Literary Wonderlands

by Laura Miller

  From the heady, super-modern heights of the Sprawl, Case and Molly head to Istanbul. If Chiba City is ruthlessly carving out the future and the Sprawl is aggressively defining the “now,” Istanbul is where the past and present co-exist, albeit uneasily.

  Istanbul’s juxtaposition of the sleekly modern—from the airport to the interior of their hotel—and the crumbling, but inescapable past—“crazy walls of patchwork wooden tenements”—is apparent all throughout the city. Case and Molly are joined by a corrupt member of the local secret police, indicating that the political situation is no more settled than the landscape.

  From Istanbul, the crew, now accompanied by the sadistic illusionist Peter Riviera, head to Neuromancer’s most exotic destination, the space station Freeside. Freeside is “Las Vegas and the Hanging Gardens of Babylon,” a playground for the ultra-rich and extremely privileged. Built and completely owned by the Tessier-Ashpool family, Freeside serves as “brothel and banking nexus, pleasure dome and free port, border town and spa.” An artificial night sky comes complete with fake constellations showing “playing cards, the faces of glass, a top hat.” Drones and other invisible servants clean up the clutter, so the wealthy tourists can spend their time completely undisturbed.

  Initially, Case and the others remain outside of the space station itself, in a tiny cluster of ships called Zion. Of all the places, Zion is the only one at ease with itself—particularly incredibly given its ramshackle nature. Only parts of Zion have gravity, the rest connected by corridors of freefall. The structure is makeshift, reminding Case of the”‘patchwork tenements of Istanbul,” but here, they hold together, as if they have found where they belong. Founded by five workers who refused to return to Earth, the people of Zion have made their peace with the complexity of the external world by applying metaphor—everything out there is “Babylon,” while within Zion is the love of Jah. Case is a hyperkinetic urbanite and struggles with the langorous pace of Zion, but even he begins to sense—if not appreciate—the peace of this place.

  By contrast, Freeside is a slick, and far less comforting, place. The space station has an unusual spindle shape, which leads to complex (and not entirely consistent) gravitational effects. The bulk of Freeside is given over to a hub of hotels, casinos, night clubs, and high-end shopping. The space station contains “outdoor” elements as well, including lakes and a velodrome. Anchoring it all, filling an entire “segment” at one end of Freeside, sits the Villa Straylight, private and impregnable, the home of the Tessier-Ashpool family. The Villa reflects the clan’s philosophy: their rigid control of finance, technology, and property through elaborate mechanisms. But it also captures their insanity and their decline, the hubris of their created world is dissolving into dusty relics.

  Case’s travels through the worlds of Neuromancer take him from impeccable hotels to grimy backstreets, from the physical and metaphorical depths of the underground to the heights of corporate rule. Each destination highlights a different way in which humanity relates to both technology and temporality. In Chiba City, hustlers scramble over scraps of data, selling stolen hard disks in a desperate bid to live another day. In the Sprawl, strangely immutable corporations create a rapidly accelerating cacophony of trends, products, and even celebrities. In Istanbul, the past and the present are at constant war. And in the Villa Straylight, the circle completes, with the Tessier-Ashpool clan again using technology in a bid for life—cryogenics to stay young; artificial intelligence to stay financially potent. The same hustle; the same battle against the inexorable approach of time.

  In the matrix, however, time does not exist—explaining, to some small degree, Case’s obsession with returning to cyberspace. In Neuromancer, the matrix is defined loosely, often more in terms of its scale than its aesthetics. Gibson describes his vision of cyberspace as “a consensual hallucination experienced daily by billions… a graphic representation of data abstracted from banks of every computer.” When Case jacks in—porting his consciousness into cyberspace—he leaves the physical world behind. Aches, soreness, abstract sensations like the passage of time, guilt, or emotional longing: All shed when Case enters cyberspace. Neuromancer introduces a mechanism where Case spends much of the book “flipping” back and forth with a VR device, reversing between the abstract vastness of cyberspace and the vigorous physicality of Molly’s sensations. With every abrupt change in perception, the reader gets a fraction of what Case must feel—the shift from languorous contemplation of the universal to grubby, painful reality.

  Visually, Neuromancer’s cyberspace is surprisingly simplistic. Case describes “lines of light ranged in nonspace,” but more often than not, data is arranged in geometric patterns. More complex data—an AI, a lethal virus—has more facets, but still moves largely as a flow of patterns.

  However, this “unthinkable complexity”—these “bright lattices of logic”—are merely the tip of the iceberg. In Case’s interactions with Wintermute, the Tessier-Ashpool’s AI, he’s transported to a realm that’s indistinguishable from the real world. The AI serves up a level of stimulus that, although dreamlike, is rendered in perfect detail. The only absence is imagination: Wintermute can pull images from plugged-in minds, but can’t create anything new. In this private cyberspace, Case wanders down a perfect beach in Morocco as well as locations from his own memory. The artistic detail of Wintermute’s cyberspace hints at the infinite potential of technology, and its limitless future.

