A non-review of ANATHEM, PLAYER OF GAMES, ENDLESS THINGS
This is not a book review. This is me wondering if I have gotten too old or too over-read to read SF books any more. The last three SF books (or SF-flavored books) I read were very well written, the product of enormous craft and talent on the part of the authors (whom any honest judge will tell you are more talented than yours truly), and yet, by the time I reached the end, I felt either indifferent, disappointed, or cheated.
Honestly, I doubt that my disappointment is due to any defect on the part of the respective authors. If I am any judge, they did just what they set out to do. But in each case, my suspension of disbelief was snapped by the intrusion of a foreign element—or, to be specific, an element that should have been there, but was not.
This kind of thing, if it is egregious, is a criticism of the author. When it is egregious, it is because the author has no idea of what human nature is like, or no intention of portraying human nature in a realistic light. The first error is a product of bad craftsmanship, the second is a decision, deliberate or not, to use art artificially rather than realistically. Such authors end up with cardboard characters, usually creatures of unrelenting depravity (see, for example, BLINDSIGHT by Peter Watts) or creatures who serve merely a mechanical function, like marionettes, that move as the author means them to move,to make a point in a morality play (see, for example, ATLAS SHRUGGED by Ayn Rand). (Not that I object to depraved or mechanical characters per se: my favorite villain is Blackie DuQuesne, who is hardly an intricate character study: I have no objection to artifice in art.)
When it is not egregious, it is merely an observation that the writer and the reader have two different views of human nature, and so what seems natural to one seems awkward and artificial to the other. The author has the made-up characters, or, in a science fiction book, the made-up world, act in a way that the reader thinks the characters or world could not act. But this is a subjective judgment: the next reader who picks up the book will swallow whole what the first reader upchucked.
The reason why I suspect this is due to age or overreading is because my reaction to these three books is precisely the kind of reaction I notice in movie critics who express boredom for things still new and fresh to me. I don’t watch that many films, so old clichés are not old to me. Film critics watch films as their job, like slushpile readers at magazines, and see the same tired mistakes over and over again.
On to my non-review!
(SOME SPOILERS BELOW)
Player of Games by Iain M. Banks
Plot summary: Gurgeh is a member of ‘the Culture’ a society that enjoys untrammeled freedom. He is game-player and game-critic. He is blackmailed into accepting a mission with the Culture’s all-volunteer black ops group “Special Circumstances”: his mission is to go to a foreign star empire in the Magellanic Cloud and participate in the elaborate board game the aliens use to select their leaders. He observes the brutality and hypocrisy of the imperial planet.
Gurgeh resolves to win the game at all costs after his minder (a robot) shows him how depraved the pornography enjoyed by the upper echelons of the imperial planet is. This is contrasted with the healthy post-scarcity freedom of the Culture, which is so free and decent that even murderers are allowed to wonder loose without incarceration or fine, but only with a robot at hand to prevent a second crime.
He agrees to lose the game in public, for the sake of the press, but in secret he wins the game against the top officers of the Empire. When he is about to defeat the emperor in a secret duel, the emperor decides to kill himself, his courtiers, and Gurgeh. The empire falls apart. The end.
My comment: I was at first reluctant to read this book, because it covers much the same genre – far future utopianism— as my own THE GOLDEN AGE, and, in all modesty, I did not want my imagination to be contaminated with ideas better than mine, but not original to me, which it would then be a struggle not to use in my own work. I need not have worried. The only idea I came across that was new to me was the idea that posthumans would have built-in intoxication glands and mood-altering drugs, so they could summon different states of mental clarity (or confusion) at will. Perhaps other ‘Culture’ novels contain more novel and imagination-expanding large-scale space opera notions; this particular book never game me that sense of wonder. The AI’s did not act like they could do anything a human could not do.
The middle of the book, where, like Gotama Buddha seeing suffering and death for the first time, Gurgeh learns that the imperial planet of ruthless imperial conquerors contains cruelty and sin, and discriminates on the basis of sex, color and national origin, struck me as unbelievable.
