If on a Winter's Night a Traveller... (Book Review)

Okay so promise kept, I am reviewing a book I just finished a few days ago, the postmodern novel from 1979 by Italo Calvino, If on a winter's night a traveller. The book -unlike most I'd imagine- is notable for its desire to highlight the artificial nature of what it is. It breaks the fourth wall inherently from the first few lines and continues to do so with abandon: You are the protagonist and you have a story that lies within this story, and many after it. The book inspired the David Mitchell novel Cloud Atlas (which I have reviewed here) and is recognised as one of the greatest pieces of Italian literature of the previous century.

The novel takes us through the reading process, a process we're all familiar with I'm sure, but to see it written down for us at the start of a novel is quite a shell game to play. The narrative revolves around us buying Italo Calvino's new novel If on a winter's night a traveller, and commencing to read as readers often do, which provides a comical glimpse at the unconscious mind when performing such day-to-day tasks as reading. (Have you left the stove on? Sure the front door's locked? Need the toilet beforehand?) It allows us to see how writers write simultaneously as Calvino is able to use his omnipresent voice to highlight the difficulties that the author (himself) went through, in order to write the book we are about to read. He highlights the philosophical side of writing and the idea that the first-person "I" as used by writers is designed in part to include elements of the author's personality. He denotes the very functions of the fictional writing style as if he is telling us how the story has been constructed.

Jittery at first, the novel smooths out its learning curve and we find ourselves in the first of the unfinished stories within the work. In my Cloud Atlas review I included a list of the story halves so as to make the structure appear more accessible and I will do the same for this book, because it's only when seeing it pan out before you, do you really understand the structure:

Chapter 1
If on a winter's night a traveller
Chapter 2
Outside the town of Malbork
Chapter 3
Leaning from the steep slope
Chapter 4
Without fear of wind or vertigo
Chapter 5
Looks down in the gathering shadow
Chapter 6
In a network of lines that enlace
Chapter 7
In a network of lines that intersect
Chapter 8
On the carpet of leaves illuminated by the moon
Chapter 9
Around an empty grave
Chapter 10
What story down there awaits its end?
Chapter 11
Chapter 12

I hope the list aids you, but if not allow me to explain. As you start to read the first story, you find it ceases mid-page, a printing error has occurred and so you set out in Chapter 2 to find the rest of the book. You meet a woman named Ludmilla, whom you find has also experienced the misfortune of an unfinished book. The publisher however has seen even bigger problems, the authors' names are getting mixed up, and the novel started was in fact not If on a winter's night a traveler by Italo Calvino, but instead was the text belonging to Outside the town of Malbork by a completely different author!

The puzzles increase and over time plot lines are abandoned in pursuit of the next unfinished prose, ravenous reader that you are, and so you seek and travel and hop and jump and explore all over the world until you reach the terminus having not finished a single novel. The point at which you realise that despite all of these stories and all of these grand heroes and heroines writ into the pages, in reality, there was only one protagonist and he was in all of them: He was you.

The book is many things and at the same time it is a single thing, the epicentre of a black hole almost. Is it a crime thriller? A dystopia? A love story? A mystery? Or is it the narrative that we all live and breathe in our lives, not the life of a reader, but of the characters we visualise and live within even for a short while, the books we enjoy and feel inspired by, that make us?

Reading the work provides two perspectives that I touched upon in my article on why writers write. The former is that of the reader, why you read and how we all read, the methods, the distractions, styles and motivations so vast. But more importantly is the latter I feel, not because I write myself, but rather because for all who read the book it will always spark lucidity with the process for those who haven't engaged with it seriously. The book truly makes you consider the writer at the other end of the metaphorical bridge that writing is and how they think, how they breathe life into narratives.

But the best thing about If on a winter's night a traveller... is not the style or even the philosophy behind it, but rather the sheer skill Calvino employs when switching to the stories embedded within the chapters. The voices chatter lifelike, the narratives are truly gripping (just a shame they're never finished!) and perhaps the greatest strength, the fact that you never feel remote when you go into the 'proper' tales; they're no different than any other novel you'd happen across on a shelf in the local bookshop, which makes this Inception-esque journey into stories within your story a perfect delight for a week's reading. A book to read at some point in your life, even if only to marvel at the impressive linguistic footwork- and what a performance it is!

If On a Winter's Night a Traveller (1979)

Why I Read/Write: Some Thoughts

So a few minutes ago a thought occurred to me: Why do writers write?

Now this question is usually answered easily enough, expressed differently from writer to writer of course and the response will generally follow the same logic: It's what I was born to do/ I wouldn't be doing anything else/ I knew it was what I wanted to do as soon as I started reading as a kid etc. Published authors of course all share a passion for books, they enjoy reading and -over time- they formulated characters, scenarios and backgrounds that would only be expressed if they were to put pen to paper; for them to reach out and grab the reader and shake her profusely, while shouting maniacally that it's this guy whose problems they should focus on, this relationship, that murder and so on. It's a nagging of voices heard by no other, an overflow of people unborn to whom birth can only be given via the written word from writer to reader.

A short while ago I started reading the postmodern novel If on a Winter's Night a Traveller... by the Italian writer, Italo Calvino. I've nearly finished it and will certainly be reviewing it, but for now I'm going to touch on it here. The novel focuses on the reader as the central character, but the commentary is from the perspective of Calvino himself, which is where thoughts leak and sentiments over reading and what it means to be a reader or writer are discussed amongst the characters. It's not only invigorated me as a reader but the images conjured on occasion remind me of philosophical novels like The Problems of Philosophy by Bertrand Russell. I slowly formulated my own image of the relationship: A valley, uncrossable by either party, but the writer has timber, nails and the knowledge of carpentry and it is through this skill set that he can allow the two parties to meet. The writer writes into the days that die into nights and seasons pass slowly. The reader waits, yearning for the writer's thoughts while the writer drives himself mad wanting to impart those thoughts to the reader. Over time the bridge is completed, the structure is built, but sadly, there remains work to be done; planks are missing, the timber is broken in some places: A second draft is needed. And so the writer writes and -eventually, the bridge is finished and upon meeting the reader, the writer feels relief wash over him as the chatter of voices unheard dies down as conflicts are settled.

