Anthony Burgess, "Puma" (2018)

 This new Burgess science-fiction novel is actually old-new, or twice-old-new: new in the sense that it has never been published before now, but old because it was actually written long ago, and old-old in the sense that original draft was chopped-about, reworked and amalgamated with other material to make Burgess’s 1982 novel The End of the World News. Back in 1975 Richard Zanuck and David Brown, producers of Jaws, decided their next blockbuster would be a reboot or reworking of When Worlds Collide, and they hired Burgess to come up with a story. With characteristic industry Burgess completed a book-length prose treatment of the idea by January 1976, calling the world-ending object hurtling towards the Earth on a killing trajectory ‘Puma’ and naming the novel after it. The movie, though, was never made.

Then, in 1980, came the success, commercial and critical, of Burgess’s Earthly Powers. It seems his UK and US publishers asked for something comparable, a ‘big’ novel as a follow-up. Burgess responded by welding together a trimmed down version of Puma (with the rogue planet renamed ‘Lynx’) with two other book-length projects he had sitting around in his desk drawer: a novel about the life of Sigmund Freud, originally written at the instigation of Canadian television (who contemplated a TV series on the subject) and the libretto to an unproduced opera about Leon Trotsky visiting New York in 1917. These components were, Burgess conceded with rather devastating offhandedness in an author’s note, ‘shuffled together’ to make End of the World News, cut into chunks and distributed across the whole—the intention, Burgess claimed, was to mimic the choppiness of channel-hopping whilst watching TV.

Burgess aficionados, in other words, have seen this work before, and may be tempted to regard Puma’s standalone publication, a quarter century after its author’s death, as doubly refried beans. That would be a mistake, though. This is a good SF novel, in many ways better than the version included so choppily in the 1982 publication. Here, freed of its adulterations, the story acquires genuine narrative momentum, and its worldbuilding, though designedly schlocky, builds an impressive heft. It is the kind of story that needs to barrel along, interruption-free, and in this version it is allowed to do precisely that.

The disaster, first impending and then actual, is parsed through more than a dozen main characters, Towering Inferno style—1974’s biggest movie and a manifest influence on Burgess’s approach. There are some splendid set-pieces, especially towards the end, and several of them were not included in End of the World News. Governments lie to their populations assuring them that Puma will pass, but they know the impact will destroy the earth, and work in secret to build a space-ark to carry a workable population of humans away from the disaster. The puritanically eugenicist process by which potential crewmembers are chosen (by a computer called VOZ) facilitates a deal of plunging Burgessian satire at the wickedness of calibrating human beings by criteria of absolute efficiency. Vanessa Frame, a pneumatic genius scientist who happens to be the daughter of the designer of the spaceship project is chosen, but her unfaithful, potbellied husband Val Frame finds himself excluded—in the End of the World News version he is deliberately left off the roster; here he is included at his wife’s insistence but gets stranded in a storm-wracked and flooded New York as the rest of the crew fly to Colorado to join the craft.

Val falls-in with the larger-than-life Courtland Willett, a hugely fat and rambunctious actor, once a Shakespearian player, now reduced to dressing up as Santa Claus in shopping malls. There’s a certain amount of verve to the way Burgess writes Willett—fierce, gluttonous, kindly, bold, lecherous, as easily moved to tears as anger, a drinker and smoker and roisterdoister—though, frankly, he loves and so indulges his creation a little too much. Comparisons with Falstaff are invited by the novel itself, but Burgess knows he’s pastiche Shakespeare rather than the real thing (he’s a Will-ette, rather than the full Will) and perhaps as a result overcompensates with long stretches of tiresome Elizabethan swearing: ‘snotnosed bastard … and now that I have leisure and breath, I might add that you are a slabberdegullion druggel, a doddipol jolthead, a blockish grutnol and a turdgut’ [48]. A little of this sort of thing goes a long way and, I’m sorry to say, Burgess gives us great scads of it.

Anyway: Val and Willett become friends, and trek across the disintegrating USA trying to reach the space-ark before it takes-off. They are, as it turns out, heading for an interestingly different novel’s-end than the one Burgess decided on for End of the World News.

