Random Notes on Agency by William Gibson

402 pages, 110 chapters, published 2020, the second novel in the Jackpot Trilogy following The Peripheral, which appeared in 2014. If Gibson takes the same length of time to produce the third volume, we might look for it sometime next year.

Agency is packed with characters, acronyms, technical jargon, and arcane diction (eg chyron, mews, opsec, sigil, vuln, tipstaff, vetiver, anamorphic floor lamp). The story speeds along in short and sometimes cryptic chapters, much of which is explained later, requiring the reader to make notes or have a very retentive memory in order to fully understand what’s going on. Adding to the challenge are the dual plotlines, one in 2017 and the other in 2136, each with a different set of characters,

The word “agency” refers to the capacity to act. Characters in the novel who are agents in this regard are Eunice, Lowbeer, and Stets. Ironically one of the principal characters, Verity, does not have much agency herself, and spends most of the novel being shuttled around by others. The blurry cover photo depicts Eunice, an AI that identifies as an African-American woman “eight hours old,” when first encountered by Verity. 

For a while I thought that Lowbeer might be an AI, as she seems as omnipresent and knowledgable as Eunice, but near the end of the book Eunice dispels that notion when Verity voices the same thought, to which Eunice replies, “No, but she’s about running competitive control areas. Had to teach herself, though, while her country turned into one.”

A number of characters from The Peripheral show up but several years older. Some are just mentioned, while others play minor roles, except for Wilf Netherton, Ainsley Lowbeer, and Ash, who are all from the future. The only one from the near present to get actively involved is Connor, who plays a very active and energetic role. Those who haven’t read The Peripheral will miss out on the tie-ins.

The ending is somewhat underwhelming, perhaps due to the difficulty of constructing a conclusion that doesn't give too much away for the real ending in the final book of the series.

FUTURE LONDON 2136

Detective Inspector Ainsley Lowbeer (female) – officially a member of the London Metropolitan Police, but “tries to improve things in orphaned stubs, to do that she manipulates the course of their future history, or tries to. It’s all surreptitious, in the stubs themselves, which suits her.” She is present in both timelines.
Ash (female) – working with Lowbeer, formerly for Lev Zubov
Wilf Netheron – now also working for Lowbeer
Rainey –Wilf's Canadian wife
The Aunties – Lowbeer’s “pet name for her office’s coven of semisentient security algorithms” 
Vespasian – “our hobbyist of hell worlds...the one who made such horrific stubs...all war, all the time.” There’s a suggestion in Chapter 2 that Vespasian was responsible for initiating contact with Verity’s timeline, and that Lowbeer is trying to stave off the results of Vespasian’s interference by encouraging “an autonomous self-learning agent...then nudge it toward greater urgency.” The agent of course being Eunice. Vespasian was dispatched by Lowbeer but not described how.
Jackpot – a global catastrophe that resulted in an 80% reduction of human population caused by the combination several factors, eg global warming, extinctions, pandemics, nuclear winter.

NEAR-PRESENT 2017

Verity Jane – the book opens shortly after she’s signed a contract to evaluate an alpha build of  “a customized virtual avatar, serious AI.” She’s sometimes referred to as an “app-whisperer” (a silly phrase) 
Eunice – “the first fully autonomous AI.” Developed by a company called Cursion, which thru Tulpagenics hired Verity to evaluate it. The name Eunice is “the acronym for the product that produced her ... Untethered Noetic Irregular Support System. U-N-I-S-S” built on the “skill set” of Navy Chief Marlene Miller. Eunice disappears for most of the novel, after Cusion panicks and and erases her. However, Eunice anticipated this development and arranged to have her laminae [aka her “branch plants” or subselves] to spirit a copy of her out before her erasure. 
Gavin Eames – Verity’s boss, CTO of Tulpagenics, a startup company
Cursion – parent company of Tulpagenics, variously refered to as spooks and scam artists, and “a subspecies of a formerly fully deniable Department of Defense op.” 
Joe-Eddy – short for José Eduardo Alverez-Matta 21, Verity lives at his place
Stetson Howell aka “Stets” – a billionaire tech investment whiz and former boyfriend of Verity
Leon Fisher – Flynne's cousin now president of the USA
Connor – now works for Leon
Flynne – doesn’t make an appearance in the book but her peripheral does when used by Verity to visit future London. We are told that Flynne is now married with kids. 
Qamishli – a town in Turkey and nuclear war flashpoint
3.7 – a coffee shop
Wolven + Loaves – shop that serves breakfast including Egg McWolven, “a mutant savory muffin” 