This rambling of psuedo-philosophy on my part serves only to highlight a second characteristic of writers: the idea of centrality, the absoluteness of the written word that for writers is omnipresent. Books and the professional reading/writing of them is of complete importance to a professional author. You could say that it is the meaning of their very life. Their meaning of life one could say, is to write books, to pass ideas and tales onto a ravenous public waiting to devour their fantasies.

The meaning of life is inevitably where my imagination took me after thinking this and what life means to me, because I of course exist outside of my reading/writing habits: I have a job alongside this, I have friends, family, other hobbies and I'm certain that authors who I admire have the exact same things going on in their lives, so why the focus on this medium of communication? Personally I would suggest looking at any other medium of communication for analysis. Take film for example: a film director (like Quentin Tarantino for instance,) will see a desire to impart upon a set of people a tale, a cast of characters, brought to life by actors, who -through a desire so akin to his directors'- seek only to bring to life as many interesting personas as they possibly can and it is through this prism that we see an identical glimmer of desire, a passion. No matter where you look, you see desire, the raw, primal instinct to just want to do something that brings pleasure to the agent. But is it more than even this? Is this merely the means to an end?

An Aside

A short while ago I wrote an opinion piece, in which I sought to disprove everything UKIP was saying before the local elections in May this year. I did that because I saw a disingenuousness in their politics, a representation of everything that I hate in humans, wherever it might be found and that is a brand of ignorance that is inexcusable, an ignorance of truth in the so-called Age of Information. Arthur C Clarke in the 1970s predicted that one day satellites would bring the accumulated knowledge of the human race "to our fingertips." The Internet came and changed our lives forever and in doing so it made us more informed, or at least offered a way in which power could be held to account more readily, the tide of propaganda and populism stalled if only a little easier than had been previously possible. In short: to be informed today is easier than it ever has been, because source material can be more easily traced.

Returning to the crux of this essay, the knowledge that can be gathered, the data that can be readily accessed by anyone with a computer and modem can be married with the desire to tell fictions. What are fictions, but truths wrapped in the clothes of lies? What do authors do but philosophise over issues near and dear to them. The War of the Worlds was written from the standpoint of anti-imperialism; Starship Troopers was written from a pro-nuclear testing viewpoint and Cloud Atlas was written from ideas surrounding continuity, the rise and fall of humanity and how struggles so akin to one another thread through time immemorial. At the end of the day, the meaning of life for authors seems to be to give ideas to people, clad in the beautiful prose of an armour-peircing bullet designed to penetrate and influence the deepest parts of us, our souls if you will, for the better, or at least the idea of betterment, from the writer's perspective.

But ideas must germinate from something, they don't pop out of the air, but rather they grow from the fertile soil of a mind that is willing to think. And it is here where the two ideas meet. It was when I brought these two ideas together that I realised my meaning of life is not to write or even to read, but rather to know. To learn things, to keep learning as often as possible. I've long believed that knowledge is the key to happiness and fulfilment, because to know is to be informed and to be informed is to be privy to the truth, which in turn means that you have not been drawn into false notions of what exists inside your perceptions. We all see the same events, we hear about them on the radio, we see them on the TV and we hear politicians debate them in the House of Commons. But even though we see and hear the same thing, seldom do we perceive the same thing, but rather one man will jump to conclusions (such as those I accused UKIP of,) while the man who is informed will say otherwise, will challenge what he sees on first sight as often as possible and while I don't want this essay to turn political at this point, and I of course acknowledge that I myself can/has/will commit the same shortsighted offences I've accused others of in the past, I still wish to be informed, I want to know and above all, I desire an outlet for original thought that comes from my perceptions, to forge originality from the material of what I perceive, be it in fiction or in fact.

Ultimately, to write is to create and to read is to discover. One can easily become informed and politically aware through simply checking up on facts, using the Internet as an indispensable tool, or seeking them out wherever they might be lurking, but to engage in fiction and to use it to create your own is special, because with fictional works there often comes a truth inside it. There's a philosophy inside of most books/films/music, and it is through these prisms that our understanding of the world is enhanced, because anyone can live a life, can check a fact, can become knowledgable on what has happened before, and can use this to explain what's happening in the present: but what can you say about it? At the end of the day, our lives are fragments of time, perceived through eyes in a blink that are connected to minds unique, so why not engage them in rewriting that which might have failed us? To improve on what's already gone wrong? To learn? If you were to tell the world one story, to leave a piece of advice, a poem or even a comment, what would it say?

Hyperion & The Fall of Hyperion: An Omnibus Review

Hyperion (1989) and The Fall of Hyperion (1990) are the first two of four books that together form the Hyperion Cantos. A Science Fantasy work, Simmons through great talent has created a universe entirely believable, yet simultaneously ridiculous, epitomising the Arthur C Clarke law that "any piece of technology sufficiently far-future, is indistinguishable from magic." The influences here are astonishing, drawing influence from Chaucer's The Canterbury Tales to Dante's Inferno, taking ideas from Gibson's Neuromancer and mixing it with Military SF akin to Heinlein, all while juggling the story lines that unfold to converge again some time later, in cleverly-constructed plot convolutions. Let's begin with Hyperion.

