Welcome to part three of a rambling email-based discussion of Iain M Banks’ Matter between Niall “Vector” Harrison, Jonathan “SF Diplomat” McCalmont, James “Big Dumb Object” Bloomer and myself.

Make sure you check out parts one [does it Matter to you?] and two [mind over Matter], else you may find yourself a little lost. And if you’re the sort of person who gets twitchy about spoilers, I’d best warn you that [pirate voice]‘ere be many spoilers, me hearties[/pirate voice].

[ For the sake of context it may be worth pointing out that "the interview" we keep mentioning was the BSFA event where Farah Mendlesohn interviewed Banks ... which was a fascinating insight into Banks as a person, but somewhat obfuscatory from the perspective of attempting to actually get beneath the skin of the man's books. ]

I’m particularly proud of my conjectural thematic sandcastle that I build at the end. If anyone who’s read Matter would like to tell me that they can vaguely comprehend how I might possibly have conceived of that idea, that’s be just great. That said, calling me a nutcase is probably the easier option. YMMV.

Paul: By my calculations, my tardy response signals the requirement for another question, so I’ll step up to the plate with:

What did Matter say to you? What was the theme, as perceived by you as reader, and how was that theme expressed at various levels?

Jonathan: To me Matter is a book about social class.

This operates on two levels. Firstly, on an individual level we have the sense of class that drips from Hausk’s children as a result of their childhood educations: Ferbin as the Diplomat and Orumen as the Scholar. They’re also loaded. Their lives are completely alien to those of other individuals from their own culture who have to try and pull together a living. What is interesting about this portrayal of class is that while we are told that the Empire of Hausk the conqueror is something he created in his lifetime, the society is already showing signs of being hide-bound, with clueless upper class generals and spoiled rich kids playing at being knights while the actual business of fighting a war takes place thousands and thousands of kilometers away. It’s a very fast progression.

The second level on which Matter’s depiction of social class operates is on the civilisational level. In Excession, and arguably even way back in Consider Phlebas, we saw that the Culture universe has always had quite a strict pecking order with some civilisations being clearly less developed — both morally and technologically — than others. Banks has flirted with the idea that this hierarchy exists purely in the minds (and Minds) of the Culture, who are endlessly smug in their moral certainty. However, Matter suggests that social class also affects galactic civilisation: Elder civilisations sit back while younger and less advanced cultures desperately scrabble for position and patronage, in a manner reminiscent of Ferbin’s servant.

The end result is one of complex social stratification and a very clearly defined status quo, almost reminiscent of that present in many of the more romantic works of the fantasy genre; we even have a Big Bad whose ultimate motivations are never really discussed but who we know is bad because he threatens the status quo in a most destructive manner.

Niall: “Clearly defined status quo” – Yes. As you say, hierarchy is the key to Matter. I liked how a character’s position in that hierarchy influenced how they interpreted, well, just about anything. Anaplian, for instance, considering her father’s career from her Cultured perspective, finds herself unimpressed, thinking of him as “just another strong man, in one of those societies, at one of those stages, in which it was easier to be the strong man than it was to be truly courageous”. Moreover, to her, the development of societies through such stages is “as natural and obvious as the progression of a star along the main Sequence, or evolution itself”. (How to make history interesting to sf readers: compare it to stellar physics.) But equally, it’s made clear that the leaders of Sarl – both Hausk, and tyl Loesp after him – know exactly where they sit on the great galactic ladder, and unsurprisingly resent it more than a little. So they seize what opportunities the societies they perceive as higher offer them (indeed that’s how Anaplian came to be given to the Culture in the first place – in exchange for ideas that are slowly kick-starting an industrial revolution on the Eighth) in pursuit of a “glitteringly pragmatic future”. I think there’s even a moment when tyl Loesp thinks to himself that he hopes such brutality as defines his life will become obsolete. (Which makes him so much more satisfying as an antagonist than the straightforwardly evil Luseferous in The Algebraist. But maybe I’ve beaten that drum enough.) To achieve that goal he’s willing to allow himself and his people to be used quite nakedly. Paul, I believe this is your cue to mention postcolonialism.