Guide to The Peripheral by William Gibson

I first read this book in 2015, the year after it was published. The hardcover version clocks in at 485 pages. In 2022 it surfaced again on Amazon Prime as a mini-series, though the second season was cancelled due to a writers' strike, a disappointment as I thought the cast was great and there were parts that I found unforgettable -- the haptic band of brothers and their use of drones, and especially the eerie portrayal of a future London with tall buildings that are part ruin, part classical sculpture. So I picked up the book again this year, but had forgotten how reading Gibson can be like boarding a moving train. He speeds through chapters without fully explaining what's going on and backfills gaps later on. This streamlines the story but the scattered clues can be difficult to pick up. Many of the details, while interesting, are not germane to the plot. Add a few twists and stir in the mini-series, which does not hew closely to the book, and you'll be forgiven for feeling a bit dazed.

PLOT SYMMETRIES

The 124 chapters alternate between the future and the past, and between the POV of two main characters. The cast is large and there is much detail which, though entertaining, is unimportant to the plot. The overall effect is like a linear jigsaw puzzle. 

Far-reaching consequences set the story in motion in chapters 8 and 15. They involve murders in two locations (London and the Great Pacific Garbage Patch). They appear unrelated at first, but later we find out that two sisters are involved, Aelita and Daedra. One is a victim, the other a perpetrator, although we do not find this out until later. The murders are bizarre and could only happen in the future.

Featured in the other half of the story, which takes place in the near-present, is another pair of siblings, this time a brother and sister named Burton and Flynne. An imaginative version of time travel brings the present and future together, separated by something called the Jackpot, a combination of war, disease, drought, and climate change that decimated 80% of humanity. Those who survived (mainly the wealthy) were able to rebuild thanks to a surge in technology, but it's mostly an empty world. Androids and nanobots do the heavy lifting, everything from menial tasks to killing.

In the near-present people drive cardboard cars made in China, and make money in two principal ways -- online gaming and the drug trade. Flynne and Burton are good enough at the former to attract the attention of a wealthy dilettante named Lev who dabbles in the past as a hobby. In other words, he too is a kind of gamer.

Burton is offered big bucks to role-play what he thinks is a game, but at a critical moment Flynne has to take his place, and she witnesses a murder. This immediately attracts the attention of unknown rivals who send a hit-squad to take out Burton and Flynne in the present. Burton however is an ex-Marine who was part of Haptic Recon unit. At first, he and his ex-military buddies are more than a match for the people pitted against them, but the conflict between present and future quickly escalates.

VIRTUAL TIME TRAVEL

No time machine necessary. Instead a mysterious server in China ("something to do with quantum tunnelling") enables an exchange of data between the present and the future. The consciousness of a person from the present can be uploaded into an android, aka "a peripheral." Such a person is called a polt (not a poult -- though that might be more fun), and is able to interact with others in the future. Peripherals have no digestive tract, and must be infused with a nutrient every 12 hours. People in the future use them as casually as people use characters in online games, both in their own timeline as well as in the past.

As soon as a connection with the past is made, an alternate timeline (or "stub") is created. Thus Flynne's present does not lead directly to Lev's future. Yet that does not prevent two of the characters from existing in both Flynne's present (which is only a few years beyond today) and Lev's future (which is 70 years distant from hers). Flynne's is the first stub created by Lev. Others exist, but we are not told anything about them and their presence is not widely known. It is soon discovered that someone else from the future has made a connection with Flynne's stub, and a deadly race ensues between the two groups for control of the past with Flynne and her family caught in the middle. How people from the future operate in the present is not explained in any detail, except to say they use their phones.

Wilf, when asked if he's from the future, says, "I'm in the future that would result from my not being here. But since I am, it isn't your future."

CHARACTERS & GLOSSARY

[Shaded entrees = Future]

Aelita West - Sister of Daedra, and a murky American figure whose murder is witnessed by Flynne.

Annie Courrèges - A Neoprimitive curator.

Assemblers - Nanobots that build things.

