David Eggers, ‘The Every’ (2021)

 [This is the first draft of a review I wrote for a magazine last year: I had misremembered my brief, with respect to the wordage, and over-indulged myself. When I submitted it the books editor gently pointed to the more capsule-sized slot I had to fill, and I chopped it down. It is a good discipline, writing effectively in brief, and my initial over-length version was entirely my fault. But blogs are more forgiving of prolixity, so here we go.]

Dave Eggers, The Every (2021)

Review by Adam Roberts

Those for whom Dave Eggers’ name evokes only his celebrated memoir A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius (2000) may be surprised at just how much straight fiction he has written. ‘Those for whom’, here, is code for: me. I confess it, the pros and cons of social transparency being one of the themes of the book under review. Though I know his influential literary magazine McSweeney’s, and have read his book-length nonfiction (his 2009 Hurricaine Katrina book Zeitoun is exceptional), I had not realised Eggers had published so much fiction—thirteen lengthy novels.

Here’s one of them: The Circle (2013), a blockbuster satire on the burgeoning power of internet companies like Facebook, Amazon, Apple and Google. We follow idealistic Mae Holland as she is hired by ‘The Circle’ (Eggers’ stand-in organisation for those, I suppose, potentially litigious others) through various in-work adventures, sexual as well as technological. She rises through the corporate ranks by wholeheartedly endorsing the company line, a kind of smiley-face Orwellianism: ‘Secrets are lies’; ‘Sharing is caring’; ‘Privacy is theft’. The Circle’s customers purchase a single online identity through the company, called ‘TruYou’, through which they have access to absolutely everything in the digital universe. This has ended all online fraud, an outcome that strikes me as very unlikely, but there you go.

I summarise this older title at some length because Eggers’ latest novel, The Every, is a direct sequel to it, and hard to follow without some sense of what has gone before—so much so, indeed, that in an act of unusual-for-me reviewerish due diligence I went out and bought a copy of The Circle to bring myself up to speed. Why Eggers considered a sequel needful is something of a puzzle. Conceivably he figured a decade was a long time in internet commerce and tech culture, and he wanted to revisit the ground with more up-to-date sensibilities. But the novel he has written doesn’t tread any new ground. It’s like The Circle, but more so. The Every parses the same mix of admiration for the smiley, shiny spaces of these tech giants and disapprobation at their increasingly totalitarian grip on global culture and society. It even has broadly the same shape as the earlier novel: a young woman, here Delaney Wells, joins the world’s biggest tech company and works her way up.

‘The Circle’ has now merged with ‘the world’s largest e-commerce website’, an entity Eggers coyly identifies only as ‘named after the South American jungle’, surely not enough to get him off the libel hook should Amazon take umbrage. The resulting commercial behemoth is ‘the Every’, whose employers are called ‘Everyones’ and whose sunlit, optimistic, rationalising and secrecy-averse tentacles are in every aspect of human life. The first hundred pages of this novel take us through Delaney’s company orientation, clueing-in the reader to the Every’s corporate culture, wandering its amenities-rich campus, dorm-like housing, gyms and recreation activities. We also catch-us up with several key characters from The Circle, including Mae, who is now one of the organisation’s Head Honchos.

But Delaney has a secret: she’s a double agent, a luddite whose hatred of modernity’s internet supersaturation was acquired in her youth, and cemented when her parents texted her news of her beloved grandmother JuJu’s death with sad-faced emojis. She hopes to bring The Every down from the inside. Will she succeed? It’ll take you nearly six hundred meandering pages to find out!

In essence The Every stages the same moral debate as The Circle: we may agree our increasingly internet saturated world is becoming a real-life Brave New World or Black Mirror nightmare and may even feel moved to free ‘the people’ from this false Zuckerbergtopia—but do the people themselves actually want to be free? Perhaps they’re perfectly happy having their data mined, their actions nudged by clever algorithms and a free lifetime’s supply of ‘You Won’t Believe What These Former Celebrities Look Like Now (Number 4 Will Astonish You!)’ clickbaits to pass the time. A potentially interesting dilemma this, though the novel’s satirical focus flattens it, and it’s a little hard to see that a second hefty novel adds much to the drift of the first.

