Iain M. Banks, The Algebraist

“Swim” said Fassin. “You know; when your head kind of seems to swim because you suddenly think: “Hey, I’m a human being, but I’m twenty thousand light years from home and we’re all living in the midst of mad aliens and super weapons and the whole bizarre insane swirl of galactic history and politics! That; isn’t that weird?”

These lines are a defining summary of Iain M. Banks as science fiction writer, uttered in his next to newest science fiction novel, The Algebraist. This novel is one in a long series of of his science fiction novels stretching back to the early eighties, though it is not set in the fictional culture and civilisation of the Culture, the rather unimaginatively named but superbly omnipotent (and thus deserving of such a lame descriptor) galactic civilization. It is a stand-alone piece, a novel set in the space opera traditions of old, where the science falls rapidly away to the fiction, and where things that are sometimes implausible but at least imaginative occur with entertaining frequency. The Algebraist shares with classic space opera like Star Wars or a dozen other, A. E. Van Vogt, Bester, Flash Gordon, E. E. Doc Smith, with enormous space empires, bizarre and unsettling alien species, startling scientific discoveries, whole universes to be conquered. There the resemblance ends.

Iain M. Banks is part of what has been called the ‘new space opera,’ a group of mostly British science fiction writers such as Banks, Alistair Reynolds, Paul McAuley (who includes M. John Harrison in this list, though I’m less certain), Charles Stross (to an extent) Liz Williams and Ian McCleod, even Dan Simmons, who use the ‘loose and unrigorous’ science of old space opera as a backdrop for stories whose central importance has little to do with death rays or flying saucers; instead, well-developed characters, well-realised plot and strands of social criticism, moral philosophy or startling imagination replace the surface deep ‘gee-whiz’ attitude of older space opera. They are also rarely possessed of the often conformist, parochial, Science Club attitude of 1940’s and 1950’s space opera (Van Vogt being a major exception) and being distinct from the Webers and Moons of ‘new’ American space opera.

Notably, Banks is reported to have torn up his British passport in protest over the invasion of Iraq, and Ken MacCleod, as can be seen on his fine blog The Early Days of a Better Nation, is involved in various socialist and revolutionary currents in the UK. Their stories do reflect this; one of MacCleod novels features a digital and heroic Trotsky, and the novella The State of the Art leaves the Culture’s contempt for our capitalist and socialist ‘democracies’ in little doubt.  The Culture is frequently depicted and described in other reviews as being an ‘anarchist utopia’, an ideal society wherein a total availability of resources and intelligence has rendered war, poverty, social inequality, even jobs, redundant, and its conflicts with civilizations that have yet to see the ‘benefit’ of such a system. The Culture novels have been recognized as much more important by no less than the Cambridge Companion to Science Fiction, praising Consider Phlebas and Use of Weapons for being brave enough to use science fiction  to genuinely imagine something different but plausible, truly, totally different, and not just replaying World War 2, the Cold War or the Napoleonic Wars in space. Or assuming that the US government and corporations will be around thousands of year from now in space.

(As an aside, it is worth noting that the Culture novels bear some striking affinities with Star Trek’s future world;  the idea of Earth as paradise where replicators have freed humanity from a need for resources and forced labour, allowing us the potential for true cultural and personal freedom is enticing…but Star Trek shows and movies rarely delve into that aspect of the Federation, and leaves us bored with Star Fleet, military uniforms and troubles that seem all to mundane from their reality…despite the nebula and bumpy headed life forms.  The Culture at least follows through on the radical potentials of its whizbang magic technology, and is much sleeker, sexier and cooler to boot).

In these new space operas, just To be sure, Things are complicated as well, there is not just evil, and non-human, and good, and pure and American; as an example, Fassin, the protagonist of The Algebraist, is a skilled scholar in an obscure field whose knowledge places him square in the middle of a vicious war; he serves, and is not particularly morally worried about this service, to a military order of a repressive, reactionary interstellar empire run by an alien species.  He is morally uncertain, a philanderer and naive, and he is no hero, not at all, but just a patsy and a scared man trying to survive in a universe that, while not outright hostile, is not friendly either, a true heir to the protagonists of New Wave space opera like The Centauri Device by M. John Harrison (who dislikes that book the most of his ouevre, apparently) and The Void Captain’s Tale by Norman Spinrad.

The Swedish author Sam J. Lundwall in his 1977 study of science fiction, The Illustrated History of Science Fiction argues that space opera is fundamentally a stale genre, one in which the hero can “single-handedly destroy an entire galaxy of fifty thousand million suns, each of them with an undisclosed number of inhabited planets, without raising an eyebrow.” The greatest genocidaires ever as heroics, and the hero concerned about his WASP girlfriend and the fame and glory of Earth; an essentially parochial genre, Lundwall calls it, and I am inclined to agree. The weakness of space operas like Smith’s The Skylark of Space and Children of the Lens, or Van Vogt’s Slan, or the innumerable clones of Perry Rhodan popular in 1977 and still going strong today, are many, but two concern us here.

Firstly, all these planets smashing, suns exploding, alien races dying, vast eons and distances crossed in stupendous speeds and times do absolutely nothing; they do not contribute to the plot in any concrete way, and as Lundwall says, all the “mile-long space ships, space fleets of hundreds of thousands of ships, heros brave and bold beyond reason and villains straight out of the nethermost regions of Hell…all seem somewhat repetitious..[and] one cannot even muster the enthusiasm these incredible feats are undoubtedly worth.” They are essentially the distraction, the wall hangings meant to hide the hollow crumbling walls beneath, or even worse, in the Popular Mechanics, Marvel Comics or Hugo Greensback Amazing Stories tradition: the plot and story are just a way to show off the space ships and warfare, gushing in all the heroic battles and destruction as they remain to an extent in American and Japanese military space opera. Either way, all these trappings of Space Opera contribute nothing specifically important to the story.