Ash - One of Lev's "technicals" who along with Ossian helps manage his hobbies. She has moving tattoos, doubled (figure eight) pupils, and a hat that resembles a black leather toad.

Aunties - Algorithms.

Badger - A social media platform. (A sarcastic jab by the author?)

Boss Patcher - A peripheral operated by Hamed. Has keratotic skin, no neck, features of a bullfrog, two penises. Lives on a plastic island in the Pacific.

Bullpup - "An Army rifle that looked like it had been telescoped back into itself, squashed front to back."

Burton Fisher - An ex-Marine getting disability from VA due to problems caused by his haptics. Uses the avatar "Easy Ice" when playing online games, and has won many drone competitions. When warned that a contract has been put out on him, he replies that he's not "a particularly easy target."

Coffee Jones - A coffee chain that also serves freshly printed cronuts. Flynne once worked there.

Conner Penske - The only other HaptRec vet. Missing an arm, leg, a foot, and several digits. Drives a special trike that burns cooking oil. Kills a 4-man hit team sent from Memphis to take out Burton and Flynne. In London his peripheral is a martial arts instructor aka the dancing master.

Corbell Pickett - Richest man in the county, involved in the drug trade. Burton pays him hush money after Conner kills a hit squad from Memphis. Corbell has Flynne kidnapped after getting an offer to kill her. Flynne is rescued by Burton and Corbell's home blown up. Corbell flees the country.

Carter - The youngest of Burton's posse, helps monitor the drones around the Fisher home.

Danny - Runs Jimmy's, a bar & grill.

Duval - Part of Burton's posse, helps monitor the drones around the Fisher home.

Carlos - A volunteer EMT, part of Burton's posse.

Clovis Fearing - A very old friend of Lowbeer who owns a shop in London dealing exclusively in Americana. Resembles "some crumbling relict saint," and is familiar with continua enthusiasts who will "buy anything from the twenty thirties, twenty forties." They "try to get as far back from the Jackpot proper as they can. About 2028, latest." She is "also a former British spy, as was Lowbeer, who ran her out of the embassy in DC."

Clovis Raeburn - An American in Flynne's time. In the future she is Clovis Fearing.

Daedra West- A celebrity exhibitionist, herself "the product" in an art form that is part reality television, politics, and performance art. After each media event she has herself flensed and sells the skin to art collectors. She breaks her agreement with the backers of her latest project (visiting the Patchers) by appearing naked and tattooed. It's a deliberate provocation of the Patchers, who had eaten the last two envoys. According to Ash, Daedra "or one of her associates is our competitor in the stub."

Dominika - Lev's wife.

Edward - Part of Burton's posse, works at Forever Fab.

Ella Fisher - Ailing mother of Flynne & Burton.

Fabbitt - A 3D printing chain.

Flynne Fisher - Burton's sister. Would have signed up for the Armed Forces when he joined the Marines, but stayed at home to look after their mother. Makes money by online gaming, and is better at it than Burton. Shoots Hamed at the end of the book.

Fitz-David Wu - Best Shakespearian actor of his day.

Forever Fab - A 3D print shop owned by Shaylene.

Gobiwagen - A Mercedes land-yacht "commissioned for a tour of Mongolian deserts" by Lev's grandfather.

Gonzales (Felicia) - President of the US. Her assassination "was pivotal, a tipping point into the deep Jackpot." 

Great Pacific Garbage Patch - A floating island made of recovered plastic, inhabited by fewer than 100 Neoprimitives.

Griff (Gryffyd Holdsworth) - Lowbeer when she was much younger. Flynne mistakes her for a man when they meet in the present. 

Hamed al-Habibi - "Minor Gulf klept...a fifth son. Quickly the black sheep." He killed Aelite, the woman he was involved with.

HaptRec Recon 1 - A unit of Marines outfitted with haptics that enable them to coordinate their movements on the battlefield.

Hefty Mart - A large chain of stores suggestive of Costco or Wall-Mart with headquarters in Delhi.

Homes - Homeland Security.

Hong - Owns Sushi Barn.

Jackman - A sheriff in the pay of Corbell.

Jackpot - Civilization "dying of its own discontents," according to Lowbeer. Androgenic and multicausal "with no particular beginning and no end." See the Heinlein short story, "The Year of the Jackpot."

