Re: The Golden Age by John C. Wright

From: Damien Broderick (damienb@unimelb.edu.au)
Date: Fri Feb 28 2003 - 17:22:41 MST

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    At 03:46 PM 2/28/03 -0800, Hal wrote:

    >Several people have mentioned the novel The Golden Age, by John C. Wright.
    >I read this a couple of months ago and am re-reading it now. It's a
    >terrific novel and I'm enjoying it even more the second time through,
    >as I see more clearly how Wright's future society works and has evolved.

    I can't remember if I posted my November 2002 New York Review of Science
    Fiction piece on the book. At the risk of tedious repetition, here's my
    take.

    Damien Broderick

    ==========

    The Golden Age: A Romance of the Far Future by John C. Wright
    New York: Tor, 2002; $24.95 hc; 336 pages

    Pastiche? Hommage? Sfumato, perhaps? (That's the Renaissance technique of
    layering paint, so that light gleams through each thickness of oil, like
    echoes of plainchant in a cathedral.) And that's how science fiction
    textuality works now, after a century in which-to change the figure-the
    ground was broken open, aerated, watered, planted, torn up, built upon,
    power lines and sewers added, malled, high-rised, urban renewed,
    solar-celled... Or more exactly, this being the future today (three chairs,
    no waiting), nanoteched, AI'd, lifespan-extended, brain-chipped. Thus, the
    influence of the megatext, that shadowy background infusing everything we
    write and read, enriching our guesses at tomorrow's trajectories, teasing
    us with ironies and missed chances, lending us those vocabularies out of
    which we make these fantastic yet powerfully resilient faux-realities,
    these worlds out of words.
    John C. Wright arrives in our midst apparently from nowhere (aside from a
    few recent short stories), in his mid-forties, with an immensely detailed
    far future romance, instantly fluent in sf's tongues of fire. Well, perhaps
    fluent is putting it a little too strongly. Despite the overheated
    enthusiasm of several early reviewers (`magniloquence', etc), Wright is not
    yet a master of prose; he's often clunky, the thing stomps along manfully
    but fails to dance except in certain especially effective Pre-Raphaelite
    set pieces. Consider this expository passage:

    "Wheel-of-Life was a Cerebelline ecoperformer of the Decentral Spirit
    School, as well as trustee for all the copyrighted biotechnology based on
    the Five Golden Rings mathematics. She appeared as a matron of serene
    beauty and grave demeanor, seated on a throne of living flowers, grass and
    hedge, in which a dozen species of birds and insects nested." (p.36)

    It's typical of Wright's method, which is an attempt to create conviction
    by inundation. Such generosity of detail is impressive, even overwhelming;
    it suggests that here we have a writer who (like John Varley) has lain
    awake in agonies of insomnia devising all these wheels within wheels and
    their special designations. But a defter writer might have named some of
    those birds, plants and blooms, picked out their color and scent; Poul
    Anderson, say, would have done so by reflex.
    Yet what Wright does palpably grows from long immersion in the megatext,
    and for all the abundance of wheels there's very little wheel-inventing
    here. A lengthy and useful interview with Nick Gevers, one of the best
    informed of sf's new critics, at http://www.sfsite.com/05a/jcw127.htm,
    offers frank witness to his grateful borrowings:

    "A. E. Van Vogt formed my childhood picture of what a hero was. Van Vogt
    portrayed a man who was more sane, more rational, than his foes, was able
    to overcome them. No other writer's works fill me with the sense of awe and
    wonder as does Van Vogt.

    "Jack Vance and Gene Wolfe are masters of style, and I filch from them
    without a twinge of remorse."

    The clearest influence on Wright's voice, and a welcome one except that he
    can't yet quite carry it off convincingly, is Jack Vance. Here's Wright in
    typically Vancian mocking dialogue:

    `Now we have heard him speak; and our open-mindedness is rewarded; for we
    now learn that [he] believes that what he does is to benefit mankind, and
    to spread our civilization, which he claims to love. A fine discovery! The
    conflict here can be resolved without further ado.' (p. 291)

