions. I end up numb and utterly gutted. It’s a book I will return to again and again. But I also have a hard time recommending it to just anybody.

The State of the Art by Iain M Banks

1. This book is split in two: some short stories and the titular novella. The stories are a big departure from the Culture novels for Banks, and not in a good way. They attempt to be philosophical think-pieces, but end up being straw-man arguments ruthlessly taken apart. I even agree with some of his arguments, but the setup and resolution often comes off bitter and angry. And these may be things to be angry about, but the bitterness really drags them down. They’re bad short stories, one-sided, and I wonder who the intended audience is. Those who agree with him will find nothing new, and those who disagree will be turned off by how uncharitable he is in ranting against the lack of charity in others. They’re too short to really set up characters, so they set up archetypes and then take them apart. The one above-average one deals with a sentient space-suit and its occupant trekking across a planet after a crash and trying to reach civilization. This is one of the longer short stories and allows characters to develop. That’s part of what makes this one so good. But it also doesn’t feel like a bitter rant against something Banks hates, which really helps. I look forward to rereading this one, but none of the other short stories.

2. The novella, on the other hand, is alright. It’s not a fantastic Culture yarn, though the story is fine. In it, the Culture discovers Earth in the 1970s and spends some time there trying to decide if they should establish contact or not. They ultimately decide that Earth is, at this point, too hopeless to help and, to protect themselves from Earth’s idiocy—murder, toil, capital, sexual violence, genocide, war—they pull back and use Earth as a sort of experimental control, a test-bed for other potential contacts. And this is where the vitriol of the short stories infects this hundred page novella: Earth’s negatives are played up and the positives are spoken only from the lips of two lunatics, a man who chooses to stay, and a cannibal. These two characters set up the central conflict within the novella: should the “good ship Arbitrary” contact and change Earth to be more like the Culture, should the Culture become more like Earth, or should the Culture become exactly like Earth. It’s the arguments of the Reformation all over again: change the church from within, abandon it and go your own way, or change it from without. This is the central theme and an interesting discussion throughout. It’s a good novella, but not great: the vitriol leaves a bad taste in my mouth, but I enjoyed reading most of it.

3. The vitriol is partly understandable as the whole series is based on Banks’ ideas of what the future should look like. But, outside of the novella, it’s all vitriol with no time given to the other side of the argument. And the one-sidedness comes off bitter and unimaginative. The stories show what Banks hates about this or that, and those of us who live with this or that know some of the positives. This disconnect left me disappointed with the whole.

4. In all, it’s a book of short stories I will not be returning to, except for the novella and one short story mentioned above. I think the longer format of novels was Banks’ strength and look forward to reading more of those in the future.

Hydrogen Sonata by Iain M Banks

1. So ends my first reads of Banks’ Culture Series novels. Here is probably his best dialogue, some structural experimentation, and perhaps the spiritual offspring of Excession and Look to Windward. It’s been some time since I’ve finished a book—a lot of writing and podcasts have filled my time—so let’s see if I can still take useful notes.

2. The two themes that struck me the most here were oughtness and responses to impending death, well, not quite death. I mean the subliming, enfolding, whatever, a state whose most boring grain of sand outshines the heights of our lives. And the real illuminating delight here is the variety of cultural responses to the subliming. It’s joyous for some, somber for others, something to avoid, liberating, or just another bit of reality to accept. The variety of responses allow him to tap into a cultural portrayal that feels true to life. And this is important, especially in such a different world as that which the Culture portrays: the best science fiction is that which portrays humans as human, aliens as alien, and manages to still communicate basic human responses and characteristics truly. The other theme that stuck out was oughtness, and this builds off the subliming theme: how ought one respond to this type of foreknown cultural shift? Through the examples given, Banks is able to give a variety of responses and put some plot to them. He doesn’t really judge any of them except one—those who attempt to preserve their power in the now through the status quo, instead of realizing the coming singularity makes the status quo irrelevant. Where Banks gets to is that one should re-examine life and culture in the new context and one needs to reintegrate into it. For instance, the partiers say that if actions don’t matter in the long term, pleasure is all there is to live for. In another instance, many people embrace a “life-task” or goal to complete before the deadline of subliming arrives. The four-armed main character does this, but ends up staying behind, not subliming with her culture, because she is still so fascinated with the Culture itself, and has really already left her culture behind to become a part of the Culture.
—Set against this oughtness is the man who lives forever when everybody else dies. This builds off a theme present in the rest of the novels: if eternal, corporeal existence is possible, why do Culture citizens choose to die? Banks typically proposes personal boredom, frustration with others, or curiosity as to what comes next as the majority causes, though he also includes a minority of thrill-seekers, people whose emotional lives are pain, or sacrificial lambs for the greater good. But what sets the eternal man apart is his resistance to change.

“So,” she said, “living all this time has been to no purpose, basically.”

“True, but that hardly distinguishes me from anybody else, does it?”

“But shouldn’t it, or there’s no point?”

“No. Living either never has any point, or is always its own point; being a naturally cheery soul, I lean towards the latter. However, just having done more of it than another person doesn’t really make much difference.” The voice from the grey cube paused, then said, “Although … I think living so long might have persuaded me that I am not quite as pleasant a person as I once thought I was.”

Cossont, presented with two opportunities to be scathing just in these last few sentences, was aware she was choosing to take neither. She confined herself to, “Really?” said in a slightly sarcastic tone.

