Science fiction, police and prison abolition

Prison and police abolition aim to replace the current criminal justice system with alternative solutions to violence and harm. These movements are international, but their heartland is in the USA, where rates of incarceration are much higher than in most countries, and with prisons filled with disproportionately many Black and Hispanic people. Police in the USA also carry firearms as standard, and the rates of people killed by the police are among the highest in the world.

The broader ambit of the abolition movement opposes many other forms of surveillance, control, and punishment. This includes the carceral infrastructures that sustain national borders in their current forms. There are also substantial overlaps with anti-carceral feminism. Anti-carceral feminism recognises how the criminal justice system frequently fails to provide effective and just solutions for gender-based violence, especially for people of colour and trans and gender non-conforming people.

In 'Two Ideas of Justice' (2022), Gautum Bhatia writes:

It is my impression [...] that as a genre, SF still remains overwhelmingly focused on issues around corrective justice. That is not to suggest that these issues are unimportant or uninteresting; however, as we enter a time in which the climate crisis reveals to a greater and greater degree the unsustainable bases of our current society and political economy, it will therefore be interesting to see if science fiction will respond with a greater, sharper focus on questions of distributive justice.

Is there much science fiction which engages seriously with prison and police abolitionism? Which imagines futures in which carceral infrastructure has been dismantled? Or has particularly intriguing ideas about justice, either corrective, or distributive, or both, or neither? In truth, I have not been able to find all that much. And what I have found (and my own short story, 'Seven Non-Abolitions', published in Phase Change) often seems quite preoccupied with science fiction about science fiction: what stories, rituals, games might exist in a world without police and prisons?

But what am I missing? Let me know.

I am especially interested in the relationship of police and prison abolition with capitalism. Some prison and police abolitionists are explicitly anti-capitalist; Bettina Aptheker describes the need to ‘mount a struggle to abolish the present functions and foundations of the prison system, an effort which can finally succeed only with the abolition of capitalism.’ Even when this is not the case, however, there are powerful resonances between abolitionism and postcapitalist thought. In particular, many abolitionists are interested in understanding the Prison-Industrial Complex as an underlying system which makes reforms to the criminal justice system ineffective. 

One way of looking at the Prison-Industrial Complex is as 'the interweaving of private business and governmental interests, serving to increase the profitability of private corporations and at the same time expand social control, while the pronounced rationale lies with crime fighting' (Papageorgiou and Papanicolaou, 74). Private companies have economic interests in profiting from construction,  utilities, catering, and healthcare for prisons. Private investors buy bonds to finance prison construction. Prison populations may form literally captive markets, forced to pay high prices for services like e-messaging, to stay in touch with loved ones outside prison. Prisoners themselves are often exploited as a source of cheap labour. 

But more broadly, the Prison-Industrial Complex can be seen as a set of mechanisms which filter and contain potential threats against the smooth functioning of capitalist accumulation. By and large, the more you are harmed by capitalism, the more you are likely to also be punished for it: your lived experience of the hypocrisy of the capitalist dream makes you dangerous. These mechanisms are the more painful and punitive counterparts to the disciplinary aspects of the welfare state. 

At the same time, some fierce critics of the criminal justice system are unpersuaded by the usefulness of the concept of the Prison-Industrial Complex. The sociologist Loïc Wacquant dislikes (among other things) how the concept tends to emphasise an economic logic at the expense of a political logic:

namely, the construction of a post-Keynesian, “liberal-paternalistic” state suited to institute desocialized wage labor and propagate the renewed ethic of work and “individual responsibility” that buttress it. Profiteering from corrections is not a primary cause but an incidental and secondary consequence of the hypertrophic development of the penal apparatus [...]

Abolitionism is also crucially about building alternatives. Mariame Kaba writes:

While some people might think of abolition as primarily a negative project—“Let’s tear everything down tomorrow and hope for the best”—PIC abolition is a vision of a restructured society in a world where we have everything we need: food, shelter, education, health, art, beauty, clean water, and more things that are foundational to our personal and community safety.

As Fred Moten and Stefano Harney point out, building those alternatives would likely also shift our perceptions and understandings about exactly what it is we are abolishing.

What is, so to speak, the object of abolition? Not so much the abolition of prisons but the abolition of a society that could have prisons, that could have slavery, that could have the wage, and therefore not abolition as the elimination of anything but abolition as the founding of a new society. The object of abolition then would have a resemblance to communism that would be, to return to Spivak, uncanny. 

