2021 Wrapped

This was going to be a list of 'non-work' stuff, but those lines have blurred quite a bit. 

Science fiction

Vector, the critical journal of the British Science Fiction Association. We did two issues, with me settling into my new role of editor-rumored-to-be-at-large. Editing #293 (Chinese SFF) was mostly the work of Polina Levontin and guest editors Yen Ooi and Regina Kanyu Wang, and #294 (SFF and Class) mostly that of Polina and guest editor Nick Hubble.

Cover art by Cao Fei.

Cover art by Sinjin Li.

To check these out, become a BSFA member. (Some 2019-2020 issues are also now available to download open access).

On my flying pink sofa, I zoomed around to some conferences and things. At the LSFRC conference on Activism and Resistance I gave a paper called 'Abolish Money': the text is here. And Francis Gene-Rowe and Avery Delany and I gave two versions of a panel about games, frames and flames: one at Eastercon and one at the SFRA conference. My bit was called 'Liliputopia' and was about post-scarcity and being small (like Ant-man is, sometimes): slides and notes here. 

ConSpire was an online mini-convention collaboration between the BSFA and the Science Fiction Foundation; sessions are on the Vector YouTube. 

I reviewed Kim Stanley Robinson's climate change novel The Ministry for the Future, TWIIIIICCCCEEE. Once for Aargh with some emphasis on violence, once for STIR magazine, with some emphasis on political economy.

Kim Stanley Robinson's The Ministry for the Future

This review is published in STIR. Consider supporting them with a purchase, donation, or subscription. I also wrote another review here.

Kim Stanley Robinson. The Ministry for the Future (Orbit, 2020). 

In contemporary science fiction, Kim Stanley Robinson is something of a titan. His books tend to be a little titanic, too: big in themselves, and about big disasters involving humans, nature, and technology. His characters are more often scientists, policymakers, and bureaucrats than space pirates or rampaging AIs, but the stakes are as high as in any multi-dimensional sci-fi caper. Sometimes those characters might save the world. Sometimes they rearrange the deck chairs.

Robinson is probably still best-known for the Mars trilogy, published in the 1990s. In good utopian fashion, it’s a tall tale in an exotic locale which, rather than being mere escapist fun, probes pressing problems in the real world. What happens on Mars doesn’t stay on Mars. No, it defamiliarises the world around us, and hopefully helps us to see its possibilities anew: if we could start from scratch (sort of), what laws and institutions would we choose? The more recent Aurora (2015) feels like a pained clarification: OK I know I wrote all the stuff about terraforming Mars, but we do only have one planet! Robinson’s chonkiest book is Green Earth (2015) – originally three chonky books – which adroitly explores the intersection of science, policy, and climate. It paved the way for his latest, The Ministry for the Future (2020).

The Ministry for the Future is a fizzling cornucopia pouring forth vignettes, micro-essays, lists, fictional eye-witness accounts, notes from meetings, and even prose-poem riddles, to peer ahead into the coming decades. It really tries to tell the story of the whole planet — refugees, billionaires, protestors, policymakers, partygoers, carbon atoms, caribou, all of us — while confessing that task to be impossible. The two threads that tie it all together are climate change, and the titular Ministry for the Future, established to

advocate for the world’s future generations of citizens, whose rights, as defined in the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, are as valid as our own. [...] [The Ministry] is furthermore charged with defending all living creatures present and future who cannot speak for themselves, by promoting their legal standing and physical protection [...] 

The vision laid out is guardedly optimistic. It is also evasive. Sometimes, a commitment to realism means finding ways to leave things out. Novels often tell us, “This happened, so that happened.” But this novel more often tells us, “This happened. Then that happened. Maybe they’re connected?” Nevertheless, I’ll plunge in with a summary, however crude. This novel definitely won’t be everyone’s cup of tea. The more summaries the better.

So what does Robinson’s positive vision of the future look like? I think it involves six main factors. First, Robinson imagines a proliferation of diverse economic models, at many different scales, adapted to local settings. Within that pluralism, there is an overall trend toward re-commoning and democratising. He argues that there is a postcapitalism already rooted in a patchwork of existing movements: “a rearrangement of various elements of old plans [...] Mondragón, Kerala, MMT, blockchain, Denmark, Cuba, and so on: all the elements had been out there working all along.” But he also points to the importance of planning alternative economic arrangements in the abstract, even if many details must be provisional. When a crisis strikes, there must be models to turn to. 

The second factor is speculative climate technologies. Negative emissions tech draws carbon out of the atmosphere; scientists and engineers pump water out from under glaciers in an attempt to slow their slide into the sea; planes trail aerosols into the atmosphere like plumes of artificial volcanic ash; and vast tracts of the Arctic Sea are dyed vivid butteryellow to bounce more sunlight: 

Geoengineering? Yes. Ugly? Very much so. Dangerous? Possibly. [...] Necessary? Yes. Or put it this way; the international community had decided through their international treaty system to do it. Yet another intervention, yet another experiment in managing the Earth system, in finessing Gaia. Geobegging.

The novel is careful not merely to cheerlead for geoengineering. It’s very clear that techno-fixes are no substitute for deep political and economic system change. But nor does the novel dramatise any of the worst-case geoengineering scenarios, nor explore, in the words of Climate Engineering in Context, “the unequal capacity between states to research and deploy the technologies,” or how to empower “countries and demographics that will suffer from the changed environmental conditions that result from engineering the climate.” For what it’s worth, I think Robinson is far too soft on geoengineering. The unintended consequences of climate technology (or attempts at novel technology) is an area where hard science fiction could have a lot more to say.

Third, with palpable reluctance, Robinson gives state power a leading role. Another recent novel, Cory Doctorow’s Walkaway (2017), arrives at an optimistic future via a more anarchist route. Robinson’s Ministry for the Future might be read as a tacit rejoinder, saying: some things we can’t walk away from, however much we want to. Instead, Robinson has a consortium of central banks roll out a novel financial technology. They issue a “carbon coin,” initially valued at one coin per tonne of CO2 sequestered. Robinson imagines plain old carbon taxes too, to make market prices better reflect the real social and environmental cost of goods and services. However, it’s carbon coin that gets the limelight:

[...] the proposal for a carbon coin was time-dependent, like a budget, with fixed amounts of time included in its contracts, as in bonds. New carbon coins backed by hundred-year bonds with guaranteed rates of return, underwritten by all the central banks working together. 

The logic here is that of money creation. These carbon coins are created out of nothing to pay for decarbonisation projects. The complexity of certifying decarbonisation, including the temptation to deceive – especially whenever you can get paid to not do something! – gets noted, but not really dwelled upon.

The fourth factor is dethroning Big Tech, and adopting its tools for new purposes. The Ministry for the Future rolls out “YourLock,” a kind of socially-owned data trust platform: “a single account on YourLock, which was organized as a co-op owned by its users, after which you had secured your data in a quantum-encrypted cage and could use it as a negotiable asset in the global data economy.” This sounds a bit better than Andrew Yang’s recent Data Dividend proposal (“Yang’s data dividend would ultimately reinforce existing inequities by playing corporations’ own game,” writes Edward Ongweso Jr. in Vice), although the devil’s in the details. The novel is also keen on blockchain, especially as a tool against tax evasion. However, it doesn’t dwell much on the carbon footprint of blockchain at scale (the Cambridge Bitcoin Electricity Consumption Index would be a good reference here), or how useful a cashless society can be to authoritarian surveillance and control (something Brett Scott has written about eloquently).