“Well,” the voice said, seemingly oblivious, “one thing that does happen when you live a long time is that you start to realise the essential futility of so much that we do, especially when you see the same patterns of behaviour repeated by succeeding generations and across different species. You see the same dreams, the same hopes, the same ambitions and aspirations, reiterated, and the same actions, the same courses and tactics and strategies, regurgitated, to the same predictable and often lamentable effects, and you start to think, So? Does it really matter? Why really are you bothering with all this? Are these not just further doomed, asinine ways of attempting to fill your vacuous, pointless existence, wedged slivered as it is between the boundless infinitudes of dark oblivion book-ending its utter triviality?”

“Uh-huh,” she said. “Is this a rhetorical question?”

“It is a mistaken question. Meaning is everywhere. There is always meaning. Or at least all things show a disturbing tendency to have meaning ascribed to them when intelligent creatures are present. It’s just that there’s no final Meaning, with a capital M. Though the illusion that there might be is comforting for a certain class of mind.”

“The poor, deluded, fools.”

“I suspect, from your phrasing and your tone of voice, that, as a little earlier, you think you are being sarcastic. Well, no matter. However, there is another reaction to the never-ending plethora of unoriginal idiocies that life throws up with such erratic reliability, besides horror and despair.”

“What’s that?”

“A kind of glee. Once one survives the trough that comes with the understanding that people are going to go on being stupid and cruel to each other no matter what, probably for ever – if one survives; many people choose suicide at this point instead – then one starts to take the attitude, Oh well, never mind. It would be far preferable if things were better, but they’re not, so let’s make the most of it. Let’s see what fresh fuckwittery the dolts can contrive to torment themselves with this time.”

“Not necessarily the most compassionate response.”

“Indeed not. But my point is that it might be the only one that lets you cope with great age without becoming a devout hermit, and therefore represents a kind of filter favouring misanthropy. Nice people who are beginning to live to a great age – as it were – react with such revulsion to the burgeoning horrors that confront them, they generally prefer suicide. It’s only us slightly malevolent types who are able to survive that realisation and find a kind of pleasure – or at least satisfaction – in watching how the latest generation or most recently evolved species can re-discover and beat out afresh the paths to disaster, ignominy and shame we had naively assumed might have become hopelessly over-grown.”

“So basically you’re sticking around to watch us all fuck up?”

“Yes. It’s one of life’s few guaranteed constants.”

Cossont thought about this. “If that’s true, it’s a bit sad.”

“Tough. Life is sometimes.”

“And you’re right: it doesn’t exactly show you in the best light.”

“You’re supposed to admire me for my honesty.”

“Am I?” she said, and reached over and turned the grey cube off.

That was when she decided she’d give the cube to somebody else, who might want it, or at least agree to care for it.

Is this Banks showing us what he has learned when nearing the end of his life? Yes, though I don’t know how much he knew about how soon his end would come at this point. The eternal man does say this as well:

“So, if you’re really so old, tell me what you’ve learned over the years, over the millennia. What are the fruits of your wisdom?”

“They are remarkably few. I have managed to avoid learning too many lessons. That may be what keeps me alive.”

And that’s probably more indicative of Banks’ voice than any other passage I’ve quoted from him, in any of my other notes. He attempts wit and wisdom, formal and gutter, serious and sarcastic simultaneously both as a coping method for his characters, and as a way to keep his readers reading. It works well, whether I agree with his conclusions or not.

3. Structurally, this is much more an adventure novel than his usual ensemble structure: it’s pretty clear right off the bat how characters and events are related here, and rather than gathering disparate elements into a central location for the finale, he has them going and coming according to their own plots, all supporting that central theme, and all relating to each other. A point about subliming is that it leaves things in the Gzilt culture half-done, and hence the novel drops a couple of threads, or takes the Shakespearean kill everybody approach to avoid overtly dropping the threads. It works to support the theme, but also feels like some of the novel may have been unnecessary.

4. The plot relies on violence to move characters and situations, and that feels more lazy than Banks typically is as a writer. There’s one part where an interview is done, then the guards come in and kill the interviewer. This is off-screen, sure, but by being the usual tactic he uses throughout, it feels like he didn’t want to try and find ways around the corners he’d written his plot into. Skip the rest of the scene, then get back to somewhere else. If it happens once, then sure, it happens sometimes. But happening over and over again makes the novel feel more pulp than all but Consider Phlebas did in this series.

5. Also lazy is that some of the non-Culture and non-protagonist characters are two-dimensional, and this is a real negative for me. I’m one who thinks that bad people think they’re doing good, but here there is very little thinking on their part. I wanted to understand them more as people. This felt more like some of his short stories: rejecting other points of views outright rather than arguing against them.

6. In short, a good novel that might be one of his most readable for non-science fiction readers. But in embracing more typical structures and two-dimensional characters, he loses some of what makes his other novels so endearing to me. So it’s a good book, but not one I’ll be returning to quickly.

Last and First Men by Olaf Stapledon — Reread

0. This is my first reread where both reads occurred after I started taking notes. This second read was for TOOL, so will stray from this site's stated purpose to discuss ideas more. This book is available to read freely online here.

1. Three things impress me the most about this book, from a writing perspective: the structure, the tone, and the imagination of the author.

I can say only that the occurrence of mentality produces certain minute astronomical effects, to which our instruments are sensitive even at great distances. These effects increase slightly with the mere mass of living matter on any astronomical body, but far more with its mental and spiritual development. Long ago it was the spiritual development of the world-community of the Fifth Men that dragged the moon from its orbit. And in our own case, so numerous is our society today, and so greatly developed in mental and spiritual activities, that only by continuous expense of physical energy can we preserve the solar system from confusion.