Janet - Friend of Flynne, makes socklike things for Conner.

Janice - Friend of Flynne, helps look after Ella, married to Madison.

Jimmy's - A bar & grill.

Klein Cruz Vermette - A law firm out of Miami working to keep Flynne and Burton safe.

Klept - Russian oligarchs.

Leon - Cousin of Burton and Flynne. An Army vet, he aids Burton by accepting a $10 million prize via a state lottery rigged by the future.

Lev Zubov - The youngest of a powerful Russian family in London, and a dilettante who is "a sort of scout for the family." Looks for things they might invest in as well as "sources of novelty." Flynne's is his first stub. When it's discovered that someone else is accessing it via the polt that Wilf gave to Daedra's sister, he takes steps to block their efforts. Has two older brothers, Anton and Pavel, and two pet "thylacine analogs" named Gordon and Tyrenna. Lowbeer thinks he will pervert the economy of Flynne's world.

Lithonia - Friend of Flynne, spells Janice in looking after Ella.

Lorenzo - Rainey's cameraperson, he records Daedra's meeting with the Patchers.

Lowbeer - Detective Inspector Ainsley Lowbeer of the Metropolitan Police in London and a former spy with global intelligence feeds. Called in by Lev after he heard Flynne's story about the murder. Has broad shoulders, white hair, and wears clothes "as ambiguous as she was." A former spy. See Griff.

Luke 4:5 - A religious group "as much a business as a cult." Hated by Burton.

Macon - Gay friend of Burton and Flynne, good at math, excels at 3D fabbing.

Madison - Playing vintage sims like Sukhoi Flankers, a main money earner for him and Janice.

Maenads' Crush - a bar.

Matryoshka - Name given to those opposing Flynne and Burton. "Out of Nassau, so that's probably where they first came through from the future." Racing Milagros Coldiron for ownership of the world in the past.

Medici - A healing device, in appearance "something like a cross between a bull's balls and a jellyfish.".

Michikoids - Aka koids, AI-operated androids able to move like spiders when the need arises, and grow extra sets of spider eyes.

Milagros Coldiron - A shell company in Colombia set up by Lev to facilitate operations in the present.

Mobi - A blimp.

Neoprimitives - People who "either survived the Jackpot on their own or have opted out of the global system." Some embrace "heritage diseases" like the common cold.

Operation Northwind - A game played by Flynne before being contacted by the future.

Ossian Murphy - Aka the Irishman, named after a fictional Gaelic poet. He and Ash sometimes communicate with each other in a synthetic language that sounds like birdsong. They work for Lev and mind his hobbies for him. He wears a pigtail and sometimes acts as a butler.

Party Time - A chemical that turns people into homicidal sex maniacs.

Patchers - A small group of Neoprimitives who cleaned plastic from the Great Pacific Garbage Patch and used it to assemble a huge floating island. They are into grotesque body modifications. They ate the last two envoys.

Pharma Jon - A pharmacy chain.

Polt - Short for poltergeist. A person operating a peripheral.

Rainey - Lives in Toronto and works for the Canadian government. She hired Wilf for Daedra's project, and afterwards tells him that they had been used to facilitate the deaths, which were an assassination, a hit.

Remembrancer - Sir Henry Fishbourne. A crooked official of the City who collaborated with Hamed. Appears only at the end of the book and is killed by Burton.

Reece - An Army vet and part of Burton's posse, forced by Pickett to kidnap Flynne.

Shaylene - Friend of Flynne, owns Forever Fab where Flynne sometimes works. She went out with Burton in high school.

Squidsuit - A camouflage suit like "cluttlefish camo, like Burton and Conner used in the war."

Tarantula - Conner's trike.

Tommy Constantine - Deputy sheriff, an honest cop.

Tacoma Raeburn- Red-haired sister of Clovis Raeburn, also a notary and a CPA who works for Griff and for Klein Cruz Vermette. Claims she's better than Clovis with a gun. 

Vespasian - A continua enthusiast from Berlin and "a weapons fetishist, famously sadistic."

Viz - An eyepiece that provides views feeds from other sources. 

Wheelie Boy - A ball with a tractor tire on each side and a mini-tablet on a stick. Used by Wilf when he visits the present, as no peripherals are available there.