Val is that most venal of figures, a writer of science fiction who supplements his income by teaching university courses on the genre; and Burgess takes this pretext to unload some de haut en bas sneering at the genre he is himself writing. Copies of Val’s ‘well-made but trivial fantasies’, we are told, ‘were to be found in airports, tobacconists and pornoshops, and they existed also in cassette adaptations and microfiche’ [34]—a nice example of how rapidly visions of the near future (Burgess in 1975 imagining America in 1999) tend to date. We’re given samples of Val’s fiction, including a number of fruity-sounding titles: ‘Eyelid of Slumber, Maenefa the Mountain, Cuspclasp and Flukefang, Desirable Sight, The Moon Dwindled’ [34]—a rather pleasing Jack Vance vibe to these, I’d say (actually the titles are all lifted from Gerard Manley Hopkins' poems, a favourite of Burgess's). But Val himself loathes his own chosen genre, and unloads on his students.

‘Science fiction is, let’s be honest, ultimately a triviality,’ said Val. ‘It’s brain-tickling, no more. The American cult of mediocrity, which rejects Shakespeare, Milton, Harrison and Abramovitz, had led us to the nonsense of running university courses in science fiction. Christ, we should be studying Blake and Gerard Manley Hopkins.’ This was indiscrete, he was also surprised at the vehemence with which he condemned the very thing he was being paid to promote. [37]

Burgess’s ostentatious flashing his cloven-hoof, here, is more endearing than shocking, the closest this honestly foursquare disaster novel comes to irony. Indeed, it is placed in a complicating context by editor Paul Wake’s inclusion, as appendices, of various accounts of 1970s SF titles from Burgess’s prodigious backlist of book-reviews. Some of these are as dismissive as Burgess’s Val: of Herbert’s Dune Burgess says ‘there is very little intellectual content in SF; neo-technological gimmicks don’t really tickle the higher centres’, and reviewing Gollancz’s 1978 list of genre titles he indulges in some satire at the expense of the gobbledygook he considers SF to be. Not only is it ‘a category of near-popular sub-art, meaning bad typewriterese on coarse paper’, but

SF plots are easily devised. We are a million years in the future, and the world is run by the Krompire, who have police robots called patates under the grim chief with the grafted cybernetic cerebrum whose name is Peruna. There is a forbidden phoneme. If you utter it you divide into two entities which continue to subdivide until you become a million microessences used to feed the life system of Aardappel, the disembodied head of the Krompir. But there is a phonemic cancellant called a burgonya, obtainable on the planet Kartoffel. You can get there by Besterian teleportation, but the device for initiating the process is in the hands of Tapuch Adamah, two-headed head of the underground Jagwaimo, Man must resist the System. The Lovers, who amate according to banned traditional edicts of Terpomo, proclaim Love. [241]

‘Type it out,’ Burgess instructs us, ‘and correct nothing: you will find yourself in the Gollancz SF constellation.’ But the reference to Alfred Bester in amongst all that potato-themed knockabout speaks to a man more familiar with the genre than he is letting-on. And other appendices included here, not least a lengthy, astute and enthusiastic introduction to J G Ballard’s collected short stories, gives the lie to his curmudgeon mode: where SF was concerned, Burgess both knew whereof he spoke and appreciated the things that the genre could do that mimetic fiction could not. I mean: look again at that sketched-out parody—let’s call it A Clockwork Potato—and confess: doesn’t it sound that a rather wonderful book? I’d certainly read it.

Andrew Biswell, director of Manchester’s ‘International Anthony Burgess Foundation’, and Paul Wake, of Manchester Metropolitan University, are general editors of the ongoing collected edition of Burgess’s complete works, the ‘Irwell edition’. Handsome comprehensively-annotated editions of 1965’s A Vision of Battlements 1986’s The Pianoplayers and 1976’s Beard’s Roman Women have already appeared; other titles are in the proverbial pipeline, or perhaps we should say (since Burgess never smoked a pipe) in the metaphorical cigarillo box. 

And notwithstanding his occasional grumpy animadversions against the genre, science fiction fans have good reason to be interested in Burgess. He wrote near future dystopia in A Clockwork Orange (1962) of course, as well as an influential overpopulation yarn The Wanting Seed (1962)—in fact Burgess complained that Harry Harrison stole both the idea and the reveal of Make Room! Make Room! from this novel—and 1985 (1978) is a reworking of Orwell’s celebrated novel. Moreover, Burgess novels not usually considered SF turn out, on closer inspection, to have key genre elements: the husband in One Hand Clapping (1961) is a telepath who has visions of impending global apocalypse, Inside Mr Enderby (1963) is narrated by time-travellers from the future (who in one scene manifest and creep around sleeping Enderby’s bedroom) and Burgess’s last published novel Byrne (1995) returns to near-future dystopian territory. Puma makes a fascinating companion piece to his lifelong, conflicted engagement with genre, quite apart from being an extremely good read in its own right.

