Book Reviews: Neuromancer; Solaris; The Light of Other Days
This is a roundup of science fiction books I’ve read recently:
- Neuromancer by William Gibson (third read)
- Solaris by Stanislaw Lem
- The Light of Other Days by Arthur C. Clarke and Stephen Baxter
Neuromancer
This is my third time reading Neuromancer, which sits alongside only Nineteen Eighty Four on my top shelf of science fiction novels. And 40 years after its publication, the book still has it all: it created the whole cyberpunk genre that inspired things from The Matrix to Blade Runner 2049; it delves into electronically encoding and preserving human minds, which was most recently explored in HBO’s Westworld; the central story is about jailbreaking an AI with the potential to unleash a singularity, which you can see in Ex Machina; the list of archetypal stories it delivers on is vast.
On top of its stellar contents, the language is poetic and turgid:
He closed his eyes.
Found the ridged face of the power stud.
And in the bloodlit dark behind his eyes, silver phosphenes boiling in from the edge of space, hypnagogic images jerking past like film compiled from random frames. Symbols, figures, faces, a blurred, fragmented mandala of visual information.
Please, he prayed, now—
A gray disk, the color of Chiba sky.
Now—
Disk beginning to rotate, faster, becoming a sphere of paler gray. Expanding—
And flowed, flowered for him, fluid neon origami trick, the unfolding of his distanceless home, his country, transparent 3D chessboard extending to infinity. Inner eye opening to the stepped scarlet pyramid of the Eastern Seaboard Fission Authority burning beyond the green cubes of Mitsubishi Bank of America, and high and very far away he saw the spiral arms of military systems, forever beyond his reach.
And somewhere he was laughing, a white-painted loft, distant fingers caressing the deck, tears of release streaking his face.
Even though it’s my third time reading the book, my impression keeps evolving. The first time reading it as a teenager I just thought it was an awesome story and that Case was great. My second time reading it a decade later I noticed how poetic the style was and how much more depth there was to Molly’s character. This third time reading it after yet another decade I finally realized I’d completely missed the central character: Linda Lee.
Though Linda seems to be unceremoniously killed off in Part 1, Gibson keeps summoning her as an apparition throughout the narrative. Whether through flashes on a screen or hallucinations in the sky, Linda becomes a ghostly ostinato weaving in and out of an Inception-like phantasmagoria. At the start of the book, we find Case locked in self-destructive “suicide-by-Night City” spiral in which Linda was the key feature: the girl who loved him but would betray him just to see how much he loved her. Near the end of the book, when Case is absorbed into Neuromancer’s RAM, he finds what he thinks is a simulacrum of Linda but is really a living simulation of her brain, captured before her demise, and who has been brought back to Case in a last-ditch attempt to dissuade him from his path. His guilt over Linda is Case’s only real motivation in the story, and she’s the only one who can influence his actions.
The first two times I read the book, I never understood why the RAM copy of Case ends up with the RAM copy of Linda, nor why Molly perfunctorily checks herself out of the story. It was obvious to then-me that Case–Molly should be a thing while Case–Linda was old news. This third time reading it, though, I quickly understood. Molly and Case don’t have a relationship; they’re just sex partners who are killing time while on a job. She was too damaged from her own trauma for any normal attachment, and she leaves specifically to keep herself from feeling anything and “losing her edge.” There was never going to be anything there.
But Linda actually loved Case, only Case was incapable of responding because of his nihilism and death wish. Once that and their other underlying problems were cleared up in Neuromancer’s RAM construct, however, it made sense that they could finally be together. It’s a satisfying glimpse of a Case who can actually care for another person—and of a Linda who can actually constructively be cared for.
The first time I read Neuromancer, I thought Linda Lee was like Duncan Idaho in Dune: an underdeveloped character who is killed off early for shock and awe. Then the next time I thought she was like Duncan Idaho in Children of Dune: a little bit more developed character who is brought back yet still serves little purpose. But now I know she’s more like Duncan Idaho in Sandworms of Dune: the linchpin to the whole saga that just takes time to manifest.