—Structurally, the organization successfully keeps the whole project legible and varied—which could be a near run thing based on the scope of this book. Brilliantly, he starts with the familiar: you and I are the first men that he spends 37.5% of the book on. In that opening, he’s setting up reference points that he will get back to in later men, allowing us to have a way to understand those later men. He’s also slowly stripping away characters and narrative traditions to embrace the biological or anthropological reporting the rest of the book will be patterned on. He spends a lot of time on the first men: even the intro to the version I read advised the reader to skip the first four parts due to their repetitiveness and their placing the book so specifically in 1930. Eventually, he continues in bite-sized steps to the eighteenth men, the structure of steps allowing the reader to keep track of how we get there, one step at a time. More time is spent on the first, second, fifth, and eighteenth men, all Stapledon's favorites except the first. Some of the later variations only receive a sentence or two of description. Let me break down the pacing:
•the first 6 chapters are given over to the first men;
•chapters 7-9 to the second;
•chapter 10 to the third;
•chapter 11 to the fourth and fifth;
•chapter 12 the fifth alone;
•chapter 13 to the sixth, seventh, and eighth;
•chapter 14 to the ninth, tenth, eleventh, twelfth, thirteenth, fourteenth, fifteenth, sixteenth, and seventeenth;
•and the final two chapters, 15-16, to the eighteenth men.
HP Lovecraft believed it a "disproportionate acceleration of the tempo towards the end." This pacing struck me two ways: either Stapledon is not being as fair and evenhanded with his philosophical opponents in the second half as he was in the first, or he ran out of steam as a writer. You know when you try and fit a word onto a poster and you kinda run out of room so you mash all the letters together there at the edge and it's obvious that you ran out of room. That's what this "acceleration of tempo" feels like. This disproportion between how much time is spent on the first men, and how much time is spent on the tenth through seventeenth men, is frustrating as a reader. It feels like a little more planning or pruning could have helped.

—He never loses sight of wonder in his writing. He fills his pages with life, beauty, horror, and tells all with this tone of wonder that is necessary to the readability of the dryer philosophical theme. He chooses to repeat this biological reporting form for his organization, and it's a big risk—writing a book without characters for the reader to relate to. But Stapledon's descriptions allow wonder to carry the whole thing:

The sky turned black. The Arctic summer became a weird and sultry night, torn by fantastic thunderstorms. Rain crashed on the ship's deck in a continuous waterfall. Clouds of pungent smoke and dust irritated the eyes and nose. Submarine earthquakes buckled the pack-ice.

A year after the explosion, the ship was labouring in tempestuous and berg-strewn water near the Pole. The bewildered little company now began to feel its way south; but, as they proceeded, the air became more fiercely hot and pungent, the storms more savage. Another twelve months were spent in beating about the Polar sea, ever and again retreating north from the impossible southern weather.

—The imagination of the author is the other impressive aspect—and probably the most influential. He packs a lot of science fiction ideas in here, and the structure is what allows that variety. After all, he’s building at least eighteen worlds over two billion years. That’s a lot of room for ideas. Some are explored in the depth of paragraphs, others mere phrases. The influence of these ideas has been widespread: the fifth men are exactly Iain M Banks’ Culture Series, the moonfall that destroys them is Neal Stephenson’s Seveneves, Arthur Clarke’s 2001 is obviously inspired by the whole thing, Bradbury seems to have read this before writing “The Fire Balloons”, CS Lewis admits to stealing from Stapledon in his Space Trilogy—and the list could go on for days. So, Stapledon had an imagination that could run this wild, structure his book to allow his imagination to run this wild, and then let his imagination run this wild. Some of these ideas seem prescient when you realize the book was written in the 1920s. Staggering.

2. But that’s not to say that the theme of his book is these ideas. The theme is very clearly what makes us human. He has set up some really fascinating tensions within the book, and they reflect what make us human: Science and Art; Spirituality and Religion; Physical and Mental Environments; Heritage and Legacy; Ingenuity and Rationality; Mysticism and Empiricism. His project is a philosophical one—he was a philosopher whose books were not selling, so he started writing science fiction instead in order to expose more people to his ideas. He tries to show what makes us human, examine what we could be, and then show a path to his utopia—a utopia which even he admits ultimately fails, but it fails in instructive ways. The list of all eighteen men will help illuminate this theme:

•He begins by describing us today, the first men. But we are too short-term in our thinking, our priorities are wrong, and we embrace every new thing that comes along without proper consideration, which eventually kills us.
•The second men are one of his three favorites in the book. They’re the colloquial great men of the first men. They’re godlike, aryan giants who have more empathy, better perception, more intellect, better skills at science, math, and philosophy. But they are too much in their own heads and the horror of existence within the natural world dooms them. Heads in the clouds, they are destroyed by practical considerations. Well, practical consideration and the martians, those hive mind, radioactive, industrial fascists.
•The third men are Rousseau's wet dream. Sexually liberated, mystical about pain, focused entirely on music and the natural world. They are cunning more than intellectual. Eventually, they realize their deficiency in intellect and sciences, have an existential crisis, and end up creating their successors using the only science they know—biology.
•The fourth men are the artificial Brads: big brains living in their own towers. They are pure intellect, with no “normal instinctive responses,” to quote Stapledon, though they are natively curious and telepathic. The telepathy is a result of using some martian genetics. They have no sexuality, no community, no exercise, no values. Eventually they stagnate scientifically and create their successors.
•The fifth men are one of Stapledon’s favorites. They are Aristotilian in their balance in all things—including emotions. Their self-repairing bodies are long-lived and filled with pre-taught instincts developed from experience and reason, but they die at the proper time. They are a balance between the academic fourth men and the nature-obsessed third men: they value the influence of the natural primitive, but focus equally on art and science. They are telepathic due to martian genes, but they still disagree on a short-term basis. They recognize the reality of futility, but can only integrate it through religion. They are so perfect they unlock the secret to accessing the memories of our ancestors directly. But this leads to the infiltration of the imperfections of those past men. Through their inability to integrate futility and the influence of the past’s evils, they begin to unravel. Suddenly the moon falls in on them. This isn’t explained during their section, but a later chapter (15.4) mentions that mentality influences physicality and the perfection of their “spiritual development” pulls the moon in on them. However, they’re still great enough to escape to Venus, where they discover the Venerians, who are a base-three species instead of the human base-two. The fifth men murder them all as their only choice is suicide or murder.

