Philip K. Dick, Do Androids Dream Of Electric Sheep? (1968) SFMW 4

“I notice you’ve never had any hesitation as to spending the bounty money I bring home on whatever momentarily attracts your attention.” He rose, strode to the console of his mood organ. “Instead of saving,” he said, “so we could buy a real sheep, to replace that fake electric one upstairs. (Loc. 125-27)

The title of Philip K. Dick's Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? (1968) certainly seems to invite the interpretation that Ridley Scott doggedly pursued in his 1982 film, Do Androids Dream of Origami Unicorns? No, wait… Blade Runner.

However, to my mind Dick's novel is rather less of a metaphysical mystery of machine consciousness than it is an obsessive-compulsive meditation on the many ways the author's characters conspire to alienate themselves.

Certainly, there is a sense in which the novel invites the reader to see humanity in androids and humanity as automata ("Most androids I’ve known have more vitality and desire to live than my wife", loc. 1251-52) and Dick goes to some lengths to explain the evolution of the various tests that have been developed in order to distinguish automaton from human.

The key point here is the indeterminacy that the act of attempted discrimination provokes and the Voigt-Kampff scale's unreliability in identifying differences between the two subjects, as well as the fact that the means of gradating the likelihood of android identity is perpetually being redefined, the Voigt-Kampff scale being merely the most recent iteration:

A small class of human beings could not pass the Voigt-Kampff scale. If you tested them in line with police work, you’d assess them as humanoid robots. You’d be wrong, but by then they’d be dead (loc. 545-46)

Beyond this, however, Dick's characters seem to do a good enough job of keeping themselves at arm's length from their own phenomenological experience. Deckard even comes to envy and fantasise about androids:

He wondered, now, about her, too. Some female androids seemed to him pretty; he had found himself physically attracted by several, and it was an odd sensation, knowing intellectually that they were machines, but emotionally reacting anyhow. (Loc. 1257-59)

The quote with which this review begins illustrates the densely layered emotional estrangement the novel's protagonist, Rick Deckard, has swaddled himself in: the association of the acquisition of money with the potential to acquire the living commodities (the prices of which he compulsively reviews) which, it is inferred, would in some way improve the quality of the lives of himself and his wife; the willing enslavement on a societal level to the influence of the mood organ; the totemic worship of animals in a post-apocalyptic environment that has destroyed many species to the point that the possession of fake animals is considered to be a social pre-requisite, and so on:

Owning and maintaining a fraud had a way of gradually demoralizing one. And yet from a social standpoint it had to be done, given the absence of the real article. He had therefore no choice except to continue. (Loc. 238-41)

The tyranny of the object over the subject, one of the mainstays of postmodernist thought, finds a precursor in one of Deckard's author-reported observations:

He thought, too, about his need for a real animal; within him an actual hatred once more manifested itself toward his electric sheep, which he had to tend, had to care about, as if it lived. The tyranny of an object, he thought. It doesn’t know I exist. (Loc. 600-02).

Dick seems both terrified of and fascinated by the commodity-informed nature of urban life, to which he speculatively assigns a self-replicating nature -- when no-one is around to see it happening:

By coming here he had brought the void to them, had ushered in emptiness and the hush of economic death. (Loc. 635-36)

Kipple is useless objects, like junk mail or match folders after you use the last match or gum wrappers or yesterday’s homeopape. When nobody’s around, kipple reproduces itself. For instance, if you go to bed leaving any kipple around your apartment, when you wake up the next morning there’s twice as much of it. It always gets more and more[…] No one can win against kipple,” he said, “except temporarily and maybe in one spot, like in my apartment I’ve sort of created a stasis between the pressure of kipple and nonkipple, for the time being. But eventually I’ll die or go away, and then the kipple will again take over. It’s a universal principle operating throughout the universe; the entire universe is moving toward a final state of total, absolute kippleization. (Loc. 881-83, 892-95).

The dominant religion of the novel's world, Mercerism, sees practitioners linking mentally with other devotees via Empathy Boxes to share the experience of Wilbur Mercer. Dick playfully describes Deckard's assessment of the androids' own aspirations towards a collective spiritual experience which, in the author's typical idiom, reveal a kaleidoscopic number of possible readings as to its symbolic connotations, inside and outside the text:

Roy Baty (the poop sheet informed him) has an aggressive, assertive air of ersatz authority. Given to mystical preoccupations, this android proposed the group escape attempt, underwriting it ideologically with a pretentious fiction as to the sacredness of so-called android “life.” In addition, this android stole, and experimented with, various mind-fusing drugs, claiming when caught that it hoped to promote in androids a group experience similar to that of Mercerism, which it pointed out remains unavailable to androids. (Loc. 2368-72)

