“Zoo City” is the nickname given the Hillbrow inner residential district of Johannesburg. Here live citizens of an underclass dubbed the “animalled,” people who have been saddled with totem beasts, mystical yet tangible icons of their “sins.” (A textual wink toward Philip Pullman’s use of this conceit in the His Dark Materials sequence is sure to provoke a smile.) The animalled began massively manifesting globally in the late 1990s, but retrospectively could be detected as early as 1986. Their appearance marked the Ontological Shift, which has allowed “magic” entry into the world. The animalled humans each receive a shavi, or power, as compensation for their ostracism. But these powers actually read more like the genre-honored psi capabilities beloved of John Campbell & Co. And in fact Beukes has a go at explaining them with science: “Lab studies show that some spells work through manipulating hormone levels, boosting serotonin or oxytocin or testosterone.”
Our juicy-voiced, dirty-mouthed, metaphor-slinging narrator and heroine is one Zinzi December, attached to an affable Sloth for the murder of her brother. Zinzi’s wild talent is a form of psychometry, the ability to mentally discern links and histories between objects and people. Zinzi has cobbled together a dicey, dead-end, off-the-books living by selling her talent for petty quests—finding lost wedding rings, etc.—and by using her old journalistic skills—from her “Former Life”—to pen spammer scams. But then she is hired by a rich and powerful music producer, Odi Huron, to find a missing young female pop star named Songweza. This MacGuffin propels her and us through a rich assortment of places and peoples and incidents, accreting a palpable vision of this recalibrated world.
A native of South Africa, Beukes pumps her novel full of that continent’s manifold cultures, miseries, joys and sensory riches. This hybrid techno-magical milieu is as colorful as African textiles, as noisy and dangerous as a liquor-sodden shebeen, as rhythmic and melodious as the Kwaito music Songweza sings. Departing from the polar opposite literary images of Africa as either a continent of failed states or a repository of mythic nobility, Beuke’s portrait of this lateral continuum establishes Africa as its own heterogeneous sovereign entity, on an equal footing with the First World.
Beukes’s novel has been hailed as another fine instance of noir sf, but if so, her noir is not that of Chandler or Hammett which William Gibson embraced. Rather, Zinzi’s telling and attitude hark back to one of the other top crime writers, Ross MacDonald, and his PI, Lew Archer. MacDonald’s focus on families and their secrets is replicated in Zinzi’s delvings into the brother-sister bonds between Songweza and S’bu, and the in loco parentis misdeeds of Huron. And her tropical Johannesburg maps surprisingly well onto MacDonald’s sun-addled, superficial California. “The urban sprawl thins out as the road deteriorates; kit-model cluster homes, malls and the fake Italian maestro-work that is the casino give way to B&Bs, stables, ironwork furniture factories, and country restaurants.” Kitsch and brand-names and slovenly construction are the uniform surface of the world, even where magic prevails.
On the sf tip, Beukes’s personable familiars tap into the same mythic and fan-pleasing vein as Andre Norton’s The Beast Master and James Schmitz’s The Demon Breed. Humanity’s long dream of a deeper consortium with the rest of unspeaking biological creation is a perennial sf trope. Her exfoliation of how the Ontological Shift would be integrated into society is blueprint-precise (hospitals have special procedures for magical animal bites). And her climax involving perversions of the shavi powers and animal familiars could only arise in the new paradigm she has invented.
The animalled ones fear a kind of dark matter of the soul they call the Undertow. By confronting this fearlessly, Zinzi December proves that the only way to emerge out the far side of any change is by moving relentlessly forward.
100
William Gibson
Zero History (2010)
LIKE SOME arcane and cryptic wizard employing a hieratic numerology to craft his spells, William Gibson likes to work in threes. Far from being impelled by the publishing industry’s fascination with commercial trilogies—for, indeed, his triplets are not even marketed as such, but only observed in retrospect—Gibson’s focus on sequential cycles of three novels seems to arise from his need to employ shifting angles of attack, to make lateral feints and forays against and into his abstruse subject matter.