•The sixth men are the first born-on-Venus ones. Part are sea-based seal kings that get wiped out by the land-based portion. These are essentially the fifth men at first, but without telepathy their disagreements are more common and they devolve to the first men. Eventually their martian genetic leftovers almost wipe them out because man is not made to be martian, duh. In Stapledon’s words, they were undone by what was inherent at their beginning. They manufacture their successors before succumbing.

During the next two hundred million years all the main phases of man's life on earth were many times repeated on Venus with characteristic differences. Theocratic empires; free and intellectualistic island cities; insecure overlordship of feudal archipelagos; rivalries of high priest and emperor; religious feuds over the interpretation of sacred scriptures; recurrent fluctuations of thought from naïve animism, through polytheism, conflicting monotheisms, and all the desperate "isms" by which mind seeks to blur the severe outline of truth; recurrent fashions of comfort-seeking fantasy and cold intelligence; social disorders through the misuse of volcanic or wind power in industry; business empires and pseudo-communistic empires—all these forms flitted over the changing substance of mankind again and again, as in an enduring hearth fire there appear and vanish the infinitely diverse forms of flame and smoke. But all the while the brief spirits, in whose massed configurations these forms inhered, were intent chiefly on the primitive needs of food, shelter, companionship, crowd-lust, love-making, the two-edged relationship of parent and child, the exercise of muscle and intelligence in facile sport. Very seldom, only in rare moments of clarity, only after ages of misapprehension, did a few of them, here and there, now and again, begin to have the deeper insight into the world's nature and man's. And no sooner had this precious insight begun to propagate itself, than it would be blotted out by some small or great disaster, by epidemic disease, by the spontaneous disruption of society, by an access of racial imbecility, by a prolonged bombardment of meteorites, or by the mere cowardice and vertigo that dared not look down the precipice of fact.

•The seventh men are the bird-men. They’re back to Rousseauian naturalism, but with Aristotelian balance applied—orgasmic ecstasy in the air, pragmatic practicality on the ground. They accept futility. They are practical and artistic. But they are also undone by their inherently unscientific nature. They assign their flightless, overly pragmatic cripples to make their successors, then they go out in the noble mass racial suicide into an active volcano.
•The artificial eighth men are giant engineers, warlike but still civilized in the sense that they don’t wage total wars. Strife is a cathartic religious experience for them. They’re industrialists who create their own successors because the sun is expanding, and they have to move to Neptune.

•The artificial ninth men are way too artificial to survive—hastily designed, fragile and miniature. But they do spark evolution and evolve extensively into the tenth men.
•The tenth are evolved naturally, so they are getting back towards the mysterious influence of nature. They’re manipulative rabbit tribalists who know no science, so they are killed by microorganisms.
•Through evolution, the tenth branch into the eleventh, the tusked men and their hunter-trappers. These are the shortest described by Stapledon, not even getting a name:

One of these early species, crouched and tusked, was persistently trapped for its ivory by an abler type, till it was exterminated.

•The twelfth are also evolved. They’re squatters with long muzzles. They’re sedentary, social, and industrious, but destroyed by a warrior kind.
•The thirteenth, the warriors, are as broad as they are tall. They are erect and bloody minded, which keeps them from progressing as a society, and they eventually just wear themselves out.
•The fourteenth are the thick-set big brains who get back to the first men’s levels. They invent a religion of love, but they are undone by imperfect spirituality and destroy themselves.
•The fifteenth are amazing again, another second men, sort of. They work closely with their environment to gain power through geo-thermal means. They are united as a culture. Their spirituality is about fulfilling human capacities. Their main goal is to abolish the five evils: disease, suffocating toil, senility, misunderstanding, and ill-will. They realize that they’re imperfect inherently, so they decide to create their successors, not because they need to, but from their spiritual desire to perfect and exceed.
•The artificial sixteenth are analogous to the fifth men, who Stapledon loved. They have a human telepathy now, instead of the disastrous martian one. Ingenious rather than rational, they have better perception and finer motor control. They determine to abolish personal ego as the mental illness it is. They again enter the past minds, but take the past’s problems as something to solve, not something to influence their day-to-day lives. They advanced as far as man could outside of group minds, but they are still stymied by three ancient problems: time, the mind’s relation to the world, and loyalty to life versus dispassion. They are unable to solve these three, so they choose a noble sacrificial leap over stagnation, and design their successors.