Rewilding and ecological restoration, including the creation of huge wildlife corridors, is the fifth major factor in this optimistic narrative. In a way, the novel itself is mimicking the goal of the Ministry for the Future. It seeks to uplift voices, to unstop the myriad strange throats strewn throughout nature. A vast and varied polyphony is assembled here, encompassing the human and more-than-human world. The novel even plays with non-human first person narration. These chapters are gleefully, nuttily anthropomorphic. It's not a sober, philosophical search for “what it is truly like to be a carbon atom”; it’s more like the carbon atom popping up like Clippie: “It looks like you’re trying to make the planet unlivable! Would you like some help?” 

I think there are two wolves inside Kim Stanley Robinson. There is a strong reverence for the sanctity of the more-than-human universe. And there is the reverence for the extremely human scientific and bureaucratic nature-based solutions that rewilded those two damn wolves in the first place. One inspiration is the Half-Earth Project, “working to conserve half the land and sea to safeguard the bulk of biodiversity, including ourselves.” So while there is a chapter about what might be the founding of a new religion “to express our love, to take the responsibilities that come with being stewards of this earth, devotees of this sacred space, one planet, one planet,” it’s really in this preoccupation with wildlife corridors – plus a few scattered scenes of natural description, as characters skirt over Antarctic ice, or observe the revelry of marmots amid Alpine wildflowers – that Robinson conveys a sense of nature’s inherent value.

The novel also commendably pulls together the perspectives of slaves, prisoners, refugees, the displaced, the grief-stricken, the heat-scarred. At the same time, I do wonder about weighting and emphases here. For instance, refugees are an important part of the story, but a passive one. A new generation of Nansen passports are introduced, as international protection for the world’s vast and growing refugee population. But we don’t really see them in use. Similarly, popular protest and grassroots activism is declared every bit as significant as the politicking of politicians and non-government organisations ... but don’t quite get the column inches to prove it, notwithstanding some euphoric revolutionary fervor in France, plus some amazing stamina from Hong Kong. Automation and post-work imaginaries don’t really feature at all.

Then there are the paramilitary actors. And here we have this optimistic vision’s final puzzle piece. Blowing up things – and often people. These paramilitary campaigns aren’t Leninist vanguards trying to seize state power. Rather, they aim to change the environment in which commercial power operates. “After several years of container ships being sunk on a regular basis, taken out by drone torpedoes of ever-increasing speed and power, the shipping industry had finally begun adapting to the new situation.” At the same time, this violence isn’t just about incentive design. It’s also about self-defense, desire, justice, and revenge. It is personal.

It was a question of identifying the guilty and then finding them and getting to them. The research and detective work was done by another wing. A lot of the guilty were in hiding, or on fortress islands or otherwise protected. 

The paramilitary action happens mostly off-stage, like the battles of Ancient Greek tragedies. Mainly the novel focuses Mary and Frank, two characters at the edges of this underground war. At first I strongly disliked that decision.  For a novel usually so intent on solutions, however uncomfortable and uncertain, it didn’t feel right to depend so much on these paramilitary operations, yet say so little about them: like they were someone else’s problems. But I think the decision has grown on me. Frank and Mary are at least what Vicky Osterweil calls “not-non-violent.” Frank seeks to join a paramilitary cell and is rejected; he tries to operate as a lone wolf but flounders. Mary heads up the Ministry, and approves the finances for its black ops wing, although she has no real idea what they’re up to. These are perhaps stories that don’t get told often enough: the stories of folks who don’t find themselves on the front lines, yet who also don’t distance themselves psychologically, politically, or ethically from those struggles. They do what they can. 

If this is an optimistic vision of the future, let’s remember what counts as optimistic in 2020. This is still a future which contains almost unimaginable suffering and loss. Robinson gives us a glimpse of that, quite early on. Then he largely sets it aside. That early glimpse lingers throughout the book, and beyond. 

There is plenty to quarrel with in this book. It is a book about blundering on with as much wisdom and hope as you can muster, and it puts its carbon coin where its mouth is. A book like this is meant to spark conversation. I hope some sparks fly.

Slightly tweaked from published version.

Conjurations #1: Reliquary

Conjurations is a new free TTRPG zine from Conjured Games, and the first issue, Reliquary, has a loose theme of relics. I contributed curator's notes on some cursed objects, drawn by Ewerton Lua for last year's Inktober challenge.

Applied Hope games jam

A slow games jam Sad Press Games and Vagrant Ludology ran this summer, acting as a strange attractor for an amazing cluster of utopia and solarpunk themed tabletop roleplaying games and miscellaneous other things. Check them out.

Abolish Money

This was originally given as a paper at the London Science Fiction Community's Activism and Resistance conference in 2021.

By money, of course, I don’t just mean coins and banknotes. I mean money itself. This paper is, like much science fiction studies, and much science fiction, about what is unthinkable, and what is thinkable. And it's about what conditions sustain the thinkability of the thinkable, and how those conditions transform over time.

I propose that until quite recently, the abolition of money has been unthinkable. 

This may come as a surprise to some of us. For instance, to Fredric Jameson, whose genealogy of Utopia begins with the fact that Thomas More could fantasize the complete elimination of money from social life: money for Jameson leading an “enclave existence” in More’s early modern moment.

I don’t think this is quite right, because I suspect Jameson exaggerates the limited and sporadic presence of money in early modern rural England, if we identify money not only with coin, but more broadly with transferable credit. 

But also, more significantly, I don't think this is quite right, because I'm not convinced that money really is completely erased from More’s Utopia. 

More represents Utopia within a world system, and he states pretty straightforwardly that the Utopians keep reserves of gold and silver to pay for mercenaries, to place bounties on the heads of belligerent princes, or to bribe those princes. Within Utopia, gold and silver are prominent in the material infrastructure that extracts forced labor from incarcerated bodies, since it is from these precious metals that the Utopians fashion the fetters for their slaves. Out-of-town Utopian merchants also enslave and import condemned criminals, and More is quite clear that they pick up a bargain or two. 

So is this money erased? Or is this money demystified? Money shown, very clearly, doing what money does?

More, I think, could not think the abolition of money, though it’s true he tried. This pattern of fudged and bungled and half-hearted abolition appears again and again in utopian literature and then in speculative fiction. 

I want to give you some examples. In Edward Bellamy’s late nineteenth century Looking Backward: 2000-1887, a time traveller visits a future United States where all forms of production and distribution are governed as one big commons. In Bellamy’s post-capitalist economy, each of us contributes equally onerous labor, and each of us receives an equal credit allowance, to claim from the national cornucopia. ‘Prices’ are algorithmically generated, as a rough estimate of the relative difficulty of producing each good. So is this a post-money future? 

The more closely you inspect Bellamy’s credit book system, the more you suspect that this is not money abolished, but money metamorphosed. For example: 

“By the way,” said I, “talking of literature, how are books published now? Is that also done by the nation?”