It was clear enough from Gurgeh and his own circle of friends that the normal human passions of ambition, sexual desire, competition and aggression still existed in their Utopia. He has a friend who is freely changing from one sex to the next, and from one partner to the next. So why is the main character here so shocked by seeing pornography? Apparently they do not have sadomasochism among the libertarian libertine liberals of the Culture, even though they have murderers walking abroad, unpunished. (Or, rather, the worst punishment visited on a murderer is to be not invited to the endless round of parties, festivals, fetes, and hobbies enjoyed by the leisured class of the Culture.)
It just struck me as unrealistic: not that the evil Empire planet had porn, but that the Culture did not. Or maybe the thought here is that only by forbidding it, does pornography decay into unhealthy fetishisms, sadism, and snuff films. If that was the thought behind the scene, it is a naïve thought. Leisure and wealth are famous multipliers of vice, and the abolition of moral codes might decrease which acts are labeled decadent or depraved, but increase the occurrence.
This struck me as the kind of wishful thinking that says laws create crimes: abolish censorship, and suddenly everyone will spontaneously be decent and wholesome in their reading preferences. Get rid of the Hayes Code, and all movies will magically be rated G!
The ending of the novel was a splendid set-piece, taking place on an odd yet not-impossible world that suffers from cyclic global forest fires along its one equator-girdling continent. And yet the end of the book was unsatisfactory, even dull, as the murder-suicide of the Emperor was not foreshadowed, and the brittleness of the Empire was conveniently arranged by the author so that, not a series of great events, but a single mad ruler, could decimate the entire system. Maybe the author was making some sort of point about the rottenness of corrupt social systems, but, again, it struck me as wishful thinking.
I have nothing against heroes in a space opera smashing an evil space tyrant because their hearts are pure — good golly, I am a fan of FLASH GORDON, so I am in no position to criticize — but what is the point of a story where the bland non-hero pursues what is basically a decadent obsession with a hobby, gets used as a pawn by Black Ops, and the evil empire conveniently self-destructs?
My overall reaction was one of indifference. Having your hero stumble, or rather, get tripped by spies, into destroying an evil empire with a glass jaw, so it can conveniently be felled in a single blow, evokes nothing stronger than a shrug from me.
The foreign element in this case was the concept that laws cause corruption rather than cure it.
Anathem by Neal Stephenson
Plot Summary: On a world strangely like Earth, a three-thousand year old culture maintains an order of technicians and savants modeled after a Roman Catholic monastic order, complete with vows, hierarchies, rituals, robes, Gregorian chants, and a Holy Office of the Inquisition to root out violations of the discipline. The order, however, is purely intellectual, and religious thinkers are dismissed as ‘Deolaters.’ The monks live in isolation from the secular world. The purpose of the isolation is apparently to prevent the spread of dangerous technologies, weapons of mass destruction, biotechnology, or, indeed, anything a simple layman cannot take apart and fix with a toolkit.
Intrigue galore ensues when one monk is discovered to have been taking readings from an object in polar orbit over the world; and it is revealed that some of the older monasteries may retain the use of ancient and forbidden technologies.
My comment: the beginning of the book was absurdly slow, on the level of JONATHAN STRANGE & MR NORRELL levels of slowness.
The middle contained some of the best science fiction writing I have read in years. On the strength of that alone, I would recommend this book to any fan of SF. In case you missed it, let me repeat: The Best SF I’ve Read in years. Just the description of the Orion-drive space vessel is worth the price of the book.
The end was confusing and unresolved, and very last page was several paragraphs of gratuitous bashing of religion, which came as quite a surprise, considering the set-up of the novel.
The set-up was that the non-monks had been torn between nominalism and Platonism for centuries. The Platonists posited that there was a Realm of Pure Ideas which the mind perceives when it reasons: and this is meant to explain the similarity of conclusions of different thinkers in different lands and ages, which a materialistic postulation cannot explain. (The author does not call them Platonists because his is a different world, but he did not attempt to disguise his conception, either). When an inter-dimensional visitor appears, it is further speculated that each world can be the ‘world of ideas’ for the next, so that concepts, and even visions, pass from one continuum to the next, and by this means even beings in parallel dimensions would share certain concepts, such as the Pythagorean Theorem.