[This review originally appeared in Foundation, 2018]

John Masefield Has Prostate Trouble

 

I must go down for a wee again, to the lonely porcelain bowl,
And all I ask is a strong stream and the aim to strike my goal;
And a quick shake and a tuck-in and a clean hand-washing,
And not to wake the wife up with my pre-dawn flushing.

I must get out of bed again, for the pressure calls inside
And my sloshy old sack of a bladder just will not be denied;
And all I ask is a quick slash with the light off, and away
And a simple shuffle back to bed, and a warm duvet.

I must to the GP again for a prescription of some kind
A pill or op or poultice, make my streaming more streamlined;
And all I ask is a few hours of uninterrupted snooze
And a good sleep, and a lie-in, and no midnight loos.

Some Five-Year-Old Titles

Must reviews be bang-up-to-date? Must blog-posts expend their attention upon century-old classics? What about the in-betweens? Here are some brief notes on books published in that dead-zone, five years since. I mean, I say five years ago. Anything from before Covid and Lockdown might as well be a century old to me. But there you are.

Peter Newman, The Deathless (HarperVoyager 2018) 

Some years ago I posted a series of online reviews of the Wheel of Time novels in which, amongst other things, I lamented the awfulness of Robert Jordan's prose. Some fans reacted crossly to this, one memorably telling me that Jordan was a better prose stylist than Flaubert. My suggestion, only half-jokingly made, that novels should be sold like wine—£4.99 for the supermarket plonk of Robert Jordan or Dan Brown, £29.99 a book for the finer flavours of, say, Vladimir Nabokov—was vilified. The prose of contemporary Fantasy was, I was assured, just fine, fit for purpose, a brilliant story-and-worldbuilding-delivering medium.

Which brings me to The Deathless, a chunk of neo-Gothic folderol set in ‘the endless forests of the Wild’, where humanity ekes out a precarious existence protected by magic crystals that ward off the myriad demons of the woods, all watched over by a chilly cast of immortals living in huge crystal castles. It’s quite a promising premise, but Newman assiduously rinses all the negative capability out of it with an unbroken stream of explain-y narrative, shining the torchlight of banality into every last corner of his concept. Still, there are consolations for the reader, not least the ingenuous badness of Newman’s prose: ‘The servant looked familiar in a way that suggested Vasin has seen him before’ [3]; ‘Though the pillars were as dull to look at as the walls, each one was double her girth.’ [46]; ‘She had sprained muscles in her shoulders, thighs and ankles’ [83]. That's: the muscles in her ankles. ‘Pits parted the sinewy hair’ [108]; ‘His face was ripe with anger, his body radiated it.’ [132]; ‘The fear in his voice was palpable.’ [193]. Excuse me for a moment whilst I palpate your voice. And finally: ‘She glared into his armpit, appalled.’ [251]. Well. Indeed.

Peter McLean, Priest of Bones (Ace 2018)

A quick check on Goodreads tells me that McLean's Rose Throne series has a large and enthusiastic fanbase, but it's a not a group to which I can claim membership I'm afraid. Priest of Bones is a sweary, very violent low-fantasy that ticks all the hackneyed grimdark boxes whilst also levering-in a series of, in this context, utterly unconvincing right-on postures about how awful rape is, how unsmiley-face is childhood abuse, how uncool homophobia. I did not buy this latter component one iota: a story that fucking loves its fucking stabby-stabby violence as much as this fucking story fucking does loses the right to pretend to righteousness on the topic of violation more broadly conceived. Story: a gang return from a Fantasyland war and settle into the mafia life in the city, using violence and murder to jockey for their position: a sort of magicland Peaky Blinders, or perhaps a Fantasy Boardwalk Empire. But it's very in your face, crudely written and I bounced hard, hard I say, off it. One final note: as a name, ‘Kant the Cunt’ is not funny the first time it is mentioned, and moves further into negative funny the more it is repeated.

Leslye Walton, The Price Guide to the Occult (Candlewick Press 2018)

A decently-enough written YA story concerning the various adventures of a young witch in the Pacific North West with the unusual name of ‘Nor Blackburn’. The novel charts the ups and downs of youth, a family curse, love etc, but I have to say I found it twee, uninvolving, and often platitudinous. I warmed to neither the magic nor Nor.