  At the end of Neuromancer, the matrix reveals two additional facets. The first is that Case’s quiet, personal vision—the beach placed in his mind by Wintermute—seems to take on a life of its own, complete with sentient residents. Whether these are fragments of memory or new intelligences is left unexplored. Also left unexplored is Wintermute’s cryptic hint that there are other intelligences “like it” out there—and by that, the AI indicates the Centauri System. Despite being a graphic metaphor for the transfer of data, the child of “video games” and military software, cyberspace has extended beyond the reach of humanity—in multiple ways.

  MARGARET ATWOOD

  THE HANDMAID’S TALE (1985)

  “God is a National Resource” in this remarkably powerful, feminist dystopian novel about a repressive American theocratic dictatorship.

  In 1984, when Margaret Atwood began writing her dystopia set in a near-future America, she made the decision not to include technology that was not already available, nor anything human beings had not already done in some other time or place, so she could not be accused of, as she put it, “misrepresenting the human potential for deplorable behavior.”

  The transformation of the U.S. into a theocratic dictatorship known as the Republic of Gilead has been brought about by true believers, religious fanatics driven by a determination to establish God’s kingdom on Earth, much as the Puritan settlers (who included some of Atwood’s ancestors) were determined to do in seventeenth-century New England.

  Prior to the beginning of the novel, fundamentalist Christian extremists assassinated the president and Congress, pinning the blame on Islamic terrorists and allowing their army to declare a state of emergency, in which the Constitution is “temporarily” suspended, news is censored, identity cards issued, and, with the new religious rulers in place, new rules imposed. Overnight, women lose the right to have jobs, or bank accounts, or to do anything except submit to the will of their husbands. And all are subject to the rule of the Commanders of the Faith, who claim biblical authority for every act, having abolished any distinction between church and state.

  The narrator of The Handmaid’s Tale is a young woman known only as Offred—“Of Fred”—designated as the legal concubine of a high-ranking Commander whose first name is Fred. Only a few years before, she had a name and a job, a husband and a child, friends, and freedoms she took for granted. But the family left it too late to cross into Canada with fake passports, and now her husband is either dead or in detention, her daughter adopted by a childless couple. The only thing keeping Offred fr
om being shipped off to perform slave labor in “the Colonies” is the possibility she might bear a baby for the Commander and his wife. For another major element driving this bleak vision of the future is that from a multitude of causes—including radiation, pollution, and untreated STDs—there has been a steep drop in human fertility, so women of child-bearing age and proven fertility are very valuable.

  The biblical book of Genesis includes the story of Jacob, who married two sisters, Rachel and Leah. When Rachel produced no children, she told Jacob to impregnate her maid, Bilhah: “and she shall bear upon my knees, that I may also have children by her.” Thus, under a regime that fears and mistrusts all science, preferring to find the answer to every problem through selective reading of an ancient book, the solution to childlessness, at least in the upper ranks, is to establish Rachel and Leah Centers for the indoctrination of “handmaids” to be assigned to the households of all childless Commanders. (Naturally, the centers are not named after the handmaidens who had Jacob’s children, but after his wives.)

  In Gilead, society is rigidly hierarchical and divided by gender: Commanders of the Faith at the top; below them the Eyes (secret police), then Angels (soldiers), Guardians (low-level police duties), all male civilians, and all women. Women have no power of their own, and are valued only as wives and the producers of babies. Some unmarried women are assigned other roles by the state—the “Aunts” who indoctrinate and control those who have been selected as potential surrogate mothers and “Marthas” who work as cooks and cleaners. A few women survive by practicing the oldest profession—a brothel known as Jezebel’s is permitted to thrive, and the men in power take liberties forbidden to others.

  If a handmaid fails to conceive after three different postings she is declared an “Unwoman” and sent off to “the Colonies.” This is a euphemism for forced labor camps, where lives are brutal and short. Women likewise become “unwomen” if they refuse to submit, or the men in power have no more use for them.

  Women are not the only victims of this repressive, rigidly stratified, coercively heterosexual, white dictatorship. Enemies of the state regularly tortured and then executed include Catholic priests, Quakers, doctors (if they ever performed an abortion, prescribed contraception, or are accused of having done so), and “gender traitors.” African-Americans, called “Children of Ham,” have been resettled in distant, underpopulated areas such as North Dakota, now designated a “National Homeland,” and Jews were given a choice between conversion and emigration to Israel.

  Offred’s life as a handmaid is relatively easy, but deeply boring. Most of her time is spent waiting. The occasions when the Commander must attempt to impregnate her are as de-sexualized as intercourse can possibly be (“This is not recreation, even for the Commander. This is serious business. The Commander, too, is doing his duty.”) and she wonders if it is worse for his wife, or for her. Her room is as bare as a prison cell, almost everything we would take for granted is classed as a luxury (hand cream) or a sin (reading). She is marked out by her red robes, as the wives are by their blue ones and the Marthas in green. Her daily walk is taken with another handmaid, and they are expected to police each other: If one tries to escape or does anything wrong, the other will be punished, too.