•The seventeenth are the first group mind men, but being designed by single men, they’re only partially successful. The realities of group consciousness is so out of context to single men, except Stapledon himself of course, that they fail. But they step aside after making the eighteenth men.
•The eighteenth men are the perfection of the group mind, and damn close to that of all humanity, nay, all the universe, according to Stapledon. They are both more human and more animal, in their own words. They dispassionately accept reality and futility and fate. Relation with time is significantly different: time is cyclic, not repetitive, an abstraction. They are more minutely tied into their environment on both a universal and microscopic scale. They are cyborgs with ninety-six member sexual and mental groups, that can then form larger and larger groups until the whole race is united through extreme intimacy, tempermental harmony, and complementariness. They think man is perfect only in how nearly it can get to aping the universe itself in organization—and the agreement of the group minds fulfills the cosmos almost perfectly. That almost is key. Their imperfection infects stars themselves with a disease and they are doomed (This is a reach, but since the disease portion is near the fifth men pulling the men in on themselves portion, I don’t think it’s an unreasonable stretch to make). This imminent death undoes them by giving them a defined goal and deadline. They lose their dispassion in chasing their goal. They desire to spread nineteenth men to the stars and try to continue mentality, but they have not enough of the zeal of primitive man to achieve their ultimate goal. There is not enough time left. This tears them apart. In other words, Stapledon wants us to get to a place where our morals are less limiting to our intellect, where we appreciate the well done good and evil act alike, and where the only things left unanswered are what the future holds and what happens after death. But he’s afraid we’ll never get to be there because there is too much in our past that we have learned the wrong lessons from.

The ether ship is in a manner symbolic of our whole community, so highly organized is it, and so minute in relation to the void which engulfs it. The ethereal navigators, because they spend so much of their time in the empty regions, beyond the range of "telepathic" communication and sometimes even of mechanical radio, form mentally a unique class among us. They are a hardy, simple, and modest folk. And though they embody man's proud mastery of the ether, they are never tired of reminding landlubbers, with dour jocularity, that the most daring voyages are confined within one drop of the boundless ocean of space.

Recently an exploration ship returned from a voyage into the outer tracts. Half her crew had died. The survivors were emaciated, diseased, and mentally unbalanced. To a race that thought itself so well established in sanity that nothing could disturb it, the spectacle of these unfortunates was instructive. Throughout the voyage, which was the longest ever attempted, they had encountered nothing whatever but two comets, and an occasional meteor. Some of the nearer constellations were seen with altered forms. One or two stars increased slightly in brightness; and the sun was reduced to being the most brilliant of stars. The aloof and changeless presence of the constellations seems to have crazed the voyagers. When at last the ship returned and berthed, there was a scene such as is seldom witnessed in our modern world. The crew flung open the ports and staggered blubbering into the arms of the crowd. It would never have been believed that members of our species could be so far reduced from the self-possession that is normal to us. Subsequently these poor human wrecks have shown an irrational phobia of the stars, and of all that is not human. They dare not go out at night. They live in an extravagant passion for the presence of others. And since all others are astronomically minded, they cannot find real companionship. They insanely refuse to participate in the mental life of the race upon the plane where all things are seen in their just proportions. They cling piteously to the sweets of individual life; and so they are led to curse the immensities. They fill their minds with human conceits, and their houses with toys. By night they draw the curtains and drown the quiet voice of the stars in revelry. But it is a joyless and a haunted revelry, desired less for itself than as a defence against reality.

—I’m sure I haven’t caught everything he’s saying and arguing for, but the journey was fascinating. I enjoy how much he lets his opponents talk, before he eviscerates them. There are points I agree with: acceptance of reality is key, reality is futility, balance is beneficial, science and art are nothing without each other. But other points I disagree with: Stapledon’s statements in support of balance in all things contradict his attitude valuing dispassion above all; the group-think and unity trends contradict extreme complementarianism; and the idea that fulfilling human capacities through group-think and copying the stars seem to undermine the basic individuality of humanity.

3. In short, this is a fascinating and important book. All these ideas spark new ideas on almost every page! But it's importance is that this book is the hinge point between the scientific romances of Verne and Wells, between the space operas published by Hugo Gernsbeck, and science fiction as we know it today. This isn't a great book: it's a slog to get through and I think the anthro-report format is useful but boring. However, this is an important book. By reading and re-reading this, I realize the impact, the influence, and the shift Stapledon brought about. Of course, he's not operating in a vacuum, but he is cutting edge for his generation. What it most reminded me of, the second time through, was Edward Bellamy's Looking Backward, with less characters.

In the Slopes by China Miéville

0. "In the Slopes" is one of my favorite short stories from China Miéville’s short story collection, Three Moments of an Explosion, which I already wrote notes about here on this blog in September of 2015. Back then, commenter Boru raised a point that got me thinking about this story more. I find I want to dig deeper into this one story to exhume the tactics and tendencies that make this a favorite of mine. I want to learn from Miéville. But not being willing to go back to school to take classes from him, I have only his written works to study.