Any author, it turns out, if they self-publish from their allocated credit, may collect and live off royalties. But Bellamy did not anticipate buyer motives beyond aesthetic pleasure, and so he let slip into his design the seeds of an entire regime of speculation and accumulation based on the legal form of the literary work. Just to give you a glimpse, imagine the oligarch who can buy 10,000 copies of any book to welcome its author to join their elite stratum, and who plies this power to string along hundreds of thousands of readers slash budding authors slash investors. 

Or take Samuel R. Delany’s 1970s ambiguous heterotopia, Trouble on Triton, which is very consciously and explicitly post-money. Yet what Delany calls “money” turns out to be more or less “cash,” coins and banknotes. The protagonist receives digital “credit” which they seem to be able to transfer freely for goods and services. The material shift from money objects strewn throughout the hands and coats and sofas of users, to a digital infrastructure where users have far less control over the legibility of their transactions to powerful actors (including but not limited to the state), is certainly not incidental, but it does not amount to money abolition. Consider that most money, upward of 90%, is already numbers on bank spreadsheets.

Octavia Butler’s Parable of the Sower and Parable of the Talents are near future dystopian works which I think are notable for their portrayal of money’s resilience even amidst the collapse of rule of law. 

On the one hand, Butler verges on the absurdity of a video game where in the midst of hyperviolent Hobbesian bellum omnium contra omnes you can always stumble over to a friendly shopkeeper with a stock of context-appropriate healing potions. Putting Parable uncomfortably close not to right libertarianism per se, but to sharing right libertarianism’s rejection of money as a creature of the state.  

On the other hand, Butler’s work is still keenly aware of money as set of tools within history, whose significance is not predetermined. Money is never transcendentalized as a feature all functioning human societies above a certain complexity threshold. This awareness comes money’s mixed relationship with one of the duology’s main concerns -- slavery, both of the chattel kind, and indentured servitude whereby slaves formally receive wages which go right back to their ‘employers’ for room, board, and interest on unpayably large debt.

In Iain M. Banks’s post-scarcity Culture series I would suggest that drones and ship’s avatars allegorically enact monetary logic, and in his Look to Windward as soon as there is a scarce resource, coveted tickets to a music concert, a system of liquidity suspiciously like money is immediately invented.

These many noble failures to fully imagine the end of money find their counterparts in mainstream macroeconomics’s more ignoble failure even to fully imagine what money is. In brief, money is (a) elucidated via three or four functions, which conflate is and ought, behavior and purpose; (b) defined to exclude innumerable more-than-capitalist indigenous moneys, media, and social technologies; (c) given an incoherent origin story which smuggles capitalist subjectivities and norms into a conjectural primordial barter society.

Money abolition is becoming more thinkable in Cory Doctorow’s 2003 Down and Out in the Magic Kingdom, which imagines a modest and limited economic hierarchy based on techno-magically mutualized knowledge of how grateful everyone is to everyone else; a sort of ideal meritocracy. But it is on the one hand, quite rightly, a very ambiguous utopia, with prescient reservations about surveillance, and about generalized incentive to cultivate a personal brand. And secondly, what fascinates me, is one moment, a key plot point, when it breaks its own rules and portrays its fantastical system temporarily behaving just like money.

Still, I think something profound is shifting here. More recently Karen Lord’s The Galaxy Game, Adam Roberts’s By The Pricking of Her Thumb, and Tochi Onyebuchi’s ‘How to Pay Reparations: A Documentary’  work at similar points of tension; Lord envisioning a dual sphere gift economy which fails to feel at all liberating, Roberts picturing incumbent elites scheming to find a new source of scarcity and therefore money and power, as Virtual Reality threatens us with peace and paradise; Onyebuchi imagining not a failed attempt to abolish money but something nearby: an attempt to recode money’s circulation to complete the abolition of slavery via algorithmic reparations.

So why might money abolition be becoming more thinkable? In a moment I will propose why. But first, I wonder if you are wondering: Why should money be abolished? How can money be abolished?

Why should money be abolished? 

Money should be abolished because it unfairly favors the wealthy over the poor.

But that sounds a little flippant. Let's try again. Why should money be abolished? 

Maybe I don’t want to answer this question right now. But I do want to resist answering it in two quite distinct ways.

First I want to reject thinking of money abolition as any kind of panacea. There are certainly post-money futures which are straightforwardly dystopian. 

But second, I'd argue that motives for abolishing money are incredibly pervasive.  Money has been subject to fierce moral criticism for centuries. But because money abolition has been for so long unthinkable, we steer these criticisms, expressively and interpretatively, in a different direction. 

Why not fund global access to Covid vaccines? Why do the cleaners get paid less than I do? Why fund fossil fuels exploration, instead of renewables, negative emissions technologies, and mitigation and resilience initiatives? I’d encourage us, for the moment, to think of money as a technological tool. It is a tool whose specific uses are frequently criticized. Did you actually buy that sweater? Did you actually commission those nuclear warheads? The point is that any of these criticisms can be reimagined: not, “Is the tool being used incorrectly?” but “Is this even the right tool?” Dissatisfaction with the tool is so widespread, across the political spectrum, I suspect that it is usually not. 

How should money be abolished? I can try to do it by myself, but I’m very busy. But three points. 

One, let’s acknowledge the more-than-capitalist world. Gift economies, kinship economies, mutual aid, more or less democratic and/or deliberative bureaucracies, material balances accounting, decision support tools, alternative and complementary moneys, time banks and LETS schemes, Indigenous moneys, the accounting practices of Net Zero transitions and the biometric practices of wellbeing interventions, the speculative currencies of science fiction, the avant-garde financial experiments of artists and activists. 

In connection with this first point I can offer, in a bewitching concoction of euphoria and grumpiness, two challenges. I would like speculative fiction writers to weave their futures with a greater variety of mechanisms for organising desires and resources. Would like to see more post-money and more alternative money futures. And I would like to see more utopian and SF studies scholars take advantage of the extraordinary leeway our discipline gives us, to surface and strengthen the radical post-money potentials in books and media and in everyday experience. For example, every game is a miniature economic system, and harbors potential that can be subjected to design and scaling. Too often, in practice, SF studies simply observes how a science fiction text exemplifies some theory, supposedly estranging or questioning some hierarchy or norm or binary. 

Two, let us acknowledge reversibility. Things can be done in more-or-less monetised ways, with complex implications; captured in the difference between driving yourself or cadging a lift with a friend or hitchhiking vs. calling a taxi or an uber. So when areas of social life have been financialised, they can be de-financialised, perhaps not back to what they were, but to new forms. 

Sticking with money as a technology, there is already a rich body of literature exploring how we might step back from harmful technologies; for example, Langdon Winner’s epistemological Luddism and Ivan Illich’s tools for conviviality are starting points for practical analyses of the use of money in a given context. Maybe money has, all along, been a kind of AI. That opens the possibility of reprogramming it.

Three, let us acknowledge the possibility of incremental progress. Police abolition theorists and activists encounter plenty of hostility and disbelief from folk who have simply never considered that the safeguarding functions that police are supposed to do and sometimes do do can be distributed in different ways across society. Post-work gets scoffed at by those who have not yet discovered, altering the culture of shame around non-monetised. Money abolition, like police abolition and like work abolition, is not so much about subtracting something from the world, as multiplying and cultivating what already exists in the more-than-capitalist world around us. Indeed I suspect these are all aspects of the same project.

