Are y'all familiar with the Far Side cartoon where the kid in class is raising his hand and asking if he may be excused because his brain is full? Sometimes, I have a string of days like that, and then reading a new book is simply too much to contemplate. So although I'm craving the immersive reading experience, I don't have it in me to swim through a new work.
Enter the refreshing hot tub pleasure of the re-read.
I went on a mini-binge of recent sci-fi reads this weekend: the first three books of John Barnes' A Million Doors series (A Million Open Doors, Earth Made of Glass, The Merchant of Souls) and Dennis Danver's The Fourth World.
With regards to Barnes' work ... although he claims the depiction of Margaret Leones and the unravelling of her marriage to protagonist Giraut Leones is in no way a reflection of any of his ex-wives or subsequent divorces, that character and her relationship to Giraut has always had the nasty taint of nonfiction about it. It's possible to invent that sort of thing out of pure imagination, but Margaret's depiction is so detailed and intimate, it stands apart from the characterization and behavior of the other characters in Barnes' books, which is why I can't shake the suspicion that I'm reading someone's angry e-mail. That sort of colors my enjoyment of what is otherwise a great space opera.
With regards to Danvers' work ... he's an interesting cat. I enjoyed Circuit of Heaven and the End of Days, both of which bravely aim at everything from environmental disasters to bad parenting to religious fanaticism, and top it off with a healthy dose of contempt for virtual reality. The Fourth World is even darker because Danvers throws exploitation of Third World peoples into the mix. In all the books I mention here, the merits of living in the real world are extolled, responsibility to real people is stressed over the relationships we forge only in virtuality and technology can still make a useful servant so long as we remember it's never our master.
What sticks both men's work is their fatalistic certainty that humanity will eventually turn into a race of purposeless drones chained to a virtual reality. It's a sort of second-wave cyberpunk, much less exuberant than the initial wave because this one sees a bleak segregation between the "real" and the virtual, and many more hostilities when they overlap.
I used to be a proponent of first-wave cyberpunk (if you will), but that may have been wishful thinking. At a recent, extended-family gathering, what was striking about the goings-on was this: everyone over the age of 25 was busy making small talk, chatting and generally paying attention to one another. Everyone under the age of 25 was either playing something on the PSP, or had their eyes glued to the 44" screen on which the game was displayed. When those folks finally did talk ... it was about what was going on in the lives of their favorite soap opera stars.
This is not to illustrate any bias against These Kids Today. What it suggests instead is this: there is probably a generational shift taking place, where instead of learning to adapt to social contacts and contexts we would not have willingly selected for ourselves, people are willfully electing to retreat to a "reality" they can control. And it is acceptable to do so, at least among their peer group. To the young relatives, the game characters they were manipulating and the soap characters they chatted about were more interesting and relevant to them than live human beings in the same room.
I can commiserate to a point -- I often had to be physically separated from a book prior to large family gatherings. I do wonder, however, if we are inching toward a million open monitors, where we're all in our own self-selected world. What happens to the bigger one we all share?
Comments