Voodoo works, Oldschool. Fear messes up your cardiac rhythms. Adrenaline kills heart cells. You can literally scare someone to death if you hack the sympathetic nervous system the right way.
Ok so, first things first, a little housekeeping. In the course of writing this blog, I am realising there are some techniques I can change, and one of them is writing this book review in the evening. It takes a fair while to describe any book thoroughly and this often means I stay up too late (not that I’m any better at getting myself to sleep early any other day!) so I will try to work on future book reviews during Saturday instead. And so, with that, on to the review which this week is another self-selected dissertation text: Peter Watts’ Echopraxia.
It served its purpose in the course of my dissertation, to
back up my theory of the posthuman being ‘less than’ human, but now I have gone
back and read it with a more generally critical eye, I can’t help but see how complicated
a narrative it is.
Science plays a big role in this book – that’s what makes it
sci-fi – and I love that about it, but the amount of complex
scientific jargon Watts’ main character, Daniel Brüks, throws at you means, even
if it is meant to illustrate how tech-savvy he is, you just feel lost. Like sitting
in on a Quantum Mechanics lecture when your highest degree is a B in A-Level
Physics. He bandies around phrases like ‘cryptochrome’ and Tystovich plasma
helix’ and ‘spline plots’ and while, yes, most of them are made-up – and
probably mentioned earlier in the Firefall series because yes, this isn’t
the first book – that only makes it harder to follow (I should probably read
the prequels just to see what I’m missing). But then one of my favourite quotes
by Colonel Jim Moore kind of sums up why it can’t be any other way:
You dumb down brain surgery enough for a preschooler to think he understands it, the little tyke’s liable to grab a microwave scalpel and start cutting when no one’s looking.
If I want things to be made understandable, it won’t translate
authentically or efficiently. So I guess I will have to let this one go. Besides,
some of the technology used in this book is incredible: smart paint which creates
a computer interface on any surface; augments which allow you to
instantly look up and know things; what appears to be living medical equipment
like bone-stitching micro-worms and amoeba-style casting putty. And then there’s
the central scientific advance of the people known as the ‘Bicamerals’ who
unite science with religion by essentially turning their brains into tumours to
accelerate growth and see divine insight in seemingly innocuous patterns. These
characters don’t get as much exposure as they should, though, which is a shame.
But then, there’s the layout of the spaceship on which most of the action takes
place which, at least in the provided illustration, is fascinating when you
realise just how big it is. What lets it down is how, due to this size, all Brüks’
movement across the ship is a dizzying string of domes, tunnels, habs,
bulkheads, spokes, and termini. I felt as overwhelmed as when I read Lord of
the Rings and, try as I might, couldn’t visualise the endless scenic
descriptions. What this story does better though is inspire fear.
Space is inherently scary with ‘the billions of lightyears
stretching away beneath his feet’ and yet, despite the majority of the story
being set there, the real fear is inspired by the vampire character Valerie, an
ironically primitive threat in such a post-modern place. She is only ever briefly
described because it is her unseen hunting techniques that are the most chilling,
playing on the mind in such deeply subtle ways, at times amplified by the chaos
she creates – or the anticipation of that chaos – and making the darkened
shafts and crawlspaces that much more unsettling. And, when viewed through the
unwitting, inexperienced, and cynical lens of Daniel Brüks (practically third-person
narration), that fear is magnified just a little more. His cynicism, however,
also lends the narrative a dry humour which I feel is much needed in a story as
contextually dense as this, from his rants - 'I sure as shit didn't ask to get stored down in your basement like a box of Christmas ornaments' - to action
descriptors which could’ve been written by Brüks himself.
What I am trying to say, through the medium of this rambled
review, is that Watts is very much onto something, uniting the realms of new
and old technology, subtly melding the genres of science-fiction and horror
which sit so well together, and creating characters who believably inhabit this
new world. And I was unnerved, I laughed, I mourned a little, I stood agog in
the face of science’s potential, but it was very much a human experience
because, for me, there was more of a connection with the dialogue, internal
monologues, and character development, than the science, action and setting
which surrounded them. It all felt a little too out of reach to be enjoyable enough. So I’d recommend starting from the beginning with this one,
but whether that is a wise assumption, I have yet to know.
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