Hel’s Eight
is the second novel in Ten Low sci-fi-dystopia-western-paranormal series, a
combination that shouldn’t work, but which does, beautifully. The first book, Ten Low, was one of my favourite reads the year it was published.
We return
to Factus, a desert moon at the edge of the universe that has resisted all
attempts to terraform it. It’s a harsh, dry, airless place populated mostly
by former convicts. Societies are violent, water is scarce, and games of chance
mean automatic death—by the beings that were there first.
Ten Low is
a former army medic trying to atone a massacre she was instrumental in. In the
first book, she discovered the Ifs, as they are called, beings of possibilities
that live on humans, and the Seekers who have dedicated their lives for them.
At the end of the book, she became their mouthpiece.
Where they go,
death follows, so Ten has lived five years outside all civilization. But then
an old friend/enemy comes asking for help, and the Ifs are pushing her to
action too. Reluctantly she agrees.
A
businessman wants to harness the Ifs so that he can guarantee a future where he
is the ruler of the moon. He believes Ten is Hel, the controller of the Ifs, because
she’s able to manipulate the possibilities the Ifs show, so he wants to capture
her. Ten knows she’s not Hel, because she knew the woman who was. But the Ifs know
differently—and to become Hel is to die.
The second
book was as interesting and good as the first. The world is unique and the
atmosphere tense and creepy. But it was a bit more difficult to get the hang of.
I had no recollection of the Ifs, and since they weren’t explained in any way
here, I’m not sure I understood them correctly. I’m not entirely sure what Hel
was either, a leader, prophet or a speaker of the Ifs, or something else. In
addition, the title of the book never became clear.
The book is
told in Ten’s first-person point of view, but there were additional notes too
by Pec Eight Esterhazy who was the previous Hel, as she
discovers the Ifs decades before Ten. Ten remained an interesting character struggling
with her past and the actions she had to take, including killing people even
though she had sworn never to do that. Side characters were a bit distant, but
I was invested in them. The ending was good, but maybe a bit hasty and vague,
though that could be because the review copy seemed to be missing some scenes.
But it leaves the door open for more books. I’m looking forward to reading
them.
I received
a free copy from Edelweiss in exchange for an honest review.
Frontier is
set in the 29th century Earth. It’s a dry, desolate place that most humanity
abandoned several centuries ago to conquer the space. Only a small fraction
remained, a religious sect called Gaians who believe in the divinity of goddess
Earth. No technology newer than 21st century (for some reason) is allowed and
even the talk of space is sin.
Noelle, a
scientist, wants to visit earth, the first time in three centuries, for
humanitarian and other ideological reasons. With her as a security is Kei, a
former army captain who has resigned from her post after a massacre. A romance forms
between the women during the six-month travel through space. When they finally
reach Earth, everything goes wrong. That’s where the book begins.
Stranger
finds herself in a frontier town. She has no idea where she is, but she needs
to find someone. For that she needs a communicator. But in the technology
averse world, those don’t exist. So she travels, rather randomly, towards the
only city where one might exist. On her way, she encounters people who either
help her or try to kill her. She changes from Stranger to Courier to Darling, with
no name of her own that she would introduce herself with, and no clear
indication who she’s looking for, other than her love.
The book
consists of encounters that are almost short stories from various points of
view. Reader gets a good idea of what the life on Earth, or at least in that
small part of it, is like. Some encounters remain one-off, some people appear again
just when they’re needed. We don’t get the backstory of the main character
until after the half-point, and only then does she get a name and we learn who
she’s looking for.
This was a
good story, easy to read and interesting. The atmosphere was a bit gloomy, and
the main character remained distant, even in the chapters told from her point
of view, thanks to the odd decision to not name her or give her any backstory
until after the half-point—odd, because the MC really didn’t seem poetic enough to think of herself
in terms other than her name. From then on, the book came to life in a whole
new way, and Kei became a real person.
The world
was interesting, a good combination of space travel and dystopian. But I wasn’t
entirely convinced of the logic of the life on Earth. There was no new
technology, and everyone seemed to be living on what they grew or scavenged,
but there was petrol for 21st century cars—still in use several centuries later—and fabrics for clothes, for example. Only
printed books existed, even though people didn’t leave earth until the 24th
century—though it was
interesting to think that Alexander Dumas and Jane Austen were still read a
thousand years after their books were first published. And in three centuries,
no one had rebelled and started creating technology that would make life better
for everyone. An outsider was needed to save them from the ill-effects of their
religion.
