E.M.Forster – The Machine Stops

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Book Review, E.M.Forster, SF, Short Story, The Machine Stops

Considering the time of writing, astonishingly and horribly prophetic

E.M.Forster wrote this ‘Science Fiction story’ in 1909. Pre-computer, pre-world wide web, pre-smart talking to itself technology.

Just over 100 years later this seems not like science fiction at all, more, something which might be a mere handful of years away, and in many ways, already here.

Set sometime in the future (at the time of writing) human beings have gratefully done away with all the challenging, messy stuff of having to communicate with each other, and skilfully negotiate co-operation with another face to face human being, in real time and place.

Instead, each lives softly cocooned like a babe inside a personal pod, where all wants are regulated by sentient technology. The technology ‘The Machine’ was once created and conceived of by humans, but now it does things so much more efficiently than any one human can do. All needs, be they of ambient temperature, health and well being, education, entertainment, furniture, are seamlessly provided by the machine, and the human being in its pod never has to rub up against the messy flesh of another. Communication happens by seeing (and hearing) each other on some kind of screen. You in your small pod, me in mine

Everything that can be controlled, is, and everything that can’t, in the material world, is regarded as unpleasant and dangerous.

Living happens in the personal pod, deep below the earth, where the air supply is regulated, and purified. The surface of the earth is deemed dangerous, the air not fit to breathe. The Machine has told us so, so it must be true.

Vashti, the central character is happy in her pod. Her son is a difficult and challenging embarrassment to her and their ‘meetings’ on screen do not go well. He also has disturbing things to say about The Machine, and appears to harbour dangerously subversive ideas about a better, earlier time, when people communicated directly with each other. And then………well, the title of the story shows where this will lead.

Twenty-first century readers can’t help but look around at a world where we are all clutching our little screens,facetwitting, Instachatting, occupying the same space as each other in cafes, on buses, colliding on the street, but rarely connecting with each other, in real. Terminals in shops instruct us that we have placed an unrecognised item in the bagging area. Doctor’s surgeries require us to register our arrival on a screen, whilst the receptionist communicates only with her own terminal. And children, so we are told, no longer realise that potatoes grow in the earth, milk comes from cows, and, from early years are plonked in front of screens with brightly coloured moving shapes, emoticons and squawking sounds, so their harassed parents can get on with the important stuff of staring at their own little screens, busy with brightly coloured moving shapes, emoticons and squawks of their own

Whilst I certainly prefer Forster’s more ‘traditional’, literary novels of relationship this is a horribly possible vision, and it is tempting to categorise it as contemporary fiction, not Sci-Fi at all

A short piece, it punches the gut and leaves the reader gasping for breath

And, the inevitable link to my virtual bloggy buddy FictionFan, who once again brought something to my attention I would otherwise not have known about. You can read her review here. We have never met, in real, and I realise the whole wonderful book blogging community is a ‘virtual’ like Forster is warning us about. There are many good things about our virtual connections, but I sincerely hope to live out my days on the surface of this planet, not beneath it (that can come later!) and welcome the real faces of real people as we meet each other, bump against each other, and even talk, face to face, in real time and space

A version a little more alarming than the better known one by Simon and Garfunkel

The Machine Stops Amazon UK
The Machine Stops Amazon USA

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The Prescient View of Science Fiction writers

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Book Review, Dystopia, Fahrenheit 451, Ray Bradbury, Science fiction, SF, Soapbox

Ray Bradbury –  Fahrenheit 451

Back whenever, Science Fiction was a genre I never thought about, convinced that such writers were (sorry, this is about my previous prejudices, and may not reflect reality about the genre, then or now AT ALL) geeky guys without social skills stuck in a 7 year old comic book fantasy of space-ships, ray-guns, stun-guns, giant robotic females with mammaries the size of whoopee cushions, who happened to be coloured green or red and had just dropped in from Venus or Mars.

It took me some time to realise that some writers whom I thought of as pretty thoughtful and thought provoking – H.G.Wells, George Orwell. (I liked their politics too) John Wyndham, even Aldous Huxley (Brave New World) were also writing in this genre. Science Fiction in the hands of these writers had far less to do with ray guns (or even Ray-Bans) and had everything to do with a device for looking at our society.