Catriona Ward, Little Eve (Weidenfeld & Nicolson 2018)

This book won the Shirley Jackson Award for Best Novel and the August Derleth Prize for Best Horror, so hasn't lacked for plaudits. Two sisters, part of a sect run by their inverted-commas ‘uncle’ on a remote Scottish island, sink deeper into either supernatural terror or perhaps only into the group-psychopathy of their strange, hermetic, violent cultic neo-religion. The whole story is written in a deliberately claustrophobic, vivid prose that alternates the eerie/uncanny with the ultraviolent and repulsive—two rather different modes, I think, that don’t actually mesh well together, such that the latter dissipates the former and the former serves only to mute the shock value of the latter. The descriptions of remote and desolate Scottish scenery are certainly well-written and effective, and the way the story takes us deeper into ‘uncle’s weird beliefs and rituals has a certain grisly power. But overall I found myself not really buying the vibe of this novel, and its twist-ending felt a bit scoobydoo. That said, this is clearly one of those occasions when you can safely ignore my reservations, go with the flow of the widespread praise, and pick up a copy.

Lidia Yuknavitch, The Book of Joan (Canongate 2018)

In The Book of Joan we're only twenty years into the future, but wars have rendered Earth a radioactive hell, and devolved genitalless humans have moved to a giant space-station known as CIEL. Cruel cult-leader Jean de Men has turned CIEL into a violent police state, and the novel spends quite a lot of time on the torture, dismemberment, sexualized asexuality and body scarification that goes on there. But then again, there's the titular Joan, a holy child with a blue-light in her head, who sings a song of healing, until she is murdered, or rather until she sacrifices herself Aslan-like (Joan of Arc, you see). 

There is stuff in this novel to like, or at least to admire: some valiant championing of otherness, weirdness and gender fluidity and a general why-can't-we-just-get-along war-is-hell love-the-planet sexism-and-bigotry-is-bad earnestness. But it’s too much of a mess: the various elements in its (schematic, generic) worldbuilding don't make sense, and I wearied of the violence, the underbaked characters, the bloat. It's a short novel but felt interminable, as Sadean torture scene followed Sadean torture scene. 

More, I was struck that Yuknavitch didn't seem to be able to distinguish between expressive, vivid writing (of which there's a good deal in the book) and ludicrous, inadvertently-comical writing of the ‘a pang stings my throat at the memory of pigs’ and ‘as a genital entrepreneur I’d be delighted to talk with you’ kind. Conceivably that is the point: which is to say, conceivably this is a deliberate refusal to abide by the canons of quote-unquote good taste, a deliberate blurring of the beautiful and the crass-and-dumb. Perhaps A pang stings my throat at the memory of pigs is, quite deliberately, an alexandrine (this is a retelling of the Joan of Arc story, after all). Maybe ‘I stare at her little head. Why are young adults’ heads so little?’ isn't a ludicrous thing to write. ‘What kind of population emerges up among the stars? A wad of alabaster meated things driven only by appearance and entertainment’ works as satire, but ‘Jean de Men stares at her. Is his smile losing its sureness, are his eyes starting to boil?’ is just bad writing, surely. Boiling eyes indeed. Of the Saintly Joan's martyrdom one character declares: ‘we'd cry great waves of love and rage for this young woman, whose resistance made our own lives look empty as nadless ball sacks.’ You certainly don't get that in George Bernard Shaw.

PEEFACE

That's from Robert Forby's The Vocabulary of East Anglia (1830) and is, as typos go, both prominent and unfortunate enough to be quite noteworthy. The surprising thing is: it's not alone. Here's Heinrich Hoffmann's Slovenly Peter Reformed: Showing How He Became a Neat Scholar (1853):

 

And here, from an 1808 edition of Dryden's poetry:

In fact a Google Books search for the 19th-century throws up literally dozens of examples. One might start to suspect the typesetters were doing it on purpose ...

“How To Run a City Like Amazon and Other Fables” (2019)

How To Run a City Like Amazon and Other Fables (eds. Mark Graham, Rob Kitchin, Shannon Mattern and Joe Shaw; Meatspace Press 2019).

