From: Damien Broderick (damienb@unimelb.edu.au)
Date: Fri Feb 28 2003 - 20:59:33 MST
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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