Then no less an admired writer (by me) than Doris Lessing began to write the stuff in the Canopus In Argos series, and moreover began banging the SF drum, saying that some of the most exciting writing was happening in the genre, as it was a perfect medium for Society to examine itself. Big ethical and philosophical ideas of now and the future could be teased out and examined, and moreover, of course, SF was a way of looking at what both a Utopia and a Dystopia might look like – or even whether Utopia itself was in fact really achievable, or just another Dystopia.

Added to my roster of other writers to admire (and I liked their politics!) were of course Lessing herself, Ursula K Le Guin and Sheri Tepper – not to mention Margaret Atwood and even Marge Piercy in Woman On The Edge Of Time. Suddenly it seemed as if there were a whole raft of feminist writers – fine writers, feminists, turning to this genre as a way of exploring gender politics, socialism – and I realised, hey, you know what, I LIKE SF!

Anyway, this preamble has brought me to re-reading some earlier SF classics, – most recently, Ray Bradbury’s Fahrenheit 451.

Now Bradbury in this book may not be writing such well crafted complex characters as some of those writers I have mentioned, and the plot itself may even be a bit sparse or creaky, but my goodness, I am shocked and chilled and awed by how much of today’s culture he was predicting 60 years ago

Reality TV where we all become content not only to watch others living, rather than living ourselves, but, no doubt, the next step arriving very soon where our TV becomes interactive and we ourselves get inserted as bit players in the soaps we watch, or software that inserts our names into live TV, so that the TV talks directly to us, with announcers addressing us directly. Then we can live even less.

He seems to have mainlined into the fact that we have dumbed culture down, his description of the way people talk to each other so that actually they are not talking about anything at all seems unnervingly like the “and then he said, he was like, it was, you know, like, it was, yeah, no, know what I mean?” babble.  You hear these conversations all around, more and more being said without any meaning:

 People don’t talk about anything’…’They name a lot of cars or clothes or swimming pools and say how swell! But they all say the same things and nobody says anything different from anyone else

He predicts also the worst excesses of PC speak, and puts his finger neatly on the button of our expectation of happiness as a right, our inability to come to terms with the fact that pain and suffering are a real part of embodiment, of living in a world of matter. The best, the justest, the fairest society will not be able to end our personal suffering

 Ask yourself, what do we want in this country, above all? People want to be happy, isn’t that right? Haven’t you heard it all your life? I want to be happy, people say. Well, aren’t they? Don’t we keep them moving, don’t we give them fun? That’s all we live for, isn’t it? For pleasure, for titillation? And you must admit our culture provides plenty of these

I was shaking my head in amazement at the accurate identification of our can’t be still, can’t reflect society which settles for circuses (never mind the bread) and drinks, drugs, medicates, and buys its way out of having to acknowledge that pain is an unavoidable part of life itself – we will grow old (if we are that lucky); we will have to manage the loss, at some point, of those we love, and we too will die.

There is more – a society which cannot deal with complexity, with the fact there may not always be an obvious right and an obvious wrong, and this too, we cannot bear. One of the great challenges are situations where whatever action is taken, it will not be without some great cost, and yet we have to take some action, as the not taking an action is of course itself an act. Events in Syria are so much illustrative of this. I am minded of W.B. Yeats’ poem The Second Coming:

The best lack all conviction, whilst the worst
Are full of Passionate intensity

How do we live having let go of  the comfortable and childish security of a world which is black OR white, and let ourselves inhabit that more confusing  challenging world filled with ever more subtle complexities of paradoxes, conflicts and oppositions coexisting together into and and, rather than either or?

 If you don’t want a man unhappy politically, don’t give him two sides to a question to worry him; give him one. Better yet, give him none.

And, seeing ahead to the vapid game show, where factual knowledge gives us the illusion we have intelligence and wisdom

 Give the people contests they win by remembering the words to more popular songs or the names of state capitals or how much corn Iowa grew last year. Cram them full of non-combustible data, chock them so full of facts they feel stuffed, but absolutely brilliant with information. Then they’ll feel they’re thinking, they’ll get a sense of motion without moving

He talks also about our inability to bear silence – everyone cushioned from the world by their own blare of noise wall to wall music piped into our heads, children plonked in front of the pabulum TV, learning early to be passive not interactive, – even the fashion for elective caesarians on non-medical grounds.