In our own pre-technological singularity era, Do Androids Dream Of Electric Sheep? can be a tough read; not because it is particularly challenging, structurally, but because of the conclusions it invites. For analogue-educated digital converts of a certain age such as myself, the novel's vision of an entropic future seems much closer now than when one of science fiction's greatest visionaries brooded over the implications more than forty years ago:

Yet, the dark fire waned; the life force oozed out of her, as he had so often witnessed before with other androids. The classic resignation. Mechanical, intellectual acceptance of that which a genuine organism—with two billion years of the pressure to live and evolve hagriding it—could never have reconciled itself to. “I can’t stand the way you androids give up,” he said savagely. (Loc. 2567-70)

Time and tide, he thought. The cycle of life. Ending in this, the last twilight. Before the silence of death. He perceived in this a micro-universe, complete. (Loc. 2377-78)

Tweet

Michael Moorcock, The History of the Runestaff (1967-69, rev. 1977, rev. 1992) FMW 36

First there was the Red Amulet, its ruddy light staining their faces as if with blood. This was Hawkmoon's strength, giving its owner more than natural energy. Then there were the crystal rings of Mygan which could transport those who wore them through the dimensions. These were their passports back to their own space and time. Beside the rings was the scabbarded Sword of the Dawn. In this lay Hawkmoon's army [Legion of the Dawn]. And finally, wrapped in a length of cloth, there was the Runestaff, Hawkmoon's standard and his hope. Count Brass cleared his throat. “Even with all these powerful objects can we defeat an empire as great as Granbretan?” (p. 591).

Published in 2003, the 36th entry in the Fantasy Masterworks series reprints the 1992 edition of the third volume in the Tale of the Eternal Champion series, a '14 volume set of omnibuses that present a considerable number of Michael Moorcock's Eternal Champion novels and stories in a 'recommended reading order'.

The Mutiverse.org summary linked to above tells only part of the story, as each of the four volumes in the Hawkmoon tetralogy ('The Jewel in the Skull', 'The Mad God's Amulet', 'The Sword of the Dawn', and 'The Runestaff') originally written in the late 1960s had already undergone revisions in 1977: '[The Tale of the Eternal Champion] was originally published by Millennium/Orion in hardcover and trade paperback editions between 1992 and 1993, and then in mass-market paperback editions between 1995 and 1998. The series was jointly edited by Moorcock and John Davey, and presented Moorcock with an opportunity to make a number of revisions to the texts to give a more uniform feel to the Tale. Each omnibus also contained a new Introduction by Moorcock', which is included in this Fantasy Masterworks edition. A further trilogy featuring Hawkmoon entitled 'Count Brass' (comprising 'Count Brass', 'The Champion of Garathorn' and 'The Quest for Tanelorn') was published as the fourteenth and final volume in the 1992-93 cycle.

Despite such an assiduous editorial history, no-one appears to have picked up on the fact that Moorcock's co-dedicatee, 'my friend Mr Ian Kilminster' (sic; p. iii), doesn't spell his name the way the author does. No matter, although as a big fan of Motörhead as well as Moorcock's oeuvre, the persistence of the typo grates somewhat. To the point:

The sequence is set in a future earth, at least 1,000 years from the present. There are hints that the setting is a post-apocalyptic nuclear one: 'the 'ancient people of [Count Brass's] Kamarg [the French Camargue] who were preserved by Fate from the blight of the Tragic Millennium[...] whose ancestors were saved by the fierce mistral that cleansed the skies of the poisons that brought others death and malformation [who] give thanks[...] for the coming of the Life Wind' (pp. 24-25)


During the Tragic Millennium, 'the world collapsed into various degrees of ruin' (p. 37) and 'desolation', and 'nothing has lived there but malformed creatures since' (p. 383). The protagonist's chaotic associate, the appositely named Huillam D'Averc has cause for concern that the maladies of the Tragic Millennium, which we recognize as radiation sickness, endure: “There could be poison air – the air that makes your flesh crumple from your face, that causes vomiting and death...”. To this observation, Hawkmoon replies “The poison air does not exist any more, D'Averc, and you know it. It only lasts for a while and then disappears. Surely there has been no poison air here for centuries'. (p. 406)

If the air of taint that hangs over the geography of the West in these novels can be seen to reflect in some way the author's own jaundiced views of the continent, then his metaphorical description of the temperament of his own countrymen is no more sympathetic. From Normandia to Ukrania, the land mass is in thrall to the decadent and cruel Granbretanians: 'their cruelty is without precedent. They are insane. Their souls are sick with a love for all that is evil, and a hatred for all that is noble'. (p. 21).