Alternative forms of safety and justice take time to build. Prison abolitionists are not against incremental changes. But they support incremental changes that are not reforms. Instead, such incremental changes need to be real steps toward post-carceral futures, which also accomplish concrete benefits in the present. For example, abolitionists work to raise consciousness and strengthen solidarity among prisoners. In Blood in My Eye, George Jackson writes, ‘The sheer numbers of the prisoner class and the terms of their existence make them a mighty reservoir of revolutionary potential’ (108). Abolitionists also campaign to halt or reverse the growth in numbers of prisons and police officers, and to invest instead in social welfare, healthcare, education, and other public services. This goes hand-in-hand with cultivating community-based transformative justice. Transformative justice seeks to keep people safe, to hold perpetrators accountable, and to resolve conflicts without involving the state. Mariame Kaba, for example, envisions ‘a different society, built on cooperation instead of individualism, on mutual aid instead of self-preservation. What would the country look like if it had billions of extra dollars to spend on housing, food and education for all?’ 

Clearly prison and police abolitionism are closely entwined. ‘Who you gonna call?’ asks Ray Parker Jr. in the Ghostbusters theme song. Abolitionism is also an invitation to reimagine how labour is divided in society, especially who does what when it comes to safety, care, and truth-seeking. For instance, Roge Karma points out how police officers are ‘trained in military-style academies’, are ‘equipped with lethal weapons at all times’, and ‘operate within a culture that takes pride in warriorship, combat, and violence’. They are then ‘mainly called upon to be social workers, conflict mediators, traffic directors, mental health counselors, detailed report writers, neighborhood patrollers, and low-level law enforcers’.

Abolitionism and postcapitalism also involve shared concern for what is imaginable. It has been said that it is easier to imagine the end of the world than the end of capitalism. Jackie Wang adds, ‘it is easier to imagine the end of the world than it is to imagine a world without prisons.’ Kaba writes, ‘when we set about trying to transform society, we must remember that we ourselves will also need to transform. Our imagination of what a different world can be is limited. We are deeply entangled in the very systems we are organizing to change.’ Police and prison abolitionism draw on a powerful history to demonstrate how what may seem unimaginable (or unimaginable to some) can quickly become real. As Angela Davies writes:

Slavery, lynching, and segregation are certainly compelling examples of social institutions that, like the prison, were once considered to be as everlasting as the sun. Yet, in the case of all three examples, we can point to movements that assumed the radical stance of announcing the obsolescence of these institutions. (Are Prisons Obsolete?, 24)

However, when science fiction explores alternative justice, it is often more fascinated with gruesome and bizarre punishments, than with police and prison abolitionism, or with restorative or transformative (or distributive) justice. In Franz Kafka's ‘In the Penal Colony’ (1914), a machine tortures the accused to death by carving the relevant law into their flesh. In James Tiptree Jr.'s ‘Fault’ (1968), the protagonist Mitch is sentenced to be ‘slipped’ for having torn off the ‘feelers’ of an alien. His movement through time gradually de-syncs with everybody else’s, an agonizing form of social death. The Quantum Thief (2010) by Hannu Rajaniemi features a virtual prison called the Dilemma Prison, where Jean le Flameur forced to play out endless variations of the Prisoner's Dilemma. 

Science fiction is also interested in speculative forms of rehabilitation — or transformations that go well beyond mere rehabilitation. Anthony Burgess’s A Clockwork Orange (1962) follows the story of Alex, a violent youth who undergoes an experimental psychological conditioning. In Iain M. Banks’s Walking on Glass (1985), Quiss and Ajayi are war criminals from opposing sides, imprisoned in a purgatorial castle of puzzles and games until they can solve the riddle, ‘What happens when an unstoppable force meets an immovable object?’

Prisons may also enact more ambiguous and ambivalent transformations. A character Adrian Tchaikonvsky’s Dying Earth novel Cage of Souls (2019) features a penal colony, the Island, where the protagonist encounters the monstrous and marvellous sentience of the more-than-human world.

I have a vision of the world in several centuries’ time. There are no human beings in my vision but there are the web-children who evolved, or were evolved, in our image, and they have prospered. They have made a civilisation that does not rest on energies and weapons. Instead they use the powers of their minds to build and create, and they work together.

A related theme is the grotesque exploitation of prisoners’ bodies. Cordwainer Smith's ‘A Planet Named Shayol’ (1961) portrays a penal world where prisoners are used to grow transplantable organs. In Larry Niven’s A Patchwork Girl (1980), convicted felons are broken up for organ transplants.