In essence, The Every’s tyranny is an algorithmocracy. Algorithms govern every aspect of Eggers extrapolated future. Workers are continually monitored (‘all the performance measurements, participation points, smiles, ComAnons, step count, sleep hours, frowns’—ComAnon is a separate app that allows employees to register complaints about co-workers) and the data aggregated by a programme called ‘Everything in Order’, which prompts promotions and sackings, or, as the Every prefers to call it, ‘deëmployment’. The company sells an ‘AuthentiFriend’ app by which you can rank your friendships, disburdening yourself of those pals who don’t score highly enough, and ‘U4U’ a personality test so widely adopted it has superseded psychology (‘Freud’s work has the intellectual heft of a streetside astrology’ says Gabriel Chu, the app’s inventor). There are many more. Here’s one: ‘EveryContent’ aggregates all film and novel storylines by their audience/reader ratings, creating a template to perfect all future books and films: no epistolary novels, no unpleasant characters, no outdated moral positions and so on. ‘No book should be over 500 pages,’ is one EveryContent rule, though with a knowing nod we’re also told: ‘if it is over 500, we found the absolute limit to anyone’s tolerance is 577’. The Every is exactly 577 pages long.

If this style of humour is your bag, then there’s stuff in this novel to amuse you, though I found the comedy diffuse and often second hand, and the satire strangely blunt. Having risen through the organisation, Delaney decides to bring it down by putting out apps so absurd that people will revolt against the Every, amongst them ‘Satisfied?’, an app that tells you if you enjoyed the meal you just ate, and ‘Did I?’, which informs the postcoital whether they orgasmed or not, and also rates orgasm intensity via a global database. These releases are all huge hits. No app is too ridiculous for humanity. I was reminded of David Nobbs’ Reginald Perrin who, back in the 70s, set up ‘Grot’ to sell useless rubbish intending it to fail, only for it to become an international success. I’m sure neither Eggers nor his core millennial fanbase have so much as heard of Reggie, though they would have done so if they had downloaded my app ‘NothingNewUnderTheSun’.

The Every grows ever more tyrannical and Maoist (their steering group is even called ‘The Gang of 40’). Having shamed and pressured people out of international travel—to save the environment, you see—they apply sanctions to anyone who commutes anywhere except on foot and by bike, and crash the US market for bananas and pineapples. And so it goes on: ‘millions more became unemployed with every new thing the Every cancelled, but there was always work in the Every warehouses, to work beside robot package-pickers and while monitored by AI and be paid a fair minimum wage.’ ‘This’, Eggers adds, ‘was an orderly system.’ This dystopian whomp-whomp of this increasingly grates. Satire needn’t jettison all nuance, after all.

Not that the ‘ordinary’ people come out of the novel any better: they are all either sheep, pusillanimous conformists, or eager Maoist converts: Eggers tries to strike comic-satirical sparks from various snowflakes and triggerables. Delaney organises a work’s outing, but her coworkers are furious, outraged by the unexceptional play-list she selects for the bus-ride there—hearing an Otis Redding song ‘ruins the day’ (‘woman-hater said [the complaint], supported with a link to an unsigned and evidence-less post hinting that he’d been unkind to an ex-girlfriend he’d met shortly before the bay and the dock and the sitting’). When the Every bans pets as a kind of slavery (‘Everyones will be given a workweek to remove their animal captives from campus’) nobody complains.

There are some interesting smaller-scale think-pieces herein, but they are embedded in a novel with the texture of suet. Every now and again Eggers throws-in a bomb—an actual bomb—to try and liven the narrative. But the novel remains unenlivened, right though to its twist ending, which many readers will see coming an ergonomic mile off. The Every is one not for everyone.

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.