However, Moorcock's critique of Granbretan is more than a side-swipe at late '60s Britain. It also serves as a commentary upon imperialism and war overall. The Vietnam war was at its height when the sequence were originally composed between 1967-69, and their dehumanizing affect hangs like a pall over the works: 'For this was the great power of the Lords of the Dark Empire, that they valued nothing on all the Earth, no human quality, nothing within or without themselves. The spreading of conquest and desolation, of terror and torment, was their staple entertainment, a means of employing their hours until their spans of life were ended. For them, warfare was merely the most satisfactory way of easing their ennui...' (p. 344)

Subsequent to his being taken prisoner in defence of his home city, the protagonist Dorian Hawkmoon von Köln is adapted by his captor, Baron Meliadus of Kroiden, Grand Constable of the Order of the Wolf, First Chieftain of the Amies under[...] great King-Emperor Huon' (p. 31): 'He lifted a hand to his forehead and felt with a shock something there that had not been there before. It was hard and smooth. It was part of him. He shuddered' (p. 67). The Black Jewel is capable of destroying the implantee's mind, and acts as surety to bind Hawkmoon to the desire of Meliadus to abduct Count Brass's daughter Yisselda from her ancestral home in the Kamarg, the last bastion of resistance against Granbretan.

As with all of the Eternal Champion novels, there are forces at work outside the main narrative that are shaping its outcomes. This episode is merely one connection in a train of events that has already been set in motion by the mysterious artefact that gives the final work in the tetralogy its title. Many destinies are woven together 'to do the Runestaff's work which was begun when Meliadus swore upon the Runestaff his great oath of vengeance against the inhabitants of Castle Brass and thus set the pattern of events' (p. 423). The Runestaff is a implacable totem of chaos as well as peace, signifying balance, binding all who swear upon it: 'Again [Meliadus] had sworn by the Runestaff, as on that fateful morn two years before. And his action had set in motion a new pattern of history. His second oath had strengthened that pattern, whether it favoured Meliadus or Hawkmoon, and hardened all their destinies a little more strongly' (p. 331).

Whilst the four novels ostensibly chronicle the struggle of the Kamarg alliance to repel and ultimately overthrow the might of Granbretan, in truth the 'justice' which the Runestaff metes out favours the maintenance of universal balance over an exceptionally long period of time rather than the advancing of the aims and aspirations of those who call upon it in the short term. This is difficult for the protagonists to discern as the devastating manifestation of the Runestaff's power sees the appearance of the latter mask the facticity of the former:'"By the Runestaff, we need aid!" [cried Hawkmoon]. Suddenly a strange electric sensation ran through his body and he gasped, recognizing what was happening to him, realizing that he had unconsciously invoked the Runestaff. The Red Amulet, [an aspect of the Runestaff] which now glowed at his neck, spreading red light on the armour of his enemies, was now transmitting power into his body[...] Then Hawkmoon was everywhere, a whirling bringer of death' (p. 321). Hawkmoon may come to 'resent the feeling of being the puppet of some supernatural agency', but there is little he can do about it (p. 529).

Every aspect of the Eternal Champion seems to manifest a predeliction to opine at some point that his desires are simple and to express resentment at the role fate has cast for him, and Hawkmoon is no exception: 'All I seek is a little love, a little peace, and to be revenged upon those who have ravaged my homeland. Yet here I am, on a continent thousands of miles away from where I desire to be, off to seek another legendary object – and reluctantly. Perhaps we shall all understand these matters in time'. (p. 497)

Such understanding as there is to be found in the sequence resides in the fact that the concept of 'justice' is a relative one. To the observation 'you fought well and you fought for justice', Hawkmoon replies: 'Justice? Is there such a thing?' Orland Fank, a servant and aspect of the Runestaff, replies: 'it can be manufactured in small quantities[...] but we have to work hard, fight well and use great wisdom to produce just a tiny amount[...] Justice is not the Law, it is not Order, as human beings normally speak of it; it is not Equilibrium, the Correction of the Balance'. However, as Hawkmoon concludes, 'the world is still wild. The justice Fank spoke of has hardly been manufactured at all. We must try to make a little more'. (p. 646)

Tweet

Samuel R. Delany, Nova (1968) SFMW 37

In the thirty-first century, intergalactic travel is facilitated by means of the use of the rare element Illyrion.

The spur to action for Lorq Von Ray, the protagonist of Samuel R. Delany's 1968 novel Nova, is neither epic nor heroic, but merely a tedious exercise in economics. A sense of disappointment must inevitably pervade the novel once the reader learns that Lorq's intention to sail through a nova and collect several tonnes of Illyrion in one maneouvre is not going to prevent some catastrophic galactic event or overthrow an ancient, nameless evil, but merely secure the future of his family's industrial empire. His father adumbrates the economic determinates that drive Nova's scant plot forward in one of the numerous passages of prolix, coma-inducing verbiage that litter the novel: "I've figured that at the present rate of expansion, in fifteen years the Outer Colonies will be able to lower the cost of Illyrion by almost a quarter. During that time, [rival company] Red-shift is going to try to kill us[...] The only way we can survive is to kill them first: and the only way we can do that is to figure out a way to get Illyrion down to half price before it goes down to three quarters" (p. 92). Why anyone should care is another question altogether.