So finally, why do I think that money abolition has become more thinkable? Well, because perhaps it is happening. I’m not sure whether it’s useful to contest whether techno-capital’s recent changes represent a radical break, a new regime of accumulation, or merely an inflection or intensification of post-Fordist or post-industrial or neoliberal dynamics. The specific labels aren’t that important. But there are certainly features of contemporary capitalism, with its myriad digital value forms including cryptocurrency and commodified big data, with its ongoing data-driven wave of AI and automation, that are not well-captured by, say, earlier critical theory’s emphasis on reification and alienation. The archetypal subject of capitalism is not homo economicus the isolated, atomic, utility-maximising agent whose inner life can only be vaguely inferred from its economic behavior, but rather a richly connected and reflective social being whose inner life and sociability are at least ostensibly legible in the vast amounts of available data. We cannot straightforwardly call the decisive steering media of contemporary capitalism ‘de-linguistified,’ as Jurgen Habermas did almost half a century ago. In short, perhaps capitalism no longer needs money. 

We might say, then, we need to abolish money, before it abolishes itself.

In Arms

'In Arms,' originally written for Gross Ideas: Tales of Tomorrow's Architecture (2019).

Speculative Public Health in The Physicians of Vilnoc

The word wellbeing might be familiar to many of us as a shibboleth of oppressors and lackeys. We exploit you, we subjugate you, we destroy the ecological basis of life, and we care deeply for your wellbeing: here's an app. (The Out of Office responds: "Thanks for getting in touch. Have the courage to take your boots off our necks, and we'll take the power we need to care for our wellbeing.")

But there is a little more to wellbeing. It is a mixed and contested concept, with roots in moral philosophy, welfare economics, positive psychology, and environmental sustainability. In other words, it’s grounded in debates around the nature of the good life; in the recognition that traditional economic concepts such as utility, and indicators such as Gross Domestic Product (GDP), fail to capture the complexity of freedom and flourishing; in the recognition that health means much more than merely the absence of pathology; and in a holistic concern for a complex, interconnected, more-than-human world. 

Speculative fiction should have things to say about wellbeing. The democratization of wellbeing, its transformation into something more participatory and responsive to the lived experience of health interventions, must therefore be a central concern for utopian and anti-utopian thinking. Speculative fiction should have things to say about public health policy, about health outcomes and health inequalities, about the relationship of health and care . . . What it might wish to say, of course, could mean rejecting these terms and their embedded perspectives altogether. It could mean devising an alternative language.

Has speculative fiction had things to say? Or has speculative fiction struggled to imagine wellbeing policy — or any holistic stance on the myriad factors that inform the health, happiness and flourishing of populations — except where the interested party is some sinister elite, perhaps a paternalistic and unaccountable dystopian government, or a clandestine sect of eugenicists like the Bene Gesserit of Frank Herbert’s Dune? 

Some counterexamples come from a perhaps unexpected direction: epic fantasy. 

Works such as Anne McCaffrey’s Moreta: Dragonlady of Pern (1983) and Tamora Pierce’s Briar’s Book (1999) explore themes such as plagues, quarantine, sanitation, mass vaccination, the influence of socio-economic inequality on health outcomes, and the perils of improperly regulated scientific (magical) research. Lengthy sieges in works like Mary Gentle’s Ash: A Secret History (2000), Umberto Eco’s Baudilino (2002), or K.J. Parker’s Sixteen Ways to Defend a Walled City (2019) dramatise the protection and management of imperilled populations. Magic in works by Robin Hobb, N.K. Jemisin, Ursula K. Le Guin, Vonda N. McIntyre, Brandon Sanderson, and others fantastically reimagine human health and healing within a broader ecological framework and — insofar as such magic systems are concerned with debts, prices, side-effects, balance, resource management, stocks and flows, contracts and the like — within an economic framework too. 

Healing magic is a richly intriguing seam. Dungeons & Dragons and tabletop roleplaying games generally probably have a lot to answer for here, with the frequent emphasis on healthcare as merely the efficient management of a meagre resource pool, and the tendency to elide the experiential dimension of health and wellbeing and focus on health as the capacity to fulfil functions within a relatively fixed division of paramilitary labor. There are plenty of exceptions. A massive critical cultural history of the Hit Point is probably long overdue. 

Lois McMaster Bujold’s The Physicians of Vilnoc (2020), one richly intriguing specimen. The sorcerer Penric is a medical detective posed with the epidemiological puzzle of a new plague, centred on a military outpost. The social dimension of public health is prominent, as Penric proactively manages the risks of rumours, superstition, and panic. 

Many aspects of the tale reinforce a rather conservative and hierarchical health ideology. We are invited to take pleasure in Penric’s competence, experience, and specialist expertise, as he works himself to the bone on behalf of his patients — sick people who sometimes don’t know what’s good for them, and must be slightly misled about the investigations and treatments they are receiving. To some extent, perhaps, the projection of the professionalization of medicine into an early modern fantasy world (the World of Five Gods) may exaggerate the naturalness or inevitability of the dominant paradigm of medical power, and foreclose the possibility of reterritorializing and mutualizing medical knowledge.

The divine order of this universe is solidly anthropocentric too, with Penric’s ‘uphill’ healing magic performed on human patients counterbalanced by ‘downhill’ magical processes that result in the slaughter of fleas, rats, chickens, and the odd pig. 

The nearby community of incarcerated migrants are also soon afflicted but they are, conveniently, so resistive to Penric’s attentions that he never really has to choose whom he cares for. In fact, although Bujold keeps the theme of differential access to scarce healthcare resources bubbling in the background, no ‘Cold Equations’ style hard dilemma ever comes forcefully to the fore. You get the impression that Penric may be making such choices often, but you are not troubled with the details (leave it to the experts). I think I’d venture that nothing Penric or his assistants do is ever really framed as morally questionable. 

On the other hand, even if the quasi-medieval Physicians of Vilnoc does not thematise democracy in any straightforward way, perhaps it has another way of gesturing toward the entanglement of wellbeing and democracy. That is via the fantastical entanglement of entities. First, in a relatively mundane sense, learned Penric is endlessly learning and teaching. And, as Una McCormack points out, “scientific method has to be supported by information gained by divine revelation and folk knowledge.”¹ In this respect, the tale does gesture toward the construction and reconstruction of medical power, and gesture toward the possibility of reconstructing it in far more democratic and participatory configurations.

More fantastically, Penric himself is something of an assemblage protagonist: the character is really Penric and Desdemona, the demon with which he is blended, as well as imprints of a long lineage of Desmemona’s previous ‘riders,’ including nonhuman entities. How large is the universe of morally meaningful beings, and how are we entangled with one another? In this sense, the novella also gestures toward the interconnection of human wellbeing with more-than-human wellbeing, and indeed the role that 'the human' as an immanent concept in history has played in the definition and distribution of the good life. However we define wellbeing, speculative fiction can propose entities with altogether different capabilities, including perhaps capabilities for wellbeing. 

1. "The Cure at Vilnoc: scientific method, revelation, and folk wisdom in ‘The Physicians of Vilnoc.’" In Short But Concentrated: An essay symposium on the works of Lois McMaster Bujold, eds Una McCormack and Regina Yung Lee.  