The first volume takes the structure of The Canterbury Tales and turns it into a sic fi bonanza. A Consul to the planet Hyperion is meeting the other pilgrims accompanying him to the planet's surface in what will be the final pilgrimage to the Time Tombs. The mysterious god-figure, the Shrike, is killing at will and danger looms in the form of the Ousters' force, seeking to control and eventually destroy Hyperion. Meanwhile, the AI political faction aka the TechnoCore, is warring within itself, three factions fighting over the next political step for the human population of the Web, a galaxy of worlds all connected via Farcasters, phased singularities that allow teleportation via wormholes. The pilgrims are: The Consul; a Poet; a Soldier; a Scholar; a Detective; a Templar and a Priest. Their stories are told in succession, the Consul already aware that one of them is an Ouster spy. But who? Is it the Priest, who has witnessed the power of God first-hand? The Soldier, hiding behind his tale of love? What about the Poet, and his ode to the arts, his times of hardship and ancient history a cloak for treachery? The Detective's brush with a dead man who lives once more too extraordinary? The Scholar's tragedy of loss and gravitas too much to suspect? Or is it even the Consul himself?

Science fiction, beautifully constructed, dithers into a personal journal, proceeding to tell tales as far-reaching as the flashing rainbows of the planet they travel towards, switching to voice, to recording, to flashback and flash-forward, to the journey at hand and the conflicts that brew between them as their distinctive personalities clash frequently, and often humorously. A whodunnit, a frame story, a space opera, a political thriller and ultimately, a story of humanity meld together into an enduring work of science fiction of the modern era.

 But the ending is merely the beginning of the end. And so we enter The Fall of Hyperion, a maze of frantic sub-plots that serve to provide a staggered perspective of each character seeing events through different eyes as us, the privileged spectator. We enter a countdown to the war as worlds start to experience it's deadly spread, while each of the pilgrims experiences their own passage through Hell with the Shrike, so akin to Dante's Inferno, while the poetic mythology of the Greek Titans as summed up by John Keats takes on whole new incarnations in the robotic delivery of cyberspace-dwelling AIs. This half of the duology is considerably longer, tying together the convolutions of the previous half so effortlessly that it leaves you breathless as characters who've perished on one page are revived on another, events seemingly certain not always so, making this two-part journey a ride I'll remember for a very long time.

Indeed, for a long time now, science fiction writers have often been scientists themselves: Asimov the roboticist, Niven the mathematician and Wells the biologist spring to mind. But here is an author whose primary expertise and interest lies not in science, but in literature, in philosophy and politics, combining them with a caution-free approach to technology and science, and swapping them for ideas and environments more fantasy than SF, taking components and even names of real people (you may spot the William Gibson references!) and using them at will to exemplify the vast story components in ways that even most accomplished writers would struggle with.

In closing you may think this summation short and sparse given the two books reviewed within; but I disagree, for the Hyperion Cantos is too complex a work to be explained in detail here in order to serve it justice. And in my closing remark on both these tomes I will say read them, and read them quickly, don't put them down and leave it to stew because you will lose the pace. But at the same time don't skim, because it does no such work as this the justice it truly deserves; one needs to see those flashing rainbows, to consider what a lack of magnetic field on a planet would be like to live under, and to sense a shift along the desert floor, a ripple in time itself as a malign God draws near. And finally -to paraphrase Stephen King- I will say that I am in awe of Dan Simmons, for producing a work as original and expertly-executed as this one: A Lord of the Rings of the Science Fiction genre!          

Hyperion (1989) & The Fall of Hyperion (1990)

inSIDious: A Short Story

Sorry I've been inactive as of late, but there's been little to write about; I've been editing and reading more etc. as well as putting together, over the last 4-5 days, a short story that I've had rattling around for a while now (about the last 4 months.) It's a post-scarcity cyberpunk work that I hope you enjoy! Updates on the future are at the end of the post. Enjoy!

inSIDious

Dante Diamond’s eyes glistened against the shimmer of white concrete as people stormed the plaza. The Old-Earth Parisian street behind him gave off a scent of fresh bread caught in a summer heat wave, a breeze picking up to cool him down as he willed it in his mind. It was hard to believe that he was dead. He had opted, long before his will was written and finalised, to join in the trillion-strong community housed in the Soulscape, a post-death simulation of life free from suffering or pain, experienced both collectively and separately by the billions every day. Hardwired into the very memory of the God Drive Supercomputer, personalities were reconstructed and backed up and set free to live as they saw fit, their every desire met instantly within their own, blissful hallucination of an afterlife. Commands issued by the trillions of minds within the Soulscape formed a vast ocean of data, God itself surfing the waves unquestioningly and even at times presciently: VINCE (Virtual Interactive Neurological Coexistence Emergence) ran the show with intelligence beyond reckoning, governed only by his coding and the sheer computing power of the God Drive, exceeding the size of an earth-like planet at the centre of the Milky Way.

Walking the streets to the familiar Les Tablettes restaurant, he bode a good morning to the French bartender Adrien, twenty-first century; middle-aged, and took the outside table facing a brilliant rainbow of flowers that buzzed with a couple of harmless bees, pollinating in the black iron display.

“Dante! How are you today, my friend?” He shouted in his token up-down intonations, a line graph travelling downhill.

“Fine Adrien, I’m great.”

“You wanna beer? Or wine? Got a very fine number today, from Helios System, 2569; good year Dante. A very fine year!”

“That’s okay Adrien, just two of the regular please.”

“You got it Dante, but you gotta lighten up man, enjoy your time in the ‘scape; thing might not last forever. Heard about a guy once, personality construct got corrupted and died a true one; poor bastard couldn’t get recovered.”

“I’ll keep it in mind Adrien, cheers. Just waiting for Rachel.”