Throughout the book, there are hints dropped that the ‘Deolaters’ or God-worshippers are correct when they assume that the Platonic World of Ideas also contains Neoplatonic Ideas. The parallels that each religion in each continuum has are remarked upon: and yet, oddly, not one of these monks of the intellect comes to the conclusion that perhaps notions of God, like notions of the Pythagorean Theorem, are concurrent in all continua because there is a higher world from which such ideas issue: a spirit world.
In the final scene, when an ancient, perhaps immortal, monk of the intellect suddenly displays supernatural powers, such as the ability to alter probably and to move between closely parallel timelines, nothing comes of this revelation.
The existence of supernatural powers does not motivate any intellectual to conclude that the supernatural exists.
Whether the monk’s powers are truly supernatural, or only a dream, or the intervention of yet a higher realm of Pure Ideas, is left unresolved. I was expecting the confusing bits either to turn out to be clearly natural — perhaps the monk who seemed to die was still alive, due to some Jamesbondian slight-of-hand — or clearly supernatural — as in a scene where the main character talks to what can only be, if I am not mistaken, a ghost.
Instead the book ends in a marriage ceremony and a non-marriage ceremony, where the one token religious character is no longer intolerant of insults against his religion, and the token atheist makes a speech where he says religion is an act of poetry by people too unimaginative to realize that their poetical metaphors need to change with the times. Oh, and religion is complimented by saying it contains many insights into the human condition, but, since it is shackled to an ancient cosmological theory, religion can be dismissed as backward and obscurantist.
Now, this is hardly the foam-at-the-mouth Christophobia of a village atheist like Dawkins or Hitchens, but it is condescending rubbish, and, more to the point, it had nothing to do with the plot or the setup.
I would not have been so disappointed had I not fooled myself (or been led) into thinking the book’s plot elements were going the other way: all the religious characters were depicted as being dependable, honest, and hard-working, and the nominalist character was a loathsome rhetorician. The religious ideas were turning out to be the correct interpretation of the thinly-disguised version of Plato.
What made it easy to fool myself was my previous experience with the author. Neal Stephenson was one of the authors who persuaded me that religion is closer to the real human condition than atheism: as an aside in one of his books (I think it was CRYPTONOMICON) a character reflects upon the slow death of scores of crewmen in a submarine, and realizes that while a believer can say some word of kindness “May their souls rest in peace” a skeptic can only point out that their biological activity has ceased. The difference between how human, and how decent, the believer was and had to be over against how indecent and inhuman the skeptic was and had to be was striking to me, even though I was an atheist myself at the time. Because he studiously avoided Church-bashing in the past, it was an unexpected and unwelcome addition to this book.
As with the last book, my suspenders of disbelief snapped and dropped my trousers: who thinks that an institution of devotees can exist for three thousand years without something to which to be devoted? Even the university system (dates back to the 1300’s) is younger than the monastic system (dates back to 500’s): for so long as the University fulfilled their original function, which was to preserver and teach the learning of Christendom, they flourished: in the modern age, where the universities turned their back on religion, and embraced a toxic mix of postmodernism, socialism, nihilism, narcissism and hatred of logic, they have failed their educational mission, can no longer keep learning alive, and are corrupt bastions of intellectual unfreedom and thought-policing at its worst. History shows that religious orders can be long lasting (indeed, the Roman Catholic Church is the oldest institutional body of any kind in the world, older than any democratic order, older than the Monarchy of England, older than the Western idea of Monarchy ) but that nonreligious intuitions are short-lived. (How long did Revolutionary France last as worshippers of the Goddess of Reason before Napoleon was forced to reinstate the Catholic Church?)