I didn’t
feel the romance between Kei and Noelle either. They were an uneven pair, and
it seemed Noelle only spent time with Kei because there were no other options.
For her part, Kei’s devotion to Noelle fit her single-minded character, but not
so much that it made a believable character motivation. There was the massacre
she felt guilty about; saving her crew to atone herself would’ve been a much
stronger reason. Now it went completely unused other than in her reluctance to
kill people.
Despite my
misgivings, I enjoyed the book. For a debut, it was excellent. It’s a stand-alone with a satisfying ending,
but I wouldn’t mind reading more about Kei.
I received
a free copy from NetGalley in exchange for an honest review.
Inscape is the debut (solo) novel of Louise Carey, and it’s
a great one; interesting, immersive and mature. I received an early review copy
from NetGalley in exchange for an honest review. The book comes out on January
21st.
The name of the book and the description gave me the notion
that Inscape would be some sort of virtual reality scape into which special
agents entered their minds at their own risk while their bodies were suspended elsewhere, like in Matrix. That’s not the case at all. The book is set in
future London in a world that has suffered a catastrophic event called
Meltdown, though what it was and when it was isn’t explained. It’s not really
important anyway. The current world is. London is divided into two zones on
both sides of the Thames, which is only a dried-up riverbed turned minefield. Each
side is ruled by a major technical corporation that have hostile relationship
with the other, InTech in the north and Thoughtfront in the south. Everything
and everyone is in the service of these corporations.
Inscape is an AR system installed directly in people’s
brains and everyone on InTech side is augmented with it; the other side has
their own system. Not only does it enhance people’s abilities—or
supress them in case of mindless slaves—it also spies the residents. But it’s
all perfectly normal as far as Tanta, the main character, is concerned.
Tanta is a CorpWard, an orphan who has been raised by InTech
to be of service for the corporation. She is happy to serve, lives to please
her superiors and fears their upset. She has been trained as an agent whose job
is to prevent the other corporation from operating on her side of the river.
She is absolutely loyal to her handler Jen, and will do anything she tells her.
Her very first assignment doesn’t go as planned though, which causes her great
deal of distress. But she doesn’t need to worry; she’s being given another
chance: find out what has been leaked from InTech and by whom. She’s assigned a
partner, Cole, a fifty-something neuroscientist with no field experience
whatsoever and who suffers from a grave memory loss thanks to an accident with
a device that wipes off peoples’ memories.
The first half of the book is a bit slow. We follow Tanta in
her new role as an agent investigating the leak. The investigation seems
somewhat random and produces results that don’t seem to lead anywhere. But the
focus is, for the reader, elsewhere. We learn, unlike Tanta, that she has been
carefully conditioned to be a perfect tool for the corporation. She is
physically incapable of disobeying orders or being disloyal. She doesn’t
understand other peoples’ reactions to her when they fear or pity her. And she
doesn’t understand how anyone could betray the corporation by deliberately
leaking its secrets.
The pace picks up on the second half. Something happens to
break Tanta’s conditioning, after which she has to question who she is and why
she is doing what she is. It’s not easy for her, but the process is described
well. Nonetheless, she’s determined to finish the assignment given to her.
Only, the truth turns out to be even more mind-shattering, not just for her but
for her partner Cole as well.
Tanta is a great character and the reader follows her path
from a mindless tool to independent thinker with interest. Cole, with his
memory loss and timidness, is interesting too, and the two form an unlikely friendship. The
characters without their own point of view, like Tanta’s girlfriend Reet, aren’t
quite as well-rounded, but they serve a role in Tanta’s change too. The world
with its technological wonders is kept simple and no explanations are given to
why it has turned the way it is. The reader plunges right in and is taken for a
ride. The writing is competent and the pacing is good. And if events fold out a
bit too neatly for Tanta and Cole, every plan and operation executed as
intended without surprises, it has enough twists and turns that the reader can
overlook it. Besides, I like books where nothing bad (relatively speaking)
happens to the characters. The book ends with a teaser for the next book and
I’m definitely interested in reading that one too.
I recently joined NetGalley, a website that makes it easier
for publishers to get books in the hands of reviewers. Like everyone else, I
hope to get the next book of my favourite author before it’s published, but
that seldom happens. However, there are plenty of books available for immediate
download by authors I’ve never heard of before and books I wouldn’t come to
read otherwise. I’ve decided to give some of those a chance.