Wilf - A friend of Lev, with whom he went to school, now a glib publicist with a drinking problem. Worked briefly for Daedra, and with whom he'd had an affair. He tried to impress her by mentioning Lev's stub and offering the use of a polt (Burton), but she wasn't interested. At her suggestion the polt was given to her sister. He was fired after the fiasco at the Garbage Patch in chapter 8.

SUMMING UP

Rainey told Wilf they'd been used by someone to kill the Boss Patcher and his his entourage. That someone could only have been Daedra, with whom Wilf had had a brief affair. Daedra didn't want the polt that Wilf offered her, and suggested that it be give to Aelita. Presumably she was the one who contacted Burton to provide security, mainly to keep paparazzi drones away from a reception she was holding. Flynne took Burton's place and witnessed Aelita being killed by Hamed, who had learned about the stub from Aelita, as they had been together for quite a while. Immediately after Aelita was killed, Ash tells Lev that someone has been accessing their stub: "seems as though it has something to do with your polt." When Hamed learned there was a witness to the murder, he went after Flynne and Burton.

On page 354 Ash comments that "it's almost certain that Daedra, or one of her associates, is our competitor in the stub." Presumably one of the associates is the City Remembrancer (Sir Hentry Fishbourne), who was involved in the monetization of an island "that he created," (p. 458), presumably the one inhabited by the Patchers who, according to Hamed, have "endemic health issues...of which they aren't yet aware." On page 471 Lowbeer speculates that the Remembrancer "might have suffered some well-concealed setback in his affairs: a real estate and development scheme, with resource extraction?" This suggests the media stunt that Daedra orchestrated sank whatever financial aspirations the Remembrancer had for the island. As soon as he is killed, Lowbeer says to Flynne and Burton, "Sir Henry's death has deprived your competitor of the sort of advantage that Lev and I afford you now."

In the end Hamed gets away with murder, as "he's too well-connected to be bothered by any of this" (p. 474). Daedra is tormented by Conner for a while but isn't harmed, so she too gets away with murder, for she had obviously set up the confrontation with Hamed, who was pretending to be the Boss Patcher. (He wasn't killed but some of his followers were.) Daedra "was covered with a hypersonic weapons-delivery system...something orbital, ready to drop in" (p.32).

The final two chapters are saccharine, probably because Gibson figured we'd had enough nastiness with the revelations about Hamed, Daedra, and the Remembrancer, and with the worst of the Jackpot still to come (but then again, maybe not in this stub). 

UPLOAD 

William Gibson makes a very brief appearance in this humorous series on Amazon, in which people can be uploaded to a virtual afterlife. In Season 3, Episode 5, he appears as a hologram in a San Francisco library and offers a few words about "AI-generated characters."

Google & The Space Merchants

 

Recently I reread a science fiction novel published in 1953. It satirizes the advertising industry by imagining such grotesqueries as the marketing of cigarettes for children (Kiddiebut) and a coffee product (Coffiest) adulterated with a habit-forming alkaloid.

It was first serialized in a pulp magazine under the title Gravy Planet. One of the co-authors, Frederik Pohl, described in a memoir (The Way the Future Was) the difficulty of getting it published in book form. He was told by a friend and editor:

"Fred, look. I don't know how to tell you this, but it's no good. There are a couple of good ideas, sure. But you don't know how to handle them. What you need is some good professional writer to pull the whole thing together."

Eventually the book found a publisher and is now considered a classic. It's still in print, and according to Pohl has been published in 25 languages. Due to the clunky plot, however, I tend to agree with Pohl's friend, but there is one bit that has stayed with me ever since I first read it, the part where an advertising executive refers to "safety cranks" stopping them from projecting "messages on aircar windows," and mentions "a system that projects direct on the retina of the eye."

I was thinking about this as I read Steven Levy's book about Google. We don't have aircars yet, but will Google be able to resist projecting their search engine results onto the windows of their driverless vehicles? And as far as directing them onto a person's retina, is that not what Google Glass does?

In the Plex

The book was published in 2011 (before the development of the two products mentioned above), and the title comes from the name of Google's headquarters, Googleplex, in Mountain View, California. I'll skip over the development of the search engine and the incredible wealth it's generated by monetizing searches, other than to give a quote that provides historical perspective:

Though the Internet was different from other media, most Internet companies were still selling ads the way Madison Avenue had always done it. Google saw the entire exchange differently. Advertising in Google was less comparable to television or print than it was to computer dating.

