The Road by Cormac McCarthy – On the road in Dystopia

Cormac McCarthy has created an unusually bleak vision of the future in The Road (2006). A boy and his father travel through a burnt out landscape covered in ash where the dead sit like poor wayfaring strangers in ancient bog body fashion along the side of the road. All they have is each other, a few paltry possessions, a gun with two rounds in it and a shopping cart to haul their meager provisions. I have read quite a few dystopic tales in my day, and this is definitely one of the better ones. There is a sense that no matter how bad things get, human life will continue on some small scale no matter what the price. The father does most of the telling, the world is described through his memories and what he sees around him.

As you might well expect not all of their fellow travelers are friendly. Cannibalism, rape and plunder are definite risks to be taken into account here, as well as the many natural dangers. If you have ever been on a long trek you know that having the wrong boots can quickly become a very big problem. Having no boots at all in cold weather when you have to keep moving to stay alive is no joke. The boy and his father have little sparkling conversations that you really feel are authentic. When the father tells the boy not to look at the many dead because things you see stay with you forever the boy merely replies “okay”. That okay is the answer to a lot of complicated conversations and questions between the two and you just know deep down that nothing will ever be okay again.

This is a true version of TS Eliots “The Wasteland”. All around are the dead, watching, and everything is covered in ash. Nothing grows, no one can live. Cities and towns and farmhouses are plundered down to the bone. People have resorted to eating their own kind because there is nothing else to eat and there really is very little hope that anything can get better. Also I like the fact that we are not told what went wrong. And it really does not matter from the point of view of these two pilgrims what happened, because they are living in the aftermath. And as a reader you feel for the father trying to keep his hope up as well as keeping them both alive. As he looks at the boy and watches him grow thinner and more careworn he also begins to become sick himself.

Normally you can feel fairly certain that the lead characters are going to make it, but in this particular novel you never feel that certainty. They could go at any minute, their life is that precarious. The language is pretty stark and grim and takes on the aspect of the gray landscape. It is one of those books that you hardly want to put down for the sheer need of knowing what is going to happen next. When the pair find some little windfall, some unexpected apples in the snow of an old orchard, or a warm place to sleep, you already know that despite the brief respite they have to get moving again in the morning.

One of the interesting aspects of a novel like this is it makes you think about what you would be able to do when forced back on yourself – what cruelty and desperation could make you kill or forsake your ideals. As philosophical questions go it is a fairly basic one, but still worth asking.

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Good Old Cyberpunk – All Tomorrows’s Parties

William Gibson’s All Tomorrow’s Parties (1999) is part of the so-called Bridge trilogy. The other two novels Idoru (1996) and Virtual Light (1993) feature some of the same characters and themes but they can be read separately. It’s not a trilogy in the sense that you get a perfect chronological development of characters and tropes. Gibson is often called the father of the cyberpunk genre, and he did coin the expression cyberspace.

Neuromancer (1984) is the first cyberpunk genre science fiction story and what I find fascinating is that Gibson manages to not let time get away from him. His dark future landscapes are claustrophobic enough to qualify as dystopias, and they deal with a future that is never far away. It is difficult to keep ahead of times just enough to be able to be in the future and still not fall into the traps of science fiction. One of which I believe to be falling in love with one’s own ideas so much that the details of science outweigh the basic human storyline. The characters of Gibson’s novels manage to stay human even if they aren’t always entirely human.

All Tomorrow’s Parties features Chevette, a former bike-messenger, Rydell an ex-cop gone rent-a-cop, Laney a hacker (for lack of a better word) and Rei Toei, amongst others. Rei Toei isn’t actually real. Or, well, she becomes reified… she is sort of the artificial icon created to incorporate the whole worlds ideal woman – the central character of Idoru and as it happens the nodal point for a new paradigmatic shift. It does sound a bit complicated, doesn’t it? Throw in some nano-technology, some ability enhancing drugs, a couple of assassins and a few other jokers and you have the basic congregation. The story takes place in San Francisco – and deep inside the complex world of the un-real. You can get seriously post-modern if you like and throw names like Baudrillard, Lyotard and Foucault into the mix here if you like.

But if you’d rather just enjoy reading a well-executed and easily read intelligent science fiction story that is definitely an option. What I enjoy is the easy flow of the stories, the fact that character and plot are allowed the space and time they need to develop and the fact that all the future-tech housed in the stories is treated as every-day common household objects. Not as something to be gawked over during endless pages of pointless descriptive prose, which sometimes happens in the Science Fiction genre. So, food for thought and guns and computers. It’s a good mix.

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Pizza delivering Samurai hacker and Sumerian myth

Neal Stephenson has a dark sense of humour and large brain to back it up with, which in any event is always a good combination. In this novel, Snow Crash(1992), he has created a kind of science fiction cyberpunk metaverse (a term coined by Stephenson) story that keeps you entertained even though it can at times be a bit taxing. The poet Coleridge talks of a phenomenon he terms “a willing suspension of disbelief” and I always thought any science fiction story makes this demand of its reader.

The story takes place in a broken down future United States where the government has been more or less disbanded and capitalism runs rampant. Various semi-criminal organisations have taken control of society and the map of the world is not what it used to be. It is a form of dystopia, but like so many of the later s/f stories of this particular strain the breakdown does not come from alien invaders or nuclear bombing, but just from the exhaustion and depletion of society and resources.

Hiro Protagonist, the main character, is a half American, half Nipponese hacker and a world renowned swordsman (he carries a traditional daisho – long and short samurai swords) who works for the mafia delivering pizza. Add to this a female skateboard courier called Y.T., various mafia dons and bigger-than-life preachers and industrial leaders and you have the basic cast.

Snow crash refers to t a kind of virus that infects not only computers but also the biological software behind them. We are talking about the ultimate machine/man problem here. What to do if the human brain is susceptible to a virus in the same way as a computer? The way this works connects to Sumerian mythology and the myth of the Tower of Babel… well, it is all a bit complicated really. Which is what I like about it. Smart, fast-paced and enjoyable all around with added bits of silliness that you just have to put up with.

Mule