The first book I picked is The Paradise Factory, Cortex book 1 by Jim Keen.
It’s being marketed as cyberpunk, which I found very misleading, as there are
no cyberpunk elements. It’s more a post-apocalyptic sci-fi dystopia. The apocalypse in
this case is brought about by the invention of Mechanical Intelligence, a
machine that has made human workforce obsolete. Hundreds of millions are
without work and those lucky enough to be employed can lose their job on a
whim, with no social security to fall back on. That the humanity is still alive
and kicking is more because of stubbornness than for any discernible survival
skills.
The story follows Alice Yu, a Brooklyn cop in her twenties—I think—whose partner is
abducted right in front of her. Even though loyalty to one’s partner and
initiative are discouraged by her bosses, Alice goes after him. Traces lead to
Brooklyn Bridge, a lawless no-go-zone ruled by criminal empire. She knows she’ll
lose her job if she goes there, but she goes anyway.
Another story-line follows Red, a young boy who needs to
deliver a message over the Brooklyn Bridge, an errand that would pay well if
the other kids weren’t trying to kill him for it. The paths of Alice and Red
meet on the bridge and they team up.
The plot is straightforward: find the partner and save him.
Obstacles come in form of bridge security trying to kill Alice for their boss, a
crime lord who has a nefarious enterprise to conceal. The constant fights became
boring pretty soon, but Alice is fighting PTSD from her time as a Marine in
Mars, which gives some depth to her character. Because of what she considers a
personal failure in Mars, she decides that saving Red is more important than
finding her partner, a decision that Red disputes, forcing her to face her
past.
After all the fighting, the main conflict is solved
amazingly easily. If it hadn’t been for the chapter that followed, which showed
the truth of what was on the other side of the bridge and gave both the world
and the main characters some new depth, this would’ve been a solid three star
book. The ending changed that.
I had some issues with the book. One of them was with the way
the scenes were set. Namely that they weren’t. Every scene, especially in the
beginning, started right with the action or even a beat after it. For example,
the book starts a moment after Alice’s partner has been taken, when she is
fighting her injuries. No context was offered to where she was, why she was
there, and why her partner mattered so much to her. As it was, I had trouble
understanding Alice’s need to go after him other than the general ‘of course
she does’. Were they friends or was there a debt to pay? Was he a lover, a
mentor? In a world where such decision means a pretty certain death, it needs
to be a good reason. Causes were given later in the book, but it came too late as
I’d already formed my opinion.
Incidentally, I’m not a fan of a narrative where character
motivations, like the cause of Alice’s PTSD, are rationed and revealed after
they have already influenced character’s actions. It made the narrative style
very claustrophobic with too little to work on. I had to put the book down
fairly often just to clear my head. That fortunately changed towards the end of
the book when all the players were familiar and the plot began to move forward.
I had issue with the world-building as well. If the world is
that rigged against humanity, with no chances of survival, how come there are
so many humans left? Especially since there’s a constant winter (and where did that come from). Why are there
no riots? The only one seems to be planned by the bad guys for their benefit. The
idea of MI didn’t work well either. How could a machine replace the entire
workforce? All it seemed to be able to do is print human body parts. They are
so expensive that countries bankrupted themselves to get one, so they can’t be
in every factory for example. And if they are supremely intellect, how come one
of them could be fooled by a human? All the other technology seemed to be in
the service of humanity, like the intelligent jacket Alice was wearing, so why
was the humanity in such a bad state. Also, most of the technology appeared to
be micro-chip based, whereas MI seems to be based on a Babbagean difference
engine—a cool idea that would’ve
changed the entire world-building if everything was based on that; a
twenty-first century steampunk world powered by nuclear reactors.
All the issues aside, I liked the book enough to keep
reading through the claustrophobic chapters. I liked Alice from the start and
Red grew on me. Bad guys could have been more evil, but considering the ending,
there’s maybe some use for them in subsequent books. I’m not entirely sure I’ll
continue with the series, but I’m glad I read this one.
The Girl in Red by Christina Henry is the latest book in her
series of fairy tale retellings. This one is based on Little Red Riding Hood.
The book started with promise, but it ended up leading nowhere. It has no story
arch and no conclusion. It has a series of events, and then it ends.