What makes this book so powerful still is the fact that so much of its dystopian vision is the way our lives actually are; not in fact so much ‘science fiction’ after all, rather a sociological analysis

We don’t need giant invaders from other galaxies with super powerful rare weapons to destroy us, and our world. We are ourselves those violent, aggressive, alien invaders

Fahrenheit 451 Amazon UK
Fahrenheit 451 Amazon UK

Christopher Priest – The Adjacent

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Book Review, Christopher Priest, Dystopia, Sci-Fi, SF, The Adjacent

Dark Ravens, not White Doves, Emerge from the Magician’s Hat

Christopher Priest is adept at mangling the mind of an unwary (and even a wary!) reader; all his books tangle, darkly, with our perceptions of reality and identity. His new novel, The Adjacent, is no exception, weaving his lifelong themes of shifting realities, alternate and parallel realities of time and place, and the alternate and parallel life of individual identity itself.

Other Priest meta themes to be woven in are prestidigitation, illusion and magic, state control, dystopia, mankind’s heavy and bellicose footprint across the landscape of our history, and the lies and deceptions of our, public relations spin accounts of our time and culture, and the dark and shadowy underbelly of social control and our nightmare, `uncivil’ selves.

Vexaton.DeviantArt.com Commons

The Adjacent weaves a story through several settings, beginning with a post-apocalyptic world, some 40 or 50 years ahead of today. Physicists have found another way of manipulating matter, which, similarly to the splitting of the atom, can be (and will be) used in the service of destruction and control, however much the invention may have been designed as `pure science for the good’.

The effects of global terrorism, environmental damage and twenty-first century religious wars have changed our world forever.

Frighteningly, as so often with Priest, none of this really seems like science fiction – the only factor which isn’t clearly visible over the horizon – or already here – is `Adjacency’ (which I shan’t spell out, it is for the reader to discover)

Strep72 photostream. Flicr, Commons

There is a flipping back and forth between post-apocalytic twenty-first century, the First World War and the Second World War, and, to continue Priest’s other territory of islands, specifically post-apocalytic islands, we revisit some earlier landscapes from his previous novels The Islanders and The Dream Archipelago.

More, I will not say, there are love stories within here, and a surprising (but perfectly apposite) appearance of a pertinent author, but even to mention characters is to destroy the careful series of shocks and recognitions which it will be the reader’s pleasure to discover.

In effect, with his interest in stage magicians and their world, I always feel as if Priest’s readers ought to become, in effect, bound by the rules of the Magician’s Circle, and NOT reveal Priest’s tricks!

I did have a slight feeling of let-down with the ending of this one, and that is all I will say against this book.

An earlier criticism, which is that Priest cannot inhabit female sensibility well, and that there is always a certain coldness and detachment in his accounts of sexual encounters between men and women, something which feels like a flaw, an over-cerebral approach to the possibility of human warmth, did dissolve away, rather, late on the book.

Priest remains a deeply disturbing, sometimes a little chilly and cerebral, but ALWAYS challenging, unsettling and thought provoking, writer. Wallpaper, muzak, marshmallow writer he is NOT. Rather a pearl from the grit in the oyster kind!

I have been an uneasy, sometimes uncomfortable, admirer of Priest’s writing for nearly twenty years, since first encountering The Glamour which may well have been the first of his novels to escape from being sidelined by the often dismissive Sci-Fi label. Priest indeed being one of the authors (along with Doris Lessing, Ursula K.Le Guin, and John Wyndham, not to mention H.G. Wells) to sternly tell me not be so snobby, narrow minded and dismissive, and to realise its not the genre, it’s the WRITING I should look at.

The unease, by the way, is caused by the often scarily prescient quality of Priest’s vision. His is uncomfortable and challenging, not escapist, literature

The Dream Archipelago Amazon UK
The Dream Archipelago Amazon USA

 

Ken Kalfus – Equilateral

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Book Review, Equilateral, Ken Kalfus, Literary Fiction, SF

Please judge this book by its cover…………..

It may seem wrong to begin a book review by spending time reviewing the physical book itself, rather than its content. After all, the phrase ‘don’t judge a book by its cover’ is in common parlance.