Anyway, all of that means that I would say that intertwined with class, and as important to the book, is the question of what freedom means. There are characters like Oramen, who are obviously not free and characters like Anaplian, who in theory are ultimately free, but in reality are constrained in subtle ways. Oramen puts it this way: “while [inhabitants of Optimae civilizations] had what appeared to be complete freedom within their societies, the societies themselves had very little freedom of movement at all. […] There was simply not much left for them to do on any grand scale.” One of the things that made me warm to Oramen, in fact, is the way he was able to come to these realizations without (unlike Ferbin) being beaten over the head by grand revelations … meanwhile, Anaplian is wrestling with the fact that interventions that on the face of it will relieve oppression will actually “subtly, incrementally but most certainly remove all freedom and dignity from the very people one sought only to help”. If you like, it all comes down to this speech that Shoum gives, when Ferbin finally finds him:

“You find yourself the unintended victim of a system set up specifically to benefit people like the Sarl, prince; a system which has evolved over the centieons to ensure that peoples less technologically advanced than others are able to progress as naturally as possible within a generally controlled galactic environment, allowing societies at profoundly different civilisational stages to rub up against each other without this leading to the accidental destruction of demoralisation of the less developed participants. It is a system that has worked well for a long time; however, that does not mean it never produces anomalies or seeming injustices. I am most sorry.”

All the Culture novels are, in some sense, Omelas problems – what is the cost of maintaining utopia? What Matter does most satisfyingly is attack this question (or this sort of question – what is the cost of achieving and maintaining civilization) in a setting that is politically intricate and resonant with our own history, while keeping alive the sense that it is a grand and important and universal question. It investigates specifics without getting lost in those specifics.

James: I thought there was going to be some “going on a journey” theme/message, but apart from the fact that everybody went somewhere (and some came back) I don’t think that very much can be made of it.

The Galactic hierarchy left me thinking that if I had to live anywhere in that universe it would have to be in the midst of the Culture, minding my own business and living the high life. Why would anyone bother working for Special Circumstances? Even if you had to join SC to get “into” The Culture, why not then leave and take it easy? I don’t think any of the SC operatives’ motives convince me. Having said that, the person at the bottom of the pile, and not Culture, is the one who survives, but maybe more by luck than anything else.

Jonathan: That’s actually an interesting point. It occurred to me a while back that ideology seems to have drained out of SF. Heinlein’s works may have essentially became fora in which he could appear as an appropriately father-like Mary Sue and then mouth off about whatever political issue was getting his goat at the time, but I think that nowadays genre is struggling to keep in touch with the idea of people being genuinely politically motivated.

The Culture books are weird in that they’re frequently political but the politics aren’t particularly fine-grained. The result is that you have characters working for SC out of a genuine desire to further the political aims of SC but as those aims are frequently unclear, the politics serve quite poorly as character motivation, merely resulting in lots of people being enigmatic and secretive.

I think that type of writing works in morally simplistic universes as characters can be secretive, enigmatic, maybe a bit ambiguous but ultimately good. Once you remove that easy moral safety net and you have to deal with real issues that motivate real people, it becomes a lot more tricky to make it convincing.

Paul: OK, the theme of Matter. Well, the clue is in the title, and even gets referenced quite explicitly a little over half way through [page 340 or so in my ARC]. Ferbin and Holse are talking to Hyrlis about surveillance, reality, truth and the Simulation Hypothesis (though not in those terms, natch). Ferbin (true to form) ignores the revelations, but Holse has the instinctive grasp, and so Banks feeds us the core of the theme through Hyrlis to Holse and out onto the page.

“If we assume that all we have been told is as real as what we ourselves experience – in other words, that history, with all its torturings, massacres and genocides, is true – then, if it is all under the control of somebody or some thing, must not those running that simulation be monsters? How utterly devoid of decency, pity, and compassion would they have to be to allow this to happen, and keep on happening under their explicit control? Because so much of history is precisely this, gentlemen.”
[...]
“War, famine, disease, genocide. Death in a million different forms, often painful and protracted for the poor individual wretches involved. What god would so arrange the universe to predispose its creations to experience such suffering, or be the cause of it in others? What master of simulations or arbiter of a game would set up the initial conditions to such pitiless effect? God or programmer, the charge would be the same: that of near-infinitely sadistic cruelty; deliberate, premeditated barbarism on an unspeakably horrific scale.
[...]
Just as reality can blithely exhibit the most absurd coincidences that no credible fiction could convince us of, so only reality – produced, ultimately, by matter in the raw – can be so unthinkingly cruel. Nothing able to think [...] could encompass such purposefully envoked savagery without representing the absolute definition of evil. It is that unthinkingness which saves us. And condemns us, too, of course; we are as a result our own moral agents, and there is no escape from that responsibility.”

