Arthur Montagu Brookfield, "Simiocracy" (1884)

 

Arthur Montagu Brookfield (1853–1940) was educated at Rugby and Jesus, Cambridge, afterwards serving as a lieutenant in the 13th Hussars in India and later commanding a battalion of the Imperial Yeomanry in the Boer War. He was a Conservative MP from 1885 to 1903, and a JP for Sussex. In 1903 he stepped away from Parliament to become British Consul at Montevideo, and (in 1904) Consul to Danzig (then in Prussia, now in Poland). All in all, a successful late Victorian Tory career.

Brookfield had a sideline in writing novels, of which I have read two. The first is The Apparition (1884), a sort of Scooby-Doo-avant-la-lettre story in which a young scapegrace, Paul French, cashiered out of the army for fighting a duel with his commanding officer (he called him a cheat whilst playing, and losing, a game of cards) runs away to an English country house, dies, is buried in the ground and afterward appears as a ghost to various people. It turns out a different person, not French, was interred, that French is still alive, and the titular ‘apparition’ was people seeing him out and about (‘“But I buried him! That’s all I can say,” replied the Rector. “But did you ever see his face; or the face of the dead man, rather?” persisted the Colonel. “No,” answered the Rector after some pause. “And what’s more I must acknowledge that I ought to have insisted on doing so. Oho!” [233-4]’). It's not much cop, this novel. 

Then I read Simiocracy: A Fragment of a Future History (1884). This is a more interesting, although still not a very good, piece of fiction. It is, in a sense, science fiction, hence my blogging about it here—although it's a narrow, satirical and frankly racist piece of work.

What happens. Well, at the end of the 19th-century the wicked Liberal Party abolishes the monarchy and establishes ‘a new British Commonwealth’. In an attempt to bolster their electoral support they change the laws so as to enable apes to vote, afterwards importing large numbers of orang utan to tip the electoral balance in their favour. This move is described as ‘in perfect harmony with the progressive spirit of the age’:

The people had been gradually induced to perceive that the opinions so stoutly maintained by some of the most thoughtful men of the day as to the original connection between the human and the Simian races, were not to be disposed of by mere contradiction or intolerant ridicule. The people had not yet forgotten the teachings of Darwin ... Had not other alien races been once despised—nay, even slaughtered? And now, were not some of the brightest ornaments of the English Bar these same abhorred “blackamoors”? And did not millions of English as well as Dutch men, women, and children bear allegiance to a dynasty of negroes whom we had once contemptuously handed over into slavery? [Simiocracy, 38]

South Africa as a majority-rule republic in this Victorian imagined future is a striking thing. But there is, obviously, no ignoring the racism here. The ‘some of the brightest ornaments of the English Bar are “blackamoors”’ line intrigued me, so I checked. From the Society of Black Lawyers website I learned the following:

In 1854 John Thorpe, a Sierra Leonean, became the first barrister of African descent to be called to the Bar and Monmohon Ghosh in 1864, the first person of Indian descent to be called to the Bar, with John Mensah Sarbah the first Ghanaian called to the Bar in 1887.

Interesting! But what strikes me as a wonderful thing clearly struck Brookfield as deplorable. At any rate, Simiocracy elaborates its premise: apes flood into the UK. Their leader is Orang Api:

Many writers have described the gratification as well as the astonishment which they felt, on finding, instead of a savage creature running to and fro on the ground with his hands and feet, a calm, and indeed dignified being, dressed in a loose suit of blue serge, and seated in an arm-chair, from which he welcomed his visitors with an unembarrassed smile and a courteous wave of the hand. When Orong Api stood up, he measured just five feet six inches in height; but his frame was now somewhat bent ... His form displayed great strength, and a certain rugged symmetry. His body was for the most part covered with hair of a dusky brown; but his face and ears, his feet and the palms of his hands, were smooth. [44]

There are various other idiotic reforms: children petition to have schools abolished, which happens (‘the obnoxious Education Act was formally repealed, and the arbitrary and feudal calling of the pedagogue banished to the limbo of obsolete privileges’); hunting, shooting and fishing are outlawed and so on. But the main change is the influx of apes.

This immigrants have, surprisingly enough, a fair deal of support among the people, the ‘Simiophile’ faction. But these new arrivals also evoke hostility: Orong Api is assassinated, and other apes are attacked and beaten in the streets. Some Oran Otani retaliate: ‘in one instance a fruiterer was set upon, savagely beaten, and robbed of all his wares. In another case a representative of the press was forced to drink the contents of a small portable ink-bottle which he carried ; and finally thrust through a glass shopfront, and compelled to seek safety in flight, horribly cut and bruised’ [129]. But these ape-acts, the narrator tells us, with an irony heavy enough to bend metal bars, are the exception, not the rule:

Surely the friends of Progress may even now feel a thrill of honest pride when they reflect, that but for the wantonness of a few hot-headed young Simians, the conduct of two and a half million successful invaders, flushed with the victory they had already accomplished, and glowing with zeal for struggles still to be undertaken, was such as to elicit the warmest praise from some of the highest officials in the English Parliament. For ourselves, we must here express our deliberate opinion that the general behaviour of the Oran Otani, at the time when they first landed on British soil, was of a kind for which the previous history of European invasions supplies no parallel: and, but for one calamitous incident which we shall now describe, we believe that the entire English people would have eventually acquiesced in this view, by rising like one man to welcome, and not to repel, the pioneers of Simiocratic civilisation and freedom. [130]

This thrill of honest pride style of heavyset sarcasm increasingly manifests as the story goes on. The ‘calamitous incident’ is a fire by the London Docks that destroys a building housing thousands of Oran Otani. Suspecting arson, the apes rise up and despoil London:

What wonder that the Simian war-cry arose ... What wonder that a peaceful and indeed benevolent army of occupation became forthwith transformed into a furious and unreasoning army of vengeance ; that bands of wrathful warriors spread abroad in every direction — to the houses and churches, to the wine-vaults, the shops, the warehouses, the wharves, and the shipping — carrying fire and sword with them, leaving slaughter, rapine, and desolation in their wake!