Except, of course, when ‘judging a book by its cover’ is a perfect illustration of the contents. As it is here. Dear would be reader, I really urge you to pay the extra pennies and make space on your bookshelves for this decidedly, but deceptively, slim tome, rather than go for the Kindle download. Firstly, you will have one of the most beautiful, alluring, evocative cover images I have seen for a long while. Like Kalfus’ meticulously crafted language, the carefully assembled juxtaposition of images will snag away at your subconscious. Much more is going on than you will initially see. As befits a book where Victorian engineering – where many ideas were held inside those intrinsic bold construction projects – is a major grounding and springboard, we have a beautiful, weighty, piece of craft. There are the beautiful geometrical illustrations. The pages are satisfyingly thick, a pleasure to turn, there is a sensory delight (and a subtext of the sensuous is part of Kalfus’ writing) The binding has been done in such a way that rather than lying flat across, it forms a little ridged trench along the long edge – and as much of the book is precisely about a fantastic engineering project in the Egyptian desert – the building of an enormous equilateral triangle of trench – this is like the book itself manifesting the construction! Sadly at the moment the book only seems available in the UK on Kindle

Ken Kalfus has written a book dense with ideas, every word, it feels, carefully chosen and slotted into place. You could, easily, race through pursuing a great story – the construction of a Victorian engineering feat in order to make contact with sentient beings on Mars. This is, if you want, an easy and enjoyable read, you won’t feel as if you have to work enormously hard to understand what the author is saying. It is not in the least bit one of those magnificent literary reads which you know ARE excellent, but need very dense study to yield up their riches.

Except – somehow it is, and what Kalfus does (like the picture on the cover) is give you something immediately arresting to respond to, but, but, and, and – if you make yourself pace yourself – well, he is hurling thunderbolts of ideas at you, often on the turn of a sentence.

Think of a modern day H.G. Wells; like Wells more is always going on than just a very exciting story about the edges of science and the stars. Except that the lengthier fuller construction of Victorian writers has been pared down. Kalfus’ sentences are compact, short, and in some ways are more like poetry – that ability to make one word hold the weight of others.

To avoid drivelling on endlessly (me, not Kalfus, who is economy personified) here is an early example:

An Egyptian royal band in full military dress played the anthem of each participating nation, as well as selections from Bizet and Offenbach, the horns glaring under the morning, then noonday, then afternoon sun.

It was that choice of horns glaring – the obvious would have probably been shining, or flashing, or sparkling – but glaring not only suggests and makes the reader feel, the hurt of the light, but contains the other thing horns do – blare! So one word suggests assaults on both the eyes and the ears.

To try to and get a bit more Kalfus succinct – what you have here is an enthralling story, a novel crammed full of ideas – evolution, maths and sacred geometry as a language, beings from outer space, class, race and sexual politics, Victorian empire building, human hubris, all wrapped up in compact yet playful, light touch writing…….there were a couple of points I shouted out loud with delight……but can’t say why, to avoid spoilers…..oh, just get the book!

I am extremely grateful to the publishers, Bloomsbury, for making a copy available to review.

And probably even more grateful to fellow reviewer FictionFan for once again alerting me to a book that I needed to read – here is her review

And as for that cover, it is the stuff of dreams, a melancholic, sorrowing, beautiful surreal juxtaposition suggesting layers upon layers of poetic meaning……….oh, JUST GET THE BOOK! (and read it, of course!)

Picture credits : Suez Canal and Earth from Apollo 17 Wikimedia Commons
2 views of Mars from Flicr on Commons
Equilateral Amazon UK
Equilateral Amazon USA

John Wyndham – The Chrysalids

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Book Review, John Wyndham, Literary Fiction, Sci-Fi, SF, The Chrysalids

Examining society through science fiction

I first read this years ago, and though I have thought that as a genre science fiction is not something I’m particularly interested in, of course, in the hands of a fine writer (Wyndham was) it provides a brilliant way of taking a more reflective look at our own society.

Written in the 50s, where the grim realities of the devastation of war, the destructive power of nuclear weapons, and the use of propaganda and control were hugely in use – the Cold War creating bogeymen from both sides of the Iron Curtain – this dystopian view of a world destroyed by some long ago catastrophe (clearly the fall out from nuclear Armageddon) must have seemed particularly potent.