The Girl in Red by Christina Henry
The Girl in Red is set in post-apocalyptic America. Most of the population has
been wiped away by a fast-spreading mysterious virus that causes a cough that
kills in a couple of days. Red, Cordelia, believes that the safest place is her
grandmother’s remote house, and she sets out to walk hundreds of miles there
through forests to avoid being taken to government quarantine camps. Militia
and people ready to do anything to survive are some of the obstacles she faces.
In Little Red Riding Hood, the journey through the perilous forest is only
a part of the story, and not even the major part. The important part is when
she reaches the safety of her grandmother’s house and finds that the wolf has
reached there first. That’s when the story happens.
The Girl in Red isn’t that book. We follow Red on her
perilous journey about two thirds of the way when it abruptly ends, followed by
an epilogue showing her reach her grandmother’s house safely. Scent of food
indicates that everything is well there. Along the way, there are two
encounters with the army ready to take Red to a camp. The third, the important
one that should take place after Red believes she’s reached safety, never
happens. The book just ends and the reader is left hanging, wondering if this
could possibly be the entire book. It is.
It seems like the author hasn’t really understood her source material. The
story doesn’t progress anywhere. There are obstacles on Red’s way, some that
force her to kill even, but they don’t form an arch. And the dangers she faces
are amazingly easily overcome too, especially considering the apocalyptic nature of
the setting.The major revelation to Red
seems to be that she’s the Huntsman, not the Little Red Riding Hood. That’s not
enough to carry a book.
In Little Red Riding Hood, the wolf is a seductive force
that lures the hapless girl away from her path so that it can reach the
grandmother’s house first. But in this book, we never learn what the wolf is.
There’s the virus, but then there’s a monster too. I don’t know why the book
needed both, especially since they only serve as a catalyst for the story. It
would have been a different matter, if it had turned out that Red’s grandmother
has the monster incubating inside her too, but the story never reaches that
part of its arch. Instead, it ends just when we learn what the monster looks
like―though not why it exists in the first place.
Red is a disappointing character. She’s a twenty-year-old college student, but
she comes across as a teenager. She has all the makings of a diverse, something
for all character, but none of it has an impact on the story. She has a
prosthetic leg, so she’s not physically perfect. But the prosthesis is just a
prop. Worse, it’s the Chekhov’s gun alluded to throughout the story (‘I hope my
leg don’t give up on me’, ‘I hope I won’t trip’), but which is never fired. She
never falls because of it and it never lets her down at an important moment.
She walks and runs with a heavy backpack on without trouble, she kicks and
defeats grown men without any problems from her leg, and it never even chafes,
forcing her to stop. So what’s the point of giving her such vulnerability? None
that I could figure out.
Red is also black with mixed background, though with such a light skin and
straight hair that she can pass as a Latina, which the author finds important
to mention. Her skin colour has no impact on how she identifies, and apart from
some rednecks who attack her parents at the beginning of the book, the fact
that she’s black plays no role in the book. So what’s the point of mentioning her
skin colour? None.
On top of everything, Red is bisexual. The book has no
romance or sex, and although sexual violence is constantly hinted at, nothing
like that takes place. Why then would it matter that she’s attracted to both
men and women? It doesn’t. So Red only looks good on paper. Her diversity has
no purpose or impact on the story, which is highly disappointing.
Apart from her character, I found myself annoyed with little
details that don’t really matter. Her food comes in tin cans, which is highly
impractical on a long trek because they’re heavy and take a lot of space in a
backpack. She’s hiking for months, but no mention is made of such nuisances
like periods or the availability of toilet paper. How much sanitary products
can she fit in her backpack and still have room for food anyway? She also wins
all the fights she gets into without getting so much as slapped herself,
hacking her opponents to death with her axe. She’s not large or sporty, and has
only attended one self-defence class, yet she’s a killing machine all of a
sudden.
All in all, this is a deeply flawed book at its root. But
the story starts well, and as it’s told in two timelines, before and after, I
kept reading to find out what has led to Red’s current situation. It seems like
it’s going to something bigger, so I didn’t really notice the flaws until it
abruptly ends without delivering what it builds up to. So I gave it three
stars. I was going along with the story right to the sudden end, rooting for
Red. I just wish the rest of the story would have been there too.
I mentioned in the previous post that I’ve read Angelfall by
Susan Ee, the first book in the Penryn and The End of Days trilogy of post-apocalyptic San Francisco destroyed by the arrival of angels bent on annihilating the humanity. I’ve since
read the other two, World After and End of Days, and I thought to review all three in one post.