As medical techniques improved and spread to the have-not nations, demands on the public organ banks had grown. The death penalty was imposed for armed robbery, rape, burglary. A plea of insanity became worthless. Eventually felons died for income tax evasion or driving while high on funny chemicals.

Some science fiction has envisioned the unbundling and distribution of criminal justice across space. Iain M. Banks’s Culture series, a “slap-drone” is a robotic escort assigned to somebody who has committed a violent crime, to make sure they don’t do it again. Larry Niven’s ‘Cloak of Anarchy’ (1972) is set in the Free Park where no law exists save a technologically-enforced injunction against direct bodily violence. Intriguingly, the ‘copseyes’ don’t really bother with who started it:

There was only one law to enforce. All acts of attempted violence carried the same penalty for attacker and victim. Let anyone raise his hand against his neighbor, and one of the golden basketballs would stun them both. They would wake separately, with copseyes watching. 

Such thought experiments explore how the unjust justice system might be shrunk to some useful minimum — perhaps in line with the harm principle set out by John Stuart Mill in his 1859 essay On Liberty. However, today they also resonate with reactionary, techno-carceral appropriations of police and prison abolitionism. 

Some science fiction explores technology from the perspective of restitution rather than deterrence or disciplinarity. In Tochi Onyebuchi's ‘How to Pay Reparations: A Documentary’ (2020) an algorithm is developed to deploy reparations for slavery. It doesn’t quite work out — the story offers a critique of a techno-solutionist approach to reparations, one that is unaccompanied by true collective deliberation and reflection. Yet it does not entirely dismiss the idea that algorithmic governmentality might be mobilised for purposes of social justice and liberation.

Science fiction and other speculative fiction sometimes gestures toward the role of the criminal justice system in bringing forth the very behaviours which it polices and punishes. In the old story, told by Rumi among others, the protagonist glimpses the Angel of Death giving him a look of wrath, and flees to India to escape his fate. But the Angel was not angry, it is revealed, merely surprised to see the man here in Jerusalem — when he had an appointment with him very soon in India. Philip K. Dick's 'The Minority Report' (1956), the vocalisations of prophetic ‘precog idiots’ are analysed to arrest would-be criminals before they commit their crimes. Peter Watts' ‘The Eyes of God’ (2008) features an airport security system that uses neural scanners to detect potentially harmful thoughts or intentions in passengers, also raising questions about privacy, pre-emptive justice, and the nature of crime. The cyberpunk anime series Psycho-Pass (2012-) imagines a surveillance dystopia, where citizens are constantly scanned and evaluated for supposed latent criminality. Psycho-Pass also features Enforcers, individuals whose latent criminality metrics have crossed critical thresholds, but who are permitted to work on the side of the law. 

These science fiction works about pre-crime resonate with recent developments in predictive policing and its critiques, including racist and classist bias, and the risk of predictive policing creating self-fulfilling prophecies. Such works also tend to explore the relationship between harms and crimes. How can someone be punished for something they have not done, even if they were (supposedly) definitely going to do it? At the same time, while the distinction between ‘harm’ and ‘crime’ is undoubtedly useful for abolitionist thought and practice, the two concepts may be more entangled than is sometimes recognised. A crime may legally codify an alleged harm that has no real basis in experience, or whose basis is wildly disproportionate. But abolishing crime and organising society around harm instead is far from straightforward. How should society equalise access to the means of expressing and redressing harms? Is every claim to have experienced a harm equally legitimate? If not, what factors should legitimate or de-legitimate a claim to have experienced harm? If certain harms become conventionally recognised and associated with certain forms of address, is there a risk of the emergence of a new taxonomy of informal crimes?

Some science fiction may shed light on transformative justice in oblique ways. In 2017, Alexandra Rowland coined the term ‘hopepunk,’ contrasting it with the nihilism and pessimism of grimdark fantasy. The term quickly became cluttered and incoherent, and drew criticism especially from outside the US and from left-wing commentators. ‘Part of the problem of hopepunk is its class blindness,’ writes Adam Turl. However, one potentially positive aspect of some hopepunk writing might be its intermittent interest in groups figuring out minor conflicts among themselves, and preempting major ones. This is also of course a preoccupation of a great deal of literary fiction. But in the work of science fiction writers such as Becky Chambers, the wholesomely optimistic futuristic setting can leach in interesting ways into these stories about emotions, expectations, compromise and communication.