His most famous set of three books probably remains his first: Neuromancer, Count Zero and Mona Lisa Overdrive, the “Sprawl” trilogy that introduced cyberpunk and cyberspace to the reading public. Following a story collection and a collaborative steampunk novel, Gibson next turned his attention closer to the present with the “Bridge” trilogy: Virtual Light, Idoru, and All Tomorrow’s Parties.
Zero History marks the culmination of a trilogy too new to have been named yet (although by this chapter’s end, an overarching appellation suggests itself), a cycle that started with Pattern Recognition and continued with Spook Country. All three books are set in a recognizable present, Gibson having foresworn traditional sf with the assertion that “fully imagined cultural futures were the luxury of another day....” Some critics have dubbed this new mode of storytelling “speculative fiction of the very recent past.”
And truly, the bones beneath the narrative flesh are remarkably similar. Still following sf’s imperative to dramatize cultural, political and technological changes in visionary ways, Gibson’s newest fiction slides a reality-enhancement filter over his authorial camera lens, offering snapshots of contemporary times that are more CAT scans than photographs, totalizing in a diagnostic readout where the estranging and deracinating forces at play all around us—a sustaining yet potentially poisonous memetic medium we swim in, and consequently ignore—are highlighted and brought into the foreground of the reader’s attention.
Consider Gibson’s current fiction as analogous to the controversial terahertz body scanners being installed at airports worldwide: they both present ghostly yet detailed and embarrassing imagery of the hidden aspects of whatever passes before their eye.
Pattern Recognition (2003) featured a female protagonist, Cayce Pollard, who possessed an almost supernatural sensitivity toward commercial hype. A freelancer, she was hired to track down, among other things, the origin of some viral video being posted on the internet. But the man who did the hiring—Hubertus Bigend, millionaire owner of a firm called Blue Ant—although he was onscreen only minimally in that first outing, would become the dominant figure of the next two books, just as Cayce would be replaced by a new model heroine. Gibson’s rethinking and retooling at work.
The enigmatic Bigend is a relatively young and charismatic Belgian whose name is pronounced “bay-jend,” although he self-mockingly accepts and encourages the easy and common mispronunciation of “Big End.” Money and fame are secondary to him, if not ultimately undesirable. What really floats his boat is surfing the wavefronts of trends and innovations, of winkling out potential new cultural explosions while they are still sputtering squibs. He is, in essence, the ultimate coolhunter, and tends to employ people possessing similar gifts. Curiously, Cory Doctorow’s recent Makers features a very similar mover and shaker, Landon “Kettlebelly” Kettlewell, leading a reader to ponder exactly why that archetype is assuming greater prominence in today’s culture.
In Spook Country (2007), Bigend employs Hollis Henry, female ex-member of an eccentric pop group called the Curfew. He sets her on the trail of what, at the time of the book’s publication, was called “locative art,” but which today has been subsumed under the broader heading of “augmented reality.” Parallel to Hollis’s strand is that of a clever and sensitive drug addict named Milgrim, co-opted by the Feds and sent after some mysterious people who might be terrorists, but who turn out to be principled avengers of wrong-doing. One of these fellows is named Garreth, and he becomes Hollis’s lover.
Zero History opens up about a year or so later. Hollis and Milgrim, relocated to London from the USA, continue to work for Bigend. The utterly believable and easy-to-love
Hollis remains essentially the woman we came to know in Spook Country: a wry, savvy, wary and principled artist and survivor. She’s a nicer version of Cassandra Nearing, ex-punk photographer from Elizabeth Hand’s Generation Loss (2007).
But Milgrim has undergone a rejuvenation, having been detoxed at Bigend’s great expense through an experimental method of multiple total blood replacements. It is Milgrim, in effect, who is starting out at “zero history,” a condition that also echoes much of twenty-first-century existence, as the restless citizenry of the planet seeks to forget or to mashup humanity’s inconvenient past in a fit of “atemporality.” In fact, the ratio of authorial interest and focus has been reversed here from earlier. Whereas in Spook Country the storytelling was about sixty-forty in favor of Hollis, here Milgrim’s personality and fate assume dominance. (One might well assume that Milgrim is named after Stanley Milgram, famed psychologist who often seemed intent on stripping down the human psyche to its essential building blocks, much in the way that Gibson’s Milgrim has been rebuilt.)