An Anglo-Simian conference is organised. The increasing influx of apes into Britain means that there is now a large simian army, although the leader of the apes, Madame Jocki, relies not only on force: ‘her first act was to transfer the huge treasure-chest, which had been brought from Borneo, into the keeping of the English Premier, to be applied to the relief of the homeless poor who had suffered from the recent disasters.’ Either way, Simian domination of England is inevitable:

A few of the wealthier classes endeavoured to rally an armed force, in the neighbourhood of Dunrobin Castle, in Sutherlandshire; but the national spirit had become so effectually tamed, that the attempt had to be abandoned. Most of those who could afford the large sums which were now demanded for a passage to the European continent or elsewhere, made haste to leave the country; and the steamship companies, the owners of private vessels, and the German and French proprietors of the four submarine tunnels, speedily reaped a golden harvest. The British coast was crowded with poorer fugitives; some of whom succeeded in chartering fishing-smacks, and coal-barges, while others put to sea on timber-rafts — and even ruder contrivances — of their own manufacture. [179]

Those tunnels are a nice SF-futurist touch. Anyway, the (human) Prime Minister is deposed by Madame Jocki, who is then herself overthrown by an aggressive young ape called Pongat Wou. He issues a proclamation, on the basis of which Britain is now to be ruled (the ‘Tupa’ mentioned is a kind of legendary Orang, supposed to dwell in Borneo, the ultimate ape power): 

‘Talking’, in point 6, refers to human speech: the Oran speech is obviously still permitted. The novel gives us a few samples of that: ‘The Premier remarked that the heat in Borneo, during the mild season, could not be much more oppressive than that of a crowded London salon — or “salong” as he called it — in the month of July. Jocki immediately showed her white teeth, and seemed to articulate something like: “Uck-chi; uck-chi. Mi ni nik.” Which, according to the interpreter, meant: “Good; good. I agree with you.”’ But our narrator declares himself delighted to have been released from the prudery of wearing clothes, and commends his history to his apish overlords. But, wait: has he written it in (forbidden) English? Or are we to assume it has been written in ook-ook eek-eek and then somehow translated into English for our benefit? I don't know.

All in all it's not a very sophisticated or notable novel. There was, in fact, a vigorous nineteenth-century subculture of apes-as-humans satire and fiction, the ancestor of today's Planet of the Apes franchises. John Clute points out why it was, specifically, the 19th-century in which this sub-genre arose:

The necessary circumstance was of course Time, or Progress. Moderns instinctively think of beasts and monsters as being prior. For there to have been an eighteenth-century Primitivist vision of the Noble Savage there must have been a sense that we had advanced – or retreated – from some earlier state. So it is no surprise that the first apes-as-human texts of direct interest to an sf reader are probably two works by a Primitivist philosopher, James Burnett, Lord Monboddo (1714-1799), whose Of the Origin and Progress of Language (1773-1792) and Ancient Metaphysics (1779-1799) contrast humanity's corrupt nature with that of the pacific orang-utan, a vegetarian flautist who may not have learned to speak but who was otherwise capable of human attainments. Monboddo's orang-utan was a potent and poignant figure, and soon entered fiction in Melincourt, or Sir Oran Haut-ton (1817) by Thomas Love Peacock, where Oran Haut-ton saves a young maiden from rape, enters Parliament, and gazes wisely upon the human spectacle. Charles Pougens's slightly later tale, Jocko: anecdote détachée des Lettres inédites sur l'instinct des animaux ["Jocko: Anecdote Extracted from Unpublished Letters on Animal Instinct"] (1824), more directly connects the innocence of the orang-utan Jocko to the doctrine of the Noble Savage espoused by Jean-Jacques Rousseau (1712-1778); this tale, along with other French-language stories of interest, like Émile Dodillon's Hemo (1886) ... But Jocko is not a Satire; and Peacock's instinct to pay less attention to the intrinsic nature of his ape, and to follow his incursion into human society in order to reflect satirically upon civilization, proved more immediately useful. ... The intelligent race of monkeys discovered in Léon Gozlan's Les Emotions de Polydore Marasquin (1857) also serve to hold up the mirror. The use of apes or Yahoos or houyhnhnms as exemplary inhabitants of a Utopia or Dystopia represents a very different – and ultimately more significant – tradition than the use of apes as illustrative examples embedded into our own human world, early examples of which are in any case hard to find: until well past 1850, therefore, an ape-as-human will typically either be discovered in a distant enclave or ideal society, or the ape-as-human will be making a visit to civilization. Only later will the enclave become a Zoo. After the publication of Charles Darwin's Origin of Species (1859), the apes-as-human topos became, of course, far more loaded, a lightning rod for the expression of and discharge of deep anxieties about the nature and destiny of the human race. Indeed, it would not be until Darwin that the apes-as-human topic became sufficiently ambiguous or threatening to warrant widespread imaginative use.