Other science fiction does touch on futures beyond prisons and the police more directly. Ursula K. Le Guin’s The Dispossessed (1974) features a group of children from a post-carceral society discovering the concept of ‘prison’ and, fascinated, turning it into a game. What they eventually discover horrifies them. Marge Piercy’s Woman on the Edge of Time (1976) imagines a post-carceral society that also has a kind of death penalty:

“Assault, murder we still have. Not as common as they say it was in your time. But it happens. People still get angry and strike out.” 

“So what do you do? Do you put them in jail?” 

“First off, we ask if person acted intentionally or not—if person wants to take responsibility for the act.” 

“Suppose I say, ‘No, I didn’t know what I was doing, judge.’” 

“Then we work on healing. We try to help so that never again will person do a thing person doesn’t mean to do.” 

“Suppose I say I’m not sick. I punched him in the face because he had it coming, and I’m glad.” 

“Then you work out a sentence. Maybe exile, remote labor. Sheepherding. Life on shipboard. Space service. Sometimes crossers cook good ideas about how to atone. You could put in for an experiment or something dangerous.” 

She stared. “You’re telling me that when I smashed Geraldo’s face, I’d tell you what I should do to . . . atone?” 

“How not?” Parra stared back. “You, your victim, and your judge work it out. If you killed, then the family of your victim would choose a mem to negotiate.” 

“If I killed a bunch of people, then I’d just sign on as a sailor or herd sheep?” “You mean a second time? No. Second time someone uses violence, we give up. We don’t want to watch each other or to imprison each other. We aren’t willing to live with people who choose to use violence. We execute them.”

Abolition Science Fiction (2022), edited by Phil Crockett Thomas, is a collection of stories by activists and scholars involved in prison abolition and transformative justice in the UK. Three short vignettes in particular offer glimpses of worlds without prisons. Ren Wednesday's 'Walk Out' imagines a mixture of revolutionary excitement and conservative moral panic, as prisoners all over the world start to learn simply to walk through walls. In Chris Rossdale's 'The Parc,' the protagonist Alex braves the People’s Activity and Recreation Centre, a place physically completely transformed from the prison it once was, yet haunted by a traumatic carceral aura. 'The Monument' by Dave gives us a glimpse of Christopher, a Municipal Heritage Warden, getting ready for work at a new location. It is intriguingly ambiguous, as Christopher feels uneasy with his own somewhat police-ish behaviours,  “scanning for damage or dereliction, spotting dangers to public safety, and keeping an eye on all the people that came and went.” Christopher also happens to be policing a monument which seems to simultaneously celebrate the abolition of the police, and the police officers themselves:

This lavish recognition, like the generous severance packages and comprehensive retraining schemes negotiated by the Police Federation in the final months of its existence, before it was forced to transform into a retirees’ social club, is by way of a compromise. It indicates, very clearly, that no personal condemnation of the police, or of those who took their side, was implied by the success of the Abolitionists.

In anthropology, the term ‘leveling mechanism’ refers to cultural practices that seem to work to prevent the emergence of power hierarchies. Science fiction imagining post-carceral futures seem to often be interested in leveling mechanisms in a broad sense. In this way it becomes, strangely, a kind of science fiction about science fiction. The prison game which the children play in The Dispossessed, like the strange monument in ‘The Monument’ which seems to both celebrate and condemn the police, imagine the kind of cultural memory that might be necessary to ensure that an understanding of carceral violence is not lost in a post-carceral world. In Woman on the Edge of Time, the inhabitants of the future utopia Mattapoisett engage in similar rituals and games:

“How is Bee?” 

“Look!” Luciente pointed. “Bee is explaining about agribusiness, cash crops, and hunger.” 

“He’s teaching a class?” 

“A memorial. Tonight.” Luciente waved at the booths, the tables, the holies and exhibits. “It’s winter games. . . . Traveling spectaclers are visiting us this week. We all played roles. Divvied into rich and poor, owners and colonies. For two days all us who got poor by lot fasted and had only half rations two other days. The rich ate till they were stuffed and threw the rest in the compost. I know in history they didn’t, Connie blossom, but it’s not right to destroy, we just can’t do it. We’ve been feeling a class society where most labor, others control, and some enjoy. We had prisons, police, spies, armies, torture, bosses, hunger—oh, it’s been fascinating. Now we’re discussing to know better before they go on.”

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?