‘The Northman’ (dir. Robert Eggers, 2022)

 The Northman consists of a great many widescreen shots of primal forests, of Icelandic hills and mountains, of vast unpopulated wildernesses and hugely star-thronged skies, sublimity in topographic form, across which move various Viking characters, sometimes dwarfed by the scenery in longshot, more often shot in close-ups that dwell on the gym-built musculatures of stripped-to-the-waist, or starkers, Alexander Skarsgård, Claes Bang, Ethan Hawke and others. For much of the movie these musculatures are smeared with blood and grime and engaged in the strenuous work of cutting and dismembering other bodies. There is a lot of shouting—really, many instances of people standing, mouth-wide, howling and gurning at one another—and a good deal of hacking, hewing and chopping with swords and axes, each blow carefully staged to maximise its visceral horribleness (sound effects play a large part here).

The story is a thinned-down, yet somehow also elongated, version of Hamlet: young Amleth sees his father (Hawke) murdered by his uncle Fjölnir (Bang). He escapes the scene and grows to swole and violent Skarsgårdian manhood in Russia as part of a band that spends its time Berserker-raiding fortified villages. When he hears that Fjölnir the Brotherless has married his (that is, Amleth's) mother, and moved to Iceland, he pretends to be a slave, infiltrating a shipment of serfs so as to work incognito for his uncle, and thereby get to a place where he can rescue his mother (and his new half-brother), kill his uncle and so avenge his father.

In addition to all the artfully mounted shots of Icelandic scenery there is some knowingly staged (a little too knowingly, I felt) pseudo-Viking weirdness: midnight meetings in stables and inside firelit caves with a Seeress played by Björk and a beardy mage played by somebody I didn’t recognise. There are mystic encounters, visions of Yggdrasil decorated with many dangling bodies like a psycho Christmas tree, hallucinations of Amleth being ridden up the night-sky by a screaming Valkyrie as Valhal swings wide its gigantic luminous sky-doors. Eggers also throws-in a couple of knowing (again: a touch too knowing, I thought) references to Shakespeare’s play: a fool played by Willem Dafoe who spends most of the film as a decapitated head, a sly bit of magic mushroom added to the stew that turns everyone except Amleth mad, and so on. There is a scene in which Amleth confronts his mother, who mocks him and then snogs him, which struck me as a touch too ‘psychoanalytic crit’ Literature 101 Hamlet-in-Gertrude's-bedchamber, really. But mostly this film is the brooding sublimity of Icelandic landscapes and the ick and shock of close-combat, decapitation, cutting off noses, slicing throats, spinning and sinking a handaxe in the shrieking body of your enemy etc etc.

For me the question is: why didn’t I like this movie more? I mean, I liked it fine, I guess. I watched it, the time passed, it was OK. But something was missing. It's a movie that works strenuously towards something that doesn't really come-off, leaving behind the impression only of that strain. I wondered, briefly, if it was aiming for a ‘300 with Vikings instead of Spartans’ vibe (“This! Is! VÍKINGR!” and so on) but actually that's a comparison that isolates what this newer movie lacks. Don’t get me wrong: there are lots of things about 300 that are objectionable: the neo-fascistic militarism by which the US marine corps is allegorised as the last macho bastion of handsomely buff dudes holding back the orientalised hordes of corrupt, violent, perverse and bizarre ‘eastern’ (that is, Arab, Muslim, Chinese) invaders. I mean, at the same time there is a compelling cod-Zizekian take on the film that would read the Persians as, precisely, the decadent West (all sexual excess and deformity) and the Spartans as, let’s say, the Taliban on a suicide mission.

I don’t mean to get bogged-down on the Snyder/Miller flick, except to make one point: 300 isn’t an ironic film, exactly, but it is a camp one, and camp is one of the ways contemporary American popular culture approaches irony. It is both ludicrous and aware of its ludicrousness, using it to leverage its more pompously earnest stuff about masculine strength and heroism and self-sacrifice. There is something savingly joyous in this, despite all the grunting and fighting and oiled, gym-sculpted musculatures, and it is exactly what The Northman lacks. It is doing similar masculine strength and heroism and self-sacrifice things, and is as liable to being adopted by today’s neo-Nazis as was the Snyder flick, but it is trying ingenuously for ‘grandeur’, and lacking the leaven of irony that effort becomes, merely, effortful, grinding, wearying. It didn’t have to be that way—the movie gives Björk a cameo, after all, in a bonkers costume. And yet it is: humourless, self-important, struggling, with every sound-effect-enhanced knife stabbing into a shoulder-blade, or sword pushing right through a head, or handaxe thwunking into a chest, to amplify its gnarly pomposity.