 

Representation and appropriation

 A hopefully-growing list of creative writing type links.

• Nisi Shawl and Cynthia Ward, Writing the Other
• Elif Batuman, 'Get a Real Degree'
• Jeannette Ng, 'Cultural Appropriation for the Worried Writer: Some Practical Advice'
• Zadie Smith, 'Fascinated to Presume: In Defense of Fiction'
• Adolph Reed Jr., Django Unchained, or, The Help: How “Cultural Politics” Is Worse Than No Politics at All, and Why
• Charlie Jane Anders, 'When Is It OK to Write About Someone Else's Culture or Experience?'
• Nisi Shawl, 'How Not To Be All About What It's Not All About: Further thoughts on writing about someone else's culture and experience'
• Lila Shapiro, 'What the Job of a Sensitivity Reader is Really Like'
• Kit de Wal, 'Don't dip your pen in someone else's blood: writers and 'the other''
• Hiromi Goto, 'Wiscon38 Guest of Honor speech'
• Nisi Shawl, 'Transracial Writing for the Sincere'
• Itxy Quintanilla, 'Cultural Appropriation in Fiction' 
• FayOnyx, Decolonizing Games Resource List
• Bettochi, Klimick, and Perani, 'Can the Subaltern Game Design?'
• Kazumi Chin, 'So You Want to Play Someone of Another Race'
• James Mendez Hodes, 'Best Practices for Historical Gaming'

In terms of writing advice, these are a bit more leftfield but relevant in various ways:

• Stuart Hall, Selected Writings on Race and Difference
• Tuck and Yang, 'Decolonization is Not a Metaphor'
• Eduardo Bonilla-Silva, Racism without Racists
• Frank B. Wilderson III, 'Grammar & Ghosts: The Performative Limits of African Freedom'
• Decolonising Utopia resource hub
• The Combahee River Collective Statement
• Angela Davis, Beyond Abolition Democracy
• Georg Lukács, The Theory of the Novel
• Barbara Foley, 'Intersectionality: A Marxist Critique'
• Vanessa Wills, 'What Could It Mean to Say, 'Capitalism Causes Sexism and Racism?''
• bell hooks, Feminism is for Everybody: Passionate Politics
• Stuart Hall, Maggie Steed et al., It Ain't Half Racist, Mum
• Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, 'Subaltern Studies: Deconstructing Historiography'
• Birch and Heideman, 'The Trouble with Anti-Antiracism'
• Kenneth W. Warren, What Was African American Literature?

Snippets:

“Perhaps instead of thinking of identity as an already accomplished fact, which the new cultural practices then represent, we should think, instead, of identity as a ‘production,’ which is never complete, always in process, and always constituted within, not outside, representation.” -- Stuart Hall

"Bearing in mind that thoughtful pre-publication critique is your best defense against unintended resonances and associations, there are some steps you can take to ensure receiving helpful critiques—and some steps you can skip. To begin with, it’s worth noting that not all those who felt the story’s resonance with the Nazi Holocaust were Jews or descendants of other groups victimized by the Holocaust. That’s good, because it means you don’t have to have a preconceived idea about who you may be unintentionally offending. And you don’t have to run your manuscript by people with exactly the same ROAARS traits as your characters. What you need is a pool of reasonably intelligent, well-informed, and articulate readers." -- Nisi Shawl and Cynthia Ward

"Against this revivalist definition of culture, we need a a materialist conception which looks at culture not as spiritual or religious heritage but as a set of material practices through which people live and produce the meanings of their lives. The starting-point for such an analysis is not the heritage of the past but the actual realities of the present, and one of the things that most crucially matter, then, is the degree of access to cultural goods — such as education or training in the arts — that different classes and social groups have in real life. When we look at culture in this way, we immediately recognise that social conflicts of various kinds, along lines of class, caste, gender, ethnicity, etc. actually leave very little room for all the people, or even majority of the people, to have roughly equal access to cultural goods, that may be shared by ‘a people’ or a whole nation to any significant extent." -- Aijaz Ahmed

"So I’ve tried to strike a balance in my own work, when I write about marginalized people whose experiences are different than my own. I aim for representation without appropriation." -- Charlie Jane Anders

"On reflection, it’s possible to see that Django Unchained and The Help are basically different versions of the same movie." -- Adolph Reed Jr.

"One trend we have noticed, with growing apprehension, is the ease with which the language of decolonization has been superficially adopted into education and other social sciences, supplanting prior ways of talking about social justice, critical methodologies, or approaches which decenter settler perspectives." -- E. Tuck and K.W. Yang

"Very often, I feel people are implicitly asking me for permission. And I understand, there is this weight of expectation and responsibility that you want to be free from. I desperately want to write with the freedom that I felt when I was ten, when I didn’t worry about what other people thought about my work or who was reading it. Self awareness can be uncomfortable, and you think perhaps this can help you return to that state of grace. [...] There is no simple fix that can be done once and allow you to stop worrying about cultural appropriation forever. It doesn’t work like that." -- Jeannette Ng

"You may notice that one profound difference has been left out of this acronym: class. This was a deliberate omission." -- Shawl and Ward

Notes from Beyond Trigger Warnings: Safety, Securitization, and Queer Left Critique

By Christina B. Hanhardt and Jasbir K. Puar, with Neel Ahuja, Paul Amar, Aniruddha Dutta, Fatima El-Tayeb, Kwame Holmes, and Sherene Seikaly.

Some interesting snippets from a roundtable published in Social Text (2020) 38 (4 (145)): 49–76. https://doi.org/10.1215/01642472-8680438.

Neel Ahuja:

[...] Because “antiradicalization” programs like CVE are promoted by liberals as an alternative to traditional warfare, their racialized and militarized forms of surveillance and their extraction of the unpaid labor of students are usually ignored by journalists. The overlap between Obama CVE programs, university communication and public health department, and antibullying discourse is particularly salient. CVE programs targeting Muslim youth work on the assumption that the racism and resulting bullying, alienation, and susceptibility to radicalization they purportedly experience is inevitable and individual (rather than produced by geopolitical conditions). Producing digital space as safe space guarded by morally virtuous undergraduate mentors, supervised by liberal faculty, is the proposed solution [...]

Kwame Holmes:

[...] After decades of reactionary, often evangelical attacks on feminist interventions against rape culture, research universities were, by the mid-1990s, the last large institutions to employ and support feminist activisms. Higher ed cities like Columbus, San Francisco, and Austin were also home to more radical feminist formations like the Lesbian Avengers and Cunt Revolt, groups that often collaborated with undergraduates in women and gender studies. On and campus-adjacent feminisms combined calls for women’s physical safety with the need for cultural transformation through shared public emotional processing, informed by a range of psychotherapeutic techniques. These included confrontational street activism, reading groups, poetry slams, healing circles, and more. For campus feminism, affect was not a by-product of activism but a primary subject of intervention. Automatic alerts undercut feminist authority by simplifying the terms of safety, leaving us safe from the more complicated discomfort we experience when asked to interrogate our personal relationship to rape culture. [...] To confront rape culture, to teach affirmative consent, or even to raise the possibility that course content may retraumatize students is to ask campus communities to sit in emotional ambiguities that feel nothing like the “safety” provided by alert systems. [...]