  No one is allowed to suggest that a man could be sterile—infertility is always the woman’s fault. But of course it is known, and the Commander’s wife is desperate enough for a baby to arrange for Offred to spend time alone with Nick, their handsome young chauffeur. Their intimacy, after so much deprivation and misery, is almost enough to reconcile her to her situation. How little it takes, to make someone stop resisting. How easy it is to be distracted.

  Although every aspect of this society is supposedly justified by the Word of God, as presented in the Bible, only the Commanders are allowed to read it, and they use it selectively, to say the least. A famous line from Karl Marx, changed to include the expected relationship between women and men, is attributed to St. Paul when repeated to the handmaids-in-training: “From each according to her ability, to each according to his needs.”

  The city where Offred serves is never named, but it is evidently Cambridge, Massachusetts, home of Harvard University. The university where Margaret Atwood once studied has become the seat of oppression, a detention center, and the site of mass executions.

  Atwood has said that one of the elements that inspired her to write The Handmaid’s Tale was a fascination with how dictatorships work (“not unusual in a person born in 1939, three months after the outbreak of World War II”). She explained: “Nations never build apparently radical forms of government on foundations that aren’t there already. The deep foundation of the U.S.—so went my thinking—was not the comparatively recent eighteenth-century Enlightenment structures of the republic, with their talk of equality and their separation of church and state, but the heavy-handed theocracy of seventeenth-century Puritan New England, with its marked bias against women, which would need only the opportunity of a period of social chaos to reassert itself.”

  IAIN M. BANKS

  THE CULTURE SERIES (1987–2012)

  The Culture is a galaxy-spanning civilization composed of several different races (mostly human) and AIs (Artificial Intelligences, known as Minds); the Culture functions as a post-scarcity utopia.

  The Culture series, ten novels published between 1987 and 2012, was created by Iain M. Banks (1954–2013) as a counterpoint to the conservative American space operas. In those stories, typically, one man saves the universe, restoring order based on the American capitalist system, and operates within a militaristic society in which spaceships are modeled on naval vessels complete with the same chain of command. Banks very carefully subverts every one of those clichés.

  His dynamic characters are as likely to be women as men. Women play significant roles in The State of the Art (1989), Use of Weapons (1990), Excession (1996), Inversions (1998), Matter (2008), Surface Detail (2010), and The Hydrogen Sonata (2012). Even this isn’t the whole story: Throughout, Banks makes it clear it is easy for people to change gender, and practically all do so at least once during their life. This leads to an increase in sexual pleasure while eliminating sexual discrimination. Furthermore, most of what passes for power within the Culture is in the purview of the genderless Minds.

  Nor does a lone hero save the universe. Individuals, even individual Minds, play no more than a small part in the shaping of great events, and often have no knowledge of what their precise part might have been or how successful or not it was in the grand scheme of things.

  Order is not restored, because order is not threatened. Indeed, order is not an issue, since this is a universe in which change is constant. When the Culture finds itself at war (Consider Phlebas [1987], Excession, Look to Windward [2000]), for instance, the very fact of war is considered an embarrassing failure, which leaves a legacy of guilt. The Culture is a nonracist society in which everyone, human, non-human, or machine intelligence, is equal. It is based on a communist model: Banks said, “Money is a sign of poverty. A [check] book is really a ration book.” The Culture, therefore, is a post-scarcity society that has access to all the power needed, and the technological ability to fulfill any need. Out of this has emerged an anarchist system in which there are no hierarchies, no laws, and everyone is free to do as they wish. The Player of Games (1988) explicitly states that the only sanction against any crime is the embarrassment of it being known; but in a post-scarcity society the need for crime is largely removed.

  They had no kings, no laws, no money and no property, but… everybody lived like a prince, was well-behaved and lacked for nothing. And these people lived in peace, but they were bored, because paradise can get that way after a time.

  The Culture is portrayed as a utopia, but this is only partly correct. On an individual level, life is utopian. People have an extended lifespan (QiRia in The Hydrogen Sonata is ten thousand years old), there are no constraints, no financial worries, sex is invariably wonderful, and built-i
n drug glands provide an artificial high at a moment’s notice. But such an existence can be boring without purpose, so people risk their lives in extreme sports, or become involved in the affairs of other races. On a political level, therefore, the Culture has a more imperial and less utopian aspect.

  The Culture is an expression of Banks’s atheistic humanism, following what Ken MacLeod calls “pan-sentient utilitarian hedonism”: The greater good leads inevitably to the greater pleasure. But again this is not straightforward. Increasingly, the novels concern the Culture’s failure to Sublime, to move to the next level of being, a move equated with death or ascent to heaven. In the later novels in particular, the Culture often finds itself in conflict with religious symbols: godlike aliens, artificial hells, a demonstrably true religious book.

  While outwardly fast-paced space operas are filled with dramatic action, immense artifacts, and great jokes, the Culture asks profound questions about the nature of utopia and of atheism.