re:mote voices: literature

Title: Slaughtermatic
Author: Steve Aylett
Publisher: Phoenix House

Steve Aylett was last reviewed in these pages as author of the story Gigantic which appeared in the collection Disco 2000. This is Aylett's third novel, following The Crime Studio and Bigot Hall, and returning to the city of Beerlight. Additionally, characters like Blince, Parker and Panacea are featured, though are not the central characters. Those roles are taken by Dante Cubit, The Entropy Kid and Rosa Control. As I say, this book is set in a city called Beerlight, a city which Aylett describes:

"Where to kill a man is less a murder than a mannerism.
Where integrity is no more than a fierce dream.
Where crime is the new and only art form."

With the central characters being proponents of the style - hence the book kicks in with a crime. Dante and The Entropy Kid are robbing a bank - but this isn't merely about money, it's about artistic statement, and as such their target is something special. While The Entropy Kid covers the staff/customers, Dante goes for the vault, which has security designed to send him 20 minutes into the future and the waiting arms of the police. But knowing this, Dante has obtained a hack and goes back in time by 20 minutes and cuts the security cameras so that when they arrive to rob the bank there will be no record. From the vault he takes a book - an interactive object created by a cult figure that is incredibly mind consuming. Then he goes and shoots himself coming into the bank - with his body at the crime scene he can't be accused of the crime, and his mother will get insurance money. But things start to go wrong - the layout of the building is not as expected, Dante Two does not die, and Rosa (backup and escape route) is not there to collect them. From there it is a downward spiral of cryptic dialogue -absurdist crime and random killings - puntuated by the hope that the two Dantes do not meet, because if they do they will implode taking the city with them.

Aylett's style is like being slapped with a stick - each line a thrown away gag or pun or something that manages to go beyond your understanding of what is actually going on. Which can become confusing, but given his undoubtable style and ability, confusion is acceptable, and most likely intentional. I guess one could call something of the content cyber - but it is certainly more punk than that label suggests - plugging guitars into the back of people's necks instead of computers with lethal results. The police and authorities are brutal and ugly - the rest of the characters are flippant (on drugs and heavily armed). The general attitude of the characters hinted at by the following, when a character has been told:

" 'God can see you when you pick your nose'. This guarantee had led him to create a snot graffiti which said 'YOU FUCKED UP BIG TIME'. But in adulthood it occured to him that maybe God couldn't read ... So now he stood on stage ... And picked his nose, baked by a fast-cutting projection of starvation, death, and disease."

But despite the flipancy and the constant floe of trick weapons and drugs, Aylett manages to have a plot which he sticks to. A plot more complex and engaging than his tone may suggest, in fact he even manages to throw in a few twists. This is an enjoyable read - good dialogue and good humour propelling the reader through its pages from start to end.

RVWR: PTR
August 1998

Title: Only Forward
Author: Michael Marshall Smith
Publisher: Harper Collins

This is the first novel by Michael Marshall Smith, which has just been reprinted with new artwork to coincide with the release of his third novel, "One Of Us", in hardback. In this book he demonstrates a quick incisive wit - while it is set in an alternate existence, he still manages to take sideways pokes at ours. The style is like many a classic detective thriller but, as with many who use this style, the flow is fueled by humour. And the flow is such that the whole novel is a fluid read; I literally sat and read this in one day - I wasn't sleeping until I'd finished, despite this being my second read.

The story involves a city which has grown to take up 70% of the land mass of the country it is part of. Part of this evolution has been the formation of Neighborhoods, where people who want to live in a certain way live together. The main character is a man called Stark, who does not fit into any of the Neighborhoods as they exist, which makes him uniquely equipped to take on "special" jobs. The "special" job in this case revolves around a kidnapping - but of course, to prevent that being to simple, things are not as they seem. To this end, the action takes a strange twist until the characters are entering a peculiar dream world. In doing so the true history and reasoning of the protagonist becomes clear.

The characters are well written - Stark never being caught short of a witty line. While the dialogue is clever and amusing, it also achieves great depth in the examination of the character's history, covering childhood, friendships, and betrayal; each of these areas affecting the character's journeys through his dreams and through his memories. All of the Neighborhood's they travel through have their own peculiarities - from Stark's Colour, where the walls are sensitive to the mood and clothes of residents; through Action, where everyone is a "can-do" workaholic; to Cat where only cats live and only those that love cats can enter.