In this larger context, Simiocracy seems thin indeed. It can't decide whether it is making a racist point about immigrants, or a local-political point about how stupid and wicked Whigs/Liberals are. Its tonal irony is too clonking, the worldbuilding too scanty. It reminded me a little, as I read, of Will Self's more scatological and wide-ranging but otherwise similarly hamstrung Great Apes (1997). Jerry Fodor's LRB review gets that book right, I think:

There are, in principle, two kinds of chimp jokes: the ones about how chimpanzees are much like us, and the ones about how chimpanzees aren’t much like us. Self’s chimps have a social hierarchy and a ritual of deference according to which one offers one’s respects by presenting one’s posterior. ‘“I am honoured, madam, to make your acquaintance. The entire scientific community is in awe of your ischial pleat ... and I, too, reverence your dangly bits. I would accord it an honour if you would kiss my arse” ... she bestowed the required kiss, then requested an arse lick from Busner in turn.’ Self finds this sort of thing endlessly hilarious; and he is the kind of humorist who thinks that you can’t tell a good joke too often. I guess he tells the kiss-my-arse joke maybe 800 times. Self also can’t get over it that chimps mate publicly and promiscuously, and only when the female is in oesterus. That, he thinks, is more laughs than a barrel of monkeys.

In all other respects, however, Self’s chimps are much like the people that they caricature; in fact, too much like and therein lies the novel’s structural problem. ... The effect is not of animals but of people all dressed up in chimp suits with nowhere much to go. By the end of the book, their fur has more or less ceased to matter to what the characters do and suffer. Maybe that’s Self’s point of course; but just what point does it amount to? Why have your people turn into chimpanzees if you are then going to have your chimpanzees turn into people? Self himself doesn’t seem to know. The novel eventually comes to a halt out of what feels like sheer authorial fatigue.

Something similar vitiates Brookfield's novel. Though it doesn't have any bottoms in it.

Ken MacLeod, ‘Beyond the Hallowed Sky’ (2021)

 

I enjoyed Ken MacLeod's Beyond the Hallowed Sky: a three-ply space opera/political thriller/first contact yarn. It’s the first Wordle-line in a trilogy, so the ending, though decently-enough landed, doesn’t tie the story into a nice little bow, and that fact perhaps dilutes the enjoyment a trifle. And there are some parts of the novel that don’t work so well: it’s overloaded with worldbuilding and tech-info in the first 50-pages, too much in too short a space I think, which makes the story a little hard to get into. And I suppose the problem with the three-ply approach is that readers are liable to enjoy one of the three elements more than the others, thereby unbalancing the whole. In my case I was less engaged by the “handsome young John Grant gadding about near-future utopian-socialist independent Scotland and stumbling into inventing FTL” story-strand. For one thing it turns out that pretty much everywhere else apart from Scotland already invented FTL fifty years previously, and that they’ve just all been keeping that fact secret, which is a little baffling. But perhaps the trilogy's remaining vols will make it clearer how all that’s supposed to go.

A little more engaging was story-strand 2: a starship (a repurposed nuclear submarine, in fact, as these vessels all are) has been shipping settlers from Earth to the extrasolar planet Apis, where we encounter a weird sentient crystalline lifeform. Apis appears to have been seeded with earthlike life many of millions of years before, such that the actual forms of life the settlers encounter have followed a different, achordate evolutionary path. This is all pretty diverting, although MacLeod has to plump it up with some running-around being-chased excitement to keep the storyline bubbling along. My favourite of the three strands was set on a floating settlement high above the surface of Venus, ‘Cloud City’. This story-strand concerns a blandly polite humanoid robot, Marcus Owen, sent to ‘Red Venus’ as a diplomat and spy (a fact he cheerfully concedes to anyone who asks) who also turns a nice line in boinking people, like Gigolo Joe from Spielberg’s A.I. There’s a mysterious ‘something’ down on the hellish surface of the planet, and Owen descends from the clouds to the Venusian ground in a super-armoured space-suit to investigate.

Although the novel takes a while to build its momentum, momentum is eventually achieved, and the final third is full of nicely-styled moments, cool ideas and narrative hooks. I will read vol 2, and indeed anticipate doing so with pleasure. That’s not exactly the ringing-est of blurbs to slap on the front cover, I appreciate. But there you go.

Hmm. That reference to Wordle, in my first paragraph, is going to date this post pretty catastrophically in the coming months, once the fad passes, isn’t it?

I know Ken, and it would be as unseemly for me to trash his novel as it would be compromised to overpraise it: it’s very good, he’s a master of contemporary SF, you should read it. His prose here, as ever, is clear and informative. You may (I tend to) prefer a more wrought, styled idiom but MacLeod’s approach is to lay the characters, material and ideas of his storytelling directly before the reader, which is a perfectly honourable way of proceeding. There’s a flat-stanley quality to many of the characters, but again, in Owen, MacLeod makes a virtue of necessity on that score, and it's both memorable and likeable the way the novel renders the robot’s convincing fakeness of subjectivity.

But this isn’t a review, so much as a notation of one thought I had, whilst reading. It has to do with story structure. So: you might write a novel and keep it focused on one p.o.v. the whole way through, but the danger there is that your reader will find this approach monotonous and tiresome. So you decide instead to dispose your narrative between two, three or perhaps even more storylines running concurrently. But how to combine them? Beyond the Hallowed Sky opts for: just plait them together, A B C A B C, one chapter at a time. It’s a common strategy, which perhaps speaks to its workability, but I find it (not just here, but wherever I encounter it) irksome, distracting, bitty and, as I say above, an invitation to skip the strands you’re less interested in to get to the ones you’re really enjoying.