‘Should cities be run like businesses?’ ask Graham, Kitchin, Mattern and Shaw. ‘Should city services and infrastructure be run by businesses?’ To explore these questions they have gathered 38 thinkers and writers to imagine cities run under various different business models: Amazon, Apple, IKEA, Pornhub, Spotify, Tinder, Uber, and so on. Some of these chapters are essays; most are short stories, fictional extrapolations — science fiction, no less. Most are thought-provoking and engaging, even if 38 stories is too many, and at 350-pages the book lacks somewhat of sprightliness.

In their introduction the editors note that ‘Let’s Run Our Cities Like Amazon!’ is a real-world position advanced by real-world people:

In an article to promote their new book — ‘A New City O/S’ — Stephen Goldsmith (a for­mer Mayor of Indianapolis and Deputy Mayor of New York) and Neil Kleiman (Director of the NYU/Wagner Innovation Labs) contend that cities should act more like Amazon to better serve their citizens. They argue that cities will be more efficient and productive if they become data-driven, using analytics and machine learning to parse data about citizens and city services/ infrastructure into insights that provide a responsive, tailored experience.

Many people, the editors point out, find such an idea concerning: ‘concerns about profit being placed before people and the environment, widening inequalities between citizens, a loss of rights, and the erosion of democracy, fairness, justice and accountability, the privatisation of public assets and corporatization of surveillance.’ It’s certainly true that the stories in this collection overwhelmingly skew in this direction.

A number of the stories here imagine cities run by data-brokerage companies, using the data they have gathered to reward or punish citizens (better or worse housing, better or worse access to city services and so on): Rob Kitchin’s ‘You’re Entitled to What the Data Says [sic] You Deserve’; Jathan Sadowski’s ‘I Am The Score Machine’; Jeremy W. Crampton and Kara C. Hoover ‘the Unseen’ (a city as run by Cambridge Analytica). The same Black Mirror-ish points about the danger of putting ourselves at the mercy of data rankings are repeated in many of the stories here. The inhabitants of James Ash’s Twitter-run city (‘Seeking Follows’) obsessively chase followers, since ‘follows’ are the actual currency by which the economy runs; it is not a good way to live. In Lizzie Richardson’s ‘Too Much Fulfilment’, a Deliveroo-run town not only has all citizens eating delivered food, it has citizens punished for ‘de-synchronising’ — not being at home as the delivery is made, and so throwing-out Deliveroo’s routine. Mark Graham’s ‘City of Loops’ imagines a virtual reality city, ‘The Looped Web’, which is run according to the logic of Facebook or Weibu.

Jennifer Gabrys’s ‘Saving the Shire’ models a Palantir-run city, modelled on Tolkien’s hobbitland, built in a 477-acre chunk of New Zealand and inhabited by people so interpenetrated with tech they are effectively ‘human-computer symbiots’. It’s sharply dystopian, is this Shire: ‘The cognitive elite will oversee this monarchical urban shire of well-equipped analysts. People of color, queers, the disabled, gender nonconformists, the poor, dissidents, deportees, women, and failed analysts: these undesirable subjects are exiled to the remote Pacific SeaSteading facilities for producing necessary supplies for MiddleEarth.’ Palantir? Boo!

In Andrew Iliadis’s ‘The Semantic City’, citizens have an actual Siri implanted in their brains. Sophia Maalsen and Kurt Iveson’s ‘Welcome to Jobstown’ imagines city run by Apple, or more precisely their fiction maps corporate demographics onto a shiny imagined urban space

The Jobstown local government launches significant updates, new services and new generation products in arena-style events; iPhone Video recordings of these events show an audience of young designers and tech-heads dressed in black polo necks, cheering on their Apple-determined future. These videos, immediately uploaded to social media accounts, reveal an interesting trend — the majority of Jobstown residents are white men. A demographic analysis shows that Jobstown is comprised of 70 per cent men compared to 30 percent women, and 55 per cent of residents are white.

A lot of the work here manifests a scholarly caution that shades, sometimes, into a deadening shore-hugging. Matthew Zook’s ‘Cryps, Chains and Cranks’ imagines a city run on the principles of Bitcoin, and begins: ‘The sky above the city was the colour of encryption, tuned to an old hash solution, three blocks back in the chain’, which is quite a nice opener — except that Zook adds a footnote, ‘borrowed from William Gibson’s (1984) novel Neuromancer’, which underestimates his readership. If Jobstown is a cultish pseudo-utopia, Bitcointown is a comical disaster.

