“It’s not enough to just take power away from those in charge. If we don’t use it ourselves, they’ll just take it back.” — “Anika” in Tim Maughan’s Infinite Detail
“Be careful what you wish for; you may get it.” — Everybody since the 2001 ape threw a jawbone into the air
Let’s think awhile about tools and how we use them, and how they end up using us when we’re not careful. Like how the human-engineered maize plant has basically turned us into a slave race frantically devoted to propagating it, defending it, etc.
Let’s think about revolutions and why they tend to fail.
Let’s think about nihilistic technofetishists and neo-Luddites and the bodiless, soulless monster that is late stage capitalism. Let’s think about how hard it was, once, to predict late stage capitalism, yet how inevitable it feels always to have been now.
Thirty-five years ago (wow!), William Gibson made the new science fiction sub-genre of cyberpunk impossible to ignore with the publication of the moody and stylish classic, Neuromancer, and spawned a movement that is still very much with us today, even though its founding works seem dated an a bit wide of the mark, if one is turning to science fiction to imagine the future instead of re-imagine the present. Neuromancer and its ilk could seem downright hokey: its brilliant and off-celebrated first line. “The sky over the port was the color of television tuned to a dead channel” is, for instance, all but impossible for the post-analog reader to even visualize correctly, because instead of a flickering, staticky grey, a modern reader will imagine a flat electric blue. It could still be a sky color, but it’s not Gibson’s sky color. And as Gibson himself has ruefully observed, he failed to predict the development of cell phones, to say nothing of smartphones and wi-fi, His version of the future is a distillation of the cultural milieu of the 1980s, but while his internet is accessed via hard-wiring and surgically implanted data jacks in people’s skulls and is abstract and baroque when compared to the banalities and baby pictures of social media today, his portrayal of pitiful individual humans struggling to live meaningfully amid the behemoth virtual and actual structures of warning multi-national corporations is still very much a thing of our present and immediate future.
I mention all of this because I first discovered cyber-curmudgeon, journalist and fiction writer Tim Maughan via Gibson in Twitter’s earliest days, when one of the best strategies for finding interesting people to follow was to see who else was following someone you admired. I suppose you could still do that now, but there’s a lot more to wade through, and ‘ware the trolls. Anyway, it proved a sound strategy that proved endlessly rewarding even back when Tim’s fiction output was confined to a handful of cyberpunkrish short stories (see Paintwork) and a lot of cool and troubling nonfiction deep dives into the worldwide supply chain, of which this article is probably everyone’s favorite. In both fiction and non-, Maughan is within the Gibsonian tradition, albeit exploring a different archaeological/sedimentary layer of what will remain of our poor, silly anthropocene.
Enter Maughan’s debut novel, the much-anticipated Infinite Detail — the title coming, perhaps, from a line in his story “Paintwork” in which its protagonist surveys a post-cyberpunk Bristol’s “infinite detail of urban decay”, though it is a phrase often employed in this book. It’s a book that only Maughan could write.
Here, too, the action is set mostly in a future version of Bristol, Maughan’s hometown, and it could well be the same Bristol as “Paintwork”, just further into the future and post-Brexit, in which the sleek chrome and consumerism of Gibson’s Sprawl* has decayed into a not-quite post-apocalypse in which the cyber has collapsed and only the punk — and the tatters of an economy that utterly depended on the cyber — remains.
We follow the fortunes of a handful of characters trying to get by in this gimcrack new world. Mary, 14, somehow sees “ghosts” that are digital echoes of Bristol’s recent past under a heavy blanket of digital surveillance; Anika, much older, is a legendary hero-criminal hangover from the former smart city’s heyday when she was part of a collective that managed to cut a good swath of downtown Bristol out of the digital grid to create a zone of privacy and creatively that annoyed the powers that were; Rush, another collective member who now spends most of his time on his friend Simon’s converted container ship that plies the seas as a combination science lab and art school, but starts off the novel on a real life visit to his online boyfriend in a Manhattan that is 20 minutes into the future, before the violent unknown event ends the digital world. And then there’s Tyrone, born too late to know the Internet as anything but a legend but haunted by the creative urge to make new music in ways that only the Internet (as shorthand for the networked digital Information Economy) made possible.