‘Alright,’ I hear you say. ‘But what are the alternatives? I’m not sure. I think it’s right to say I’ve never written a novel that adopted the braiding strategy, but that doesn’t mean I shouldn’t. My most recent novel (available from all good bookshops etc) deliberately disposes two quite different p.o.v sections into an overall amphibrach, a three-part shorter-A long-B shorter-A structure, for Dantean reasons. Otherwise I prefer the discrete Rothko-like blocks of text to the intimate braiding. I say ‘prefer’, in the sense that this seems to me a more aesthetically interesting and striking way of doing things, but my taste may well not be yours—and indeed, judging by reactions to my writing, it probably isn’t. So what’s a better way of doing it?

The First Generation Starship

 

Since faster-than-light travel is impossible, and the stars are so very, very far away, any craft making interstellar journeys will take many centuries to get where it is going. Generations will be born aboard these ships, live and die and be in turn superseded by younger generations. This standard trope of SF is predicated upon the unbending realities of physics.

But who was the first to hypothesise a ‘generation starship’? Wikipedia says this:

Rocket pioneer Robert H. Goddard was the first to write about long-duration interstellar journeys in his The Ultimate Migration (1918). In this he described the death of the Sun and the necessity of an ‘interstellar ark’. The crew would travel for centuries in suspended animation and be awakened when they reached another star system. Konstantin Tsiolkovsky, considered a father of astronautic theory, first described the need for multiple generations of passengers in his essay, ‘The Future of Earth and Mankind’ (1928), a space colony equipped with engines that travels thousands of years which he called ‘Noah's Ark’.

Clute, Nicholls and Langford go further back:

Tsiolkovsky's ideas ... were anticipated as a passing fancy, though with a more realistic timescale, in John Munro's A Trip to Venus (1897): “... with a vessel large enough to contain the necessaries of life, a select party of ladies and gentlemen might start for the Milky Way, and if all went right, their descendants would arrive there in the course of a few million years.”

But 1897 doesn't take us far enough back into the early history of this idea, I think. Here's James E Lake's Bishop Foster's Heresy (1889), imagining a future-fleet voyaging out into the interstellar spaces for ‘millions of years’:

Look out from our flying ship as we sail out upon the universal sea of space. We turn our faces toward the sun, whose bright beams shed such a wonderful sea of material glory over us, that all nature is hid save this effulgence and our own ship ... we begin to look out through the evening twilight upon the vast ocean of trackless ether, upon which we are sailing, and now thousands, yea, millions of ships like our own heave in sight ... Come with me as this fleet of ships sails on its great voyage for a million years, and ask what mighty fleets are these that accompany us over this infinite sea! Hail, thou voyagers over this unsounded sea! Hail Arcturus! Hail Polaris! [154-55]

The scale of the cosmos had been understood for a while by this point, and it is a natural extrapolation from that knowledge to speculate how long it would take for a craft to traverse such distances, and what that would imply for the crew. H F Warren's Recreations in Astronomy (1879) included this intriguing Space 1999-avant la lettre conception:

If our earth were suddenly to dissolve its allegiance to the king of day, and attempt a flight to the North Star (the centre of the Circumpolar Constellation), and should maintain its flight of one thousand miles a minute, it would fly away toward Polaris for thousands of thousands of years, till a million years had passed away before it reached that northern dome of the distant sky and gave its new allegiance to another sun. The sun it had left behind it would gradually diminish till it was small as Arcturus, thus small as could be discerned by the naked eye, until at last it would finally fade out in utter darkness long before the new sun was reached. [72]

There's a lot of late 19th-c speculation about the distances of such voyages, actually.

The Matrix Resurrections (2021, dir. Lana Wachowski)

I stand by my initial reaction to Matrix: Resurrections, tweeted immediately after leaving the cinema:

It’s a busy film—too busy, really—full of ingenious revisitings and twists on the original Matrix trilogy, but it falls flat. The main failure is tone: there’s none of the menace, the brooding Goth-intensity or bravura kung-fu brilliance of the first movies, and worst of all none of their chewy, thought-provoking ideas. I still cleave to my rather unfashionable take that Reloaded is the best of the original trilogy, not so much because its set-pieces are bigger/better (bigger doesn't automatically mean better of course) or because of the wonderful, bonkers Architect scene (love it though I do) but because it is built around what seems to me the most interesting idea out of the three films, and I'm old-fashioned enough to still think of SF as a literature of ideas. So: the big idea in Matrix 1 is ‘reality is an illusion’: a cool idea, but hardly original (Plato's Cave, Marxian ideology, Dick-ian paranoia and so on). The big idea in Matrix 3 is: ‘everything that has a beginning has an end’, which is, qua idea, less thrilling, athough it is at least saying something. But the big idea in Matrix 2 seems to me the most exciting and thought-provoking, though it goes largely unremarked in the fan reaction and critical commentary on that text: it is that choice is not a matter of choosing (to do A or B), because you have actually always already chosen (to do A or B). Choice is a matter of understanding why you have chosen what you have chosen, because we can't see past the choices we make unless we understand them. That's a very cool idea, I think.

There’s nothing so clever in Matrix 4. In place of ideas like these, the movie performs without really interrogating metafiction. Neo and Trinity are not dead, but living in an annex to the Matrix, she as a wife and mother, he as a successful but solitary game designer whose biggest hit is a playable version of, precisely, The Matrix Trilogy. He has flashes of true memory, catches odd glimpses of a balding greybeard instead of his still-handsome if grizzled fiftysomething Keanu face in the mirror, worries that he is hallucinating. But with the help of a blue-spectacle-wearing analyst, played by a simpering Doogie Howser, and bolstered by a constant stream of blue mental-health pills, he gets through the days under a blue-sky, living in a steel-blue appartment. He has the blues, though. Do you see? Blue is the Colour, Matrix is the Game, we're all together and winning is our aim.