But that is not my complaint. If an author wants to posit a three thousand year old illuminati group, fine! I have no problem with that. Myself, I assume worshippers of the gods of Egypt still exist in hidden caverns under Iceland and are still taking telepathic orders from the mummy of Pharaoh Amenhotep, and would have taken over the earth long ago with their Way Cool mind powers and their Earthquake Ray Machine, had it not been for Doc Savage and The Shadow descending into the volcano-crater of Snæfellsjökull in order to thwart their powermad schemes. I am not going to complain that a long-lived conspiracy group is unrealistic.
My complaint is that the author sets up what is obviously a religious hierarchy with all the trappings of a religion and none of the pith, and then goes out of his way to (gently) bash religion, even though, apparently unbeknownst to him, the religious interpretation, or, at least, the supernatural interpretation, is a more feasible one than the nominalist or secular interpretation of the events he himself portrays in his book. Once you have mystic monks able to waltz through locked doors due to their control of the multiple world-lines predicted by quantum mechanics, it seems ridiculous to ridicule people who believe in mystic monks. Once you establish that you live in a universe where inspirations and insights issue from a Higher World, it seems foolish to mock those who believe in a Higher World.
Religion is nothing more than bad science or poetic metaphors taken too literally, eh? I came away from this original and thought-provoking book, truly a book of new ideas, thinking it was something I had read before, many times. Many, many, many times.
My reaction was one of disappointment. The foreign element here was the backhanded condescension toward religion, which was out of place, considering what the plot had established.
Endless Things by John Crowley
For this book, let me give my reaction first. This book is a cheat.
It is the same old Gnosticism crap, that promises everything and delivers nothing. The foreign element was the wall-eyed blindness toward Christianity in general, Catholicism in particular.
Now, if you have not run across Gnosticism over and over again in various forms, both in fantasy books and philosophical writings, the ideas may seem shining and new to you.
This is the fourth book in John Crowley’s ambitious AEGYPT sequence, and a long-awaited, very long awaited, sequel to his 1980’s novel of that name. The books are Ægypt (1987) [aka ‘The Solitudes’], Love & Sleep (1994), Dæmonomania (2000), Endless Things (2007)
Plot Summary: there is no plot, if by plot you mean one event leads to the next in resolution of some sort of conflict, inner or outer. This work is a long character study of two or three characters, some ancient and some modern, some fictional in a book-within-a-book, some real, in the author’s book, which may perhaps turn out to be the book the fictional character is writing.
A failed historian named Moffet wonders about things, wanders to a township called Faraway Hills, has some pointless and unconsummated love affairs, including a sodomite union with the ghost of his dead son, or maybe it’s the god cupid; he dabbles in magic, dabbles in sadomasochism, gets a grant to finish a historical tract on the idea that the laws of nature change as human paradigms change, does not finish it, gets an advance to finish the unfinished historical novel about Giordano Bruno, does not finish that, has an insight as to why reality exists, and then other stuff happens. And then there is a scene with an Aeolian harp.
The theme, however, is that the universe contains a secret history: back when we all believed in magic, there actually was magic, and now that we cease to believe, our minds have erased the reality from reality, and only fragments remain. The book is full of hints that a new age is coming, and magic will once more rule the world. These hints, of course, are a cheat.
The theme is not an innocent one. In the earlier book, Daemonomania, the antagonists were an evil Christian cult called the Powerhouse, who were evil because, well, they were Christian. They did not have to do anything wrong, merely to be Christian and onstage was apparently enough. The Christians were trying to use prayer to cure a little girl of disease.
The idea that, if witchcraft is about to rise up from its long exile and take over the world, the rational thing to do is to get on the side of a Good God who can exorcise demons and drive back vampires with a cross, well, is an idea that never occurs to any character in the book. The idea that magic actually existed back in the day when we all believed in magic ergo, QED, the miracles and mighty works of saints and apostles also actually existed back when we all believed in miracles, saints and apostles, is once again never raised in the book, though to me it seems an obvious, even inevitable, conclusion.