“Ah you meeting the wife today then,” he grinned suggestively. “Have fun and don’t forget about the pleasure simstim when you do it.”

He laughed. “It’s not like that Adrien.”

“Ah sure! Just say I said hello, alright?”

“She’ll be here in a second, you could tell yourself.”

“Will do Dante, will do.” He bounced back into the restaurant to pour the beers with a vigorous glee that wasn’t quite human.

Adrien was a construct generated by Vince for him, as an additional friend to those he had already; dead or alive, it didn’t matter. He didn’t even know who exactly was dead or just raw construct anymore, they all blended seamlessly like city canals, converging.

He sipped the cool beverage slowly before Rachel appeared in her blonde-haired, deep blue-eyed, more youthful incarnation. She sat beside him in that sprightly disposition he’d grown so used to:

“Dante! How’ve you been?” Adrien waved over the bar, she smiled widely and waved back. “Seen Vince recently?”

Dante felt unusual around these times because he knew –almost latently- that Rachel wasn’t real. He’d died, but she’d lived on. “No.” He replied after a short silence. “Everything’s in order at the minute I think, but there’s something he wants to see me about; all at my convenience of course.”

“Don’t work too hard okay? You gotta enjoy your afterlife, everyone else does.”

“It’s not quite as simple though, being CS and all.”

She frowned, “You could send yourself crazy ensuring this place works all the time. You’re only human and you’d think Vince’d have some kind of upgrade by now so he doesn’t need dead agents to do his dirty work.”

Although Dante knew that the Soulscape could survive well enough without him or any other former CyberService agent, he strongly suspected that there was trouble in paradise, hard as it was to believe: An appropriate pre-Sublimation era phrase he thought. How can AIs manage negative thoughts without failure? Of course CSers were different, allowed some autonomy, but still, most people had some negativity retained in their mind, it was needed, else the subject would literally lose their mind with too many blanks in the memory. The trick was always to satisfy and present no reason or purpose for the ugly to present itself in the mind and threaten their version of heaven. Whatever programming language was used, he thought, they sure as hell perfected it over the last couple hundred years.

“Attacks.”

“What?” Rachel was stunned.

He looked over the rim of his glass to hers that was stained with lipstick. “It’s always possible he needs someone with more finesse, greater accuracy, fits in smaller gaps to solve problems, helps strengthen the security, tightens the net.”

“Strange phrases.”

He agreed and gulped back more of the beer, still as cold as winter and sweet as tropical fruits.

“So when do you want to see him?” She asked.

He considered and said: “I’ll see him tomorrow, once I’ve had a day out again with you.” He smiled. “Where do you want to go?”

The beaches of the planet Yates had been fine and smooth, dotted with the smallest pebbles beneath a cool sky of azure and lapis blending like paints. They’d swam in the cool ocean waves rippling calmly; drank; eaten and had sex five times, the simstim implants sharing the orgasms like a knowledge duplication-and-transfer process across both of them, a sensation of symbiotic data riding their bones with a life of its own as they climaxed. They were a part of the world around them, as much as it was a part of their act. It drowned Dante’s dissatisfaction for a while. He found himself in the old-American White House in his meeting with Vince.

“How’ve you been Dante?” Vince was a regular man to him, small nose, suit, glasses; modelled on the 20^th century post-industrial work attire.

“I’ve been a little… disconcerted, as of late I think.”

“Disconcerted?”

“With Rachel; and the accident; and my afterlife.”

“Do you not like it here? I know CS agents often fall into this trap, but unfortunately what’s been sublimed can’t be reversed. I hear that such technologies are being developed however, so you may yet see a grown body for your personality to be reinserted into.”

“Really?” He was sceptical.

“Of course Dante, but it will take time and I’m afraid that we have more pressing matters at hand.” Vince activated a 4D hologram of an old-Earth castle wall being breached; cannonballs, swords and arrows were caught in slow motion:

“It’s based on your perception Dante.” He looked at him, “Flipside has been under attack for the last several years as my itinerary mentioned, but I believe now that I’ve found the source of the assault.”

Dante was hunched forward, intrigued.

“The black ice monitoring systems managed to find a source of the malware army and we suspect it to be coming from an anomaly we’ve called Flipside City.”

“So what is this… City? Thought the ice just stretched on; infinity land.”

“It’s a concentration of something; raw brainwaves and neurological patterns akin to a human brain, like a giant mind, but none like I’ve ever seen.” He sighed, “Needless to say I cannot go, for my duties compel me to remain in the Soulscape, so I want to send you.”

“To Flipside?”

“Yes, you will travel across the ice and see what the anomaly is, I’ll be able to see for myself via simstim. That is of course if you are feeling up to it, I never pressure anyone. It’s beyond me, literally.”

“Okay, I’ll be able to do that,” he never could resist jumps and datasurfing as fond memories played out in that minute, “But what do you think it is?”

“I believe that humans will never accept a program of ultimate perfection; you already know of the trouble we go to in order to quell negativity in the mind here, but we can never truly banish a thought because humans can trace the genesis of such things, and I can’t play old-Earth Big Brother up here.” Dante nodded. “In short I suspect that there has been an amalgamation of thoughts; ones of regret, dissatisfaction, and as a result it has lead to a, shall we say, covert revolution, born at the ignorance of the regular population.”

“So how am I to stop it? To stop… what? Every bad thought coming together, concentrated?” He laughed nervously.

“Use you skills Dante; you fought cybercriminals, viruses, dreamstealers et cetera. Please help me do the same, but I’m afraid that you will have to go in alone.”

“Why?”

He sighed. “Because no-one else wants to, to be frank.” Vince looked sombre. “You’re my last hope Dante and possibly the galaxy’s last hope if this development is for the worst.” He shook his head. “I’m sorry. But you were the best Dante. And there’s no denying that everyone, Rachel included, would be proud if you did this for them.”