Fatima El-Tayeb:

[...] A number of them [activists] are current or former UCSD students, working until exhaustion, while also fluent in the language of self-care and trigger warnings. In my experience, the latter are often a shorthand for students’ attempts to make sense of their shifting position in the world; that is, this is not necessarily about specific issues or images they are exposed to but about larger fears and stresses. Calls for trigger warn - ings, safe spaces, and especially self-care tend to activate my Grumpy Old Man Fatima persona, but I acknowledge that I come from a not very productive “what doesn’t kill you makes you stronger” background, which is enhanced by being an immigrant into a culture that performs emotion in ways that are still sometimes baffling to me (and I do worry about the many immigrant students from similar cultural backgrounds who might not be helped but, rather, further alienated by this shift in campus culture). In classes, I try to work with community agreements instead, which means we proactively and collectively take ownership of the class room experience, focusing less on avoiding triggers than on strategies to deal with the anger, trauma, and sadness that invariably surface when addressing the experiences of communities of color under racial capitalism [...]

Sherene Seikaly:

[...] To me, coming back to teach in the United States after a decade in Europe and later at the American University of Cairo, trigger warnings looked like another weapon to contain and police. On the first day of my modern Middle East history class, I gave a blanket trigger warning: everything in this course will trigger you. There will be blood. You have to deal. The regime of trigger warnings had placed a barrier between me and my students. It did not take long to wake up. I quickly learned to appreciate and be empathetic to my students, who in the public system often navigate two, sometimes three jobs and face a future of debt, uncertainty, and insecurity. It took me a while, but I came to learn that the language of trigger warnings, as Fatima suggests above, was “often a shorthand for students’ attempts to make sense of their shifting position in the world.” Dismantling the trigger warning as a barrier required two steps. The first was to invite students to search for commonalities in addition to differ ences among the Iraqis, Egyptians, Palestinians, Turks, Kurds, Algerians, Iranians, Israelis, and others they were learning about. The second was to explain that we were not just learning about these other people; we were also learning about ourselves. The tactics and strategies of historical actors are an abundant resource for confronting our realities. Students in the United States today are subject to the ravages of neoliberalism; they understand what it might mean for people in other places. Many students are increas - ingly denied the promises of security and safety. They live the reality that things can always get worse; we do not have to teach them this lesson. The task at hand is to dismantle and repurpose trigger warnings in a way that models radical empathy and provides students with tools to enact it. [...]

Aniruddha Dutta:

[...] I pointed out routine cases of workplace exploitation within nonprofits where trans feminine kothi-hijra staff from working-class and Dalit (oppressed caste) backgrounds cannot even raise allegations without risking their livelihood — thus the exceptionalist attention to sexual assault would result in a safe space only for select middle-class activists who could afford to raise such allegations. Another participant proposed that the collective should be conceptualized as an enabling space rather than a safe space, where complainants would be enabled to share their stories and seek legal help, but the collective would not pronounce judgments or take punitive action. In this context, the imperative of preventing miscarriage of collective justice takes precedence over “safe space,” which emerges as less of a valued ideal relative to many similar spaces within the United States [...]

Aniruddha Dutta:

[...] Safety and safe space thus gather contrasting valences —an aspira - tional tool for equalizing higher education, a neoliberal ruse that tokenizes diversity, a feared capitulation to hegemonic morality — rather than functioning as a coherent logic or discourse, neoliberal or otherwise [...]

Paul Amar:

[...] UCSB is the home of the UC Education Abroad Program; my global studies department has the highest proportion of students in international study opportunities in the entire UC system. Despite their high profile, these programs have been choked by securitization. For example, students were ordered to leave Egypt during the Arab Spring. Subsequently, insurance companies and politicalrisk consultants have refused to authorize the reopening of study abroad in the country. This has had real economic effects on youth in the Middle East, since it led to the near bankruptcy of our partner school, the American University in Cairo. AUC is one of the most important educational institutions in the Middle East, which depends on international student tuition to be able to offer scholarships for less privileged Arab students. And this process has been repeated in a number of sites. The security or risk rating for a site seems to be shaped by generalized notions of cultural otherness, by Eurocentrism, and by political risk experts rather than by dialogue with knowledgeable educators on the ground, much less with youth and student movements in those world regions targeted as at risk. Programs in Paris, Rome, or London are never closed, although students frequently become injured or even arrested during study abroad in Europe. [...] 

Kwame Holmes:

[...] Perhaps the most devastating moment in the experiential and narrative arc of the campus safety response is when, inevitably, the dean or university president announces that the event is over. Often this arrives as a notification indicating that “all is clear.” But is it? There are unreported micro- and macroaggressions on a daily basis. It is impossible for them to know that “all is clear” on their campus. Yet provided campus alert systems allow administrators to create a virtual record of safety, they can avoid accountability for their institutions inability to provide comprehensive safety all members of the campus community [...]

Sherene Seikaly:

[...] Several strategies can facilitate collaborative intentions and outcomes. First, it is crucial to delink safety from discomfort, to embrace risk and diffi - culty as rich opportunities for learning, and to aim for fostering brave rather than safe spaces. Here, too, I am following the leads of Aniruddha, who discusses above enabling as opposed to safe spaces, and Kwame, who sug - gests above that confronting the challenges of our times requires “campus communities to sit in emotional ambiguities.” [...]

Sherene Seikaly:

[...] A third strategy is to insist on antiracism as a shared goal. This insistence infuses the room with a mutual accountability to name, own, and tackle Orientalism, Islamophobia, antiblackness, and antisemitism. Students and scholars of Palestine who are invested in the Palestinian demand for freedom can shy away from engaging antisemitism because of how it has been weaponized to silence critique. This is not a viable strategy, neither pedagogically nor politically. The history and present of antisemitism are crucial to understanding the history of Palestine. Antisemitism is inextricable from historical and contemporary iterations and experiences of race. [...]

Fatima El-Tayeb:

[On 2010 Black Student Union’s declaration of a state of emergency at UCSD.] [...] pressure came not only from the administration but also from nominally radical male faculty taking on leadership roles. Unsurprisingly, this led to the increasing marginalization of female and queer activists who had done much of the exhausting and unglamorous work that had made the movement possible. The end result of this pragmatism was a superficial diversity that could be used by the administration, while hiring and retention of faculty of color, especially Black and Native, remains abysmal and there are consistently low numbers of Black and Native students and a growing hostility toward identity politics and political correctness (also known as anything that would empower people of color). In retrospect, I am still deeply impressed with the students’ commitment, political insights, and strategic smarts and utterly disheartened not so much by the administration’s reaction, which was as expected, but by the failure of progressive faculty of color to support the students’ radical vision, instead using their supposed expertise and power to force them back into a system beyond whose limits most of us seem incapable of seeing, even while it is imploding. If nothing else, this serves as a reminder that the current, seemingly individualized understanding of safe spaces is in part a reaction to a failure of imagination not of a new generation of apolitical students but of our generation of faculty.