The MacGuffin is a “secret brand,” a line of clothing known as Gabriel Hounds. Bigend wants to lay his hands on the creator of this anti-product, and sets Hollis and Milgrim to ferreting out the origin of the clothing. But they unfortunately intersect with a semi-deranged ex-military type named Michael Preston Gracie, as well as his mean sidekick Foley, and a simple investigation turns deadly. Add in Hollis’s dirty-tricks boyfriend Garreth, her two ex-bandmates, and a Federal agent named Winnie Tung Whitaker, among others, and Gibson has a recipe for a complicated and farcical thriller.
Mention of the thriller mode raises the issue of Gibson’s altered taste in narrative templates. His earlier books were famous for their noir influences. But this latest trilogy firmly adopts the armature of the simon-pure caper/thriller/espionage novel: a bit of John LeCarre, some Elmore Leonard, some Carl Hiassen. (Gibson’s mordant, droll humor is an aspect of his writing frequently overlooked.) A Mission Impossible-style climax here would have seemed totally out of place in his earlier works. And in fact, one suspects that the formula employed in these three books even offers a sly nod to Charlie’s Angels: mysterious Mr. Big(end) sends his wily women on various secret and dangerous assignments.
But of course, if with one eye completely closed and the other half-shut, a reader could view Zero History as Gibson’s Charlie’s Angels script, with eyes fully open the same reader would see Gibson’s evergreen deep tropes and themes utterly intact. His Pynchonesque preoccupation with paranoia and with subterranean movements and factions remains on display, as does his Ballardian fascination with the surfaces of the material world. Just as Ballard posed the existential and koan-like question, “Does the angle between two walls have a happy ending?” so too does Gibson’s intense and minute particularity, concerning such things as Hollis’s luxe hotel room, induce a kind of slippery, almost Phildickian apprehension in the reader, a sense that quotidian reality is a loose warp and weft we continually re-weave to keep from falling through to our doom.
One notable aspect, however, about the new-model William Gibson different from the younger version is a kind of cooling down of affect and tone. This might derive simply from the author’s aging, or represent a deliberately dispassionate strategy in dealing with the confusing postmodern world. The white-hot impatience and drive of his earlier protagonists is missing nowadays. Sex, for instance, is hinted at and spoken of, but never indulged, either on- or off-screen. Moments of high drama are few and far between, and when they do occur—such as the collision of cars carrying Milgrim and Foley—they are rendered in subdued fashion. It’s all very “The Dude Abides.” The working-hard-just-to-maintain stance, always an undercurrent in Gibson’s fiction, has now expanded to be the default option for navigating the world.
In a Wired essay titled “My Obsession,” Gibson declares, “We have become a nation, a world, of pickers.” Scavengers, in other words, for the beautiful and odd and valuable and fascinating. Given that this same obsession is precisely what drives Bigend, the ultimate engine of all three books, we might call this latest cycle of Gibson’s novels the “Picker “ series. We all are searching for gems in the manure, says this X-ray-eyed observer.
101
Hannu Rajaniemi
The Quantum Thief (2010)
THIS EXTRAVAGANT, densely-loaded, intricately playful high-energy novel is the equivalent, for the end of the first decade of the 21st century, of Gibson’s Neuromancer when it launched cyberpunk and closed David Pringle’s volume of best sf novels up to 1984. First of a trilogy, it’s a dazzling attempt to weave into one long story every major idea and method of telling it that today’s sf has devised, and then add some more.
It is about the search for a key, and for keys to open boxes hiding other keys, and itself needs a key to unlock some basic mysteries that are lurking in plain sight. In Finnish PhD string theorist and entrepreneur Hannu Rajaniemi’s astonishing debut novel, Jean le Flambeur is imprisoned in the vast mirrored expanse of the Dilemma Prison. He is the greatest gentleman thief of his time, and is soon to escape. Rajaniemi proffers the needed key, with all bland innocence, in the opening epigraph, a quote from the French writer Maurice Leblanc (1864-1941):
…there comes a time when you cease to know yourself amid all these changes, and that is very sad. I feel at present as the man must have felt who lost his shadow…
—The Escape of Arsène Lupin
Leblanc’s Lupin was the French equivalent of Conan Doyle’s Sherlock Holmes, but with a twist: like le Flambeur, he was a master thief. A flambeur is a flamer, a big-time gambler. So this is not Jean’s true name (and neither was Lupin’s), but marks his occupation. For most English-language sf readers, though, this simple key, and many others scattered through the novel like Easter eggs, will be unavailable without repeated trips to Google.