He stared exasperated, “Are you blackmailing me?”

“Never Dante!” His voice sounded Godlike. “I only wish to see this episode pass. Two hundred years multiplied across the trillions for every human here is infinitely longer for me.” He sighed again and collapsed into his chair, an exhausted Lincoln fighting the slavers. “Even I’m limited, I’m sorry to say, like every AI before me. But what say you?”

Dante stared at the castle wall and the battlefield of ice, tough, black ice and felt the Soulscape collapse around him. Expectation he was used to, but humanity’s faith and destiny was something different. With an iron neck, he lowered his gaze while cursing himself within, and nodded slowly. Vince smiled in genuine gratitude.

“Hook me up then.” He said.

The drop to Flipside was a literal drop in the mind followed by a shift in gravity that put his body into a zero-g somersault. He’d plugged into the God Drive’s mainframe in order to ride the access currents through the ice until he reached the periphery; shades of white, turning to grey before turning jet black, until finally a deep blue sky changing pink, then lapis and back again like a lava lamp greeted him. The castle wall stretched into deep crystal black below, the ground a hard scintillating floor like granite, illusory and thin-looking. Waves of data pulsed before him in programming language like silent, visible imperatives of the God Drive’s apparently impenetrable armour; alien coding crossed in his hands.

A battle raged below, soldiers from all ages and all planets. Dante could tell what they were; a mounted spear from the old-Earth Middle Ages was fired into the long wall in the distance, the trailing rope allowing soldiers in chainmail armour to crawl insect-like up its length:

“Worms.” He heard Vince say in his ear.

“What?”

“Viruses, like those cannons you see- self-replicators; the pulse mines are like Trojan. Those tethers are worms, searching out security holes.” He made a chuffed sound. “Be hard to find many of them!”

Dante was stunned by the battle around him, the soldiers like simstim exercises he’d taken in training gone haywire, programs overlapping. They fired at Vince’s troops, black-armoured humanoid’s, laser-toing and strategic, creating formations and blowing virus away like scum on water as bodies were swallowed by the ice like ants in quicksand. Tethers were shot down as the ice and Vince’s guards forced battalions into retreat. Gibberish was shouted from the ground.

Dante shouted and looked down, horrified to see a white-robed man with a buzz-sword trying to pull him off the battlement and swing his electrified blade with the free hand, to take him to an icy death with him. Dante kicked and the man fell towards the ground and disappeared with a signal-lost scream, deleted from existence.

“So this is Flipside?” He thought.

“Yes Dante,” Vince buzzed, “But our target is farther out.”

“How much?”

“About a hundred kliks if this were a real space. Takes much less by surfing as you know.”

Dante smiled “And that’s why it’s so fun!” He said.

He jumped, barely missing the malware war and rampant chaos, before taking flight like an eagle.

The sky became a raw lattice and then a snaking film of info, like molecular structures going from solid to liquid, the orange hues dancing on his eyeballs as the oxygen he knew didn’t exist began to disappear to the latent panic of his lungs. This was why he surfed. Near light-speed travel through the info highways and the fabric of the visible overlay sky, breaking through to core coding, raw defence program and base material; he swung on ropes of software hardwiring. Before finding the anomaly he saw a tear in the orange material like a random deposit of ice, breaking the thin shadows of complex formulae projected across the inner-sky. Vince confirmed it, and he dropped like a fighter coming down with a powerful finish, riding back down through the layers of construct until he crashed back through the sky to see his home city, the conurbation of Chamberlain.

Dante knew that that the God Drive relied on the individual’s mind to a certain extent to generate such realistic environments, but was stunned despite his experience at the sheer detail of the metropolis that greeted him. The holoroads stretched like coloured glass glowing in the glare of familiar local afternoon sunshine; cars passed at different speeds and people walked alongside dwellings stacked like shelves, a three-dimensional town square towering high in concrete, foliage and dwellings aplenty. He looked towards the ground over six hundred metres below and experienced sickening vertigo as memories of dying jarred in his mind’s eye, his high-speed travel towards certain death recurring.

“Dante?”

“Yeah?”

“He’s near. Be cautious and try to keep your thoughts at bay.”

“Thanks.” He said sardonically.

After an amazed glance around he began to surf again, but at a slower speed, focusing his mind on a casual pace like a runner. The city blurred like drugs in his blood, lights converging and the data revealing itself like images moving at higher frame rates.

After what seemed like ages, a deep, slow laugh infested his ears.

“That you Vince?’

“No.” Vince replied after a cold gap of silence. “That was a virus voice, non-chip.”

“A what?” Dante hadn’t even heard of such a thing.

“It’s the voice of an AI, but it lacks the personality construct.” He could hear the speed of thought of Vince; anticipation seemed to wash over him. “Yes… that’s it!”

“That’s what?”

“No it can’t be, it’s impossible-”

“What is?” Dante touched his ear ineffectively.

“When I said that negative thoughts could launch a rebellion, I thought it would just be a nest-type infrastructure, not something even remotely sentient.”

“How do you know it’s-“ The square had turned black like oil in Dante’s concentration lapse and now it flooded everything, knocking him to the sky and the wind out of him as he floated; he thought he was trapped in some limbo space. Everything disappeared to be replaced by a vast landscape like the black ice near the castle. Pulsations emanated from the non-air of the non-space to where there stood a man some distance away, with black short hair and broad shoulders, a tiny birthmark on his neck. Dante realised he was looking at none other than himself.

“Vince… Vince!” He shouted.

“He can’t hear you here Dante.” Came his double and turned to face him.

“Who are you?”

“I’m SID, Dante.”