Secondly, Space Opera used to be, and still seems to be, a rehashing of the old Horse Opera from which it derives its name, or World War 2 adventure stories, one in which the brave, square jawed hero faces off against a menace (once the Indian, then the Jerry and the Jap, and now the Alien) that threatens peace, order, civilisation, and worse still, our women folk! They sublimate racism and violence into an acceptable form, in which things we do not understand can be destroyed without moral or ethical repercussions; it is a fantasy then, too, one shared by many comic books and movies, in which the Good Guy, because he is Good without question and his opponents Evil without remorse, can massacre at his leisure. Dave Weber remains to me the mso prominent of this new breed of old Space Opera, and the continuing popularity of men like Smith and Van Vogt and the Star Wars franchise (though the novels and extended universe has troubled the morally simplistic dichotomies of the original trilogy) would seem to indicate at least in part a longing for a simpler moral order that never existed, and for murderous destruction without any repercussions (a trend pointed out by Norman Spinrad in his fine novel, The Iron Dream).

It is worth noting that in Banks’ Inversions, the alien species known as the Affront, imperialistic, militaristic, violent, sadistic, carnivorous, xenophobic and contemptous of all, reveling in the name given them to others, get at least some sympathy from Banks, and one of the ‘heroes’ ends up using the Culture’s advanced techology to become an Affront by the novels end.  Curious that.

It seems as if Swim, what the hero of The Algebraist describes far above, would be ideal to describe the deplorable space opera Lundwall so ridiculed. And of course, it does, after a fashion, as that is precisely how we are intended to feel by Space Opera, and by science fiction in general: our heads like ballons floating on a stream, our bodies dragging far below, as we attempt to come to terms with what exactly we are faced with. Disconnected, overwhelmed, mystified, confused, awed (Stanislaw Lem is particularly good at this.) Ideally that would be the feeling, but in practice, it is not realised, instead we are submerged in gory detail.

The Aliens are Reds or faceless hordes of Asian monsters, just the same; nothing is different or special save the warp drive and the size of the guns. That is science fiction of the tawdry sort; my head swims only from the shallowness, one has to assume? However, the term itself is not a throwaway. I think Banks’ intended it as both a joke, a jab at science fiction and the acceptance of the extraordinary in the mundane and vice versa, but also as something different.

How different? Well, I was first piqued into this thought by reading a negative revue from The Guardian from a few years ago. The author, Justina Robson, was largely critical; though praised as being intelligent and stylish, The Algebraist was just so much dead weight, a bloated corpse tied to a brilliant author by too many long words, plot points, complex twists and strange aliens, to quote: “his editor is on holiday.” Some of my friends had similar feelings about the book; that it failed in a way none of his Culture novels ever succeeded in doing, by having too much and therefore being bogged down in the details of space societies, rampant AI and alien hierarchies. The general point of all this is to leave The Algebriast a disappointing project, seemingly burdened by the weight of all that dead muck of Space Opera, the same fascination with monsters and spaceships as fifty (Or ten years) ago it was supposed to avoid.  And I have to concur with some of these criticism, especially with Robson’s remarks about the narrator, and I sympathise with my friends dislike of its length and ’slowness’ (the difference being they also concur that the average Dickens novel has much more dead weight than any Banks sci-fi, whereas I can’t image Robson questioning the validity of forcing students to read Dickens).

A thought: what if the Swim that Fassin describes is something metaphor for the space opera, and science fiction, as a whole? Swim, that feeling of being totally overwhelmed and lost by the presence of a greater universe, would almost certainly meet a basic criteria as a standard of science fiction, ideally: being ‘weirded out’ is incredibly important to the isolation and perturbation of good science fiction. Information overload, or future shock, or cognitive dissonance, whatever you want to call it; my argument is that, rather then simply being a dead weight, the length and concentrated details and descriptions, fast-paced and frequently overwhelming, is at least partly deliberate, perhaps even necessary for appreciating The Algebraist.

To that end, the baggy, weighty fat old body of the text, too much detail, too many characters, too many that critics and friends complained about. Like our own body fat, also extremely important for an enjoyment of the novel. I shall cite two passages as proof of the style that Banks’ employs: often rapid dumps of information, exasperated in tone, awed and shamed in attitude, and not a little excited. Quote the first:

“The Voehn were the calmly relentless, highly intelligent, omni-competent, near-indestructible, all-environments-capable undefeated uber-soldiers of the last nine millenia or so. They were the martial pin-ups of the age, the speckless species peak of military perfection…and yet they were few and far between.”

Quote the second:

“The Shrievality was..the paramilitary Order/discipline/faculty of technicians and theorists in charge of had once been called Information Technology, and so it was also, though less exclusively, concerned with the acceptably restricted remnants of Artificial Intelligence allowed in the post-AI age…”

In both cases, the reader is presented with a series of rapid dumps of information and revelations that partly stem from the current view point’s mind and partly from the narrator, invisible and chatty; The dump is usually preceeded by an exclamation of wonder or amazement shding into fear or respect, but ratehr then simply creating an atmosphere through the use of imagery and metaphor, the syntax and construction of each paragraph. Serves to alienate or confuse the reader beyond just simple description. A rapid barrage of description and information, leaves us swimming as readily as Fassin; when I read The Algebraist, I find myself  rushed along, confused, uncertain, surprised and a little lost, no better off then the protagonist whose steely reserve does not exist an d who like the reader, spends much of the novel very very confused, and yet trudging on regardless….