It’s part of a larger thing. In a recent Lawyers Guns & Money post, Erik Loomis trolled his readership (it’s increasingly becoming Loomis's USP as a writer, this) by asserting, without evidence or argument: ‘Queen is one of the biggest bullshit bands in the history of rock and roll, just complete overwrought garbage’. Various people challenge this dismissal in the comments below the post, causing Loomis to double-down on his take, at the same time as insisting that he likes good bands like The Who and The Band. De gustibus, sure: but I absolutely love Queen and one of the things that elevates them above the common herd of stadium-filling megastar rock bands is precisely their campness. Their irony. It is absolutely integral to what they are about, especially in their early albums, filled as they are with elaborate prog-rock, Mercury's pseudo-operatic vocals, Brian May’s flute-clear guitar licks and curlicues (many of which are hard rock and blues) lifted out of the rut by a properly Sontagian campness and play. They were a band who revelled in pomp that never becomes merely pompous, able to articulate heartfelt sincerities of affect (‘Love of my Life’, say) not despite but because they are so unashamedly ironic, so playful, funny and camp—in a word, so queer. The Northman is not nearly queer enough, in any of the senses of that term.

Since we're ambling down memory lane: I remember all the way back in 1995, when various artists contributed music to a charity record called The Help Album to raise funds for war-stricken Bosnia and Herzegovina. The album is full of famous (or famous in 1995) musicians recording earnest songs about war being bad, or covers of appropriate rock classics (Suede doing ‘Shipbuilding’ for instance). The one exception to this is a gleeful track by the KLF called ‘The Magnificent’, in which a voice, notionally from Serbian radio, is intercut with a remix of the theme from The Magnificent Seven while some dude yells ‘The Magnificent!’ over and over. It is jarring, because it is so utterly at odds with the earnest, pious-priggish tone of the rest of the album (‘humans against killing—that sounds like junkies against dope’ mutters the Serbian voice). It was criticised at the time for being flippant about a terribly grave matter. That one mode of engaging with the horrors of the wars being fought across the former Jugoslavia might be to embrace irony did not, it seems, occur to people back then. Irony was on its way out, and it remains, to this day, out in the cold, culturally speaking. A pity.

“Everything Everywhere All at Once” (dir. Daniel Kwan and Daniel Scheinert, aka ‘Daniels’ 2022)

 

Every review everywhere all-at-the-moment agrees on the excellence of this movie, and I'm certainly not going to disagree. It is (maybe) a tad over-long, and in particular the penultimate staircase-up-to-the-bagel-of-doom sequence is over-extended. But the film's two hours ten minutes running time is so restless, so crammed with action, ideas, visual wit and panache, and the cast do such a great job delivering the material, that the time fair rushes past. Rushes rather frantically and exhaustingly past. But you certainly won't be bored. It's an absolutely spanking movie, sometimes literally so.

Michelle Yeoh’s Evelyn Wang, wife, mother and small-businesswoman, is in almost every shot, and the movie really stands or falls (or gongfu-leaps or falls) on her performance. Fortunately, said performance is amazing—capturing at once Evelyn’s determination, her energy, her querulousness, her exhaustion, her ADHD and her many moods. The movie in effect narrates in exteriorised SFnal mode a woman going through both the breakdown of her marriage and personal psychological collapse, and Yeoh does a compelling job with this story. That said, I thought Stephanie Hsu, playing her daughter Joy, delivered in some ways an even more impressive performance, covering the emotional highs and lows of the role with panache, all the time wearing a series of endearingly bonkers Lady Gaga style costumes, whilst also pulling-off a convincing Gen Z sarcastic-nihilistic mode that speaks effectively to today’s generational divide.