The theme is certainly connected to hierarchy, but the human hierarchies are mirroring the bigger one – the hierarchy of truths, of actualities.

Now the problem is that I can’t put this into words very well, because it was one of those revelatory things that rolled on in from the sidelines while I was reading the passage in question. I suppose the best way of grasping toward the feeling it produces when I think is to talk about Russian dolls of reality – not stacked universes or dimensions or anything (though they, again, mirror the same thing) but realities as perceived by players within them.

(Banks’ love of games manifests here as well – I think he’s saying that ultimately life, consciousness, sentience etc is a game that the universe plays with itself (like an only child, perhaps?). Complexity increases as we move toward entropy and heat death; as energy coalesces into matter. Matter is an emergent form of complexity – maybe Einstein’s God doesn’t play dice with the universe, but there’s evidence that the universe isn’t averse to rolling for snake-eyes while it waits for the bus. But I digress.)

Those perceived realities have the added complication of intersecting in time and space – they are conceptual territories that share space-time with the territories of others, and so matter goes to war with matter, over matter …

I’m not explaining this well, am I? I really need to read the whole thing again with an eye for the clues and intrusions of this theme (just in case I have in fact invented the thing out of whole cloth without realising it). But I think it was more obvious because I’d been utterly buried in Brasyl prior to reading Matter, which uses a similar idea in different ways.

In short, I’m saying something like Jonathan, but I see the layering of perceived realities reaching out way beyond notions of class and civilisation, and into the way everything interacts. The class thing is just one facet, one expression of the overarching principle. From the mighty empires, transcended races and Cultures and so on, right down to ticks on horses, and chemical reactions. The WorldGod is, to Ferbin, a god. To Hyrlis, it’s just an unhinged and inscrutable member of a mostly transcended elder race. Same corporeal entity, different things to different people – and the way they see it is a function of the reality they perceive.

This is why the Shellworld is such a great set-piece. It’s not just an awesome sensawunda BDO, but a mirror of the bigger idea – nested realities, each with their own ecology of sentience that makes no sense to someone or something at a different scale.

And this is why I think Holse is chosen as the person who can actually grok it, even though it takes him a while. Holse can understand (and ultimately manipulate) hierarchy because he always saw himself as somewhat aloof from it. It doesn’t control him in the way it controls others because he is more aware of it as a system, as a set of interlocking rules and principles. He doesn’t see monarchy as some expression of divine right; monarchy simply is, and he deals pragmatically with things as they stand. This makes him a survivor, and ultimately an agent of change.

Because Holse, you see, is the Culture in microcosm.

James: All I’d add to that is that at Alt.Fiction Banks said that he used the title Matter because it was the working title for The Steep Approach To Garbadale, so he used it again to annoy everyone on the interwebtubes…

I don’t like to think of myself as the boastful gloating type. But today, I shall wilfully be exactly that.

Because I have an ARC of the new Iain M. Banks ‘Culture’ novel, Matter.

Nothing else matters, indeed.

[I was pipped to the post with my boast by the good Mr Bloomer of Big Dumb Object ... but I retain top rank among jammy bastards, because I have the privilege of doing an interview with Banks for an Interzone feature. I believe the appropriate phrase is "get in"!]

Peer-to-peer book sharing

There’s an awful lot of people who’d very much like to be able to read that book rightf*ckingnow. That hunger for fresh material has driven the P2P distribution systems, at least as far as the music industry is concerned, but as yet there’s no easy way to ‘rip’ a book.

Or is there?

Well, obviously there is, or I wouldn’t have laid that obvious bait. Observe! The Atiz BookSnap:

Atiz are calling it the first consumer book-ripper, but that’s a bit of a stretch at over US$1500. But it is the Model-T of things to come; a device that will (with some assistance from you, at least in this instance) convert a book into a digitally scanned PDF file.