The story, while being funny, also has other aspects to it - elements of thriller, of tech, and of horror - thrills as it becomes clear that there is a force working against Stark, then chills with the realization of the awful truth. The tech is ever present and while it is not a driving element, it serves to give substance and background to the character's lives - examples are the talking machines with bad attitudes (a warped lift and a huffy bug detector) or the grav-benders (turning the gravity planes of items and rooms around on themselves). Progressing to the final section of the book, Michael has added another reality to the already strange city in the form of the dream world - where in the characters meet their worst nightmares in a form more horrific than they are really prepared for.

Having sought this book out after reading one of Michael's short stories, I can say I was not disappointed. I enjoyed it as much this second time as I did the first and would recommend it, along with his second book "Spares". For those interested, I suggest you check out the preview of "Spares" on the publisher's site Harper Collins/Voyager2, which will give you a feel for how this man works.

RVWR: PTR
August 1998

Title: The Cassini Division
Author: Ken MacLeod
Publisher: Orbit

The Cassini Division is the third instalment in MacLeod's loosely related serial. Starting his career with The Star Fraction, he offered a very enjoyable and re-readable piece of work. Set in the near future, The Star Fraction had that joy of believable extrapolation. In a post-post...revolution-splintered UK, we are set up for the next revolution, the next wave of change with the imminent birth of an AI-generated master plan and the threat that the US/UN star wars system will wipe out any country where an AI is detected.

Some years after the events of The Star Fraction, comes The Stone Canal set on the newly colonised New Mars. Here we had a more alien territory, yet MacLeod flashes from the AI-enabled New Mars to memories and rivalries of Glasgow in the 1970s. Plausible SF factors once again tied to recognisable elements that hook us in.

With a couple of characters from The Stone Canal returning through the wormhole to Jupiter they encounter The Cassini Division. Which brings us to here, starting 5 years after those events and focusing on the members of this system defence force who encountered the returnees. Here MacLeod takes us back to the futures of drastic political, social, and technological change. Having gained the technology, a splinter of the human race has given itself up to machine technology. Accelerating through AI, these people become the fast folk; rapid thinking living generations, they devour Jupiter's moon and create the wormhole. While The Stone Canal dealt with the people that got carried along on this journey, The Cassini Division shows what happened to the worlds left behind. The fast folk who remained turned in on themselves becoming demented, a side-effect of which was the transmission of deadly viral broadcasts. Broadcasts which wiped out all of our technology resulting in great difficulties. Rebuilding ourselves we put the Cassini Division in place to watch Jupiter - the wormhole and fast folk.

With the return of humans from New Mars and the subsequent rebirth of the fast folk, something must be done to ensure that the AI on either side of the wormhole are not a threat to what has been rebuilt.

While The Cassini Division does have the flashing back to a past, it is still a future to us. As such it does not trigger the same responses as the easy extendibility of The Star Fraction or regression of The Stone Canal. Which means that it loses an element of that accessibility. Having said that, I have no doubt that The Cassini Division is as well written and as enjoyable as his previous books. The familiar themes remain and move on, making this a fitting extension of his work. Full of communistic anarchies and capitalistic anarchies, MacLeod presents his interpretations on these doctrines, while the tech aspect is important and impressive though integrated enough that it is fully a part of the story and totally unobtrusive.

After a long wait for this in paperback, I can recommend anyone unfamiliar with MacLeod's novels picks up The Star Fraction and works their way to here. My only complaint is the length of time it took to make this available at an affordable price and they cancelled the joy of that out by releasing the next volume The Sky Road in hardback at the same time.

RVWR: PTR
August 1998

Title: Diaspora
Author: Greg Egan
Publisher: Millennium

In Quarantine, Egan introduced us to the ideas of permutations, of possibilities - each reality can have so many more edges and dimensions to it than those we can perceive. In Permutation City, he expanded his ideas for human evolution into software - where personalities become data packets and day to day life relies on the processing speed of the hardware. With Diaspora, Egan takes these ideas in evolutionary directions.

The world presented to us is one where humans have taken one of three options - to remain flesh, with varying levels of genetic engineering; to transfer one's singular software translation into a robot body; to load one's singular software translation as a sub programme of a supercomputer. These supercomputers are called Polises - each living by a set of rules or policies, and if the subroutines representing an individual don't accept these then they have themselves saved to another Polis. This plausibly extends the ideas from Permutation City - new developing technology has become the norm. for millions. Mirroring the reality of perceptions shifting from incomprehension and rejection to total acceptance.