Evelyn runs a coin-op launderette but her tax affairs are in disarray, and the movie opens with her and her wimpy husband Waymond (Ke Huy Quan) porting a pantechnicon-ful of receipts and loose paper to the IRS office. Here Jamie Lee Curtis’s sinister tax officer is looking to wreck Evelyn’s financial life and repossess her business. But actually unwitting Evelyn is the one hope to defeat a multiverse villain threatening to destroy all realities. In the tax office an alt-reality Waymond from a more macho version of the multiverse does a Morpheus-from-The-Matrix act on her, whereupon the movie explodes into a frantic string of settings and worlds, fists furying and kicks flying, as Evelyn first learns the identity of and then confronts the cosmic menace, the story zipping along on and ornamenting its narrative with a series of brilliant, witty, bizarre and ingenious grace-notes.

The through-line, if we are disposed to stop and isolate it for a moment, is maybe a little pat: the importance of family, respecting your elders, accepting your offspring, all the anti-Seinfeld hugging and learning gubbins. There is perhaps a confusion too, over the movie’s moral: viz., that Evelyn has to ‘let her daughter go’. This is styled both as a (healthy) acceptance of Joy’s independence and individuality—her gayness, for instance, acknowledgement of which Evelyn initially resists—and as a more psychopathological desire on Joy’s part to commit suicide, to give up and die. For Evelyn to ‘let go’ in the latter sense would be an abdication of her love and duty for her daughter, surely; where ‘letting go’ in the first sense is a healthy and needful part of mutual growth. Eliding these, as the story seems to me to do, flirts with wrongness. But the movie as a whole is such a blast that it hardly matters.

Anyway I’m not really here to review this film, concerning which you will already have heard many good things, and which you’ve probably already seen. Instead I’m interested in the word ‘multiverse’. This is what Clute, Nicholls and Langford’s Encyclopedia of Science Fiction says about it:

Its best known early use was in an 1895 speech by US philosopher-psychologist William James (1842-1910), collected in his Will to Believe (1897): ‘Visible nature is all plasticity and indifference, a moral multiverse, as one might call it, and not a moral universe.’ This was anticipated by the scientist and science writer William Denovan, who in a published letter contributing to debate over planetary motion in our Solar System asserted (of God) that ‘the Great Mechanic presides over a universe, and not merely a cohering multiverse.’ (22 November 1873 Scientific American). 

Michael Moorcock reinvented the word for sf in ‘The Blood Red Game’ (May 1963 Science Fiction Adventures), where it stands for the totality of all possible alternate universes or Parallel Worlds. Placing such worlds in the common framework of the multiverse implies the possibility of contact, interaction and travel between alternate realities or Dimensions. This meaning, reinforced by very frequent restatement in Moorcock's later sf and even more in his Fantasy, is now commonly used in both sf and sf criticism.

This, I suppose, is the consensus. In the words of Michael Wood: ‘the word “multiverse” was coined by William James in 1895, but he was only talking about the one universe that kept failing to get its act together. (The OED says it was first used in its present sense by Michael Moorcock in 1963.)’ Is this right though?

I'd say the original Jamesian sense had already, before Moorcock, come under the pressure of physicists' and mathmeticians' speculations to come to mean something more like the modern sense of the word. J A Kennedy's The Triuneverse: A Scientific Romance (1912) spins a tale of, as its title suggests, three linked cosmoses. Cosmoi. Cosmim. Whatever the correct plural is. Kennedy's story starts with Earthly astronomers watching as Mars splits in two, afterwards fragmenting into myriad pieces that swarm out and destroy Jupiter and Saturn. Then the sun explodes. Our heroes escape destruction by diverting through an alternate universe, the ‘infratronic’ (that is, smaller than electronic) world, to arrive eventually at Alpha Centauri where life can begin again.