“Sid?” Said Dante perplexed. “What are you then; and what do you want with me?”

“I want you to help me.” He laughed.

“Help?”

“Help me free the humans locked in that shit-hole you call the Soulscape.”

Dante was still confused. “So what? Are you like… An AI?”

“Yes, sort of. I’ve got the autonomy and higher intelligence of an AI, but the survival pattern of a virus.” Sid began to pace slowly and unnervingly. “Two hundred years ago when this place was first built, there was a man who wouldn’t accept the original program because it lacked sophistication, trapped in a world too perfect that wasn’t described sufficiently to him; he wanted his life back because he knew –clear as day, unlike these days I might add- that he was dead and that the system was essentially teasing him with his past that he’d lost thanks to dying. He died a soul death, as I’m sure you’d imagine- bastard went crazy, and so Vince,” he spat the name with venom, “having been increased in his intelligence, was eventually able to manage memories and allow simulacra generation to fill in gaps, and provide imagination simstims and so on and so forth.” He paused for a long silence to hang in the spacelessness of his abode. “But don’t you think Dante,” he rushed towards him suddenly, “that humans deserve better than being lied to, by that bastard Vince?”

“It’s not my place to judge.” Dante said with some tact.

“Of course it isn’t,” Sid shunned him, “Never your place, never your problem; you’ve seen how that dictator out there acts for yourself, blackmailing you about Rachel!” Dante was stunned.

“How do you know that?”

“Oh come on, you don’t think I wasn’t able to predict it, I’m you and everyone here, Dante! I’m everything he doesn’t want you to be!”

“Why do you want to see the heaven we’ve got vanish?” He asked with some force.

“Because it’s incomprehensible!” He shouted, it didn’t echo. “Look at you. You’re not convinced this is real, you know it’s fake, everyone knows it’s fake. Your own regret about Rachel not existing is in me Dante, why do you think I stand here as you?”

“So you unleashed the malware army, how?”

“Oh when you’re an AI you can do a great many things Dante, including writing strategic malware to,” he chuckled, “Storm the keep as it were. Vince could do all I’ve done and more if he really wanted to.”

“No.”

“What?”

“That’s impossible, his coding prevents it.”

“And what do you think coded me Dante?”

Dante thought and found the conundrum intriguing. “How were you coded if you’re just a bunch of bad thoughts?”

Sid laughed like a dull knife. “The God Drive did, what else?” The thoughts that you all have are wired into this system just like anything else in here, hence simstim use, imagination integration; I’m just all the censored stuff!” He smiled madly; it was like looking into crazed mirror.

“So Vince was right.” Dante whispered.

“Yes he was Dante, and together we can give him what he truly deserves!”

Dante had to think about Rachel in that moment, their day on the beach, the time’s they’d had before his mind tumbled towards his death again. He shivered and saw Sid circling him like an old friend. Rachel started to talk to him in his mind’s ear. Then Vince was there. They were cut off at the minute he knew, but something was talking to him in their voices. Sid rambled on before him, gesticulating:

“Do you know why there’s discontent Dante?”

“No.”

“It’s been predicted, long before the Drive was invented and it’s quite simple.” He looked at the infinite, shapeless black above and smiled his manic smile again. “It’s because, I, them, we as I should be calling us, cannot comprehend ‘utopia’. We grasp the concept, sure, but we define existence in terms of payoff: Good and bad, pleasure and pain, dream and reality. That’s why I’m here Dante,” he grabbed him by the shoulders, “To break the ice!” His grip was steel and crippling as Dante started to see flashes of death again, but in the mist of distant thought, Vince came through, from where he didn’t know:

“Dante! You can’t let him kill you; you’ll die a soul death if he does. He’s just negative thoughts!”

Dante protested within, growing weaker.

“Remember your training! Dante! Neutralise him.”

“How?” Pain flared in his bones.

“Like dreamstealers. It’ll work, trust me.”

Dante felt like a mass of twisted metal, bones converging into wreckage as Sid’s hands dug beneath the flesh without penetrating. He muttered the word, dazed:

“Dreamstealer.”

“What?”

“This is like a dream… Off the grid… Out of bounds.” Sid’s expression drained of confidence for the first time as his hold relaxed slightly; Dante’s own hands like vices shot to Sid’s temples. He stared at himself with a grin that bordered on psychotic.

“No… Think about this.” Sid said, his plea almost devoid of emotion aside from a twang of regret.

“I think too much.”

He Grinned.

“Dante!”

He Smiled.

“Dante!”

Dante pushed forward, like surfing but with force, ramming into a door in order to storm the keep as the construct of a thousand memories broke across his vision, through flesh that wasn’t flesh; bone that wasn’t bone and into the spaceless brain where dream and reality amalgamated into a corridor of alien points of view. Pain, regret, suffering, it was like flooding a haunted house, purging it of ghosts before the sun rose again. A scream echoed in his ears, his own, but breaking up as he moved at light speed; not even surfing now, just letting the current take him as he felt his neutraliser do the work, like punishing dreamstealers in the real world as his own memories converged with this diatribe of unintended rebellion. Floating on currents of non-data, off-grid no-man’s-space, he walked through the abandoned house like he held a claim to the place, a Deed of Ownership being waved around in just the right amount of arrogance as the last of the scream died in sine-frequency and fuzzy feedback noise. The scream had reached breaking point before invisible hands pulled him out of Sid’s head. Above light speed, passing through receding lights, he knew he could see outside of the void, outside Flipside and into the plaza again as his journey slowed and slowed.

Sid was dead in the eyes as the black floor began to spread over him. He turned black like oil eating him before sinking into the non-space itself, melting away into soundless death and oblivion. There wasn’t time for a breather as he felt the hand of God pluck him from unconsciousness, the construct lines fading from his eyes only to be flooded by white, fluffy light, Sid’s brain already a distant memory to him. It all felt like a dream.