The structure of the trilogy, which is very compact, makes
this a natural approach. The next book begins with the same scene than the previous
ended, with the same energy too. Since I read them back to back, it suited me
perfectly, but if I’d had to wait for the next book to be published—I think
they came out a couple of years apart—I wouldn’t have remembered where the
previous book ended, and would’ve needed more to catch up. All in all, no more
than two weeks passes in the books in total, if that.
Angelfall by Susan Ee
We follow Penryn, a seventeen-year-old girl determined to save her family, mother and sister, from the angels and humans equally bent on survival. Paige, Penryn’s seven-year-old paralysed
sister, is first taken away by angels, and then, in the second, driven away by
humans afraid of her. This forces Penryn to go after her to save her.In a way Paige is the catalyst of two of the
books. In the third, Penryn takes a more active role in forming the outcome of
the story and forcing the final battle between humans and angels.
The tight timeframe means that Penryn’s development from a
scared teenager looking after her little sister and schizophrenic mother to
sword-wielding angler killer is rapid. Perhaps unnaturally so. The last book
mentions that all humans have diluted angel blood in them, some more than
others, but the author doesn’t make it clear if Penryn had more than her share
of it. Whatever the reason for her strength and skills, there isn’t a man or
angel big and strong enough she couldn’t beat in a fight. She never even hurts
herself, which in a book that revels in gory details of people’s injuries, is
remarkable.
World After by Susan Ee
The series point of view is strictly Penryn’s. There are
major things going on constantly in the background that she only learns about
after the fact. It suits the atmosphere of post-apocalyptic isolation well.
There is no way to communicate with people, so she can’t possibly know what the
others are doing. And it’s a change to similar books, where meaningful events
take place only when the hero is present. Sometimes Penryn is in the thick of
the action, sometimes she’s in the side-lines.
However, this means that the development of other characters
is non-existent, and most of them remain sketches. That goes for the characters
that are closest to Penryn too, like her sister and mother, and Raffe, the
wounded angel she rescues in the first book. They each have interesting roles
to play in the story, and it would’ve been nice to have some flesh around their
bones. Now her mother mainly remains a crazy lady everyone’s afraid of, who
does crazy things and somehow not only survives but helps to defeat the angels.
We don’t even learn her name. Paige, the little sister, is horribly altered by
angels; has to endure constant pain and violence, and deal with the violent
urges of her own, yet she’s looked at only from the outside. That’s mostly
because neither of them gets their own voice. They seldom speak and if they do,
they don’t tell anything about themselves.
End of Days by Susan Ee
Raffe, the inevitable love-interest, suffers from this too.
We do get some glimpses to his inner life, but only second-hand through a
sentient sword. He never talks about himself or his life. Yet, we’re meant to
believe that a relationship between him and Penryn is possible. That was
perhaps the weakest link in the trilogy. I was happy with the first book where
the possibility was only toyed with. Even in the second book there wasn’t much
else than a teenage girl’s crush on a handsome guy. The last book went all out though,
and it wasn’t always in service of the greater story. The action would stall
while Penryn fantasises about Raffe. Still, nothing much happens between them
except a few hot kisses, and I would’ve been perfectly fine with an ending
where the two go their separate ways. But, this being young adult fantasy, that
ending couldn’t happen.
All in all, the trilogy is sufficient as is, and not
well-developed enough. There would’ve been room for so much more. The angelic
system is never properly explained. While they’re clearly from Christian
mythology, they sort of spring from nowhere or from a different dimension.
Where were all the woman angels? Only one is mentioned in the whole trilogy. And
what about Penryn’s mother: did she really see demons and was guided by them? It
was alluded to, but in the end her notions were brushed away as her mental
illness. But the ending was satisfying enough, and in a way that didn’t solve
all the humanity’s problems at once. The kind of ending that leaves room for
the reader’s imagination too.
Atlas Alone is the fourth book in Emma Newman’s brilliant Planetfall
sci-fi series. So far, each book has been a stand-alone, set in different
places with different protagonists. But Atlas Alone leans heavily on the second
book, After Atlas, with its world-building and characters.