1. Miéville uses a third-person voice throughout. It focuses tightly on McCulloch, the character whose perspective the whole story follows—except for the few paragraphs after the reveal, where Miéville offers about a page of info dump. My question is whether his voice is as tightly focused as Cherryh’s typical voice. My knee-jerk response is that the two voices are similar. But how?
—I’ll start with an example—Miéville’s description of the island’s central volcano: “The dead volcano sat sulking, hunch-shouldered.” Here, Miéville describes the mountain without describing the concept of mountain anew. He doesn’t begin at the start, talking about piles of stones, magma in the crust, the Pacific’s ring of fire, etc—he simply states it’s a volcanic island and it’s hunch-shouldered. I understand that it’s a shield volcano, but I’ve no idea which ocean it’s in. And I don’t need to because it doesn’t relate to the theme. Additionally, the description of the mountain shows how McCulloch views the thing—I bet that Soph or Will wouldn’t describe it as “sulking”. In this example, Miéville’s voice reminds me a lot of Cherryh’s. The whole story uses this voice, not just that one example. I’ll give one more example to drive the point home: after reading this story multiple times, I’ve little idea what McCulloch’s shop looks like, or his home. And I really don’t need to. The details he does give—McCulloch watches TV while at the counter, the whitewash is peeling, and the door-bell is on the fritz—show the slowness of McCulloch’s business and life, as well as his character and priorities: he can’t be bothered to fix the bell or whitewash, maybe because of the slowness, maybe because of apathy.
—What I like about this voice is pretty simply explained: it does four things for the reader that I appreciate in prose. First, it trusts the reader to figure things out, rather than spoon-feeding all the information. Spoon feeding often comes off insulting, while this voice seems like Miéville trusts his own writing and his readers. Second, it focuses on the theme rather than focusing on the context—which keeps the ideas, characters, and story moving and changing quickly. Third, it helps explain the characters through showing what they notice. For instance, when McCulloch enters the bar, which he’s been in many times before, he notices everything anew because he’s looking for Soph and Will. That helps show his mental state. Fourth, and this is most important, it allows me to fill in the blanks with my own imagination. Like the old adage “don’t show the monster”, this tightly focused, third-person voice trusts that the reader will fill descriptions in with details more effective to themselves than Miéville could ever dream up.
—At the same time, Miéville allows himself a paragraph or two here and there—or a lengthy section like the info dump after the reveal—to break with the voice and add a little context. For instance, on page five Miéville describes a little more of the nature of the culture, from a narrator’s point of view, rather than McCulloch’s. But he focuses it all on why this information is important to McCulloch, rather than leaving it out there as unimportant details. And that narrator's voice shows how his voice is different than Cherryh’s: where she allows extensive interior monologue, he frames his breaks with the voice of a narrator who consistently refers back to McCulloch. If you squint, you could say it’s summarized interior monologue. In that fifth page example, these thoughts are not being thought by McCulloch in the now, but these past thoughts and decisions are influencing his actions in the now—it seems unlikely that he is rehashing the history of the island since he moved there, all while sitting in the bar with Cheever. So Miéville summarizes McCulloch’s past thoughts, as a narrator, placing that information right there because it influences McCulloch’s next statements.
—So, there is a difference between Cherry and Miéville’s voices: it’s only the slightest difference, but it is one I noticed. But in conclusion, the answer is mostly yes: Miéville and Cherryh’s tightly-focused, third person narratives accomplish similar goals through similar tactics. And they are both effective for me. They are not exact copies of each other, but they’re closely related enough that I think of them in the same vein.

2. There is a deep care and consideration put into every word. I would call it poetic—not primarily in the sense of the whole sounding beautiful and following syllabic or stress patterns, but in the sense that every word matters.
—The example of the mountain's description shows how that word “sulking” is doing double duty: describing both the mountain and how McCulloch sees it. Even something as throwaway as Soph buying a bag of chips comes back in later, multiple times, and ends up being important to McCulloch getting into the dig site, to Gilroy accepting him there, and to his role in the later events. A third example is calling the unknown intelligences “collaborators”, which first occurs on the second page, twelve pages before the reveal. I have no context for it, no reason to think he means what it ends up meaning. So I assume that he’s talking about the culture the archaeologists are investigating, I assume he's implying they worked together more than other ancient cultures—and he is, but in a way that gives the word new meaning and importance after the reveal. Before the reveal I think it’s an egalitarian culture, a friendly one; after the reveal the friendliness with beings so other to us gives the word a new context that still perfectly describes what the world believes about these cultures. It’s a perfect word-choice, both before and after the reveal, both in the first read and in a reread. I am massively impressed by that one word. And this one word is a perfect example of the care given to every word within the story.
—But Miéville doesn’t ignore sounds. Rather, there are places within the story where sounds are important to the structure of the paragraphs.

Digs, development, and tourism were all controlled: the chamber of commerce constantly complained.

All that consonance is an extreme example, but he also uses vowel sounds intentionally and to make the prose beautiful.

“How dare you, sir? I’m curious. Oh, for a sprinkling of the old Sodium Pentothol.” Cheevers mimed opening a compartment on his signet ring and pouring something into Paddick’s glass.

In these two example, the prose’s beauty adds interest to the writing. And the story is better for it, for having this beauty. Not only is it yet another layer to dig into in this complex and beautifully crafted short story, but it also raises this prose well above the typical prose and shows how much hard work went into it.
—This level of care and consideration is a ton of hard work, and I appreciate it whenever I can find it. These are stunning combinations of words, taken as a whole, but he doesn’t let the beauty run away with the tale—it’s still efficient and tight prose that communicates effectively. Miéville shows brilliant balance, coming down on the side of efficiency, but not letting that stop him from writing beautifully. For contrast, Asimov is efficient and never beautiful. I vastly prefer Miéville.

3. To build the world through this voice and writing technique, Miéville often implies instead of stating directly. Like the example of the mountain’s description shows, he implies it’s a shield volcano rather than outright stating that the island was formed from a shield volcano. The old name of the bar, “Cunny Island”, implies that it used to be a brothel or strip club; and it also implies something about the culture of the island’s residents and tourists before the archaeology really took off—an implication which ties into every other part of the story. The season is implied as being a week past summer weather when McCulloch is said to have packed up the beach balls and towels and packed them into the store-room; as well as with the line, “The municipality had just switched over to the winter schedule and, for a few weeks, the streetlights would start to glow pointlessly early,” a line that also implies something about the lackidasical nature of the island, the lack of precision and pace of life. The line “Friendly business competitors” implies the nature of the community of the locals now, after the archaeology ramps up. Stating that the fisherman are coming up from the bay implies something about the economics of the island without telling a detailed account of the economy.
—There is some groundwork directly stated in the way the islanders tend to preserve rather than exploit, and this is on page five. But even that direct statement implies a cultural baggage that is important to the narrative and world-building.
—In short, the story implies rather than describes the world, but implications are even in the direct descriptions.