I have my own set of opinions about this, which regular readers will doubtless be able to predict quite effectively. But I’d be fascinated to hear the opinions of library staff, publishing staff, bibliophiles and writers about what this will mean to them (and everyone else) in the long term.

First one to mention DRM is a rotten apple.

I’m sure this must happen to other bloggers, too; over the course of a few days, from completely unrelated sources, a set of posts on a subject of interest to you that isn’t your normal blogging subject will arrive in your RSS reader, as if orchestrated from afar.

But I’m still too woolly-headed with a cold to make some sweeping statements about synchronicity and the Zeitgeist acting in some emergent harmony … not to mention writing anything coherent and interesting about science fiction literature (with two pending book reviews stewing at the back of my brain already).

So instead, you get a round-up post on graffiti.

First up, via Anders Sandberg, comes Graffiti Archaeology - a Flash-based site that examines the accretion and interaction over time of pieces of graffiti in certain locations. Nicely made - I generally loathe Flash sites, but this is the sort of thing it actually does really well.

Next, this is what happens when a professor of psychology and culture starts looking at graffiti with the perspective of an outsider trying to understand a body of work within the context it was made in - Bill Benzon’s series of three posts [link to first in series] at The Valve feature not just images of graffiti, but examinations of the settings and contexts within which they appear. I’ve been fascinated by graffiti culture for years, but I’ve never found myself asking as many questions about it as Benzon. [The image above is clipped from Benzon's article.]

[As with much of what I read at The Valve - a group blog to which the wry and subtle Adam Roberts is a contributor - I can't be entirely sure how serious an article this is (they're way too cunning with their language sometimes) - but joke or not, it's fascinating stuff.]

And finally, Matthew Ingram’s piece at Stylus Magazine examines the history of the band logo, which has conceptual roots in graffiti as well as political activism and typography of a more pedestrian commercial type. Nice to see a couple of obscure bands that I’m a fan of raise their heads in the images included - a VCTB gold star to the person who guesses which two I mean! Answers in the comments field, if you want to play.

In the meantime, I will post something related to science fiction as soon as circumstances permit. Thanks for your patience.

From Nick Mamatas:

“As the readership of science fiction is widely believed to be overwhelmingly male, there is a long history of women writers obscuring their gender (so as not to have their work prejudged) by writing under a name that includes their initials and their last name.

Going through the slush recently, I decided to count up the number of women who use initials versus the number of men who do so.

One hundred percent of the authors who submit their work to Clarkesworld under an initialed byline are women.”

There’s no doubt that there are gender and cultural imbalances in the genre fiction scenes. Is this doing anything to help the situation?

Proof (as if proof were required) of the old adage that “if you don’t blog about it today, BoingBoing will have pipped you to the post tomorrow” … but better late than never; here’s a sterling post from Warren Ellis on internet publishing and ‘burst culture’.

In keeping with the spirit of what he’s saying, I’m just going to snatch out the bits I want, but you should really go and read the whole thing - it’ll take a few minutes at most, and it’s time well spent.

“365Tomorrows was an ideal reaction to sf publishing in new media, the concept of flash fiction and the way the medium works. 100-word bursts of speculative fiction, daily. JR Blackwell’s gotten herself a career out of it. And note how 365T kept producing and fulfilled its mandate even as sf sites and sf print magazines died on either side of it.”

365T is a good little site; Jeremy Tolbert and a bunch of co-conspirators have something quite similar going on at The Daily Cabal (which, for my money, carries higher quality fiction, but as far as I can tell doesn’t yet have the reach of 365T).

“How far behind the curve is the sf publishing community? When International Pixel-Stained Technopeasant Day came around, hundreds of writers of gift and ambition ran short work for free on the web. This came about following a recently-resigned official of the Science Fiction Writers of America calling those who produce material for the web SCABS.”

I can add nothing to that.

“The web isn’t a replacement medium — it’s *another* medium. That said, if your concept of a magazine is something designed in one-page bursts, or three pages that only carry 500 words due to the mass of images, then, really, you’re not doing anything the web can’t do better, are you?”

Zing!

“Bursts aren’t contentless, nor do they denote the end of Attention Span. If attention span was dead, JK Rowling wouldn’t be selling paperbacks thick enough to choke a pig, and Neal Stephenson wouldn’t be making a living off books the size of the first bedsit I lived in.”