Things start to unravel for Neo—or from the point of view of the ‘real world’, things start to ravel for him—when he is ordered to write a sequel game to his Matrix original, and the memories of his time become harder to repress. Then a new, younger Morpheus and a new character called Bugs visit and try, first unsuccessfully and then successfully, to get Neo to take the red pill and leave the simulation.

Intercut with the scenes set in this new blue-tinged Matrix are shots from the original movies, back when the Matrix had a pleasingly submarine-y green tint. Everything is a bit blue in the new Matrix because it is only by repeatedly dosing Neo with ‘the blue pill’ that the machines can keep him sedated and in-pod, although that raises the intriguing question of why the old model Matrix was so chlorine coloured. What does the green pill do? I feel we should be told.

The thing is, Resurrections isn’t really a movie about the world, or ideas, of The Matrix. It’s a movie about The Reboot, about our contemporary fascination with reshooting (as it might be) the same Star Wars film every few years, tweaking a couple of things and calling it The Eternal Recurrence of Skywalker or The Last—Last? Are You Kidding Me? There Are Dozens of These In The Pipeline—Jedi or whatever. Certainly no shortage of remakes and reboots today: endless the-same-but-slightly-different product extrusions.

Now Nietzsche’s ‘eternal recurrence’ is a really intriguing idea (not right, I think; but fascinating). But where Groundhog Day did something both hilarious and profound, actually, with that notion, this movie only dips its toe in the water. After the first quarter-hour or so of Neo’s endless loop, the filmmakers, perhaps worried about boring their audience, switch mode to kick-ass shoot-em-up. There are gunfights, there is kung-fu, there are explosions and punchings on a train, punchings in a warehouse, a motorcycle chase and the like. But these scenes all under-deliver in terms of excitement, because they lack tension, because the audience never doubts that Neo will survive them all in order to rediscover his ‘one’-osity, and reunite with Trinity. In such a context the flash-back cut-ins only serve to remind us how much more exciting and high-stakes and intense these kinds of scene were in the original flicks.

There are several ways Lana Wachowski might have framed a story about postmodern self-reflexion as constitutive of modern life,  but I have to say the way she has actually chosen flirts with self-indulgence, a love letter to the earlier movies that reads them, facilely, as a simple narrative of heroic self-liberation. I mean, you’re free to interpret those movies any way you like of course, and this is certainly a reading. My problem isn’t that it’s ‘wrong’, it’s that it strikes me as not an especially interesting reading. There are cleverer, more striking and powerful things going on in 1-3 I'd say.

At any rate this film is essentially the same story retold, somewhat smugly, with some superficial self-referential upgrades—you remember the ‘exiles’ from Matrix 2, holdovers from an earlier version of the Matrix who can only be killed with a silver bullet? Werewolves, in effect. Well, Matrix 4 not only brings them back in for a curtain call, it includes Matrix-zombies, ‘the swarm’. You remember ‘bullet time’? Matrix 4 name-checks this constantly, bathing in its coolness, and then offers a bullet-time-plus, which turns out to be actually considerably less cool, a kind of super slow-mo.

This means the movie reverts us to its worldbuilding and story, and those, in Resurrections, are both shonky. Believe me, I love me some Meta, but a meta-gesture towards worldbuilding and story-coherence isn’t the same as actual worldbuilding and story-coherence.

So the premise behind the story is: a new programme, the Analyst, has taken-over from The Architect the job of designing and running the Matrix. He has discovered this One Weird Trick for maximising the power-output of the system: namely, to grow new versions of Neo and Trinity inside special pods that are near one another without actually touching. These two characters have been parked in a kind of annex to the Matrix, called a ‘Modal’, and run through endless cyclings of their respective lives, occasionally seeing one another but never actually connecting.

This tantalising unconsummated-yearning is, it seems, super effective at generating the electricity the machines need to survive—though, whatever Morpheus told us in Matrix 1, this is clearly not the same electricity that is generated by Duracell batteries and that flows around copper wires. It is, rather, some Monsters Inc style abstraction of human affective intensity, which the machines are able, somehow, to convert into workable energy. Fair enough. My problem isn’t really with this. I mean, it’s bobbins qua premise; but a premise is a premise. My problem is with the way this Monsters Inc premise is spun-out.

So: the machines can literally resurrect dead humans? Like, clone Neo, restore his eyes, restock his cloned brain with his personality and mentation, all that? That seems to me, if I may quote Ron Burgundy for a moment, kind of a big deal. The movie spins this as ‘special’: resurrected Neo and resurrected Trinity are kept in special pods in a special secret machine tower hidden from the rest of the machine city. But presumably ‘growing humans’ has been the machine modus operandi from the start. Where else do all the human bodies come from, otherwise? I assume it was never the case that the machines occasionally wake in-pod humans, have them fuck, wait for the females to come to term and so on? Which is to say, what’s big about this deal is not that the machines are cloning humans, but that they’ve found a way of recreating not just the bodies but the psychological, emotional and memorious aspects of specific humans. That’s—wow, though. If the machines are not only growing the flesh but adding-in consciousness, why not edit the latter to make the in-the-pod person more contented with their lot? Or if (as per the unfulfilled yearning energy-source) not contented, then discontented in ways that don’t lead to people taking the red pill?