4. This method of worldbuilding is clearly secondary to Miéville building his theme, which rests in the relationships. The relationships are not restricted to being between two people: Miéville’s relationships also include corporate ones. You can look on the complex relationships here as a family tree, each level informing the two on either side of it. For instance: the locals to the archaeologists, the archaeologists to archaeology, everybody to the collaborators; each of these relationships are reinforced through the specifics of individual relationships involved—Paddick’s relationship with archaeology differs from Gilroy’s relationship with archaeology, which is different than the locals’. Through the lens of those three relationships, a corporate relationship is built.
—However, the story is about McCulloch and his relationships to his past, the island, and other people—but again, the relationships are always interconnected, and these three categories of relationship inform and build his relationship with himself. And here is the crux of the story. Miéville shows McCulloch growing increasingly integral to his world and the people around him—that’s the plot, McCulloch changing from a disaffected semi-loner to a person who is an integrated part of his society’s structure. At the start he’s not “Johnny come lately” because he’s an immigrant, it’s because he is so disaffected. At the height of the drama he’s helping people, he’s interested and invested, and this all appears to be new for him—at least since he moved to the island. He is sucked into the whole situation by circumstance, happenstance, perhaps fortune, and it affects him. He’s watching Soph unravel before his eyes, and he can’t handle it. She knows what she wants, and now she’s furious and denied. It hits too close to home for him. He is disturbed by how affected he is—especially after the fact, after he gets a chance to step back and look at it all from the outside again. While everything dies down a bit, he ignores the phone calls and stays home in order to try and recapture his disaffected habit. But at the end, when Soph walks into his shop, he caves to his curiosity and sociability and accepts the connection, realizes he needs it. From here, will he continue to cut himself off, or will he integrate? I don’t know, but Miéville leaves us on his relationship with Soph, therefore he seems to imply that McCulloch gets back to his life while accepting a new depth to his relationships, a new need for sociability. In other words, the whole situation finally illuminates to him how interconnected he already is on the island, and he finally accepts it, somewhat. Or at least has a chance to. But he probably wants it on his own terms.
—And that relationship with Soph is never explicitly one of attraction. I don’t get the sense that this is a potential romance. I get the sense that he connects with her because he is still somewhat of an outsider, she’s friendly to him first, she can satisfy his curiosity, and later because he can help her and he shares her disappointment at Paddick’s actions. They are comrades, not potential mates, throughout.

5. The dialogue is spectacular. It’s really Brian K Vaughan level stuff. Miéville rides that line between the fractured, day-to-day reality of conversations in half-sentences, and the unrealistic literary dialogue that must always make sense in the retelling. This balance is done well and I feel like McCulloch and Cheever are fairly well-spoken individuals, but not outside the normal bell curve.
—Miéville shows that he is deliberate about matching his characters’ words to their mental states. For instance, when McCulloch arrives in Banto he doesn’t know where to go. In this instance, I would be a little nervous—he’s already shown he doesn’t know that much about Banto or the people there, and his need to stop and ask directions could induce nervousness. He's outside his comfort zone, but he’s also an islander, not a tourist. So he affects a casual, “I heard there was a dig somewhere,” and this shows his mental state spectacularly.
—But the mental states are not all shown. Miéville also tells. An example would be in the scene where he guesses Sophia’s name as Sophie and she corrects him: Miéville writes simply, “He was embarrassed.” This telling line informs McCulloch’s next statements, showing him putting on bravado to cover his embarrassment.
—The dialogue fractures even more when the emotions run high, when Soph starts shouting at Paddick. This change in the length of sentences, mixed with the word choices, drives home the drama of the situation for McCulloch and the reader.
—Through all this, Miéville stays away from explaining everything between the dialogue. Instead of paragraphs describing McCulloch’s embarrassment, he simply writes, “He was embarrassed.” This is a sentence, not a paragraph. It contextualizes more than it explains.

6. That reveal halfway through stunned me the first time. It’s on page fourteen. The first half assumes the reader knows, then they suddenly do know. They don’t know everything, but they know. It is effective for two reasons: first, it makes a reread enjoyable. On rereading I finally noticed all the mentions of collaborators in the first half, and saw how integrated they were throughout. Second, the casual, foregone conclusion tone of the reveal reiterates the tone of the story. It reinforces the focus on McCulloch’s life, but contextualizes just how disaffected he is. He lives in this place where the collaborators are a daily reality, and he’s still this disaffected. The collaborators are amazing! They’re unprecedented! They’re fantastic! They change everything about Earth and humanity. But they’re already commonplace to the islanders, even to a new one like McCulloch. Sure, he goes to see the exhuming, but only because it’s a notable one. And even there, he's sort of nonchalant about the whole situation, especially compared to the excitement of the archaeologists.
—The collaborators are just another piece of this story, McCulloch’s story. They’re the most fantastic context, but they’re not the point, like they would be in many other speculative fiction short stories. The collaborators are subsumed beneath the relationships of the characters. Sure, the archaeology is central to the characters’ lives, but the story is the characters’ lives. That’s why the archaeology is in here—to help explain the characters—not the other way around.
—The question here is whether the reveal overwhelms the story or not. The danger is that the reveal is too fantastic, distracting too much from the focus of the story on mundane McCulloch. It didn’t affect me this way because even the reveal is as nonchalant as McCulloch—reinforcing the story’s thrust in the heart of the distraction. But I can see a reader being overwhelmed by it. On rereads the focus on McCulloch was driven home more than on the initial read—I was less astounded by the collaborators when rereading. But that comes with the knowledge of the reveal.