The story starts with the concept of a hardware mechanism or operating system following a routine designed to prevent the Polis from becoming stale (or inbred). Like genetic engineering's manipulation of DNA, there are ways of engineering the bit patterns to produce new citizens. To explore the potential variables these patterns can be assigned, the system will create an orphan - a parentless citizen with test genes/opcode. Here we have just that process occurring and we read of the generation of this individual. Following the rise of the orphan from barely formed software protocol to full citizen, Egan provides us with some of his most emotive writing to date. Adapting our own growth to the situation, Egan is giving us an insight to our own learning process - from basic word/image association to cause and effect.

Having grown us a character , Egan then creates a plot on top of that - where, level by level, what the character has is threatened. This starts with the threat to the Earth, then, as they search for a solution, the threat to this Universe. Which leads us into more familiar Egan territory - the concepts of permutations lead us to other dimensions. Here he builds upon these other dimensions, tipping reality askew as the characters find themselves in other universes. For so many others, these ideas would seem fanciful and unconvincing and many of these ideas of other realities and worlds within worlds have been tried before.

But this is Egan's skill beyond all others; he backs everything he tells us with hard fact. Starting so often with chemical or biological or physical or mathematical theories that are real, he extrapolates and expands, creating new theories and new scientists to have discovered them. With care he progresses them incrementally, so that you are utterly convinced that everything you are reading is hard fact. All that despite the fact that it is all speculation, it is all things which may be discovered years from now. The sheer depth of detail here can make Egan's work difficult at times, requiring a great degree of focus - but it is all worth it, as grasping what is happening will blow your mind.

It's not all hard science though - it's about ideas, situations and characters. Here the characters do struggle with situations - they don't take everything for granted. As the story proceeds the number of people willing to take the next step reduces steadily.

In addition we have the growth of this novel from the short story Wangs Carpet, which is a fascinating transformation in itself. As with Permutation City, Wang's Carpet and seemingly a lot of Egan'swork , there is an exploration of solipsism, which, when dealt with by Egan, shows advantages and disadvantages and makes the whole concept intriguing. As are all his ideas- I mean, think about being able to "download" human life/intelligence onto a computer. What will we really have - a simulation ? How will they relate to flesh and blood ? Without the same restrictions as flesh, and capable of evolving at different processor speeds, what will the outcome be? All these questions are asked and answered through the body of Egan's work. The answers are disturbingly familiar yet unfathomably alien. Reinforced with each sign of real alien presence that is encountered. In the same way we are different from our origins, the future we spawn will in time become so mind bogglingly different from us.

RVWR: PTR
August 1998

Title: Faded Steel Heat
Author: Glen Cook
Publisher: ROC

By my reckoning Faded Steel Heat is Glen Cook's 9th tale of Private Investigator Garrett. With the long running war over, many soldiers have returned to Tun Faire to find themselves unemployed. Forming a group known as The Call, racial tension is running high. When splinter groups try to extort funds from Garrett's friends at the Weider Brewery he becomes involved. But when Garrett gets involved nothing runs smoothly and soon he finds himself caught between the human right, the mob, the secret police, a group of shape shifters, mercenary centaurs and more gorgeous woman than even this charming rogue can deal with.

Cook manages to create something unique with these magical detective stories. There is a strong fantasy element - a land full of wizards, elves and all manner of creatures. But the whole presentation and detective angle creates a whole other noir mind set. Garrett's cases are always genuine - building from client contact, through clues, to whatever conclusions dictate. And as one would expect the whole PI, first person narrative is spot on and very funny.

Each novel is self contained and each story can be read individually without difficulty. The cast of characters is colourful and engaging: The Dead Man, a creature that has been dead for 400 years, but its race are notorious for hanging around; Morley, proprietor of the only vegetarian establishment in town and dark elf assassin; Tinnie Tate, professional red head and heart breaker.

On top of all the self contained story there is always a wealth of detail which fleshes out the characters and the country they live in. This serves to give context to the story but also amasses between the books to offer an impressive continuity. Characters are recurring and these details can become complementary to your enjoyment - passing favours returned as often as old enemies. Which adds another dimension to these works - making each one all the more compelling.

Unfortunately Glen Cook's is not readily available in the UK, whether this applies to the rest of the world I do not know. My first contact with Garrett was in his second novel Bitter Gold Hearts (oh yeah - the names follow a pattern also) with a second hand import copy. Since then my collection has been brought together from vigilance of import book sections and various travels. I can't recommend these books highly enough, though I am clearly biased, each time I come across a new Garrett novel is a cause for excitement!

RVWR: PTR
August 1998