Stanisław Lem, ‘The Futurological Congress’ (1971)

 

Lem’s Kongres futurologiczny (1971) was published in a (very smart) 1974 English translation by Michael Kandel as The Futurological Congress—I say smart, because Lem’s novel is a satirical comedy that makes extensive use of wordplay and puns, especially where the many medications and hallucinogens manufactured in his future-world are concerned, and Kandel does sterling work in coining English equivalents for these.

The plot is a brisk and funny series of rabbit-hole plunges, conceptually speaking. As the story opens Ijon Tichy is attending the Eighth World Futurological Congress in the immensely tall Costa Rica Hilton in Nounas—the academic gathering so vast that there is no time for the various conferences papers to be read aloud (they are pre-distributed with numbered paragraphs and delivery and discussion involves shouting these numbers aloud). The political situation is volatile and the hotel is bombed during a battle between government forces and protestors, so Tichy and a few others escape into the sewers.

But by this point Tichy has already ingested hallucinogen-spiked water, and his sense of reality is warping. In the sewer he encounters giant rats walking around on their hind legs. He is rescued by the army and flown away in a helicopter, but then gets blown up so badly his brain must be transported into the body of a young and attractive young black woman to keep him alive (her brain is transported into a younger and even more attractive body, whose brain is likewise transported … and so on). Then he discovers he's still in the sewer. Or is he? Unable to distinguish reality from the hallucination, he is told by doctors that he must be put into suspended animation until such time as medical science has advanced to the point where it can cure him.

He wakes in 2039, and Tichy goes on a Cook’s tour of his future utopia. Drugs tweaking and improving mental states and perception address all the former dissatisfactions of life. War and poverty are things of the past—anyone can go to the bank and borrow any sum interest-free, covering the loan by ingesting a specific drug that instils in them a sense of work-ethic and pride in settling one’s debts. For fifty or sixty pages the novel describes the high-tech world of the future and its many conveniences and peculiarities. There are robots everywhere, catering to all manner of human needs and desires, although some of these robots have malfunctioned or otherwise rebelled against human control. Indeed, we discover that these non serviam robots represent a large and dangerous group. 

Trichy grows increasingly dissatisfied, especially when he hears that among the many hallucinogens is a class called ‘mascons’ which mask or occlude whole aspects of reality. It’s at this point that the reader starts to notice certain similarities between the novel and a famous science fiction movie released some three decades later. The process by which Tichy ‘wakes up’ from what is, we learn, an almost entirely simulated reality begins when he is offered the choice of two pills by his girlfriend:

Tichy discovers the high-tech modern life is just an illusion. The reality is a grim, low-tech, utility environment.

In reality, people eat a revolting-looking gloop, although Tichy is assured by others who have escaped the illusion that this food contains all the nutrients the human body needs.

The remainder of the novel traces Tichy's fight-back against this simulacrum-world, although Lem takes his story in a more Dickian direction than the rather linear logic of the Wachowskis' movie. This grim utilty-level reality turns out to be yet another hallucination, behind which is another ‘reality’, behind which is yet another. In the last few pages Tichy encounters George P. Symington at the top of his skyscraper and the baseline reality is revealed: there are no robots, only people drugged into believing they are robots. The world is slowly freezing, an unstoppable slow apocalypse, and the layered realities of the various hallucinagens are used to obscure this terrible truth from humankind and prevent mass panic. Outraged, Tichy grabs Symington and jumps out the office window, dragging him down in a precipitous fall. But instead of dying, Tichy only splashes, solus, into the grubby water of the original sewer, which means that everything he has experienced was false and he is back in the ‘real’ reality of the Futurological Congress, or else that this is yet another layer of unreality, as perhaps was the original setting. I prefer this second reading.

So, yes: turns out the Wachowskis' film is Matrix: Recyclings. But you knew that already. [Laurence Fishburn voice: ‘no one can be told what The Plagiatrix is. You have to see it for yourself.’]