Back in 2020 a bunch of Bitcoin billionaires bought up four downtown blocks to make a model of a fully self-executing blockchain neighbourhood via a series of smart contracts and Dapps within a larger a Decentralized Autonomous Organization (DAO). Some bad coding in a couple obscure smart contracts — one for tracking waste output from toilets and another polling music preferences — got stuck in a loop and since then every 47.31 minutes the septic systems discharged into the streets and speakers in the district played an indie folk interpretation of Bohemian Rhapsody.

Alison Powell’s ‘Registering Eve’ is based on a different blockchain, Etherium. Anthony Vanky’s ‘The Most Magical Place on Earth’ imagines a Disney-run city, and is, unfortunately therefore, a story that includes such phrases as ‘tee-hee-hee’ and ‘bibbidi-bobbidi-boo!’ In Manuel B Alber’s ‘Easycity’, Easyjet runs a city: in such a place a basic house is ridiculously cheap, but literally everything else is very costly. You start to see, I’m sure, the underlying principles by which these stories have been confected. And so the collection goes on: Matthew Claudel’s city is based on the business model of notorious academic publisher Elsevier (‘The Civic Method’): that is to say, the city is flashy but restrictive and exorbitant. Gavin Brown imagines a ‘Grindr City’, divided into tribes (‘Bear, Clean-cut, Daddy, Discreet, Geek, Jock, Leather, Otter, Poz, Rugged, Trans or Twink’). The city in Dietmar Offenhuber’s ‘Premium Places’ is run according to the logic of Pornhub (he thinks it would ‘in several ways like Facebook’, only with more sex).

Google gets several goes: in Leighton Evans’s ‘Seeing the City Through Google’s Eyes’ everyone is wearing Google-made ‘ARLens’ spectacles, which enables Google to control what they see. Tooran Alizadeh’s ‘There Is No Such Thing As Free Infrastructure’ tackles Google Fiber. Ayona Datta’s WhatsApp story, ‘A City of People, for the People, by the People’ imagines a city in which justice is rough and ground-up: if somebody shares video of you having sex on WhatsApp, you don’t go to the authorities; you share a more click-y story that shames your enemy, or distract the populace with some other online bait.

One of the best stories here, Pip Thornton’s witty ‘Subprime, Language and the Crash’, concerns a city in which Google has monetized the very words people speak (‘People know that if they use certain words, they get more data and cheaper Wifi bills, and this changes in different areas, so if you talk about how wonderful Google is here in the Bay area, you end up with loads of money. And if you talk about rival products in a building sponsored by a particular advertiser, you get less data at a higher price’). It leads to disaster, when words as such become ‘subprime’ and the market collapses.

But most of these 38 stories are pretty samey. The prose is generally grey, the characters mouthpieces for their author’s ideas, the satire — when the stories are satirical — tends to the clomp-clomp. Many authors take a tech company or product and imagine a city saturated with that tech rather than governed by that tech — but perhaps I’m nitpicking. There are certainly lots of interesting things in here, and since Meatspace give you the option of setting your own price when you download the PDF, you can certainly afford it. I recommend it, too.

One thing, though, strikes me, having gone through the whole collection. Nobody questions the underlying premise. I don’t mean, the question as to whether life in a city ruled by Cambridge Analytica or Twitter would be dystopian — I’m sure it would be. I mean the principle behind all these stories: corporatocracy, the notion that corporations are capable of or indeed interested in running actual countries. It’s a staple of cyberpunk, this: the belief that not only are corporations interested in governing us, but that just such a grimly deracinated, money-over-people, violent corporatocratic future is coming our way. I’m not sure it is.

Facebook, Google, Apple and Disney are huge corporations, no question, and they make obscene amounts of money. But none of them have taken over the business of actual governance. On the contrary, the nation state is as strong as it’s ever been (arguably, with Brexit and the election in so many territories of aggressively tribalist-nationalist quasi-fascist leaders, nationalism is stronger than it’s been for a while). Indeed, it seems to me a moot question whether Google, Facebook and Apple are huger, as corporations, than were (say) the Ford Motor Company or BP a century ago. We forget: not only did Ford generate eye-popping profits throughout the 1920s, he even bought up a five-thousand-square-mile chunk of Brazil in order to establish his own Fordlândia quasi-country, with a view to ensuring a steady supply of rubber for his US factories. That came to nothing, of course. But actually that coming-to-nothingness is my point. Big corporations have always pursued the best ways of maximising their profits. That’s what they do. It transpires taking over the business of national and international governance is not one such. Which, if you think about it for thirty seconds, makes sense, actually. Running a country is not profitable. Profit is maximised by identifying one aspect of life and mining it as deep as you can. Running a city is not about one aspect, but an interlocking series of many aspects, and the most effective way to orchestrate such a thing is via not profit but ideology. I’m not suggesting Corporations are ideologically neutral entities, of course. But I am suggesting that whilst the various individuals who make up corporations, from senior management down, are each congeries of ideological framing and signification, the corporation as such is determined by a very narrow ideology — make $$$. Maximise profit. Shareholder value, all these euphemism for the abduction of money. Money exists ‘in’ society (and cannot exist outwith society) so it is logical that the most efficient strategies for getting are version of niche identification and extraction. It’s a hostage to fortune, but I don’t believe we’ll see a real-life Neuromancer-style social future in which Google or Rotten Tomatoes or whoever are running everything. Nation-states are loss leaders, necessary frames that enable corporations to make mucho-mucho money.