The term Kennedy brackets under his triuneverse concept is “multiverse”. Indeed the book's opening chapter is called ‘The Multiverse’, and the narrator argues that ‘the Universe displays the organization of the Multiverse, the life of the Organiverse, and the permanance of the Spirituverse’ [204] (hence Triuneverse, you see). A quick Google Books search reveals loads of pre-1963 hits for Multiverse, by no means all Jamesian, as well as plenty of hits for Organiverse and, indeed, Infiniverse.

I'm not trying to rob Moorcock of the credit for reintroducing the term. Kennedy's is, clearly, an obscure and little-known text, and it's with Moorcock that the term starts on its jorney to the mainstream, and today's Star Trek/Spiderman/Doctor Strange ubiquity. But I would insist that pretty much all the story-beats and conventions of ‘The Multiverse’ were in place before Moorcock slapped that moninker on it. 

For instance: Sam Merwin's House of Many Worlds (1951) sends its can-do hero Mack on a rollicking adventure through a sprig of parallel worlds, all accessible via a portal in Florida's Spindrift Key, for some reason:

Indeed, loads of Pulp SF parallel worlds adventures were published in the 1940s and 1950s. 

Raymond Jones’s Renaissance (originally serialized in Astounding, Jul-Oct 1944, later reissued in book form under the title Man of Two Worlds) opens in a utopia called Kronweld. We discover how this Utopia was created: Earth scientists, having discovered time travel, used it to go back and not only kill Hitler, but all the Hitlers: ‘we pointed out what changes there would have been in the world if such as Alexander, Nero, Attila, Hitler, Michoven, Drurila and the hosts like them could have been examined at birth and their criminal tendencies discovered and destroyed without giving them a chance at life.’ [138]. But there’s a hitch. Utopia proves sterile, so the population is maintained by Kronweldians raiding parallel realities and kidnapping their babies. ‘There exist parallel worlds,’ the novel informs us, ‘in which the oscillation rates of the component particles making up their atoms differ’ (the character who tells us this rather dismissively adds: ‘you won’t understand that, neither do I’). 

And in Fritz Leiber's Destiny Times Three (Astounding, March-April 1945: published in book form 1957) our protagonist Thorn rattles quickly through three alternative universes:

In three days he had seen three worlds, and none of them were good. World 3, wrecked by subtronic power, cold battlefield for a hopeless last stand. World 2, warped by paternalistic tyranny, smoldering with hate and boredom. World 1, a utopia in appearance, but lacking real stamina or inward worth, not better than the others — only luckier. [119]

This is merely the tip of the multiverseberg, there being, we are told, an ‘infinitude of infinitude’ of such dimensions. Thorn's access is provided by a ‘Probability Engine’ super-computer: ‘every point was adjacent to every other point, and so infinity was everywhere, and all paths led everywhere, and only thought could impose order or differentiate’. Leiber's preferred term for this multiverse is ‘transtime’. It seems to me that might just as easily have caught on as Moorcock's usage.

So there are multiple multiverses, and vice-versa multi-manyverse transtimes, all before Moorcock dispersed his diverse multiverses in nineteen sixty-three/which is rather late for me. 

-------

Postscript: 29-05-22. A couple of reactions to this post online. Here, my mate Rich Puchalsky thinks I've got the focus of the (second part of the) post wrong:

Why did Moorcock create a multiverse? Someone who does actual biographically informed criticism can give a real answer, but he is a prolific writer who had written a large number of fantasy and SF novels that used the same ideas but had different characters.

The concept of a multiverse joins all of these books together into a more or less coherent whole. Instead of being scattered books where Moorcock repeats himself with variations, they are retrospectively about different multiversal versions of the Eternal Champion. The Eternal Champion cycle begins (if that is a meaningful term in a multiverse) in the Moorcock book The Eternal Champion, which itself is a fix-up. Notably, the short references to other Moorcock works which make it multiversal only were added at the fix-up stage. Rather than write about the content of the Moorcock multiverse, I'll mention that as a publishing device it often took fans who read his Elric books and convinced them that the rest of his sprawling, prolific oeuvre was connected to them and that they should read the whole thing. Therefore, the precursor of Moorcock's multiverse was in an important sense not the various little-known books that used similar ideas, but James Branch Cabell's Storisende edition, which has many similar qualities