Delany attempts to imbue the narrative with some of the colourful hues of space opera by portraying Lorq's antagonist Prince, the aristocratic leader of the Red-shift empire, as a semi-cyborg psychotic. However, the effort he expends in attempting to provide a motivational back-story by portraying the youthful encounters between Lorq, Prince and his sister Ruby backfire badly as the reader can think of Prince as nothing more than a spoilt child on encountering him again later in the work.

There are some enjoyable elements tucked away within Nova; despite the woefully heavy-handed use of the hoary metaphor of 'the musician who speaks through his instrument' ("a gypsy with a syrynx instead of a larynx", p. 136), Delany's descriptions of Mouse's virtuosity on the 'sensory syrynx', which projects sounds, holographic images and scents as well as music, are probably the most entertaining passages in the text.

Additionally, some of the ideas that Delany was thinking through in the late Sixties have a contemporary resonance beyond that which he may have expected: "At the beginning of that amazing century [namely, the twentieth], mankind was many societies living on one world; at its end, it was basically what we are now: an informatively unified society that has lived on several worlds" (p. 148). Obvious corrections regarding global economic inequality aside, the former element of this proposition stands without the need for annotation; replace physical worlds with virtual worlds, and the latter also has more than a ring of truth about it. Consider also the following passage, with its interesting contemporary use of the metaphor of the 'net': Katin reflects on how "each individual is a junction in [the] net, and the strands between are the cultural, the economic, the psychological threads that hold individual to individual. Any historical event is like a ripple in the net[...] it passes over and through the web, stretching or shrinking those cultural bonds that involve each man [sic] with each man" (p. 163).

Delany's imagining of a world where trades and skills are facilitated by means of sockets that plug into the operator's central nervous system (a concept invented in the novel by 'Ashton Smith' (pp. 203-5), perhaps echoing Clark Ashton Smith?) has become something of a SF mainstream trope since Delany's exposition of the same, although other writers such as Cordwainer Smith examined the idea first.

Delany's attitudinal dispositions and habitual ticks more than conspire to destroy any pleasure that the reader may have been able to take in the novel had he not resorted to such bouts of wilful self-indulgence. Delany is the very worst offender for 'info-dumping' that I have ever encountered in genre fiction, and Nova is littered with his heavy-handed erudition, which is not what I would have expected from an author who has had a parallel career as an educator. The shrill tone of these sections bespeaks a distasteful condescension which a twenty-first century readership, expecting its information to be mediated through communities of purpose rather than be disseminated through the dull drone of éminence grise, will not receive well in the future.

Delany's development of 'alien' language patterns grazes the eye within pages of the commencement of the novel, taking delight as he does in constructing a hall of mirrors for unsuspecting grammatical elements to trudge through and endure their unwelcome distortion. As if narrated by Yoda much of this novel is. Delany's insistence on the truth-value of tarot cards is another Sixties excresence that dates the novel badly: 'If somebody had told me I'd be working in the same crew, today in the thirty-first century, with somebody who could honestly be skeptical about the Tarot, I don't think I would have believed it' (p. 118).

Many more objectionable and pretentious elements coalesce in the person of the crew member Katin who is collecting hundreds of thousands of notes on a voice recorder in anticipation of his embarking on the writing of his magnum opus novel, a mode of discourse which has become redundant by the Novas imagined contemporary present. It is hard to say whether Delany mocks or reifies Katin's delight in knowledge for knowledge's sake, but the reader has lost the will to consider such issues having had their natural inclination to question Delany's intentions beaten out of them by lecture after purposeless, directionless, joyless lecture: '"History? Thirty-five hundred years ago Herodotus and Thucydides invented it"' (p. 124). I may never be able to pick up the Landmark editions of either of these authors again without thinking of Nova, which is another reason why I am glad to return it to the shelf posthaste. Mouse's dismissal of Katin's agonies of indecision regarding an appropriate subject for his work are, however, amusing: "I was born[...] I must die. I am suffering. Help me. There, I just wrote your book for you" (p. 164).

The final encounter between Von Ray and Prince is predictably anti-climactic, and the premise that a ship could fly through a nova so under-considered that even Delany thinks it only appropriate to draw a veil over the event that the entire novel has been building up to, and not describe it. An irritating entry to the SF Masterworks series that I cannot see myself returning to at any point in the near future, or come to that the far future.

Tweet