7. In all, this story is memorable to me, and I hope it’s influential as well. The reveal certainly took my breath away the first time, as a writing tactic more than for what the collaborators are. But the dialogue, the world-building, the character of McCulloch, and the voice astounded me more.

Distrust That Particular Flavor by William Gibson

1. This is a collection of essays by William Gibson. They range from personal essays, transcriptions of lectures, prefaces to books he didn’t write, reviews of books he didn’t create, etc. The breadth and scope of discussions, ideas, and topics impresses—I half expected this to be twenty-six essays on technology influencing culture. And though a few essays touch on that most Gibsonian reflection, in no way is this an Ayn Rand book restating the philosophical premise every five pages. Through the varied approaches, topics, and purposes of the essays, much more is said than, “Culture is technologically driven, mmkay?” I guess what I’m trying to say is that, being interested in Gibson, I love this book, but people who are less interested in thinking about the ways culture and technology interact might need an angle to pick this book up, might need to be led to which essay has something they’re interested in discussing. And the shotgun-scatter of topics presented here—a selection from over twenty years of his life—should provide a gateway for most. Whether it’s literary criticism with “The Road to Oceania”, early science fiction with “Time Machine Cuba”, ruminations on the creepiness of regularly listening to dead people in “Dead Man Sings”, discussions of Japan and Tokyo as cities, or an essay about the famous Vandevar Bush essay—there are a lot of inroads here and most of them lead to interesting places. For me, my interest in his mind was key, so the whole book was a must read. But for others I’ve met, a single essay will often get them to peruse the book for other essays whose topics interest them, instead of reading all of the essays within.

2. The structure uses self-criticism to contextualize some of the less apparent essays. For instance, a long essay in the middle rambles: partway through I grew aware of how many words were being used for a discussion that Gibson would typically use less for. After the essay, in the self-critical portion, Gibson admits that, stating,

Gosh, but could this article ever do with a haircut. It’s at least twice as long as it needs to be: dripping with wholly extraneous detail. I must have had really quite a lot of coffee. Sorry about that.

But then explains why he includes it anyways:

Although it does detail my mysteriously belated arrival in cyberspace, should anyone ever be interested, while forever proving how little I actually knew (or know) about any of that stuff. I had very little idea of what I was talking about, when I wrote this. This tends to be the case when I discuss newly emergent technologies, and is always the case when one makes generalizations about depths of specialist knowledge one is still scarcely aware of. I stood, at the time of writing this, unknowingly, on a precipice.

And that is one of the questions that often comes up about Gibson: why isn’t he more of a cyborg? Why isn’t he always online? This essay explains, probably so he can stop answering that question every day. But this self-criticism also allows him to illuminate certain time periods. For instance, one essay deals with the making of the film, Johnny Mnemonic, and the joy and craziness he felt through a portion of the process, while the self-criticism admits to his later disappointment.

3. And that’s a characteristic of this book: about two-thirds of the essays are fascinating from an outside perspective. The other third navel gazes hard. That’s not to say some interesting things don’t come out of the navel gazing—the reasons Gibson was initially interested in Tokyo help contextualize the influence technology has on culture. But it’s New Journalism. Gibson’s process echoes Tom Wolfe’s attempts to write about something he doesn’t know by living there for a couple of months, then going away to write about it.

4. Structurally, Gibson’s essays often follow a bit of a pattern where multiple things are being discussed and likened and connected, then a holistic thought is pulled out of them. For example, “The Road to Oceania” is a piece he writes for the NYT OpEd page on what would have been George Orwell’s 100th birthday. It’s structure is indicative of some of the other essays:

1. 1984 is about 1948
—panoptic CCTV surveillance could echo 1984, or could seem an almost organic growth of the streets
—but 1984 is clearly about broadcasting, especially on public mood during the war
—broadcasting media in service of totalitarianism: like in certain backwards nations today
2. But that’s not us today
—broadcasting is backwards already
—we approach informational transparency: lack of privacy is across the board, not hierarchical
3. Both the paradigm and the technology have shifted from Orwell’s day
—the globalization of information is key to how we didn’t end up under Ingsoc
—transparency is egalitarian: to governments, corporations, and citizens
—but the craziness that comes with the transparency and globalization is profound and linked [I think of all the YouTube conspiracy videos]
4. Through transparency, secrets are gone
—we cannot hide truths from the future [A crooked politician will eventually be found out by the world]
—but truth (singular) still relies upon interpretation [We all saw the twin towers fall, some believe it to be a demolition, others do not]
5. Orwell succeeded
—maybe he went there so we didn’t have to, but he succeeded in envisioning his dystopia
—his dystopia is rooted in the nightmare core reality of 1948 and he succeeded in transmitting that
—but dystopias and utopias are not about the future, they are not a map to there or to the present

As you can see, the structure is interconnected and weaving back and forth. It would have been simpler to split this up into three parts: literary criticism, different types of electronic communication, and globalization of information. But rather than writing the five paragraph paper with each of the body paragraphs discussing each of these three topics, they’re interwoven in a way that makes the whole apparent: of course these three topics cannot be talked about separately when the framing angle is 1984. I didn’t realize this before reading the article, but now I can’t imagine not discussing these three together in that frame. It’s a wonderful structure at engaging the reader and trusting they’re paying attention. These notes of mine are notes, where I’m trying to separate things in order to organize my thoughts into points about different aspects or topics: Gibson mixes them all up in order to have a wall of sound-esque flow of information.

5. In all, this book of essays is profound and seems obvious after reading, but revelatory while reading. Some navel gazing, but most are applicable to me today. I enjoyed reading these essays, though books of essays almost always require breaks between reading to let the mind mull over the thoughts presented. I’d read some of these essays before, but having them collected is a worthy addition to my library.