Aniruddha Dutta:

The lure of diversity and safety discourse as a bait for free speech trolling, on one hand, and as a mechanism for articulating white/conservative victimhood, on the other, might serve to undo the dichotomy of liberal freedoms versus political correctness that the right-wing machinery relies on. The very slipperiness of safety/diversity politics that permits its uptake by the Right might also frustrate conservative deployments of these terms. Such ambivalence demonstrates the lack of any singular socioeconomic logic behind safety/ diversity discourse seen in my previous response, and its inability to guar - antee a liberatory or reactionary politics by itself.

Kwame Holmes:

Indeed, we too easily forget that the political movements that pro - duced Black studies, women and gender studies, and various iterations of queer inquiry were themselves in a generative (though often uneasy) relationship with psychoanalytic therapeutic methods. Well, to be fair, the we I am referring to here are my fellow historians. Yet as history expands its purview from telling the stories of queer subjects to incorporating queer theory as method, modern Americanists will need to return to the emotive origins of the social movements we study. What happens to our studies of Black Power, when we take seriously Fanon’s career as a practicing analyst? How can we better narrate the conflict between white and Black feminisms if we don’t take seriously Hortense Spillers’s discussions of the impossible subject position of Black women in the West? Can we make sense of the origins of modern homonormativity without always keeping in mind gay liberation’s preoccupation with shame? I guess I’m saying, no, we can’t.

Review: Great North Road (2013)

Peter F. Hamilton, Great North Road (Pan Macmillan, 2013, 1104 pp.) 

This review first appeared in Foundation Vol. 43, No. 118 (Autumn 2014), pp. 135-140. It's been very slightly amended. Thank you to Andy Sawyer, Maureen Kincaid-Speller, Paul March-Russell, and Tony Keen.

There is a body in the Tyne, and its autopsy suggests extraterrestrial incursion. When the case lands on Detective Sidney Hurst’s desk, so do the nebulous agendas of innumerable civil, political, military and corporate elites. Meanwhile, through the shimmer of Newcastle’s stargate, a military expedition strikes out into the vast unexplored jungles of St Libra, Sirius – oblivious to a mustering ecological cataclysm – in search of sentient life. Among them is civilian advisor Angela Tramelo, fresh from serving twenty years for a brutal massacre which she has always maintained was the work of an alien life form; her team is headed by Colonel Vance Elston, the same spook who twenty years earlier tortured her and suppressed key evidence at her trial. We can expect that people on this trip will get crabby. 

The relationship between crime fiction and science fiction is an extremely intricate one. Any work which is serious about synthesizing the two tends to discover its own distinctive pattern of complements, affi nities, tradeoffs and contradictions. Ronald Knox’s fourth ‘fair play’ commandment for Golden Age crime writers (‘No hitherto undiscovered poisons may be used, nor any appliance which will need a long scientific explanation at the end’) suggests one way in which friction may emerge. To hide its solutions in plain sight, the clue-puzzle relies heavily on implication, on a shared social consensus. As often as not, it is not really until the last page of an sf novel that the reader knows enough about its world to start making clue-puzzle-style guesses about its secrets.

Great North Road is not particularly concerned with fair play. Data is supplied in whatever order is presumed to be most exciting. For much of the time, the novel solicitously stokes the possibility that Angela Tramelo really is responsible for the brutal massacre for which she’s been imprisoned. Eventually the backstory becomes interspersed through the main storyline, gradually rolling towards this alarming incident. The pattern of interleaved linear timelines is well established: but when we expect to find Tramelo either exonerated or recast as antihero, instead we confront … an ambiguous aftermath. We have skipped the massacre. Tramelo is scrabbling in panic, slicked with blood, her contribution still indeterminate.

It is especially awkward that Great North Road sustains such indeterminacy whilst we pay frequent visits to Tramelo’s consciousness. Of course, many crime authors invite us to peer into characters’ heads without letting us glimpse their guilt or innocence. Guilty people are often experts at having innocent thoughts. But there must be a difference between allowing leeway for sleights-of-hand and excusing authors for withholding whatever they feel is convenient. So how might we formulate that difference? You could say authors should not artificially keep things from their readers. But that’s only a mildly satisfying way of capturing it. Literature is artifice through-and-through: why does only some of it strike us as illegitimate?

Another approach holds that crime fiction should offer a consistent epistemology. That is, good crime fiction takes a stance on what knowledge is and how it can be achieved. As we read, we learn what happened, but we also learn something about learning itself. The electrifying story tacitly establishes parameters within which many other stories are feasible. Disclosures in Great North Road, by contrast, often seem artefacts of its formal idiosyncrasies. They give us very little that is portable or expandable. Sitting and waiting for it to be your turn to know is not a convincing model of how knowledge is produced. Readers work patiently and attentively through a towering stack of pages. Just like the police investigators they depict, we may be tempted to skim, but risk missing something important if we do. The meticulousness and staying power which the novel requires of us are the same virtues it valorises in Detective Sidney Hurst and his team.

It is interesting that the novel’s dazzling socio-technological premises – interstellar wormhole tech, shapeshifter implants, an elite dynasty of clones, longevity treatments, drugs you take by banging them on your neck – don’t radically reorganize its police procedural dimension. The novel does explore how detection is transformed by a regime of sophisticated forensics and ubiquitous surveillance and archiving. With all this advanced kit, must we basically watch our protagonist click ‘solve’, our only source of narrative tension the progress bar moving to 100%, with its cryptic contour of humps and downhill stretches?

But that is familiar territory for police procedurals with a contemporary or near-future setting. In C.S.I., as in Great North Road, the detection function is distributed across a network of experts and technologies. The middleranking officer occupies the hero slot, though not in quite the same way as the classic sleuth. In integrating a variety of specialist perspectives, the managerial perspective is only primus inter pares, not a transcendental arbiter of salience. There is no subject who experiences every stage of the solution, nor could such calculations in principle be fully performed within human experience. This partial decentring of the detective is mirrored by a partial decentring of criminality; there is a heightened interest in its systemic context, and a decoupling of the execution of social justice from the determination of legal culpability.

Great North Road does not, thankfully, trouble us with the professional fetishism or the glossy state triumphalism of C.S.I. The atmosphere is perhaps more closely matched by The Wire (2002-8). Hurst must bargain, cajole, orate, gain leverage, bend rules, cash in favours. There are no faces, no heels, only tweeners. The priorities of individuals seldom harmonize with those of their job description. Bureaucratic and technological systems don’t function as they should. Great North Road is uninterested in fair play conventions; nor does it seem fully committed to exposing the systematic context of its criminality. The politicking, loopholes, glitches and mercurial surges of social complexity tend to be dictated by storytelling imperatives, rather than providing storytelling with its scope and materials.

John Doe sloshing downstream, for instance, may be a reputable way of opening a contemporary police procedural yet it is unclear why anyone in 2142 should take such pains to put John Clone in the Tyne. The gangland body disposal team can anonymize cyborg corpses and hack into municipal surveillance systems. With relatively comprehensive surveillance of public space, shouldn’t we expect such well-resourced criminality to shift to private space? Is melting a bit of meat and bone in a private apartment really beyond them? But the body is not put in the river by gangsters, to sink without a trace; it is put there by Hamilton, to be found.