Besides my stellar praise, there is just one nit I have with the book. Now granted Neuromancer is waaaaaay better than anything I’ve ever written, but I will make one small complaint that I don’t think the AI should’ve spoken to Case in the final chapter. The Finn was how the AI used to appear before its fusion with Neuromancer, so it showing up in its old visage was an odd rewind that made it feel like nothing had changed. Also, its mention of contact with aliens felt tacked on and vitiated the impact of the AI’s transformation, which I felt could’ve been left totally open-ended and mysterious. If the epilogue had only included Molly’s breakup shuriken, Case’s last trip to see Ratz, and the vision of RAM Case and RAM Linda, that would’ve been perfection. Again, Gibson is a waaaaaay better writer who’s produced far better writing than I ever have, but, if I could get a Neuromancer Director’s Cut, that’s the one tiny tweak I’d like.
Other than that, 7 out of 5 stars.
Solaris
I was a big fan of Steven Soderbergh’s 2002 film Solaris, and definitely not because it included George Clooney’s butt. It was 100% because it had Natasha McElhone in it and 0% for Clooney’s butt (okay, 0±5%). So I finally decided I would read the original source material, Stanislaw Lem’s Solaris.
In this book, Lem does a great job with atmosphere and suspense, and every scene between the main characters has the layerings and tension of a stage play where any moment could turn into mass murder or projectile vomiting.
The first interaction in the book is where our main character, Dr. Kelvin, arrives at Solaris station and meets Dr. Snaut — who is so obviously a suspicious doppleganger who killed and ate the real Dr. Snaut, that it made me remember that that’s what happens in the film: in a third act twist, Dr. Snow (an alternate translation of “Snaut”) is revealed to be a replica who killed his original:
So I kept reading waiting for this to be revealed in the book — but it never happened. Despite this being a great twist in the film and feeling a natural fit for the book, I guess either Lem didn’t think of it or just left it implied. There is still much circumstantial evidence for this in Snaut’s behavior, plus the fact that at the end he refuses to leaves Solaris (maybe because, as a replica, he can’t). I felt this omission a pity, however, because I could have imagined a lofty philosophical confrontation between Kelvin and dopple-Snaut concerning egotism and the self. I mean, everyone else’s visitor is a deceased loved one or someone they feel guilt over, but Snaut’s visitor is just his own reflection? What an ego …
As with any aging science fiction book, Solaris now bears interesting anachronisms. For one, even though they are on a bare bones research station on a remote planet, Lem stresses many times that the station is absolutely chock full of hardcover books that the main character constantly consults. There’s even a plot point where Kelvin needs one key piece of information and he’s lucky that the station has the exact copy of the book he needs. It’s an interesting juxtaposition that this novel is so cutting-edge in pondering the limits of consciousness that it personifies an alien ocean, yet so mundane with general physics that it has space fleets carting around the Encyclopedia Britannica.
There was also a line that went: “We need to contact the satellite — quick, turn on the interstellar radio! [flips switch] … Just gotta wait a few minutes for the vacuum tubes to warm up.” (Though Neuromancer itself has the infamous line, “Damn, she stole a full three Megabytes of RAM!”)
Solaris also has a long break in the action just after Kelvin arrives when he stops to read from a history book on Solaristics (i.e., the study of Solaris), apparently just to give the reader more backstory. It was kilowords of academic pleonasm where Kelvin recounts in scholarly terms the lives and accomplishments of the many fictional scientists who studied Solaris:
Muntius analyzes this ‘heresy’ of planetology very simply and trenchantly. He brilliantly dismantles the Solarist myth, or rather the myth of the Mission of Mankind.
Muntius’s had been the first voice raised in protest, and had encountered the contemptuous silence of the experts, at a time when they still retained a romantic confidence in the development of Solaristics. After all, how could they have accepted a thesis that struck at the foundations of their achievements?
Solaristics went on waiting for the man who would reestablish it on a firm foundation and define its frontiers with precision. Five years after the death of Muntius, when his pamphlet had become a rare collectors’ piece, a group of Norwegian researchers founded a school named after him …
(source)
I found this a little surreal, like if Tolkien randomly had Gandalf start reading from an appendix to The Lord of the Rings because he needed to stretch out the plot.