Meanwhile, Moffet, who becomes fascinated with magic powers, uses it to lure his girlfriend into becomes his bondage-fetishist sex-slave. This, of course, is another implication of what would happen in the twilight mystery of magic suddenly flourished in the hard sunlight of a modern age. The logical thing to do, even for an atheist, it would seem to me, if magical creatures started flowing in from the cracks of the world, would be, first, to call the Ghostbusters, and, second, to call an Exorcist. (You call the Ghostbusters first because they make no demands that you amend your life, or repent your ways.)
Now, someone explain to me in what way the magician, using his powers to corrupt a girl into sexual perversion is the good guy, and the Christians using their powers to heal the sick are the bad guys?
Is there some rule involved in modern urban fantasy which decrees that one can believe in Demons and Fallen Angels but cannot believe in Unfallen Angels?
In other words, the reader is not led to explore what the logical implications of this theme might be. That does not fit with the author’s purpose, because it would lead to uncomfortable intellectual territory, such as the idea that if that the angels described in the opening of the first book actually exist, then the God who made them also exists, and that it is right to give Him thanks and praise.
The author’s purpose is to put across the alluring possibility, or, if it is impossible, the melancholic might-have-been, that the world is nothing more than a snare from which we can escape, and remake truth and reality as we would. The Christian view that the world is a snare from which we can be saved, and learn the truth so that the truth might set us free, is nowhere explored or mentioned.
And honest approach to the theme of "what would the world be like if belief could make it so?" would explore both the selfish beliefs of the Gnostics, alchemists, and magicians, and contrast them with the selfless beliefs of saints and sages.
So much for the theme.
On one level, the novel is an exploration of the parallels between the Youth Movement of the late Sixties, and the Rosicrucian movement of the 1600’s. I must admit that I personally have always regarded the Youth Movement as one of history’s great errors, fit for a chapter or two, if only a modern version were written, in Charles Mackay’s EXTRAORDINARY POPULAR DELUSIONS AND THE MADNESSES OF CROWDS. The interest and fascination in magic and alchemy, which is, due to popular ignorance, ascribed to the Middle Ages and the Church, is, in reality, a product of the Renaissance, an era when scientific speculation was crippled. The posture of the Church regarding magic, astrology and alchemy is well known to anyone who cares to know: as is the relation of logic and natural philosophy to metaphysics, and the attitude of schoolmen and churchmen to them. The Rosicrucian Movement is the end of one of the most exacting and logical periods in intellectual history: a great mass of confusion between symbols and the things the symbols represent, a period of hysteria and delirium. The parallels to the Youth Movement in this regard speak for themselves. Much of my youthful enthusiasm for the magic of the Renaissance was damped between the 1980’s when I first read AEGYPT, and now, when I’ve read ENDLESS THINGS, mostly because my respect for the Middle Ages increased.
Now, any critic who says that Crowley’s AEGYPT sequence comprise one of the greatest novels of the Twentieth Century is telling the truth. It perfectly captures the spirit of the century, with its bitter disillusions, its dreams, its utopian plans, its unfinished meandering, its intellectual impotence, its turning away from religion. Allow me to define the Twentieth Century not according to the calendar, but according to the spirit of the age: it embraces the years between 1914 and 2001, roughly between the outbreak of the Great War and the onset of the Terror War. This Century contained the hope and bewilderment of youth, in a fashion that the sober maturity of earlier centuries lacked. But the hope and bewilderment of youth were those of a disobedient and, yes, self-destructive youth: a beatnik, a hippie, a punk, a drunk.
AEGYPT is one of the great novels of the Twentieth Century: I say this again. This novel is written on many levels; it is a tapestry of words; it is haunting; it is deep. Merely to trace the myriad connections, plays on words, echoes and reflections woven into this well-woven work would be the work of a lifetime. If you want to see the kind of intricacy Alan Moore brought to his WATCHMAN on display, springing from the pen of a master, read Crowley.
I kid you not. This is a great book. But I recoiled from it. I am sorry I wasted my time.
