I’M READING AS FAST AS I CAN (AUGUST 2021 EDITION)
Is it the end of the month already? Where does the time go, I ask you.
The Fifth Head of Cerberus by Gene Wolfe
My rating: 1 of 5 stars
I’ve tried Gene Wolfe once before, and it didn’t go well. But An Evil Guest is one of his less famous late-career books, and The Fifth Head of Cerberus is the one that everyone cites as a must-read classic, so I decided to give him another try. And the setting is a good hook - the twin colony planets of Sainte Anne and Sainte Croix, the former of which is believed to have once been inhabited by shapeshifting aboriginals, now long gone. But were they wiped out by the colonists, or did they kill the colonists and replace them?
The book is actually three related novellas - the title track involves a narrator reflecting on his childhood on Sainte Croix, raised by a robot nanny while his father (a scientist and brothel proprietor) conducts experiments on him and his brother. The second story (written by “John Marsch”, an anthropologist who appears in the first story) tells a mystical tale about Saint Anne aboriginals. In the third story, Marsch has been imprisoned following the events of the first story, and the narrative derives mainly from Marsch’s prison diary and his field notes from an earlier expedition to Saint Anne to investigate the mystery of the fate of the aboriginals - but is Marsch really who he says he is?
It sounds great when you type it like that. In reality, Wolfe writes these stories with unreliable narrators and a deliberate ambiguity so that it’s difficult to understand what’s really going on or what/whom to believe. Which, various literary critics and fans assure me, is the point - the stories are political and philosophical critiques of the effects of imperialist colonialism, which in real life are complex and ambiguous, etc. And, you know, great? But for those of us who don't read SF for the purposes of deep-dive academic analysis, it’s not particularly satisfying. Anyway, I will say the title track is the most straightforward and satisfying of the three. But while I got something out of that section, the rest is enough to convince me that Wolfe is not my cup of tea.
Agency by William Gibson
My rating: 4 of 5 stars
This is William Gibson’s second entry in his Jackpot trilogy, in which rich people in the 22nd century can digitally communicate with past timelines, although doing so results in a new alternate timeline (called a “stub”) that can have serious consequences for the people in that stub - especially when someone uses this technology to manipulate the stub and generate conflict for fun. This time, someone has created a stub that started in 2015. The good news: in this stub, Donald Trump eventually loses the 2016 election and Brexit doesn’t happen. The bad news: Syria has become a flashpoint that may well escalate into nuclear war.
The mysterious Detective Inspector Ainsley Lowbeer believes the key to stopping the war lies in a military-grade AI called “Eunice” (like Alexa, but sentient and way more powerful) that has been stolen by Silicon Valley start-up Cursion, which hopes to commercialize it. They enlist star beta tester Verity to try out Eunice, but Eunice has other ideas, and soon Verity finds herself on the run as Cursion tries to contain the situation. This kicks off what is basically a drawn out chase sequence that takes up most of the book as Verity is aided not only by a bespoke team of freelance operatives assembled by Eunice, but also by Lowbeer’s team in two alt-futures.
All of the hard work of reading The Peripheral must have paid off, because I found Agency much easier to get into, since I didn’t have to spend the first third of the book trying to get a handle on what’s happening and where. Also, Eunice is a far more interesting MacGuffin, and leave it to Gibson to come up with the weird idea of leveraging gig-economy culture to assemble a temporary amateur black ops team. Overall, I enjoyed this, and found it to be an improvement of the formula established in the first book. Your own experience may well depend on how you feel about HRC being President, which I only mention because I’ve seen quite a few articles complaining about this plot point, although she doesn’t appear as a character and is strictly background. But, you know, everything is political now.
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