Daryl Gregory, Afterparty (2014)

Smart near-future thriller about designer drugs is smart. Lots of lovely 'woh!' and 'mmm?' and 'aha!' moments here, and a likeably quippy alt-culture narrator. The big sell is the notion that 'the Numinous' which (Huxley, following Rudolf Otto, long since pinpointed as the salient where religious belief is concerned) might be something a pill makes neurologically manifest in people. Not a brand new notion this, in terms of SF, but it's interestingly handled here. There are various other cool speculative drugs, some nifty future tech (like miniaturised living farm animals you can keep in your bedroom), some rather gratuitous fighting and torturing and a good deal of running about.

It wouldn't be the first novel of which one could say 'it might have been better if the author just laid out his cool ideas rather than trying to realise them in novel-form via storyline, characters and all that'. But it would be, eh, a novel. Of which one could say that. If you see what I mean. The 'ideas' part are super-cool, the character interactions intermittently cool and the overall story not really very well handled. I had problems with the worldbuilding too. In our not-future-at-all present many people buy their drugs from dealers; but even now there are plenty who are happy to grow and/or mix their own. After all, Jesse Pinkman is perfectly capable of running up some passable meth; what Walter W. brings to the party is the extra quality that comes with his Respecting The Chemistry. Fast forward to a future where everybody has 3D printers and concoction machines, surely most people would be downloading recipes from shady online sources and cooking their own? But Gregory's crime-story plot needs a sub-culture of dubious dealers, fences and cooks, pursued by law enforcement of several stripes, so that's what we get.

Mind you, one thing I liked very much was the novel's emphasis on the affective rather than the logical. This, after all, is what drugs are about. People talk about 'smart drugs', but the reality is people take drugs, from alcohol to heroine, from LSD to speed, to alter their affect, not their intellect. And this is right for religion too. One of the mistakes Dawkins-gang atheists frequently make, I would say, is treating religious faith as a set of rational (to them: irrational) truth-claims about the cosmos. That kind of thing is a vanishingly small proportion of actual religious praxis, I think; and Francis Spufford is surely right that whether or not religion makes cognitive sense it does make surprising emotional sense.

I might dilate upon this for a moment, actually; because an older, eighteenth-century brand of atheism (the one that shaped Shelley's Necessity of Atheism pamphlet, for instance) starts from precisely this position ,and uses it to make points rather more compelling than Dawkins does. Because if the truth of faith is felt, not rationalised, then that by definition limits the reach of religion. People are often capable of rationalising a belief after the fact; but it's really not possible to force oneself to feel something one does not feel. The Jehovah's Witness people leaning on my doorbell are working against the insurmountable friction of that fact when they try to draw me across to their view of the cosmos. But the flip-side of this is that Dawkinistas are just as surely on a hiding to nothing in trying to convince people who feel faith to abandon it on merely rational grounds. Faith is a species of love, after all; and the more earnestly and rationally a third party strives to prove to you that the person you love is unworthy of your affection, the more you're liable to dig your heels in. When it comes to love, you feel what you feel.* Gregory understands this basic aspect of religious pretty well, I think. At one point the Vincent, a CIA expert in stress techniques, mulls over the old 'right and wrong' question. What is the difference between those two things?

'I know in my head,' the Vincent said. 'And what I've learned is that it's not knowing what's right or wrong, it's caring. Feeling the wrongness ... Your morality is not rational, or handed down to you on stone tablets by some divine cop, it's wired into your nervous system. [89]

It's possible the novel leans a little too hard on the 'just because it's imaginary doesn't mean its not real!' [340] angle. But it's good stuff. You should try a toke.

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*I don't want to derail the review by banging on about this, but the parallel interests me. It's the circumstance of the proselytising atheist that is so fascinating. Person A loves God. Person B loves Dennis. I think person B could do better: Dennis isn't actively abusive, but he isn't the kind of the person *I* think merits so profound a human emotion as love (it doesn't matter, for our purposes here, why I think this: maybe Dennis is a bit of a slob, or deadbeat; maybe his politics are 'wrong'; maybe he just strikes me as inconsequential). The point is this: what kind of individual would I have to be to try and intervene into Person B's life to persuade him/her that s/he really shouldn't love Dennis? I suppose it's possible that my strawperson Dawkinista considers Person A's 'relationship' with God to be abusive; and indeed, if Person B loved a violent, emotionally controlling or otherwise abusive person I might feel moved to intervene. But it's hard to see how a non-existent person could be abusive. What it boils down to is: I don't see that Dennis is loveable, which is an index of the fact that I don't love Dennis. That's a pretty thin reason to try and drag Person B across to my view. Similarly, what grounds do I have for meddling with Person A's love?