This is not really a criticism of How To Run a City Like Amazon and Other Fables — these are thought-experiments, satires and exercises in ludic conceptualising, not prophesy, and Feyerabandian principles quite properly govern such things. But a little more variety of approach would have leavened the lump, and such thoughts are one such variant.

Poem: Heroic Quatrains

 

In his martial rage, the high point and essence of his existence, is like a lion, a wild boar, a storm, a river in a flood, a raging forest fire, a bright star from a dark cloud; his armour blazes like the sun, his eyes flash fire, his breast is filled with irresistible fury, his limbs are light and active. He mows down opponents like a reaper in a cornfield, like a wind scattering the foam of the sea, like a great dolphin swallowing little fishes … When a hero dies, dark night covers him, he is seized by hateful darkness; he is robbed of his sweet life, his soul rushes forth from the wound; it goes down to Hades bewailing its fate, leaving behind its youth and strength. The doom of death covers his eyes and nostrils, he breathes out his life in the dust, hateful fate swallows him up, he gluts the god of war with his blood. [Jasper Griffin, Homer on Life and Death (Clarendon: 1980), 90]

1
A lion in his martial rage
a boar, a river running loud,
a storm, a raging forest blaze,
a white star in a blood-dark cloud:

his armour blazes like the sun,
his eyes flash fire, his breast is filled
with irresistible fury and
his limbs are active. He has killed.

2
You’re covered by the night, you’re seized
by hateful darkness, you are rushed
below, you loose your limbs and knees
your gaping mouth bites only dust

down to hades fate-bewailing
leaving youth and strength behind
lightless eyes eyes cloud inveiling
as blind as death as dead is blind

you glut the god of war with blood
your blood your blood yours in his maw
your strength ebbs outward as a flood
for this is war is war is war

Frederik Pohl and Thomas T Thomas, "Mars Plus" (1994)

Frederik Pohl’s Man Plus (1976) is a minor classic of hard SF: set in the then-near future of the 1990s, it’s about the colonisation of Mars, but proposes that instead of terraforming the planet to make it hospitable to us, we should adapt and cyborgize our human bodies to make them fit for Mars as it is. The protagonist Roger Torraway is an astronaut slowly modified over the course of the story into a transhuman cyborg who can gambol happily through the extreme cold and near vacuum (1% of Earth’s atmospheric pressure) of the Red Planet. These external alterations change his personality, which is one point of the book, although Pohl also chucks in a twist at the end: it turns out that humanity’s computers have become sentient and are promoting human colonisation of the galaxy to ensure the spread of computers and so preserve what Pohl, wincingly, calls their ‘race’.

Two decades later Pohl collaborated with the symmetrically-named Thomas T. Thomas to write a sequel: Mars Plus (1994). It’s not very good.

The sequel picks up from the computers-have-come-alive twist at the end of Man Plus, or it sort-of does. For it turns out that even after half a century of further developments, humanity hasn’t realised that ‘the cyber’ has become self-aware. Symptoms of sentience in the computer network read to the people living on Mars only as ‘system bugs and errors’. The novel’s 1994 idiom is creakily off-key where computing is concerned:

sometimes the cyber you were working on crashed its system through no traceable fault in the code … some said the grid was infected with the mother of all viruses, one so insidious that nobody had ever seen it, so rabbit-fast at replication that nobody had ever cornered.’ [26]

Rabbit-fast! Th-th-that’s A.I., folks. (We’re told that the Martian ‘cybers’ operate in the almost-inconceivable ‘teraflop range’—I mean, my son's PlayStation5 console operates at more than 10 teraflops, but I guess that seemed like a impressive number, computing-wise, in the mid-90s.)