The death of print does not mean the death of reading. At least, it doesn’t *have* to.

“And just a thought: if you’re an sf writer grappling for space in one of the fiction magazines for seven cents a word or whatever the rate is now — what exactly are you losing by teaming with writers of like mind, going to the web and convincing a friend to work out the monetising bells and whistles for you?”

I refer you again to The Daily Cabal. And also to the No Fear of the Future group-blog, which has been running some brilliant material since it started up, and has done a great job of shoving the names of a bunch of previously unfamiliar authors in front of my eyes on a regular basis. Sure, it’s early days yet - but there’s a lot to be said for boarding the train early while it’s easy to find a comfy seat.

Nothing particularly new there, at least not to anyone who’s been reading rants (by me and others) about this sort of thing for a little while. But because Ellis has come out and said it, the meme will get a lot further (31 links to the piece as counted by Technorati at time of posting this response). For some reason, people pay a lot more attention to him than they do to me …

The inclusiveness debate seems to be gathering pace to become the current blazing topic of the sf-nal blogosphere. I’m keeping my mouth shut quite firmly - not because of any particular shameful or virtuous opinions that I feel I should hide from view, but because I believe that in these sorts of situations, if you feel you have nothing original or constructive to say, you’re best off keeping your lip buttoned. Jonathan McCalmont has a good overview of the situation, however.

I mean, I can see there’s a male/white/Western/Anglicised bias in sf, but I have no idea how the hell we should go about changing that situation. I’m not even sure if it can be done purposefully, either - I think it may be one of those things that can only change slowly over time as generations succeed each other. It puts me in mind of a quote from Poincaré, talking about the way that scientific theories and ideas tend to stay in currency while their progenitors are still around:

“Science advances … funeral by funeral.”

***

Talking of views dissenting from the canon, I thoroughly enjoyed the channelled ire of Liz Henry taking the freshly-fueled chainsaw of feminism to the old wood of Anne McCaffery’s Pern novels:

“The main thing Lessa seems to do in her capacity as Weyrwoman is to serve food. She’s always deftly serving F’lar’s dinner. She pours the klah during important meetings. She clears the table a lot too, and rings for food. Which appears magically from a dumbwaiter from the Lower Caverns where all the slutty kitchen women live. You could go through the book and mark up all her waitress moments.”

I cut my sf-nal teeth on those books, but you don’t read from a very critical perspective at eight years old. Hindsight is a curious thing.

And talking of feminism and diversity in sf, Cecilia Tan has reposted an old interview she did with Octavia Butler, which is well worth the time it takes to read:

“What do you think is going to happen to the human race in the next millennium?

Pretty much what is happening now. Why should anything different happen? There will be technological innovations and biological innovations, but things will be essentially how they are. The future is not some mystical magical place. The future is moment to moment. Thirty years ago we didn’t have the computers we do now, but we’re still doing the same things.

Meaning, even if the power grid collapses on January first, human beings are still going to be pretty much the same.

The human being is essentially lazy.”

Smart lady; I must read some of her books soon. Or rather, I’ll add her to the ever expanding list of authors I must pay attention to - a list that grows in inverse proportion to the amount of time I have available for reading things I want to read. *Sigh*

Just a few things to share that I thought deserved more than the standard link-dump treatment due to their vague thematic connectedness:

Jonathan ‘SF Diplomat’ McCalmont has been thinking about the dichotomy in genre criticism - which is nothing new, but he’s done it out loud this time:

“So what does all of this mean? It means that SF criticism has been around as long as SF but that it is now, and has probably always been, prone to placing itself in a ghetto constituted from an inaccessible conversation between critics, authors and the occasional genre fan who wants to think a little bit more about the books he has read. The way to satisfy Le Guin’s demands is not simply by producing more critical writing, it is by making sure that genre criticism is read by as wide an audience as possible.”

It’s worth a read, even if (in fact, especially if) you don’t read much sf lit crit. It’s also (though he’ll hate me for saying so*) a little less incendiary than some of Jonathan’s other posts … unless you take offence to the Livejournal jibe.