Tying it all together is Grids, friend and protector of Mary, former member of Anika’s and Rush’s collective, and the only person we encounter who’s actually trying to rebuild civil society, albeit by questionable means.
Exploring the origins of the non-networked fate of the world, and, incidentally, the true nature of Mary’s ability, is the central task of the novel, which plays about a bit confusingly in time — it took me quite a while to fit Rush’s chronology into that of everybody else — and drives home a point that many are just beginning to notice the sting of: that the great promise of the Internet and a networked world went to hell the moment we decided to treat it as exploitable private property instead of a public good held in common.
In the process, the reader is treated to a lot of bitterly amusing scenes depicting the (one hopes) unintended consequences of having turned too much decision making over to algorithms, a heartwarming and challenging trans-Atlantic romance between Rush and his boyfriend Scott, and a lot of meditations on what we’ve given up and what was given up on our behalf generations before we were born, all in the name of fixing problems without having, also, to take responsibility for them.
And there we find the antagonist, the villain of Infinite Detail: our culture’s collective abdication of responsibility to its ideals and its citizens, an abstract further abstracted into the form of algorithms designed by well-meaning but short-sighted humans, guided by their personal experiences and blinded by their privilege. It’s quite a feat to communicate this in fiction, and most other writers choose to create terrifying sociopaths (see Gibson’s Hubertus Bigend in his later Blue Ant trilogy, or all the no longer human monsters in Matthew de Abaitua’s Red Men, which I reviewed here last year) or mysterious and shadowy artificial intelligences like Gibson’s Wintermute and titular Neuromancer to manipulate their protagonists into acting against their own interests. Maughan chose the harder task and pulled off a marvel. It makes for an uncomfortable read but a necessary one.
Kind of like the nonfiction reportage that’s made Maughan famous in certain circles.
If the book has a flaw, the flaw is a good one to have. In showing us the aftermath of the ultimate DDOS attack, Maughan depicts several weird new worlds besides that of his beloved Bristol, and all of them are potentially compelling enough to deserve novels of their own. I definitely want to know more about this world’s Wales, for instance, where the remnants of the British army have forced everybody else into permanent agricultural slavery. We only learn of this via brief sketches of Anika’s back story. Or Simon’s ship, which at least we do get a better glimpse of when Rush hitches a ride on a world tour of the former world’s now-halted and abandoned container ports. Simon is a character straight out of J.G. Ballard and I’m kind of a fan. And New York City in the immediate aftermath of the crash, I mean, that’s always interesting, right?
If Maughan plans to write more novels in this milieu, I’m here for it. Knowing him from afar as I do, though, I suspect he’s going to want to move on to other projects. Having (I hope) successfully ticked off the box for “generating a tight self-denying prophecy”, he’s not going to be satisfied to sit back and wait to see if we’ve gotten the message. He’s going to want to keep trying to do something about it, besides providing, in another memorable refrain of the novel’s, filler between the ad breaks.
Though if his debut novel does as well as it deserves to, that might be an unignorable incentive to write more of them. Rabble rousers gotta eat, too, and his wife is an academic, so, you know, economic security isn’t a given.
Such is ever the risk when activists become fiction writers, and turn out to be good at it.
Anyway, treasure this one like it’s the only one you’re going to get, because it might be. The infinite detail of this precarious world of ours could overwhelm him and us at any moment.
Best get to planning for that.
*Which we only see from the bottom up in the “high tech, low life” of cyberpunk, no matter the era, but we are assured is still glitzy and luxe, an age of “affordable beauty” and elective surgery that even orphaned teenaged gang members can somehow pay for — a purely Boomer vision of the future. Neuromancer was written before the rapacity of the Reagan years had really taken hold and ruined any chance of an evenly distributed future for the young readers who dreamed eagerly of Shadowrunning into adulthood.