The way of life shown in Great North Road is not always minutely reflective of its social, economic and technological infrastructure. There are exceptions, but to sloganize somewhat: Far Future Tech, Near Future Customs, Manners, Mores. This incongruously contemporary cultural atmosphere is not necessarily uncomfortable. A proudly Geordie stargate is, in and of itself, a very fine thing to contemplate. Moreover, it’s possible that this atmosphere has not accumulated by unexamined failures of the imagination, but rather been deliberately wrought, as a self-styled clear-eyed provocation that some things never change.

Exhibitions of extrapolative rigor are one widely acknowledged tactic by which science fiction negotiates its mandate. An awkwardness can cling to tacit claims of rigor when the axioms rigorously worked upon are conspicuously a legacy. New space opera is often spotted proving its seriousness by how responsibly it sponges off a trust fund established by cyberpunk. Less well attested but equally important is the tactic of exclusionary rigor. Here what is necessary is that nothing break the spell. The grizzled capsule pilot who, engrossed in the archipelago of an approaching asteroid field, so much as carelessly sparks up a Camel is in peril of losing his legitimacy as an image of our future. Superfluous innovations are as risky as superfluous relics. Just as nothing must improperly last, so nothing must improperly change.

In Great North Road not much seems to have changed about the aesthetics, habitus and culture of corporations, the military, and the police and prisons. No doubt such choices are mixed up with extrapolative worldbuilding to some extent. But I suspect that how plausible they are is fundamentally a wager about their aesthetic intelligibility. In other words, their plausibility solicits preferences and associations formed independently of the novel’s future history. If men in green fatigues with machine guns don’t look out-of-place milling around in front of a stargate, then that has little to do with how probable that scene really is. It has everything to do with the saturation of the contemporary imagination by images of prevailing military institutions.

There is another front, also closely connected with taste, on which Great North Road doesn’t play it quite so safe. One effect of the central mystery is to pose the question: is ‘the alien’ – in the sense of a monstrous, sentient extraterrestrial organism, perhaps the hegemonic trope of science fiction – still a legitimate sf figure? Or is the alien now a spell-breaker, rather like a rocket or a UFO? Eight hundred pages in, we still do not know for certain if we are reading a story with aliens in it. Instead, we are treated to a pageant of proxies. It is as though we are asked, will clones do instead? Or, genetically modified humans; won’t they do? Cybernetically enhanced people; will they do? Extraterrestrial plant life, surely it will do? Then there is the Zanth. The Zanth is a sort of kaleidoscopic reality glitch, akin to an ecological catastrophe. But it receives the kind of treatment typically reserved for Heinlein’s ‘Bugs’ or Wells’ Martians. It even gets called an alien threat. So, will it do? What, exactly, do we need an alien for? And how badly do we need it?

In its collusion with the spectacle of multinational corporations and standing armies that just keep on standing, Great North Road invites a critique of ideology, but it does make fairly safe wagers vis-à-vis evoking a convincing and immersive future history. The ‘ET or not ET?’ business is a bolder bet, but one which pays off. The alien that might be in this story could even be read as knowingly retro-futuristic, a nod to the far-fetched hominids of an earlier era, some horror confined to the shadows because budget is too low to show it in the light. We may realize we do miss this alien and are prepared, after all, to make some allowances.

But Great North Road makes another wager which is neither bold nor really pays off. Just as corporate life has proved robust, and standing armies are standing in pretty much the same pose we left them in back in 2013, so too gender institutions have changed very little. The drip-fed revelations of Tramelo’s past, for instance, ooze sleazy glamour and gratuitous fan service. As we try to conceive of a credible 2140s, we may want to ask – as a rough benchmark – how have gender and sexual politics changed from the 1880s to the present day? Yet Great North Road gives us a deeply binary and subtly hierarchical world, peppered with hokey truisms about boys and girls, men and women, husbands and wives. 

Complexity is added, however, in the form of Hurst’s sidekick, Detective Ian Lanagin. We first meet Lanagin on duty, flirting with a pair of scantily clad lassies: ‘I’m in there, man. Did you see those lassies? Up for it they were, both of them’ (9). Lanagin is a manifesto for cyborg misogyny, who abuses police data systems to stalk his targets and devise his pickup strategies. As an institutionally fostered social type, and a case study in police sexuality at the intersection of voyeurism, chivalry and clout, Lanagin is one of the novel’s subtler achievements. But the resolution of his plot arc is unacceptable. When Lanagin meets his match – gorgeous, rich and, discomfitingly, class-inflected – revisionist implications ripple back across his previous frightening behaviour. Boys will be boys, seems to be the official line, but some day they all grow up and settle down. Lanagin’s emasculation is apparently being played for laughs. Are we soon to meet the predictable evolution of this comic character; grumbling, doting Lanagin under-the-thumb? Luckily, a monster slashes his throat out before we have to discover.

Great North Road is tricky to place ideologically. On balance, my impression was one of discreet Middle Englishness. Granted, the capitalism it portrays is one of corporate misdeeds, cronyism, corruption, decadence and precarity. Teamwork, even to the point of sacrificing oneself for a collective, rises and disports itself rather elegantly above this mire. But for all that the novel’s capitalism resembles our own, it is an embroidered version of the current regime. There's a kind of literary centrism at play here. What a left-wing reader could just about celebrate as a prophetic satire, a right-wing reader can still regard as a boundary flag – as a pathological and dysfunctional extreme implying, the relative moderation of our contemporary status quo. Perhaps Sid Hurst was a bit of an Ian Lanagin himself in his day! But now he is a decent, family man, doing what he has to do: possessive individualism and civil, vocational and familial privatism. We are supposed to like him, his long-suffering wife Jacinta, and their two impertinent kids. So if Hamilton is trying to please everyone, I think he catches the right-wing reader’s eye oftener.

That said, thoroughgoing Middle Englishness could never really survive an act of imaginative expression of such scale and ambition. There is ultimately a great deal to like about this novel. There is merit in the bare fact of being able to turn out 1,000-plus pages of proficient prose. Certain economies of scale kick in: a plot thread simply left hanging long enough then seized up again can feel satisfying in the same way as a plot twist can; and though Hamilton does not achieve the stylistic variety of, for instance, Iain M. Banks’ space opera, by the end of the novel a diverse grandeur has gradually accumulated.

There is some excellent interplay between passages of deliberately arduous information and often bloody action sequences. The St Libra narrative strand is dominated not so much by military science fiction as military logistics science fiction. The fine grain elaboration of its material culture is another of its admirable features, albeit at times a bit Top Gear. Hamilton is particularly proficient at contriving tense scenarios by layering together mundane and extraordinary mishaps. Sometimes the slow, detailed mode is also deployed as a crucible of tension in its own right. The plodding early phases of the expedition employs that mode, gradually establishing a potent sense of remoteness. There is a real sense that small decisions or acts of neglect can have tremendous consequences. The Zanth in particular is used sparingly but thrillingly; the novel’s closing sentences are excellent. Part of me was left wondering, however, whether Hamilton could have cast his exacting eye a little oftener in the direction of the human (posthuman) heart? Or indeed, what might he have written had he permitted himself complete absorption by his unfolding material, bringing to bear his considerable talents – his comprehensiveness, his copia, his evident interest in pacing and his skill at convergence – in a manner less attentive to his presumed readers, and to their presumed appetites for worlds and thrills?