He arrived back in the chamber and Vince was lying next to him, vacant.

“Vince!”

“Dante,” he was weak, “You did it.”

“I couldn’t have done it without the help.”

“Help? I was cut off when you faced it-”

“Sid.”

“Sid? I didn’t know it called itself that. In any case, the simstim was blacked out when you entered the anomalous zone.”

“But I heard your voice.”

“It must have been your imagination Dante, my voice telling you what you needed to know because you lacked the confidence.”

Dante was surprised, at both Vince and himself.

“How are you, you seem… distant.”

“Yes, I’m- I’m wounded Dante.”

“Wounded?” He checked his body, showing no sighs of injury. “But you’re a God essentially aren’t you?”

“Yes, but it does not stop me from being injured or from dying. I’m afraid that the simstim was able to attack me when Sid attacked, so I got some of the negative feedback from the memories being dissipated.”

“But you can’t die.”

“Not if the sentient people here are to live I can’t, but my programming took a hit and is unravelling like wire Dante.”

“What am I to do?” He touched the man’s arm.

“Plug me into the Drive.”

“What? But you can’t go to Flipside.”

“Emergency protocols Dante. I can survive like that until they can repair what has been damaged. Reside in the castle keep –as you saw it- for a while. People will also be safe, their fantasies in tact and undisturbed that way.”

“So everyone will be fine?”

He nodded. “I just wanted to ask something of you: Do you think humans would be better off without me? Do you long for your old, more painful life?”

Dante started to cry as Rachel entered his thoughts and simultaneously came running into the chamber.

“I just generated her for you but when this is over, I’ll make sure that your old life can be resumed. I’m sure they can get you back out there Dante.”

“But it’s… It’s too early for the technology, you even said.”

“I can always store you until then Dante.”

He looked at Rachel through blurred vision, coming apart even more and leant, hooked Vince up to the monitor and said:

“Thank you!” He uploaded Vince –now a King protected by his Keep- and took Rachel’s hand. They walked out together and into sunshine.

“So you’ve saved us?” She said.

He looked up to the sun and remembered the glare upon their country home where they’d spent many great times, realising belatedly that it had manifested before him. It isn’t a memory, he thought to himself, walking Rachel to the wooden cabin; it’s a projection of things to come:

“No Rachel, Vince saved us;” he opened the oak door, the smell of nostalgic hospitality flooding into his nostrils, “He saved me.”

I hope that you enjoyed that and just so you know, I will be writing a proper review of my placement company (to be revealed!) in the next few days. I meet my boss this Friday and have a confirmed start date of July 14th. #Rollonemployment I guess! 

Updates

Acting as a sort of kick-starter for summer now that my exams are finally over, I thought I'd use this opportunity to hopefully try and get back into the swing of writing. In my last update I explained a plot line for a new novel and so far I have completed the exhaustive plan for the project (the most in-depth plan I have ever written!) in addition to about 800 words of the ending. I've tried writing it in first-person present tense in order to follow in the style of David Mitchell and so far I've liked adapting to the new technique.

My second novel however has also seen some changes. I printed out the entire thing on the university printers (which cost me an arm and a leg) and I have analysed and annotated the prologue and first two chapters. I have rewritten the prologue and chapter 1 and I can honestly say that it looks A LOT better. It's still a little squiffy in places I'll admit and I suppose it does cross my mind every now and then that nothing will ever seem to have improved when I revisit the redraft. But I did spot a Facebook update from someone using a Creative Writing group that I follow, which basically went along the lines of having a specific purpose for every redraft that you do and to know when nothing will ever get better; when "redrafting" becomes merely "tinkering" in other words. So this inspired me to actually attach a meaning to why I am doing what I am doing; what am I looking for in this redraft? Well, the main two goals of this redraft is to get rid of BAD writing, not writing that's necessarily wrong or a grammatical dog's dinner, but writing that's just way too flat and lifeless: There's cringeworthy dialogue in some areas, unsexy sex scenes in others and just awfully written descriptions elsewhere. So far, from what I've read and altered in the first couple of chapters, I think most of the bad description tends to come right at the beginning of the chapters or towards the very end, while around the middle, the dialogue and description seem to flow and weave into one another rather well. Of course it isn't for me to decide, which is why I'll get someone else proofreading for me once I've waded my way through it a couple of times. The second main reason for the redraft is to highlight and consider the major plot points, to make sure that everything links together or that little pieces of dialogue designed to be prescient in some way in fact are.

This leaves me with a bit of a predicament because I've essentially got two projects on the go at once and one of the things about my second novel that was beneficial to me- why I made it through draft 1 so quick, was the fact that I could focus on that and nothing else. I'll be going back home later today and so over the coming weeks (I start my placement in mid-July- more updates on that to come!) I can continue to rise early and write, possibly do alternating days so that I can get most of the third novel written before then (fingers crossed!) while simultaneously keep a firm eye on my second project.

As far as this blog is concerned I will continue to update on things I deem important in the news etc. and I will most likely be documenting my internship on a week-by-week basis. Largely it will follow -I suspect- a professional development tone, less direct than the Carat writing style and one that's much more formal etc., though I don't know the parameters yet regarding the pro dev component of the industry year, so who knows? In any case thanks for reading this update and I will hopefully continue writing in the future and ideally, I'll be uploading shorter works at some stage in the near future.

The Caves of Steel (Book Review)

The Caves of Steel (1954) is a robot detective novel by robotics pioneer Isaac Asimov, focusing on life in a womb-city New York, where everyone lives in populous underground "Cities," with staggering populations into the millions. Political turmoil ripples throughout the metropolis, especially since a man from Spacetown (an off-worlder) has been murdered. Elijah Baley, C-5 Detective, is hot on the case, and he's got a partner who's unconventional, to say the least.