Society is once again primitive and there is total control exercised by fundamentalist Christianity – its like going back to the seventeenth century and the fear of witchcraft – except the society being pictured is clearly both the America of McCarthyism and the Russia of Stalin. Here, birth defects (caused, the reader quickly realises, through the effects of widespread deviation) are feared, seen as evidence of God’s punishment and disfavour. Such deviation from the norm – whether in humans, other animals or vegetables, must be destroyed.

But what about deviation which may not be visible – a deviation of thought – here is where the parallels between the McCarthy witchhunts and their terror of reds under the bed, and those reds’ own terror of deviation from received thinking – become clear.

Wyndham wraps this all together in an exciting plot-line, with the central characters, and the hopes for a better future, residing in the young.

He is far more than a polemicist – the philosophical considerations arise perfectly from within the characters themselves. He is that wonderful mixture – a superb storyteller, a creator of interesting and layered characters, and a writer with something to say.

This is enough to make me want to revisit all the other post war, on-the-edge-of-a-nuclear-apocalypse territory writing Wyndham created. I never particularly think of Wyndham as a science fiction writer (which he is) but purely as a writer. And a very fine one, at that

The jacket shown here is of a version available in the States with a foreword by another wonderful, thought provoking SF writer, Christopher Priest
The Chrysalids Amazon UK
The Chrysalids Amazon USA

Christopher Priest – The Islanders

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Book Review, Christopher Priest, Dystopia, Literary Fiction, Sci-Fi, SF, The Islanders

The subtitle of Christopher Priest’s The Islanders `All men are islands’ cocks a snook at Donne’s `No Man is an Islande’ which points out interconnectedness. Priest’s supposed `gazetteer’ of the islands of The Dream Archipelago both reinforces Donne and his own subtitle, which hints at the also truth of isolation, inward looking, self-reflective nature of islands and island dwellers

This is a book to mangle minds. Told by several unreliable narrators – including the writer himself, who turns out to have dedicated his book to one of his mysterious characters, and thereby does that `up yours’ gesture to the reader who wonders how much the writer of the foreword, Chaster Kammeston, is, or is not, Priest himself – this book systematically pulls rugs out from under the readers’ feet, up-ending and wickedly landing them on the floor.

Those familiar with Priest’s writing will be no strangers to his ability to severely disorientate and deliberately unsettle the reader, turning his dream landscapes to nightmare, whisking what seemed safe ground away to reveal the yawning chasms of danger beneath. Echoes of his earlier works are scattered throughout the text. Indeed the islands themselves are part of The Dream Archipelago, the title of a previous work. One of the islands is the island where lottery winners achieve, through medical science, immortality, and some of the island names as well come from that previous work

Set in what is probably a post-apocalypse near or parallel future of this world, (environmentalists are already predicting this could be nearer than we think) global warming has flooded most of the landscape, leaving 2 war torn major land masses and the long, divided chain of islands of The Dream Archipelago. Presented as a travelogue or guide to some of the major islands, which, according to Kammeston are idyllic, peaceful areas of neutrality outside the still warring land mass areas, where the arts, education and scientific research which benefits all are held in high regard, we quickly learn that much of what Kammeston claims can be disregarded. The `no man is an island’ of Donne’s view and the `all men are islands’ of Priest’s subtitle clash and weave together – the oppositions proving and disproving each other just like 2 of the major installation artists of the book are shown to do.

Nothing is as it seems here, Priest reworking some of his major preoccupations with illusion, sleight of hand, the conscious attempt to deceive of theatrical magic – the major focus of his earlier The Prestige (GOLLANCZ S.F.).

To lay out more of the spells, the illusions, the darknesses and the oppositions Priest explores would be to spoil the new reader’s own journey of dislocation and necessary obfuscation.

If you are unfamiliar with Priest’s work, an excellent place to start is The Glamour (GOLLANCZ S.F.) (which is where I first encountered Priest) To describe him as an SF writer – as often happens – is not completely right. To my mind, he is a kind of English Borges, a philiosopher metaphysician with a scarily challenging mind and imagination. What I particularly appreciate in this book, is a sense of light touch and playfulness, leavening the darkness
The Islanders