    Wright introduces his own novelties, but the most conspicuous is a
    regrettable tyro usage that marks disbelieving anger thus: `You blame the
    solar disaster on Helion?!' Tor's copyeditor was either absurdly indulgent
    or asleep at the stick (this jarring solecism recurs throughout, and the
    book is littered with such literals as `where' for `were', not to mention
    `Apha Centauri' and `Bernard's Star'). Will ?! be extirpated from the
    sequel?! I hope so!!!
    Elsewhere, he recalls the impact of van Vogt's sf on him, `the sense of
    wonder that the grand. tradition of space opera embraces. I am trying to
    write a space opera in his style, so I never have a super-starship ten
    kilometers long when a ship one hundred kilometers long will do; I never
    blow up a city when I can blow up a planet.' So Wright is the latest of the
    recent, and ambitious, deep future space opera boom-David Zindell, Steve
    Baxter, Paul McAuley, Iain M. Banks, Peter Hamilton, Alastair Reynolds,
    Wil McCarthy. As a long-time fan of this mode I rejoiced to read his
    Prologue, `Celebrations of the Immortals', which in about 350 words
    sketches a truly wondrous carnival of beings gathered for the Golden
    Oecumene's millennial High Transcendence. All human and posthuman
    neuroforms are represented, fictional as well as real, high transhumans
    returned briefly to earthly estate from their calculational realms,
    projected future descendants, `languid-eyed lamia from morbid unrealized
    alternatives'. It is a beguiling pageant, an instance of what Paul Witcover
    recently dubbed `posthuman space opera' (NYRSF No. 167).
    In this feverish, abundant, user-pays utopia, foppish Phaethon of
    Rhadamanthus House finds himself inexplicably ill at ease. Before the book
    is done (and it is only the first half of a diptych: The Phoenix Exultant,
    though complete, is not due until next year), this flawed sun god will test
    the very nature of his identity and that of his beloved wife Daphne, a
    natural human and former Warlock of the Cataleptic Oneiromancer School and
    now builder of fantastic VR worlds, of his clone father Helion (another
    solar name, for an engineer who works literally in the bowels of the Sun
    like an escapee from Charles Harness's The Paradox Men), contest with
    artificial minds thousands of times more potent than his own, spar with
    human variants collective and modified, and test his nerve in a puzzling
    challenge that combines the curse of Orpheus with the temptation of Pandora.
    Is this libertarian Golden Age truly one, with all its immense wealth,
    cruelty, absolute responsibility to and for self? (One hardluck case
    complains, to perhaps unintended comic effect, `You are wealthy people. You
    can afford to have emotions. Some of us cannot afford the glands or
    midbrain complexes required.') Or might it be a Golden Cage, penned shut by
    the caution of immortals within a Solar System that can be reshaped (the
    Moon brought closer, Venus relocated farther from the Sun, the Sun's chaos
    itself tamed) but not escaped. There are no aliens in this future, no
    superluminal physics, no time machines, and apparently the single
    extrasolar expedition failed long ago. Who, then, attacks Phaethon with
    such determination, guile and ferocity? Are there alien invaders after all?
    Or perhaps Sophotechs (AIs) gone to the bad, which is to say become as
    self-interested as their charges? Or is Phaethon, like many of sf's
    amnesiac supermen, a terrifying rogue force about to reduce order to ruin
    if his self-inflicted shackles are opened, or carry all into some
    transcendence beyond the year's festive High Transcendence?
    I'll say little more about the plot. The book is on one level a
    travelogue, and Phaethon's misadventures a pretext to display spectacular
    scenery. In this case, though, the spectacle is rarely as simple as a
    catalogue of advanced technology (although there is lots of that, and
    rather nice it is, too), or dazzling settlings (one poor man is obliged to
    trudge downstairs all the way from geosynchronous orbit, compiling his food
    and drink from air and wastes as he descends a space elevator's core, a
    ludicrous but enviably crazed plot move). No, the spectacle shares
    something with the posthuman cognitive explorations of Walter Jon Williams
    (Aristoi) and Greg Egan. Tens of thousands of years hence-Wright says
    millions in an interview, but that can't be right--these people differ in
    mentality as much as in flesh or chip, or so we're told; this is rarely
    enacted satisfactorily, perhaps because it would exceed our capacity to
    grasp, and Wright's to imagine. Still, it is enchanting to consider the
    segmented and spliced levels of Phaethon's own consciousness, the ways in
    which his inward construction of the world can be tweaked, betrayed,
    filtered, manipulated, clarified, the profusion of people in the Golden
    Age: the Hundred-mind near the kindled star of Jupiter, the gelid frozen
    brains of Neptune with their envious designs for good or ill, the idealized
    computer eidolons of the Aeonite School, Warlock neuroforms with intuitive
    skills derived from non-standard neural links between brain modules,
    Invariants with a unicameral brain immune to filtering and hence dwelling
    within an utterly stark Weltbild-hideously deprived, not unlike our own
    current condition yet perhaps saner. On and on it goes, in a sort of
    extended commentary, from the right, on Olaf Stapledon's classic, minatory,
    marxist Last and First Men: A Story of the Near and Far Future. (Brian
    Aldiss called its successor, Star Maker, the `one great grey book of