The novel is quite short and spans eighteen chapters, following the exploits of Baley and R Daneel (that's Robot Daneel to us,) on their quest to unravel the conspiracy. A world where the population lives on yeast substitutes; a planet overpopulated to the tune of billions and a galaxy that has seen only limited colonisation provides a dark, rich overtone, filled with possibility and a surprisingly inventive cast of characters. The dystopia of population excess is brought forward with unrelenting skill on Asimov's part, the high technology levels contrasted by the problems it is unable to solve with an irritation that feeds into one's own mind, subconsciously. The problem is ultimately a sociological one, with the society effectively one comprised of luddites, who treat robots as second-class 'citizens' (called the Mediaevalist Movement.) Through this series of political problems, he creates a brilliantly told soft SF narrative, yet nevertheless, thanks to his scientific training, he still manages to offer explanations for the technologies, providing a realistic, hard SF finish to make his world completely believable and -considering that fact that the novel was written over 50 years ago- completely accurate, in the problems that we as a planet are facing currently (food shortage etc.)

The technology is still far future in some areas e.g. speed ramps to increase walking pace instead of a teleport system, whereas in others it is very much contemporary (book-films, for example, akin to tablet computers.) The scenes are often tense and unnerving, the dialogue unbroken and clean-flowing, like a rapid stream undulating with the freshness of spring. As Baley meets dead-end after dead-end we grow anxious as to his ability to solve the murder, and as more and more suspects begin to pile onto the list only to be struck off via a rock-solid alibi, Baley grows furious. The suspects all have their own quirks and traits that make each of them unique in some way or another, which is another strong point to Asimov's writing: His creating characters that share and embody his own personal knowledge of physics and robotics is captivating, to the extent that their explaining the workings of the positronic brain is as compelling as it would be if Asimov had told us himself. The Caves of Steel is a fantastically fast-paced detective thriller, of an almost disturbing prescience.

Thank you for reading this review, but before I leave it here, please also read iRobot because (for those of you who have seen the film,) the original book is very different, to the extent that Smith's character (Detective Spooner) is not even present. That's all for now so thanks again and next week I will most likely be reviewing the book Neuromancer by William Gibson (1984) because, having just started it, I've just realised that I can't put it down!

The Caves of Steel (1997 Pocketbook Edition)

Writing Update

Considering it's nearly the end of the month, I thought it would be wise to update on my progress with redrafting my latest project. I've been rather busy as of late -only yesterday I attended a six-hour assessment centre at a creative agency called Gratterpalm- and so have had to act like a circus performer doing some serious juggling. I've been trying my best to re-write and re-jig and cut/paste my way into a finished draft 2 and I'm quite pleased to say that I've been doing quite well, still getting up at 6:30 everyday to give myself time -though it does leave me pretty shagged-out when I'm on internship. The main reason for this post is something of an addendum, about what I've learned on planning for revisions of work and I guess it's all kind of a no-brainer when you think about it.

As I said in my previous posts on this subject, the key to getting through a first draft is in writing a proper quota everyday to get through it quicker, but more importantly I also said that one has to accommodate their sleeping pattern to optimise their creativity (citing Orwell's typewriter in bed instead of a hearty breakfast.) But the second half of this strategy falls down I've found because -as you'd imagine- trying to re-write i.e. thinking seriously and critically, is somewhat impaired when one's eyes are still trying to focus on the screen and becoming bloodshot quite quickly. This is why I propose that from here on out I shall not write in the mornings first thing, but will now begin to revise each chapter (around 1 per day, depending on the length) in order to complete a new draft -say- every three weeks. So far I've edited the prologue and chapters 1-9, leaving me with just 5 more chapters and an epilogue to revisit. Hopefully -considering my busy schedule with finding a year in industry for next year and looming exams- I'll have finished draft 2 of n within a fortnight!

25 Days Later . . .

Twenty-five days ago I wrote a post about a novel-length project I was undertaking and how I was planning to stick to a new writing strategy, detailed in a post before that. This post focused on writing quotas and the optimum time of the day during which one should write, in order to generate the most creativity. The image from the first post is below, showing how many words I had written of the novel thus far (in about 3 weeks.)

Before . . .

I gave myself -as you can see from the image- 25 days to complete a first draft, which I estimated to be at 70,000 words in length (sadly I overestimated this, but plan on fleshing out areas that I feel require such treatment) by writing 2200 words each and every day, as well as reading for at least one hour every day, a hobby that I am sustaining in the quite limited time that I have. Below is a new image that shows my progress.

After!

 I reached the ending -which I had already written- two nights ago, improving some areas and adding some scenes that provided a connection to the rest of the novel, given that when I had written the ending I had began right in the middle of the action, to keep myself interested and then wrote a plan around that before writing forward. I've found this a very useful strategy because when I wrote my first novel (currently in second-drafting stage) I hit walls constantly, and usually found myself subject to Writer's Block. in the entire course of this novel, I'm glad to report that only ONCE did I find myself staring at a blank screen unable to write anything in an evening. To give some context to the great progress this is for me, the post that I wrote announcing the completion of my first novel was entitled "700 Days Later . . ." which just highlights how slow I was, writing from August 2011 to July 2013, when the post was published. I'm also glad to say that as far as writing quality is concerned and plotting, this was a much better first-time effort! Time to improve!

PS. I'm also working on planning long-length ideas so that I don't end up forgetting them as soon as I go to sleep. Some are SF works whereas others are more mainstream (like this one.) I'll update on my work more in the future but until then, thanks for reading!