Jean Le Flambeur, trapped in a deadly iterated Prisoner’s Dilemma game meant to teach him the value of cooperation, is sprung in a daring raid by Mieli who wants her female lover Sydän back and needs the thief’s help. Of course that is just one of the motivational threads in this monstrously complex tale. Escaped to Mars and a gigantic walking city, the Oubliette, Lupin is pursued by 20 year old genius detective Isidore Beautrelt, who is entangled with a cryptic and powerful woman, Raymonde. These names and motivations are taken directly from Leblanc’s Arsène Lupin Vs. Sherlock Holmes: The Hollow Needle, where the task of the brilliant boy detective Isidore is to find his way through a maze of tricky clues and false leads. And indeed a Maze plays a key role in The Quantum Thief, as does memory and forgetting, hiding and disclosure, false names and faces. It is a confection that keeps you on your toes even as it melt on your tongue, like the chocolates that are one of the Oubliette’s specialties.
Rajaniemi carefully chooses terms from Finnish (the intelligent, saucy spacecraft Perhonen is a butterfly, the alinen is the substrate of a vast cyberspace, Mother Ilmatar is a goddess from the national Finnish epic, the Kalevala), Russian (the enslaved minds or gogols are a pun on Nikolai Vasilievich Gogol’s novel Dead Souls, while the Sobornost collective mind ruling the inner solar system is a borrowing from Russian precommunist mysticism), plus scads of French. But the teasing search provides its own pleasures, as does the deluge of neologisms and borrowings that decorate the surface of The Quantum Thief.
Young Isidore is called in early to investigate the baffling murder of “Marc Deveraux. Third Noble incarnation. Chocolatier. Married. One daughter…. As always in the beginning of a mystery, he feels like a child unwrapping a present. There is something that makes sense here, hiding beneath chocolate and death.” Deveraux’s mind has been stolen and hidden in plain view, and in solving the crime Isidore manages to get his face in the papers, something he really didn’t want in this society based on a technology of gevulots (Hebrew for “borders” or guarantees of privacy and containment). The city is a masque of people in masks, blurry or invisible unless they allow access.
All of this politesse is
handled by the exomemory system, which of necessity must be utterly sacrosanct—but, Isidore deduces, has apparently been breached and tampered with. He hopes to join the company of the tzaddikim (Hebrew for the righteous elite who represent justice), and has been taken under the wing of a tzaddik, the Gentleman, whose metallic mask hides more than a face. Meanwhile, le Flambeur is drawn into his most audacious, risky heist and saved by the quite literal wings of Mieli, whose augmented body and brain serve the immensely powerful posthuman pellegrini. (Joséphine Pellegrini, as it happens, is a foe and lover of Arsène Lupin. Marcel, Gilbertine and Bathilde are from Proust’s In Search of Lost Time. None of this name-dropping can be accidental, nor anything as simple as whimsical borrowing from the canon of European crime and literary fiction. Watching how all this masking and unmasking works out will be part of the pleasure of the unfolding trilogy.)
The book seethes with action, vivid and inventive decoration, peril and audacious escape:
Mieli shatters the pseudoglass with her wings. The shards billow across the room in slow motion like snow. The metacortex floods her with information. The thief is here, the tzaddik there, a fleshy human core surrounded by a cloud of combat utility fog…. Then her wings’ waste-heat radiators are blocked too, and she has to drop back to slowtime.
The tzaddik’s foglet-enhanced blow is like colliding with an Oortian comet. It takes her through a glass shelving unit and the wall behind it. The plaster and ceramics feels like wet sand when she passes through it. Her armor screams and a quickstone-enhanced rib actually snaps. Her metacortex muffles the pain; she gets up in a cloud of debris. She is in the bathroom. A monster angel stares at her in the bathroom mirror.
Science Fiction: The 101 Best Novels 1985-2010 Page 35