After Atlas introduced a near-future earth where democracy
doesn’t exist anymore and everything is owned by corporations, land, air, and
people included. Some people are indentured to corporations, sold for their
skills or to human experiments. Everyone is chipped with a personal AI that is
both a blessing and a curse. The book ended with the protagonist, Carlos Moreno,
an indentured detective conditioned to never leave a puzzle unsolved, securing a place for
him and his friend Dee on Atlas 2, a space-ship leaving the earth to a distant
planet introduced in the first book, Planetfall. As they leave, they witness
something that has a direct impact to this fourth book.
Planetfall by Emma Newman
In Atlas Alone, the
point of view protagonist is Dee. She came across as a sulky teenager in After
Atlas, but she turned out to be in her early forties. That doesn’t mean much,
as people can genetically modify themselves and live for at least a couple of
hundred years. Which is good, considering that the journey Atlas 2 is on will
take twenty years. Dee is a data analyst who has spent her adult life as a debt
slave conditioned in what is called hot-houses to toe the corporate line of
whichever business owns her. Her life hasn’t been easy, and she has serious
trust and emotional issues.
The book starts six months after the end of After Atlas. Dee
and Carl have trouble adjusting to the life on Atlas 2, mostly because of what
they witnessed as they left the earth. A chance job offer allows Dee to begin a
serious investigation to what happened, who is in charge of Atlas 2 and what is
its mission. This she does by becoming a member of an elite gaming community,
with the help of a mysterious benefactor that has the ability to override her
AI chip. The games turn out to be oddly personal for Dee, as they all have to
do with her past and the tragedies that have shaped her. But she is strong and
unemotional, and has had decades of practice in locking her past away. The
games don’t change who she is, even when her mysterious benefactor tries to
probe into her issues with her past—or especially because of it.
After Atlas by Emma Newman
What Dee learns in the games is that the ship is run by
fundamentalist Christians who are prepared to kill millions of people and
enslave the rest. She becomes convinced that the only way to bring them to
justice is to kill them. First she does this within the immersive games, but
somehow the deaths happen in real life too. And then it’s time for her to ditch
the games and kill the rest of the bad guys in real life.
Planetfall books are brilliantly composed to look like
sci-fi mysteries, but each book is actually a journey to the mind and psychopathology
of the protagonist. Each time, it’s done so subtly that the reader is convinced
to the end that the story will turn out to be fairly conventional. In Atlas
Alone, even as the last chapter began, I thought I knew how everything would
turn out. I was wrong.
It’s impossible to talk about the stunt the author pulls at
the very end without spoiling everything. It might seem like a wrong way to
finish the book, but it actually makes the reader re-evaluate the entire story
and realise what it’s been about all along. I found it a perfect and just ending
for Dee.
It takes great skill to dupe the reader to such extent and still
make them appreciate the ending. Here it’s done brilliantly. Nonetheless, I
only gave the book four stars. Some of it is for my disappointment that a book
set on a space-ship mostly ignores the ship in favour of immersive games that
take Dee back to earth. Also, the gaming sections were slightly boring and even knowing their worth in hindsight didn’t change that. But I don’t think
the author is done with the series, and I’m absolutely looking forward to
reading anything she sets in her Planetfall world.
“There is
more than one way to burn a book. And the world is full of people running about
with lit matches.” Ray Bradbury
Today is Ray Bradbury’s
birthday; he would have been 93 years old this year. I’ve only ever read one of
his books, Fahrenheit 451 (1953) and so can’t present myself as any kind of
expert or fan of his work. Especially since the book was compulsory reading at
school and, like all school work, was met with resistance.
Fahrenheit 451 by Ray Bradbury
Reluctantly though the
book was read, my teacher made sure that the themes were discussed thoroughly so
that even those who hadn’t finished the assignment understood them. If I recall
correctly, we even watched the movie.
Most people are
familiar with Fahrenheit 451, or at least know what it’s about. One of the
great themes of the book is controlling people and suppressing
individualism. Government submits people to mass media in order to keep
them in check, and books with their dangerous ideas are burned. Book pyres
become a powerful symbol, a reference to book burnings by Nazis.
Fahrenheit 451 is a dystopia
of government oppression, although in a late interview Bradbury noted that “the
culprit in Fahrenheit 451 is not the state—it is
the people.” It has been seen as
a visionary book, too, that predicted inventions like flat-screen TV and ideas such as people becoming
alienated by media.
Bradbury wasn’t able
to predict one major development. Books have gone through a physical change in the past
couple of years, an event that Bradbury was still alive to witness. Books,
like all information, have become digitalised. Ideas spread anywhere and
everywhere at once. Containing information, let alone suppressing it, has
become all but impossible.