Man Plus’s Torraway, more machine than man now, appears as a minor character in Mars Plus, but most of the sequel’s story is given over to Demeter Coghlan, a blonde, green-eyed, curvaceous Earth-woman sent to Mars to do some spying, or something, who gets caught-up in a local revolution. She undertakes some eyes-of-the-reader, look-at-the-worldbuilding wandering around, and she has a lot of badly-written sex. How badly written, you ask? Let's see.

‘Suddenly she felt his hands snaking around her from behind. They travelled up the length of her body from knees to breast cupping and probing as they went.’ [92] Nothing like a man cupping your knees from behind to turn a girl on, I suppose.

‘His lips were on her neck again, hot and slick. His domed, pink member slid up towards her face as she sank back on the bed with the points of her shoulders against the padding that had rucked up against the wall.’ Sexy! Though the next morning Demeter, looking back, is not so sure: ‘it had not been good, healthy sex. More like a fumbling rape that had gone uncontested. It was not clear to Demeter which of them was the rapist.’ [97] Wait, it was not clear?

Frankly it’s almost impressive how solidly unsexy Pohl/Thomas’s strenuous faux-lubriciousness is, throughout ‘… Jory working his hips up and down, pressing the bony arch of his pelvis into her convenient hollowness’ [129]. Convenient hollowness. ‘The woman had long, black hair that went across her shoulders, down her back and tucked under her rump’ [77] Under her rump, you say? What, poking out the front, like a sporran? 

Wait: what?

What are dresses like in the future, you ask? ‘Demeter wore a tube dress of sheer nylon the color of a raspberry Popsicle. It hung from her nipples to a mere four centimeters below her crotch’ [187] Hung from her nipples. That’s practical couture, right there.

Anyway, we get a Cook’s Tour of future-Mars, which throws up some strange details (‘“Nobody speaks Finnish anymore.” He shrugged loosely. “Russian’s easier to pronounce, and English’s got simpler spelling rules.”’ [79]). The economy is hyper-capitalist, law-enforcement almost non existent and there’s a distinct wild-west vibe, although at the same time folk are too much polite for proper Deadwood-style swearing (‘“Oh, poop!”’ [89]). The book also contains some eye-popping anti-Asian racism: ‘Two sallow Asian faces, one fat, one thin, both with the sorts of eyes that were used to squinting down the sights of a rifle when the game went on two legs instead of four’ [57]; ‘his skin was much yellower, less healthy looking … she glanced around surreptitiously for the servant, Chang Qwok-Do … [he was] probably back in the kitchen arranging to barbeque a dog or something’ [118]). Ouch.

So, overall: no, not good. The plot meanders and drifts. There’s a big denouement when Torraway pops up again and goes mad, or seems to.

But look, never mind all that. One particular detail of the worldbuilding snagged my attention, and it’s this: instead of a space elevator, people enter and leave Mars via a ‘space fountain’. How does that work? Well: ‘on the equator near Tharsis Montes, a linear accelerator stood upright at the bottom of a well dug deep under the Martian surface’:

The accelerator shot a series of ferrite hoops, each a metre in diameter and weighing almost a kilogram apiece, straight up into the sky. Moving at some tens of kilometers per second this fountain of objects created a tremendous kinetic energy. At the upper end of their flight, the hoop-stream entered an electromagnetic torus that functioned like the pulley wheel in a sheave block: bending the stream back on itself to descend at gravitationally increasing speeds towards the planet’s surface. There the stream entered another torus which passed it across to the accelerator again, completing a closed loop of flying rings. The system resembled a chainsaw held together by the forces of inertia and magnetism. [11-12]

We’re told that building this mega-device had consumed ‘whole quads of electricity, enough to drive the industrial sector of a fair-sized moon’, but once it was up and running, and the upper-torus was in synchronous orbit, ‘it required only minor additions of maintenance energy to stabilize the stream … to replace the miniscule amounts of kinetic energy that the freight handlers bled off in the form of electricity.’ OK: but how do people ride this alarmingly chainsaw-ish structure, up and down? Grab a hoop, as it’s passing at tens of kms a second, and hope it doesn’t rip your arm out of its shoulder socket? (Obviously not that but—how? Pohl/Thomas don’t say. Am I missing something obvious?)