Peter Tinniswood, ‘The Stirk of Stirk’ (1974)

 

What an oddity this book is. Tinniswood was, in his day, a quite successful comic novelist, writing mostly in Northern-English realist mode. He also adapted some of his books into fairly big-time TV comedy dramas. Perhaps his biggest hit was I Didn't Know You Cared which ran for four BBC series from 1975-79: an ensemble piece about a large and varied Yorkshire family, character-based comedy and local colour. My father still sometimes wheels out one of the show’s catch-phrases: deaf old Uncle Staveley’s “I heard that! Pardon?” Tinniswood had other TV successes, several long-running radio drama series, and also wrote a great many cricket-related stories: Tales From A Long Room (1981) was the first of nine such collections. He died in 2003.

The Stirk of Stirk is an entirely uncharacteristic Tinniswood. It’s a kind of fantasy novel set in a version of medieval England. The titular character is a Scottish warrior-nobleman, stern and unbending; he rides about with two companions, a dwarf with an enormous head who appears, from his dialogue, to be Welsh and a gigantic Black man who is a congeries of ghastly racist stereotypes: physically strong, hyper-sexualised, none-too-bright and prone to calling the Stirk of Stirk ‘bass’ and saying things like ‘man, man, what’s this?’ and ‘you idle cotton-pickin’ doggone sonofabitch’ and ‘oh, baby, yipperooooooo!’ These three are, in effect, bounty hunters, searching for Robin Hood, who has a price on his head—they find him almost at once, an elderly, miserable and utterly clapped-out geezer, living with ‘Maid Marion’, his young catamite. Unlike the monstrous racism of the Giant’s character, Tinniswood doesn’t indulge in as much homophobic tittering at this circumstance as I might have expected. He does, however, give us great scads of unreconstructed 1970s sexism: busty women of various kinds lubriciously described in various states of undress and ravishment. The style is dialogue heavy, a cascade of short, often one-sentence paragraphs, peppered with repetition and occasionally with arch narratorial interjections. It looks like this:

And sometimes, I’m sorry to say, like this:

My mother, who had I think several of Tinniswood’s regular novels, bought the paperback of this sometime in the late 1970s, which is when I first read it. I suppose I did so because at that stage—I was, twelve, maybe?—I was an obsessive reader of Tolkien and his imitators, and it looked like a Fantasy novel. It is a Fantasy novel too, although of a very different stripe to the standard commercial post-Tolkien heroic gubbins with which I was familiar. 

The thing is bits of this novel have, for whatever reason stayed with me. Here's one: the Stirk, his companions and Robin Hood and Marion (now their prisoners) are stranded in a snowstruck wood: the dwarf finds some hibernating hedgehogs, lights a fire, rolls the beasts into balls of mud and bakes them in the flames—when the mud has hardened he cracks each ball open, thereby breaking off the spines embedded in the mud, revealing the hedgehogs' well-cooked flesh inside—everybody cries with delight at how delicious this meal is. For whatever reason, it’s a little scene that has lodged itself in my head. Some of the sex stayed with me, too (I was at an impressionable age) but the main thing that has never left me is the novel's surreal ending.

So, the Stirk and his companions, after various peripatetic adventures involving sinister monks, strange beasts, violent Vikings, shapeshifting nuns etc, are captured by the evil Sir Ogden De Mobberley. He tortures them and then ties them to posts in his castle's arena where they will be killed by a gigantic, malevolent red bull. But the Giant saves the day, and this is how:

A hideous horrendous howl came from the throat of the giant.

His eyes rolled. His head tossed from side to side.

His eyes rolled. His head tossed from side to side.

A scream. A shriek …

Everyone in the castle froze.

Motionless. Rigid. Mouths open. Locked.

And bound to the stake the giant writhed.

He thrashed. He squirmed. He screamed.

And from his great pink gash of a mouth there flew a crow.

And another.

And more. And more and more and more.

Soon the sky was filled with enormous monstrous black crows, which grew larger as every second passed.

They blacked out the sun.

Pitch blackness in the castle.

Total darkness over the surrounding lands.

Time stopped. [186]

The Stirk and his companions escape under cover of this darkness. But the sheer oddity of this scene, entirely unprepared-for in the earlier sections of the novel, really lodged in my imagination.

Anyway, I’ve been thinking about Fantasy as a genre recently, pursuant to writing something critically about it, and remembered this novel. Curious, especially since it is as unlike the mainstream of post-Tolkien Fantasy tradition as it is unlike the Pratchettian comic-Fantasy mode, I picked up a copy for peanuts on eBay (ridiculous how cheap old books are nowadays) and re-read it. In many ways this was a disappointing experience: the unleavened racism and sexism have aged catastrophically, and the book seems, on a reread, lesser than my inchoate memory of it. But the strange potency of that denouement, the crows flying out of the black man’s mouth, still has its power, I think.