Yet book pyres haven’t
disappeared. Only this week we were told how British government ordered the Guardian newspaper to destroy computer hard drives, even though
they knew perfectly well that the information they contained was stored
elsewhere too. It’s the symbol of the act that matters. When government orders
books to be burned, they don’t simply burn physical objects or destroy ideas. They
demonstrate that they have the power to control ideas.
In Fahrenheit 451, the
book burnings themselves become entertainment for the masses. We surround
ourselves with a ceaseless entertainment and constant influx of information,
just like Bradbury predicted. We are still able to see that the pyres are
burning around us, but for how long. If we are the culprits responsible for our own fate, how long will it take before we watch the pyres and not see what they stand for. Will they become only entertainment for us too?
I’ve read
sci-fi in bursts, never in any cohesive manner and not much in recent years. In
my teens, whatever sci-fi book happened to catch my fancy when I visited the
library was picked up and read. I don’t think half of it made an impact; I most
certainly can’t remember most of it. If I recall correctly, the theme was
interstellar travel and faraway planets, inspired by Star Wars, no doubt. Of
those, Dune is the only one that has remained with me and that one mainly because
my husband likes it so much.
The
Tripods, on the other hand, made a lasting impression.Only a few books that I read
depicted the earth in some distant future date, the idea so novel for me that I read the series a couple of
times. I found it very scary and for a long time I feared alien invasion –
though the TV series V may have had something to do with that too. I didn’t
want to end up as a slave to some machine or a lizard. However, as I grew up, I
lost the certainty that the earth would be invaded by extra-terrestrial beings
and so that kind of sci-fi lost its power too.
As an
adult, though, the sci-fi that has stayed with me the longest is the kind that
depicts a dystopian future for our planet. William Gibson’s
Neuromancer and Philip K. Dick’s Do Android’s Dream of Electric Sheep? both
picture an overcrowded planet destroyed by a war or pollution, where natural resources
are almost gone, the flora and fauna are extinct and most of the population live
in slums. Big corporations dominate the world and democracy is non-existent.
Dystopias did – and still do – seem like a plausible end for our present way of
life.
At the time
the books were written, Dick’s in 1968 and Gibson’s in 1984, the height of Cold War, a devastating war between two superpowers seemed likely. Cold War is long
over and with it the threat of nuclear destruction, but the themes of over-population and overusing the earth’s resources haven’t gone away. And while
1992 didn’t see our planet populated by lifelike androids and the cyber space like
Gibson imagined hasn’t truly actualised yet either, both books retain the sense of
plausible in their predictions for the future.
The world
has changed more since Neuromancer was published than it did between the
publications of Dick’s and Gibson’s books. I read an article recently by John Gray titled What’s going to happen in the next hundred years? In it, he takes a look at the past century
and concludes that after all the turmoil of the past hundred years, the world has returned to the state it was in at the end of
the 19th century. With that he means that there isn’t a leading power that would
control the planet, which makes things unpredictable. According to him, it makes
a war inescapable.
Gray’s
notion would make the kind of future Dick and Gibson describe even more likely.
However, I’d like to think it opens up the future, makes it unknown. The next
hundred years don’t have to follow the lines of the past century; it could be
different. And that offers possibilities for imagining a new kind of future in
sci-fi too. The best sci-fi authors have always been able to depict unknown futures that seem possible, but they tend to be narrow in their scope. For all their brilliance in predicting the course of humanity, Dick and Gibson failed to take into account quite a lot of human issues.
Science fiction set in near future earth could tackle different themes than destruction or technological
advance: women and sexual minorities, for example. Both groups are better off
than they were a century ago – or at the time Dick and Gibson wrote their
books. Surely we could imagine a future where things would be even better – or worse, in case of dystopias. Asia won’t necessarily be the leader of the world like Gibson depicts,
but what would be the alternative? “The shift to unconventional energy may
still be a game-changer, as the effect is to make the position of oil-producing
countries increasingly untenable,” as Gray notes. Would that speak for a future
where the planet hasn’t been destroyed?
The idea
that we have returned to the beginning, cleaned our slate, is intriguing. It
isn’t entirely true, of course, but for utopian writing, or dystopian, it
offers endless possibilities. I, for one, would like to read those books. How
about you?
Here’s the original trailer for Blade Runner, the movie based on Dick’s
book.