Lem also spends much time describing the exact shapes and geometries of the Solaris ocean, which read like an audio description of the Claymore manga for the visually impaired:
The ‘tree-mountains,’ ‘extensors,’ ‘fungoids,’ ‘mimoids,’ ‘symmetriads’ and ‘asymmetriads,’ ‘vertebrids’ and ‘agilus’ … ‘extensors’ are formations that … are produced in a substance which externally resembles a yeasty colloid … during this fantastic ‘fermentation,’ the yeast sets into festoons of starched open-work lace … like a tensed muscle which fifty feet below the surface is as hard as rock but retains its flexibility … stretching for miles between membranous walls swollen with ‘ossified growths,’ like some colossal python which after swallowing a mountain is sluggishly digesting the meal, while a slow shudder occasionally ripples along its creeping body.
For as baroque as these descriptions are, they don’t factor into the story or its conclusion at all, so I guess it was a weird fetish Lem had.
In the end, the denouement is that Kelvin has developed a new theory of Solaris being a “despairing god,” which he touts as a novel advance in Solaristics. Given the amount of time Lem spent describing Solaristics, I guess this was supposed to be the big payoff, but it didn’t work for me. I liked the open-ended transformation/apotheosis at the end of the Soderbergh’s Solaris better. In fact, I read the book specifically because I was hoping for more insight into that transformation, so finding it absent from the source material made me really appreciate this touch from Soderbergh.
The Light of Other Days
This one got my list because I listen to the All-In Podcast and the book is a persistent recommendation from David Friedberg. I’ve read a lot of books that felt like they didn’t contain enough new ideas, but this is the first book I read that felt like it had four novels’ worth of ideas all crammed into one.
Novel 1 is where the main characters create wormholes to transfer information instantaneously between any two points. That alone could be a whole story right there, maybe a spy drama about how the walls in the world are brought down and financial markets are upended as the lightspeed limit is abolished. Instead Light races through this concept just to say, “Yeah, governments use it for top secret communications, but not much else—now wait for what comes next …”
Novel 2 starts when they expand these wormholes to allow visual information to pass through, thus being able to spy on any point on the globe without possibility of countermeasures. The book spends most of its time on this development and does adequately depict a society where privacy is abolished.
Novel 3 is when they figure out how to use these wormholes to look into the past (even though it breaks the book’s physics), letting them view any historical event. Of course the staunch Catholic main character immediately goes Christ-hunting and the book digresses into an alternate history of Jesus, which is a genre I’m not really interested in.
Novel 4 is when they figure out how to put wormholes directly in people’s brains and create a hive mind consciousness, and use wormholes to backtrace DNA to find anyone throughout time, and wear Zen Gnostic masks to escape from the prying eyes of “wormcam” operators, and use wormholes to transport thermal energy infinitely cheaply — just a whole lot of stuff happens.
While I liked all the ideas and developments, I felt they were missing counterpoint. While we do see how society is affected by each new technology, we never see where people counteract or invert the technology. I would have been interested to see everyone become dependent on these technologies, then someone develops an even more brilliant countermeasure that introduces challenging asymmetries once again. Though I can imagine that the author was trying to convey the impression of scientists always racing forward forward forward to see what comes next without pausing to consider the consequences.
One threat looming over the whole story is the “Wormwood,” an asteroid that will destroy Earth in 500 years. Honestly, I didn’t think this was that big a deal. Seriously, 500 years is a long time. Just 100 years ago humans could barely fly, and now we’re debating the economics of Elon Musk’s plan to colonize Mars. One main character in Light is the reporter who discovered the Wormwood, and I rolled my eyes every time she declared, “I’m a journalist and I can tell you that science will develop nothing over the next five centuries to deal with a large rock, so everything is meaningless and we’ll all be destroyed!” Even the book agrees with me when, in the epilogue, it turns out the Wormwood has been dealt with conveniently and cheaply off screen.
Conclusion
Next up on my reading list:
- Nineteen Eighty Four by George Orwell
- Children of Time by Adrian Tchaikovsky
- Man in the High Castle by Philip K. Dick