    science fiction'.) How successful that argument proves we won't know until
    the sequel is published. For now, the first half of the trip is clearly
    worth taking.
    If all this sounds boringly didactic, though, it's not, just. (Certainly
    it can get weirdly stretched out; Phaethon is asked a question on page 280
    and apparently answers it, instantly, on page 286, with an outburst aimed
    at somebody else in a simultaneous accelerated conversation.) Wright has a
    quirky sense of humor--Wells' Martian pops in for a guest
    appearance--perhaps alarmingly manifested in the names of his own sons,
    Orville and Wilbur. Reading this in his biography, one seriously starts to
    wonder if perhaps he's really a composite invention himself, dreamed up in
    an idle afternoon by Bruce Sterling and some Texan pals. Actually I doubt
    it; Mr. Wright's rather ramrod young fogy sense of propriety--he deplores
    the louche way sf editors and writers freely address each other by their
    first names--lends an eerie patina of conviction. And his characters are
    not wholly given to mighty projects (Phaethon, it's true, unblushingly
    craves `deeds of renown without peer'); one AI likes to manifest as a
    penguin, fishy-breathed but able to fly so fast he leaves a vapor contrail.
    The writer I found myself thinking of quite often-aside from the obvious
    begetters, Stapledon, E. R. Eddison, David Lindsay, Vance (Emphyrio and all
    the rest), Harness, Moorcock (The Dancers at the End of Time), Felix
    Gotschalk (Growing Up in Tier 3000)--was Ian Wallace, a quirky psychologist
    who briefly flared with Croyd (1967), Dr. Orpheus (1968) and several other
    tales of superhuman razzmatazz before fizzling into the backwaters of DAW
    books. That fate is not for Mr. Wright, we can be sure. But I did have one
    jolting thought, at about page 70: Oh, dear God, this is the Ralph 124C41+
    of the early 21st century. It's better written and thought-out than
    Gernsback's dreadful prophetic classic, of course, because it stands on the
    shoulders of giants (as do we all, luckily), nor do I mean to imply that
    Wright has read his scientifictional predecessor.
    In fact, it reminded me more closely of accounts of a lost masterpiece or
    oddity I've never had the chance to read, Curme Gray's Murder in Millennium
    VI (1951). Damon Knight extolled Gray's `audacity and stubbornness', noting
    that while the tale is set thousands of years hence, in a society whose
    customs and technology are utterly unlike ours, `there is not a word in the
    book that might not logically have been written by the narrator for the
    edification of his own posterity' (In Search of Wonder, p. 183). That's
    Campbell and Heinlein's `lived-in future' taken to the ultimate. I felt
    Wright was trying for the same goal, perhaps by similar methods, and was
    pleased to find hidden on his website, among other sf writers' names and
    characters from his book, `curme grayphoenix exultant'. Oddly, Wright
    denies knowledge of the book.
    Similar spookiness (literally) attends the name of one among Phaethon's
    jury of Hortators, guardians of tradition: Casper Halfhuman Tinkersmith of
    the Parliament of Ghosts. `He was a writer of educational matrixes famous
    for his cold logic when he was in his human body, and for his unusually
    vivid passion and drive when he was downloaded into an electrophotonic
    matrix' (pp. 305-6). That should be `uploaded', but doesn't it sound a
    little like the late Dr Paul Linebarger, CIA spook and psychological
    warfare authority, yet hallucinatory creator of the Underpeople and the
    Instrumentality as Cordwainer Smith? A `cordwainer' is a shoemaker, not a
    million miles from the tinker's craft. All this is coincidence, Mr. Wright
    informs me. Ah well. Such are the perils of the megatext.
    What we have then, in The Golden Age, is part of an enormous future
    history that takes for granted many of the narrative devices that are, for
    our time, what rockets, robots and television sets were to sf's golden age.
    What it appears to dodge, although this might be elaborated in the second
    volume, is the ghost at every deep future feast today: the absent
    Singularity. Vernor Vinge gave it a name, this prospect of an absolute
    break with history resulting from runaway exponential growth in certain
    convergent technologies, especially computing and molecular manufacture,
    and we've been trying to tame or dismiss it ever since. A recent
    rec.arts.sf.written thread on Wright's novel even had the telling subject
    line: `Domesticating the Singularity'. You can't, of course. All you can do
    is duck and weave, as Vinge himself, and Banks and Zindell and others (me,
    too) have been doing. In the interstices between the human present, the
    transhuman prospect and the radically posthuman future, there remain
    localities to set superb fiction, as Bruce Sterling showed with Holy Fire.
    Can one leap ahead millennia to the High Transcendence and retell Vance's
    To Live Forever or battle Stapledon ideologically, and get away with it?
    Not really. But then, by definition, the Singularity or Spike stands hidden
    from us by its own appalling upward curve toward infinity, or some
    sublunary approximation. So in the meantime all we can do, perhaps, is
    build as well as we might fables decorated with ingenuity, density, wit,
    sly comedy and, it's to be hoped, some passion. Wright doesn't do half bad
    at that.

    Damien Broderick lives in Melbourne, Victoria, Australia, and San Antonio,
    Texas.



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