Pulp fictions

Bad Gibson; good Estelman

I’m a huge fan of The Peripheral, and indeed most of William Gibson’s books, but Agency, the sequel to The Peripheral, was a huge disappointment when I reread it last week. One warning sign should have been that I remembered nothing of the plot or characters except for a vague impression of explosions at an airfield. This is really unusual for a writer with such a gift for scenes and settings. His plots have grown successively less cartoonish and more character driven as he’s grown older but his special gift is for dressing the sets on which the characters act so as to suggest whole worlds.

He doesn’t do this only in the original cyberspace of the sprawl trilogy, astonishing though that was. The dystopian future Appalachia where most of the action of The Peripheral takes place is almost as hard to forget, and so is the Bridge in that trilogy.

In all of these worlds there is an almost feudal division of society between the unimaginably rich and the predestined poor. Like all my favourite science fictions (the Pohl and Kornbluth novels of the Fifties, for example) these show us the present in the light of a future that’s already here. Nothing will improve on the description of the American TV audience from Virtual Light:

Best visualized as a vicious, lazy, profoundly ignorant, perpetually hungry organism craving the warm god-flesh of the anointed. Personally I like to imagine something the size of a baby hippo, the color of a week-old boiled potato, that lives by itself, in the dark, in a double-wide on the outskirts of Topeka. It’s covered with eyes and it sweats constantly. The sweat runs into those eyes and makes them sting. It has no mouth…no genitals, and can only express its mute extremes of murderous rage and infantile desire by changing the channels on a universal remote. Or by voting in presidential elections.

People say that science fiction can’t predict the future, but here you have Trump explained, in 1993.

Gibson’s plots, when you break them down, are really Chandleresque: fast moving clockwork swirls numerous crooks and lowlifes around the heroes in a bewildering dance. When you don’t know what to do, Chandler advised, have a man come into the room with a gun. Gibson would rather have a swarm of nanoassemblers bring in the gun but the idea and the propulsion of the plot is the same.

That kind of twist, or jump in the plot is one of the most enjoyable elements of his books: you get so suspend just enough disbelief to feel you’re flying; but the effect depends on there being some real danger to the hero. The villains have to be malevolent, powerful, and present. The Peripheral passes all these tests.

The good guys are in danger and seem weak and helpless. One of them is an alcoholic, and two others damaged or crippled veterans of an unspecified war. The division between rich and poor or powerful and powerless plays out over two axes, in time, between the future in which 80% of the human race has been destroyed but the survivors wield immensely powerful technologies, including a form of time travel which allows them to communicate with past worlds through computers no one understands, and an (alternative) present where rural America where shadowy drug barons preside over economic devastation and the poor get around on electric bikes or cars made from cardboard.

The good guys are at the wrong end of both power gradients and are at first very reasonably suspicious of their allies from the future. Only gradually do the two teams come to trust and even like each other.

The southern tough guy dialect is nicely caught: “On a war crimes dial stops at ten? About a twelve.”

There is a glorious foreshadowing of an LLM implant:

“Ash leaned forward … ‘We’ll just test it,’ she said to Flynne. ‘Tell us, please, why you think Daedra West’s art is important today.’ Flynne looked at her. ‘West’s oeuvre obliquely propels the viewer through an elaborately finite set of iterations, skeins of carnal memory manifesting an exquisite tenderness, but delimited by our mythologies of the real, of body. It isn’t about who we are now, but about who we would be, the other.’ She blinked. ‘Fucking hell.’

‘What is that thing that talks?’ she asked … ‘Cognitive bundle … It constructs essentially meaningless statements out of a given jargon, around whatever chosen topic.’

Although the goodies from the future are essentially superheroes when they appear in the past, or affect parts of it — they are able, for instance, to gain access to an unlimited fortune for their allies — they remain human and weak in their own time, and the affections that spring up across a gap of centuries are tinged with horrible loss.

Almost all this is lost in Agency, even though many of the characters are the same. The good guys have lost all their vulnerabilities, and enjoy what might as well be superpowers. They can blow up anyone they choose without fear of retaliation. The gabbling implant is replaced by a Dea ex Machina, an almost omniscient and omnipotent AI who is able to survive her own dismemberment and resurrect stronger and wiser than ever before. It reads more like the novelisation of a comic book than anything else.

It was a relief to turn to Whiskey River, a novel of warring gangsters during prohibition in Detroit. Boiled too hard the crime novel disintegrates like a potato. I can’t read Jack Reacher, for example, because the books have only one character. He has no feelings and no one else has any reality. But Loren D. Estelman boils it just right. There are plenty of murders, but the hero cares and the reader is shocked; or, when they come too fast to be properly noticed, the hero cares that he doesn’t care. He wants to be hard boiled but he ends up merely lonely.

I hadn’t reread Whiskey River for maybe twenty years. I think I picked up my copy in some literary editor’s office, in the days when you could wander in and find unconsidered treasures piled in drifts around the room. But Estelman was frighteningly prolific and last year I read another six of his Detroit novels in which a skein of characters map the city’s history from the rise of Henry Ford until the 1980s. He can’t make worlds come alive the way the Gibson can. I’ve never been to Detroit and the names of its suburbs and streets evoke nothing for me when he uses them to tack his canvas down. I’ve never been in outer space, either, but I can still see the interior of a Tessier Ashpool satellite. What Estelman can write about is betrayal and corruption, greed and disappointment, all illuminated by flickers of decency and courage. He’s all on Kindle. Try him.

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If you want the gold standard of grumpy old farts, here’s Robert Graves, in 1962:

“English has been in decline as a reliable poetic language since 1650; but can still be used if one takes enough trouble with it.”