Mieville, Atwood, and Stross
June 22, 2011
The City and the City by China Mieville. In a departure from his earlier work, China Mieville gives us a detective story set in the fictional split cities of Beszel and Ul Qoma. The unique feature of these cities is that they share a common space, only separate by mental barriers and a common societal taboo. Each citizen simply works to *not notice* the events in the other city, while also staying away from certain locations which are only in the other city. It is an interesting idea and Mieville uses it to tell a gripping detective novel. The prose is much more sparse than his earlier work, befitting the genre. There are hints of fantastic origins of this arrangement, but to my regret these are not explained.
Oryx and Crake by Margaret Atwood. Margaret Atwood claims that she doesn't write science fiction, because everything in her books "could actually happen." From this I understand that she actually means she doesn't *read* much science fiction, because she certainly writes it. Oryx and Crake is science fiction at its purest. An extrapolation of current social and technological trends is used to explore some classic aspect of human nature. What happens when love, jealousy, ideology, and genius combine into a dangerous mix of power and irresponsibility? How different can a human be before we stop calling it human? Atwood has a strong sense of pace and organization. Her three main characters are believable people with real human motivations, although Oryx is unnaturally calm and good-natured considering her difficult life.
Glasshouse by Charles Stross. Glasshouse is a kind of sequel to his earlier novel Accelerando. Stross shows us a post-scarcity, post-death, post-everything society in which physical forms are infinitely malleable as are the varieties of human experience. A group of "experimental archaeologists" have set up a lab in which to explore some aspects of historical human society, namely 1950-2010 middle-class America. The recruit volunteers and set them up inside a panopticon which has spooky simulacrity with modern America, but as a group of future historians might interpret it from incomplete documentary sources. For example, they routinely mistake normative texts as descriptive ones. The main character uncovers more sinister motives and works to escape the prison while simultaneously escaping his past war traumas.