I also tweeted some thoughts, having finished the book.

Alastair Reynolds, ‘Eversion’ (Gollancz 2022)

 

I very much enjoyed this: cleverly done, extremely readable. It’s hard to summarise beyond the initial premise without giving the whole game away, and I recommend you read it, if you can, without any  sense of where the story is going—you, seasoned reader of SF that you are, will have some sense of what's happening, and some of what you suspect turns out to be the case, but it still carries you powerfully along. So: Silas Coade, the narrator, is ship’s surgeon on a fifth-rate sailing vessel, the Demeter, exploring the fjords of Norway. The opening chapters are written in a sort-of cod-1800 idiom, an as-it-were Master and Commander: The Fjord Side of the World. Coade is himself writing an improbable scientific romance in his spare time. His first action in the novel is to trephinate one of the crew who, concussed, has developed a subdural haematoma. We meet the book's other characters: the captain, a mathematical genius, a rowdy Russian millionaire, a beautiful, mysterious woman—Lady Cossile—who has a low opinion of Coade’s writing, and whom Coade finds aggravating, although there is some kind of spark between them. 

The Demeter is on a voyage of discovery, looking for something very particular, hidden away beyond the narrow cliff-walled inlet of a northerly fjord. A gigantic structure of mind-puzzling topography known as ‘the Edifice’, perhaps an antique castle, perhaps something much stranger. Topolsky, the Russian, hearing about it from another expedition, had chartered the Demeter with a view to locating and penetrating the Edifice, to uncover its mysteries and thereby grow rich. The novel starts slow-build, but Reynolds’ command of pacing is exemplary: his ratcheting-up of the narrative, the placement and effectiveness of the plot’s many twists, the drip-drip reveal of the various mysteries: it all generates a really splendid reading momentum.

Here's a paragraphful more of more spoiler-y thoughts, including one or two reservations—though, to repeat myself, this is a highly enjoyable, readable SF novel, and I recommend it. So the Demeter, in attempting to navigate the narrow channel into the fjord in which the Edifice is to be found, crashes, gets wrecked, and Coade is killed. He is briefly a man in a space-suit in a dark tunnel who, checking his reflection in a mirror, sees only a skull peering out, like the cover of one of those old 1970s Pan Horror-SF paperbacks. Then he’s alive again, back on the Demeter, except that now it’s a paddle-steamer searching for the Edifice off the coast of South America. Killed here, he reincarnates on more and more technically advanced version of the Demeter (a propellor ship, a dirigible, a spaceship) as the natures of and relationships between these ‘realities’ come into focus. I liked this, although the conceit’s resemblance to Dick’s A Maze of Death began, once I noticed it, to impinge upon the book’s ability to surprise me. It’s a balancing act, isn’t it: a book that teases you with a mystery naturally engages your own problem-solving capacities to try and work-out what the mystery is (to deduce who dunnit, what the Edifice is and so on)—but it is equally unsatisfying to be completely baffled until the author deigns to reveal the truth, or to see through the misdirection and puzzle-play so as to solve the mystery too soon. Overall Reynolds does pretty well keeping both these possibilities at bay, but still. I was, I suppose, a little disappointed that Eversion doesn’t turn out to be turtles all the way down, or at least turtles more of the way down than the book actually gives us. And I’m not sure Coade works, as a character in the larger sense. Reynolds characterises him pretty well to begin with, such that you can believe he would revert to more comforting and comprehensible story-worlds than the perilous, alien incomprehensibilities in which he actually is. But then—plot twist!—spoiler—it turns out Coade is basically this guy, and I could no longer see why traditional human storytelling, the fixtures and fittings of mundane familiarity, would be so appealing to him. Some of the names are clues, some are not, unless they are but I missed clues to what (why the captain is called ‘Van Vught’ for instance ... is there a Voyage of the Space Beagle reference here?); and although the book is a little bit metafiction it could have been rather more metafiction for my taste: I never met a fiction I didn't like etc etc. Still: very good.