More: if the continued power-source of the machine world relies on Neo not realising who he really is, why are the machine intelligences insisting he design a video game that rehearses, in minute detail, all the specific details of who he really is? Why not have him designing Minecraft? Or Candy Crush? I suppose it’s possible (this isn’t spelled out in the movie, but I’m speculating) that the machines can’t stop Neo remembering, howsoever vaguely, his ‘true’ past, and have created this world to give him a plausible explanation for these odd memories. But then you’d think they wouldn’t repeatedly insist that Neo return to this project. The whole opening move of the film is Neo’s boss—actually Smith, in a new, younger-handsomer skin—insisting over Neo’s demurral that he go back to the Matrix. Why would he want such a thing?

Yahya Abdul-Mateen II’s Young Morpheus is an agent programme that has switched allegiance and decoupled from the Matrix into a man-shaped cloud of magnetically floating ball-bearings. So—not in any sense Morpheus, then? Why not a new name? And if his real-world avatar is a man-shaped cloud of magnetically floating ball-bearings then why does he have to, as he does, clamber strenuously up the side of machine-world structures? Couldn’t he just float up?

Anyway, Neo's corporeal body is freed from the Matrix a second time in a smash-and-grab by a Quisling machine betraying its kind—I’m sorry did I say ‘Quisling’? I meant a brave fifth-columnist machine, secretly allied with humankind, truth and justice. The rest of the movie is about the mission to likewise free-up Trinity, which, since liberating Neo used-up mankind’s only insider fifth-columnist Quisling-robot, is tricky to achieve. That’s the whole story.

The ‘real world’ set-up is more than a little incoherent. On the one hand, since Neo’s sacrifice in Matrix 3, there has been peace between humans and the machines for 60 years, which has allowed such machines as wish-it to leave machineland and live with the humans, gigantic floating metal dolphins and insects and whatnot. Subterranean human city Zion, renamed Io, is enjoying the peace-dividend by growing strawberries and generating misty patches up by the rock-ceiling so it looks more like sky. Io is hidden from the machine’s spermatozoaesaque soldier robots by a magic holo-curtain, though I wasn’t sure why this was necessary, given that the two worlds have been at peace for so many decades. I also wasn’t sure how the camouflage was supposed to work: as if Poland erected an invisibility curtain along its border with Germany on account of their 60-year-old former beef, leaving invading German troops standing around scratching their heads, I guess. I mean: I guess?

President of humanity is Jada Pinkett Smith’s Niobe, the actress aged 60 years by the application of much latex. Pinkett Smith’s performance of a 90-year-old woman is a dreadful pantomime of creaky-voiced bent-backed shuffling about, and reminded me of nothing so much as the ‘I'm a poor old man, my legs are grey, my eyes are old and bent’ geezer from Life of Brian. 

Niobe rebukes Jessica Henwick’s ‘Bugs’ for rescuing Neo, and forbids any attempt at rescuing Trinity. She even locks Neo in a Rapunzel Tower, but real-world Morpheus is pooed out of a pipe as a stream of ball bearings in order to jailbreak him, and off they go to rescue Trinity anyway.

And here, actually, the movie briefly flickers with actual dramatic potential: Niobe tells Neo straight it’s a choice: leave Trinity trapped in the Matrix, or rescue her, restart the war and destroy all humanity. If the film had had the courage of its convictions where this choice was concerned it would have been much better. But it doesn’t: Niobe changes her mind, Bugs is reinstated, and leads the team to rescue Trinity through a baroquely over-complicated process of incursion, goop-draining, double-bluff, replication, shouting, fighting, motorcycle-chasing and assorted nonsense. This all felt markedly unexciting, partly because we the audience are never in doubt that Trinity will elect to leave her ersatz hubbie ‘Chad’ to ride again on the grizzled john ‘wick’ of the true love-of-her-life Neo, but mostly because the stakes here remain too low to generate drama. This is no longer saving humanity: it's reuniting two old flames, and just that. I mean: alright? But also: so what? It turns out the reunion doesn't damage the peace, reignite the war, or have any larger effects whatsoever. So: so what? So.

I see the point in swapping the grand-guignol melodrama of Hugo Weaving for the smarm and gym-built good-looks of Jonathan Groff—it’s a point about the blandification of modern life: everyone standing around in the elevator checking their phones, everything banalised. Lambert Wilson’s ‘Merovingian’, now trampified and dishevelled like Alan Moore dragged through a hedge, appears briefly ranting about how in his day it was fine wine, theatre and elegant conversation and now it’s all homogenised commodified soullessness and iPhones. But the movie as a whole doesn’t really commit to this satirical point. Lacking that we’re in a replay where the hero not only gets the girl, but does so costlessly. Imagine if Neo and Trinity getting back together actually entailed the destruction of Io and resumption of the war: imagine if this movie were actually The World Well Lost For Love. But it’s not. Neo gets his cake, has it too, and flies around rainbow skies with his newly freed, empowered and beautiful partner. Old tricks. Meh.

Robots and Orphans

 

The word robot, as every schoolchild knows, was coined in the 1920 science-fiction play R.U.R.: Rossum's Universal Robots by Karel Čapek (though the ‘robots’ in Čapek's play, though artificial, are organic rather than metallic creatures). I sometimes see it claimed that robot is the Czech word for ‘slave’, but that's not quite right (the Czech word for ‘slave’ is otrok), although it's not entirely wrong either. In fact robota means ‘serfdom, villeinage, corvee’ and came to be used for any arduous work or drudgery. ‘Robot’ is Čapek's back-formation from this term. There are versions of the word robota in other European languages: Arbeit in German, arbeid in Dutch (the Middle English word arveð is a cognate) and that's because they all derive from a now-lost common etymological ancestor: *orbъ (“slave”), which itself is derives from the Proto-Indo-European word *h₃erbʰ, “to change or evolve status”. This speaks to a world in which not only was work what slaves did, but anybody might become a slave if their status was overturned or degraded, as for instance when a man or woman was captured in war, or a child was orphaned. Indeed, *orbъ is the root, via *h₃órbʰos, of the English word “orphan”. 