This book is also a cheat in the same way the Twentieth Century itself was a cheat. The melancholy for former ages, ages when man was one with nature, ages when we believed in magic, combined with the desire to find a shining truth, when we have abandoned all the tools by which we distinguish true from false, gave the Twentieth Century all unique character: what distinguishes the Twentieth Century its false hopes for utopia, and all its bloody totalitarianism by which those utopia dreams were given Caesarian section, only to be born dead.
In philosophical circles the intellectual compliment of utopianism is an abortive philosophy (or, to call things by their right names, a heresy) called Gnosticism. In the same way Utopians ascribe to man the ability to make Eden on Earth, Gnostic ascribe to man the ability to reshape reality. If I may be permitted to simplify a many-faceted and every-changing idea, Gnostics teach that Man made the Cosmos, and that by breaking free of the Cosmos and its deceptions, we shall become as gods, knowing good and evil, or, rather, become once again as gods. Like Utopians, Gnostic teach that everything will be perfect if only we reject everything we know.
The main character, Moffet, spends all his energy searching for a mysterious something he knows but cannot name. At one point, he is literally looking for the Philosopher’s Stone, which will turn base things into gold, and allow you to breathe the air of which comes from the Forever Lands. He is looking for miracles, and he never looks in the one place where miracles are still found. That one place just never seems to come up; the option is never even explored.
All the mystery, all the alchemical magic he seeks, are found in a true way far from the false maze of shadows and false promises which comprise Gnosticism. The whole appeal of Gnosticism is that it is secret. The Gnostics have a secret knowledge which grants them eternal life, and communion with spirits ,and so on.
Neither Moffet, nor, it seems, the author, stops to think that if someone actually found the secret of the world, the first thing he would do it tell it. He would go to the synagogues throughout all Palestine and preach it. He would go to the Hill in Athens and tell the philosophers. He would lift the beggar by the gates and tell him, and the beggar would dance away, rejoicing. Anyone who knew the secret of life would build tall steeples and hang bells in them and ring them in joyful celebration. He would go to India and preach it there, or to far Cathay.
Well, who Is it, beloved, who acts this way? Who tolls the bells in joy and tells the world of our mysteries?
After following the career of Moffet for more pages than I can count, it astonishes me that he does not see what is right before his eyes. But no, like Gollum, he is only interested in the dark places of the world, the buried secrets, the Gnostic knowledge.
In the end, nothing happens, nothing is resolved, there is no plot, no point, and whatever you expected for this book, expect those expectations to be cheated.
Now, if you are like me, you are sick and tired of Gnosticism, because you have seen it everywhere, either in disguise (THE MATRIX, STRANGER IN A STRANGE LAND) or undisguised (A VOYAGE TO ARCTURUS). It seems to be the default assumption of the more artsy and self-absorbed branch of the artistic community. It is a dogma without a doctrine, and idea that makes no demands, but strokes the ego: you are secretly a god, trapped in a false life by the forces of unenlightenment.
Gnosticism is a notion as romantic as the story of a boy raised by wolves who will one day found Rome, or a knight’s son raised by peasants whowill one day find The Grail. The romance is due to the danger and the mystery. The romance is due to the conspiracy theory nature of Gnosticism: as if you are a detective in disguise in the midst of a dangerous cabal of anarchists. But in this case, the Gnostic is the anarchist, the bomb-thrower in rebellion against God and Creation, and the Orthodox is the Policeman, the Orthodox who are patriotic to reality, life and the universe.
As to whether or not it is more romantic to be an anarchist, in rebellion against God and Life, or to be the policeman in disguise, in rebellion against a world turned to anarchy, I leave it in more capable hands than mine to answer, and refer the reader to MAN WHO WAS THURSDAY by G.K. Chesterton.
About John C Wright
John C. Wright is a practicing philosopher, a retired attorney, newspaperman, and newspaper editor, and a published author of science fiction. Once a Houyhnhnm, he was expelled from the august ranks of purely rational beings when he fell in love; but retains an honorary title.