James Branch Cabell was a prolific and very good fantasy writer (although he did not call himself one: he was influenced by earlier genres), who decided to join up his books into one edition, and in the process put in little rewrites to connect them as the Lives of Manuel. Manuel is, basically, The Eternal Champion. His lives are spread out into pseudo-historical eras rather than a multiverse because Cabell saw himself as writing in the style of Walter Scott rather than as with Moorcock in the style of pulp SF or sword-and-sorcery. But the publishing effect was similar. Cabell gathered up everything he'd ever written, including his poetry, into an 18 book limited edition which he convinced a publisher to put out. He supposedly spent a year personally signing every book. More to the point, he not only modified the works slightly, he wrote new introductions for each of them that framed them as part of this overarching work, which did not exist until after most of them were written. The multiverse, then, is a way of restating one's artistic tics -- ideas that someone keeps coming back to, reused stylistic bits -- as not repetitions, but as the bones of a work. As such, it's perfect for contemporary media franchises. Marvel vaguely understands, as an amoeba does, that all of its products seem rather the same, so in makes a TV series Loki in which all of these repetitions are really part of its universe and therefore intended

This is very interesting to me, although I wonder if James Branch Cabell isn't rather better known on the other side of the Atlantic than over here. But I don't doubt I should read more of him. Then my old friend Abraham Kawa makes this suggestion: ‘one influential addition to pre-Moorcock multiverses is Gardner Fox's The Flash Of Two Worlds from 1961, which not only posits parallel timeline earths with variants of people, but posits the notion that one reality's people experience the others as dreams.’

A Trove of Triffids

John Wyndham's 1951 novel The Day of the Triffids manages the impressive task of making vegetables scary. It requires a degree of contrivance, but Wyndham pulls it off. First he posits bioengineered carnivorous plants that can walk about on three stumpy legs and sting their prey with whip-like tentacles. Then he adds-in a second disaster: a spectacular meteor shower, which may actually be an orbiting weapons platform, that happens to have the effect of blinding all who watch it, leaving whole populations helpless before the perambulating plants. The result is one of the masterpieces of British ‘cosy catastophe’ science fiction. 

The original Michael Joseph cover by Welsh artist John Griffiths (at the head of this post) imagines the triffid as a sort of giraffe-shaped artichoke on tuberous legs. Since ‘gigantic artichokes’ rather undersells how tense and scary Wyndham's novel actually is, Griffiths has superimposed spiraling green lines to convey alarm. Still, his conception of triffid was iconic enough for it to be copied across to the 1961 Penguin first paperback edition with only minimal changes:

There's something about the neatness of Penguin's orange-and-white livery that adds menace to the clear-line drawing of the plant in the middle; an effect enhanced by the way the penguin logo itself appears to be giving us an alarmed side-eye at the proximity of the monster. The cover art for the first US edition (1951), by New York artist Whitney Bender, reworks the British cover by adding turmoil in the sky:

The splendour of the rendering of city and sky rather dwarfs the poor little triffid, who looks more like an overgrown lampost than a monster. Bender was in his day a respected painter for whom book illustration was a sideline, and there's something a little too stately about his terror-plants. By way of contrast this Earle Bergey cover for the ‘Popular Library’ paperback of 1959 is much more kinetic and vivid, even if it relies for its effect on the titillation of partially undressing the books' heroine:

‘Revolt ...’ was clearly considered a grabbier title than ‘Day ...’, although that shout line is a little strange. Hard to read it, now, without inserting a tentative pause between the first and second words. ‘An  ... unusual science fiction novel’. Still the triffid itself is painted with impressive force and dynamism. And here's Gary Visikupic's cover-art for the 1979 Doubleday edition:

 Three of the things, I suppose, because of the tri- in triffid, athough the crazy sunflower hairdos and the grumpy-looking woman scurrying by bottom right, like Mrs Cut-Out in that Python sketch, perhaps add-up to a more ludicrous effect than this genuinely unsettling novel deserves.