So many of our stories and folk-tales concern the magic orphan, the Moses or Oedipus or Harry Potter figure, the special child whose orphaning is only the prelude to a story of heroism, rise and greatness, that it's easy to forget the fate of children orphaned was, for thousands of years, servitude, so much so that ‘orphan’ and ‘slave’, and now ‘robot’, are all, fundamentally, versions of the same word.

Neal Stephenson, "Termination Shock" (2021)

This review is a pendant to my previous piece on Kim Stanley Robinson’s Ministry of the Future (2020), by way of thinking through the way we narrativize climate change. My argument in the Robinson review is that, by refusing the easy narrative satisfactions of eucatastrophe, Ministry of the Future does something interesting in terms of how we conceptualise and storify and therefore apprehend the enormities of climate catastrophe. Neal Stephenson’s new book is also about climate change, but it embodies a different story-shape, and that’s what interests me.

I blow hot and cold on Stephenson, some of whose books are interesting, but who often writes books are a remarkable, puddingy badness: bloated meander-fests in which the prolix lucubrations of a high-IQ moderate-EQ individual are rehearsed at excessive length. Lots of research is kneaded into the dough of the text, characters and the narrator trading great gouts of infodumping with one another and the reader. In this respect Termination Shock (2021) is representative Stephenson. I’ll describe it briefly in the next couple of paragraphs, with spoilers.

We’re a few decades into the future, and the global climate is deteriorating. Sea levels are rising, day-time temperatures in many parts of the world are too hot for humans to endure, and a ‘whirling dervish troposphere of superstorms’ wreaks havoc. People struggle through outbreaks of ‘COVID-24 and COVID-27’ and other terrors and horrors. The book’s opening sentence is: ‘Houston’s air was too hot to support airplanes.’ This is a problem for Saskia, one of the book’s three main characters and Queen of the Netherlands. A hands-on progressive monarch, Saskia is flying her own jet to Texas to meet with an elderly billionaire named T.R. Schmidt, who has a plan to address the climate catastrophe She diverts her plane to Waco, but on landing she smashes into a troup of feral hogs dashing across the runway.

She is helped from the wreckage by Rufus, a swine-hunter who is chasing one pig in particular, a gigantic wild sow called ‘Snout’ who had previously eaten Rufus’s daughter. We get a brief chunk of Rufus’ backstory: a no-nonsense, ex-military man who tried to make a go of a farm until his daughter was killed, and who afterwards went all Captain Ahab on the feral swine, hunting them at night. Saskia happens to have crashed into Snout herself, and Rufus is finally able to dispatch the monster. Rufus joins Saskia’s team, and they trek across Texas to meet with Schmidt. It’s an exciting opening, but the novel soon bogs down into an awful lot of directionless infodump-lumpy wandering about. Interspersed are sections concerning the novel’s third main character: a young Canadian Sikh called Deep Singh but known as ‘Laks’: an outdoorsy, well-built type who travels to India to reconnect with is roots, and afterwards uses his martial arts skills manning the ‘Line of Actual Control’ between India and China.

Those are your three main characters. For the middle 400-or-so pages of this 700-page novel nothing very much happens. Stephenson puts in more infodumps; Saskia and Rufus become lovers (in a fearsomely unerotic scene: ‘Rufus now wished that he had taken an extra minute to put on clean underwear since his penis was getting bigger and rubbing against the mil-spec stitching [of his cargo shorts]’ [273]). Laki gets a reputation as a kung-fu hero, ‘Big Fish’, fist-of-fury-ing at the Chinese. They retaliate by baking his brain with a targeted microwave weapon, after which Laks has to spend a long time in hospital, the Indian government paying for him to be rebuilt as a kind-of Robocop. He’s not properly Laks any more after this eventuality, although he does make his way to the States to join Saskia and Rufus for the big denouement.

That denouement? So: the reason billionaire T.R. Schmidt called Saskia (and representatives from other low-lying sealevelrise-threatened countries) together was to pitch his Big Gun solution to climate change: to shoot very large levels of sulphur (‘sulfur’, as US-citizen Stephenson insists on spelling this word) into the atmosphere, to cool things down. This happens, and has a broadly positive though uneven effect on the climate: temperatures do come down, although the atmospheric sulfur messes with the monsoon in Northern India, causing droughts (‘India’s pissed off’ one of Saskia’s people tells T.R., late in the novel. ‘“What’s India got to be pissed off about?” T. R. asked. “Perhaps,” Wilhelm said, “they regret you did not consult with them before building a giant machine that fucks with the weather.”’ [596] But the drift of the novel is that this intervention, this firing of what the novel calls ‘The Biggest Gun in the World’, arrests the worst of climate collapse.

There’s a shoot-out when T.R.’s compound on the Rio Grand comes under attack, and is defended, mostly by Chinese troops flown in for the purpose. Rufus, who had previously made his living hunting feral hogs for money, tracking them with drones before dispatching them with his rifle, uses his skills as ‘The Drone Ranger’, to help fight off the assailants. Laks is sent in by the Indians to sabotage the sulphur-gun, but gets killed a second, and final, time before he can.