So, two cultures, you say? A growing gap between them? Sounds like the sort of situation that causes … revolution**! Martin McGrath’s largely unpublicised stealth blog (which you should all subscribe to and read, because firstly he’s a lovely chap and a good critic, and secondly it’ll wind him up no end) features an extended version of a riff I heard Martin deploy at Eastercon, namely that revolutions that occur in science fiction novels are almost invariably improbable in their execution:

“The instantaneous change: Even in sf that obeys the laws of physics and outlaws FTL there’s always one thing that travels faster than light, revolution. Nevermind the vast amounts of time and money it takes in the real world to make things even incrementally better – in sf the mere action of announcing the revolution is often enough to have the peasants dressing better, eating better and quoting Shakespeare.”

Ouch. He has a point though, and it’s an intelligent post from someone who actually knows more than he’d really like to know about politics. Go read.

[*You can consider that revenge for the Whitney Houston gag, Jonathan. ]

[** I warned you the connection was vague, didn't I?]

Great news via Big Dumb Object - the next Iain M. Banks novel is scheduled for release next February.

It’s set in the Culture (which was revealed a little while ago, IIRC), and will be called Matter (apparently just to annoy internet people, as that was the working title for Steep Approach to Garbadale).

According to BDO, the sample the man himself read out had all the usual IMB goodness we have come to expect. There’s a reason to look forward to the new year - as far as I’m concerned, the release of an Iain M. Banks novel should be treated as just cause for national holiday.

Banks holiday weekend, anyone?

OK, I’ll get my coat.

As a number of you have probably already noticed, sf author and critic Gwyneth Jones has an excellent article in the Guardian discussing how reality has caught up with science fiction:

“It was called “cyberpunk” [...] The manifesto went like this: in the forseeable future there will be no aliens, and no trips to distant planets. Digital technology, however, will get better and better at an incredible rate, throwing up fantastic new gadgets that will not remain in the hands of the wealthy. They will immediately be adopted by “the street”. Every punk will have a supercomputer in his pocket (and this was before desktop PCs, mind you, when video-camera, Wi-Fi internet access phones weren’t even a twinkle in a Finnish eye). And everything else in the world will get much, much, worse.

Much of the science-fiction establishment hated the cyberpunks. Science fiction was supposed to be about progress, and how advances in technology will inevitably create a better world. But they were right, and the truth they told is highly relevant to this new century of sci-fi come true.”

Although clearly written for a lay audience, the points Jones makes are important ones for fans and writers of science fiction, because they highlight what is sometimes described as the genre’s existential crisis - in other words, how does one write insightfully about the future when the future is already here - albeit, as Bill Gibson said, not evenly distributed as of yet?

It’s a singularity of sorts - not like Vinge’s version (at least not entirely), but in the sense that there’s a very near point in time beyond which it is increasingly hard to speculate with any sense of plausibility.

Which is why, I would contend, that the stronger (and arguably more literary) works of science fiction are exactly those which look closer to home in a temporal sense. It’s increasingly hard to write old-fashioned space-opera without it coming across as hokey and dated, not to mention wilfully ignorant of technology, science, economics and politics - at least to an audience that demands more than pure escapism, which I’ll freely admit is not the whole audience by a long shot.

The stuff that is really staying true to the extrapolative agenda, the speculative roots of the genre that grew from the compost of the early pulp material, is the stuff that looks at the issues which we’re already facing - cloning, nanotech, life enhancement and extention, exponentially-increasing power and ubiquity of computing, climate change, resource shortages, socio-economic changes and crises - and looks at them as more than backdrops and props for tales of derring-do and dastardly deeds, treating them instead as characters, forces and players in their own right.

It’s also the only stuff that has a hope of keeping an audience among a cynical younger generation that, when given the chance and not patronised to, are more than smart enough to pick holes in the top layer of any story. They get plenty of practice from watching TV and browsing the web every day, after all.

OK, so perhaps it’s just me, but when I heard (from Big Blog of Cheese) that there’s a review written in the style of a graphic novel about a graphic novel, that is itself a story that combines not just the history of the graphic novel as a format but also a re-examination of a canonical English fantasist author -

Well, let’s just say that the whole meta-ness of it brought a real big grin to my face. File under ‘reasons to leave the house more often’ and ‘postmodernism is rotting my brain’, perhaps?