This is, to return to the terms of the Stan Robinson review I link to above, a eucatastrophic sort of story. Stephenson doesn’t tie-up everything with a neat little bow: climate collapse isn’t ‘solved’ with this one neat trick, and the purpose of the Biggest Gun in the World is to slow global temperature rises long enough to allow new carbon-capture technologies to come online. As a solution it is, T.R. admits, ‘messy’. But the whole story is built around this massive intervention. I think this is bad. I don’t mean, or don’t just mean, in terms of the likelihood of the science of this (though obviously this is a jejune ‘solution’: the Earth’s climate is a super-complex system, and altering one single variable is not going to reset it in one fell swoop). I mean it’s bad in terms of the story-shape of it, for the reasons I outline in the link above. Not for nothing did Tolkien talk about the eucatastrophe in terms of Fairy Stories—something he did to dignify the fairy story, rather than to denigrate the eucatastrophe, since for him the greatest ‘fairy story’ of all was the sacred narrative of Christ’s passion. I might almost think Stephenson is self-consciously playing with this: for all the tech-thriller specifics of guns and planes and big machines, and all the adventure-story running around and fighting, Termination Shock is fundamentally a fairy story: it’s about how the pig boy shows himself brave and resourceful enough to marry the princess (or, in this case, Queen), It’s about how a happy ending is just waiting there, to be pulled from the story’s hat. It’s mendacious.

"Midnight Mass" (dir. Mike Flanagan, 2021)

A priest arrives on remote island to replace the previous priest who, very elderly, had gone on a pilgrimage to Jerusalem and suffered some unspecified type of health breakdown. The old priest is supposedly on the mainland recuperating; the new priest, Father Paul Hill (played by Hamish Linklater) is a locum, until the old priest gets better. 

Pretty exciting so far, no?

So, this show consists of seven hour-long episodes and as such is somewhere between too long and way too long. The various island characters each get plenty of screen time to act and interact, and also to perform dreary and interminable monologues, all delivered with scads of irksome hefty actorly acting, darling. There are fishermen and their wives, the sheriff, the doctor, the town drunk, various teenage kids, but also two adults who left the island for adventures on the mainland but who have now returned under a cloud: Riley Flynn (Zach Gilford), a venture capitalist who killed a kid on the mainland in a drink-driving incident and has come home after a stint in prison, and Erin Greene (Kate Siegel), his quondam childhood sweetheart who, after some rock-and-roll living on the mainland, is now the island's one schoolteacher, unmarried but pregnant.

There's a twist in the basic way this story is delivered, which I'm now going to spoil for you. For the first three episodes Midnight Mass is a slow-burn study of a religious revival, centring on young Father Hill's charismatic ministry and his ability to perform literal miracles, such that the lame can walk and the elderly start to grow young again. Then the twist in episode 4: the young priest is the old priest, rejuvenated. In Israel he passed from the centre of Jerusalem into a huge, peopleless desert by walking for a few minutes, which seems topographically improbable to me, but what do I know. Out in the wilderness at night he was bitten by an ancient, leathern-winged monster. Rejuvenated by this envampirication, Father Hill has travelled back to the island carrying the old leathery dracul with him in a big suitcase. 

Since then Father Hill has been adulterating the communion wine with his own vampiric blood, thereby passing vampireness, or vampirosity, in vampricially small quantities to the whole population, which explains the apparent miracles. Meanwhile old leatherwing has been flying around at night doing all the things antique vampires like to do: drinking cats, peering in at windows and occasionally killing people. The remaining three episodes of the drama switch sharply into schlock-horror territory: Father Hill, abetted by some of the islanders, plans on turning everyone into vampire. They burn all the boats so no-one can get away, summon everyone to church for the titular Easter midnight mass and then lock the doors. There's a lot of biting and screaming and blood squirting and running around and stuff. 

Twists are tricky things, storytellingwise. They can be cleverly deracinating step-changes in the logic of a text, that make you re-evaluate everything you thought you knew. Or they can be daft, ‘you've been tango'd!’ face-slaps. I had no sense of this Netflix series before watching it, beyond knowing that it was by the Haunting of Hill House geezer, so the ‘oh, it's vampires!’ stuff did surprise me, pleasantly enough. But the twist soon sours, tending to banalise the previous, more carefully observed and unusual drama, and jolting the whole into something far pulpier. It doesn't help that the whole vampire conceit is treated so sloppily.

So, as per your standard vampire movie, sunlight scorches and burns these vampires. Indeed the story's big denouement is that, having turned everyone (except two of the more likeable teens, who escape in a canoe) into vampires, Father Hill and his cronies are caught out: in the orgy of destruction all the island's houses have burnt down and now, as dawn comes, there is nowhere to hide from the sunlight. Oh no! Not one shady spot with covering foliage, not one cave, no cars or vans, not so much as a single tarpaulin (on an island whose economy is fishing, don't forget) to pull over oneself until the comfort of dark: nothing! So all the vampires instantly burst into fire and crumble to dust as the first rays of the sun strike them. But wait: Father Hill himself has been fully vampire for months and months, so much so that he is entirely rejuvenated, and in the show's early episodes he walks around the island cheerfully in full daylight. Some of the islanders, having drunk priestly blood, now cannot be killed, a fact demonstrated with various stabbings and shootings from which they resurrect. Others who have also drunk the priestly blood, but who are pegged as ‘good’ characters, arbitrarily, by the writing, can be killed, and are. 

The story also suffers badly from the Ambridge problem. I mean: the way Ambridge is the only village in England in which nobody listens to The Archers. Here not a single character at any point goes ‘you mean they're ... vampires?’ Nobody mentions Christopher Lee or Twilight or What We Do In The Shadows. The island doctor makes an awkward speech about some strange parasite causing combustability of blood, and none of her audience go: so, vampires. Perhaps Flanagan thought stating the bleeding obvious here would demean the more pretentiously grandiloquent ambitions of the piece. A bum call, I think.