An interesting part of Google's success is its vertical integration. It is the world's largest manufacturer of computers and owns "more fibre than anyone else on the planet." Google's hunger for data is due to the constant need to feed its search engine and provide expanding markets to its advertisers. The ultimate goal is "organizing all the information in the world."

Parts that I found especially interesting:

• the setting up data centres in Brussels and Oregon
• the development of Gmail, Chrome, and Android
• the gobbling up of other companies including Blogger, Picasa, and Youtube ("after Google itself...the most popular search engine in the world")
• clashes with Apple and Microsoft
• the competitive threat posed by Facebook
• an entire chapter on Google's failed expansion into China
• the fiasco resulting from Google's attempt to digitize every book in existence

Privacy

Google faced privacy concerns over its storing of searches and emails belonging to people with Gmail accounts. Even more alarming was its acquisition of DoubleClick, an ad network that "radically broadened the scope of the information Google collected about everyone's browsing activity."

Using DoubleClick in conjunction with its own search engine gave Google "an omniscient cookie" that "provided a potentially voluminous amount of information about its users and their interests, virtually all of it compiled by stealth."

There is much to admire in a firm whose unofficial motto is "Don't Be Evil," and in the unconventional business practices of co-founders Larry Page and Sergey Brin. (For example, doors set on sawhorses serve as desks.) Yet it could also be argued that Google has more than a passing resemblance to the advertising agencies in The Space Merchants.

Sometimes I get the feeling that Google is stalking me, which is why I've stopped using it.

Heinlein & Norton

Craving some light summer reading, I opted for a couple of books by Robert Heinlein and Andre Norton. I have very fond memories of their YA titles, which I devoured as a kid. 

These two are among their earliest, Red Planet being published in 1949 and Star Man's Son 2250 AD in 1952.

In both books two young men clash with authorities and undertake a perilous journey to escape pursuit. There are alien creatures in each book, as well as a bond between one of the young men and a non-human character.

  Red Planet                      Star Man's Son

The hardcover editions had illustrations that made the books extra special for me. Those in Red Planet were done by Clifford Geary, in Star Man's Son by Nicolas Mordvinoff. In each there was one that made such an impression that it became inseparable from my enjoyment of the book.

To my knowledge, the above illustration from Red Planet is one of the very few that made it into the paperback editions, but with a little searching you can find most of the others on the web. (I have taken some liberties by cropping the Mordvinoff drawing, as it was originally done as a two-page spread.)

Red Planet

Red Planet takes place on a Mars with canals, indigenous flora and fauna, and three-legged Martians who live in ancient cities. Humans inhabit several bubble settlements and work for a company engaged in an atmosphere project. The canals ice over in winter and provide an escape route for the two boys when they put on skates to flee. One of them has a Martian “roundhead” or “bouncer” as a sort of pet.

When outdoors, people must wear respirators, one of which is portrayed in the Clifford Geary illustration and used as a frontispiece in my Ace paperback edition. The zebra stripes are personal decoration.

After finishing the book, I made a surprising discovery. The version I read had been so mangled by an editor that Heinlein considered removing his name from it. Not until 1992 was a restored edition published by Del Rey.

In Imagining Mars, Robert Crossley devotes a few pages to Red Planet, saying, “Heinlein insists that Red Plant be read as an allegory, with Earth as the exemplification of Law and Mars of Freedom.”

Heinlein re-used some of the ideas he developed in Red Planet for his later best-seller, Stranger in a Strange Land. Though I have enjoyed a few of his adult books, my favourites are all YA titles, especially The Rolling Stones, Tunnel in the Sky, Citizen of the Galaxy, and Have Space Suit Will Travel.

Daybreak 2250 AD

Star Man's Son (reissued in paperback as Daybreak) takes place on Earth after the “Big Blowup” has caused mutations in people and animals, and rendered some areas uninhabitable due to radiation.

Fors has white hair which plainly marks him as a mutant and turns him into an outcast. But he also has superior hearing and night vision, and a non-verbal form of communication with a mountain lion – a vague sort of telepathy – that enables them to work as a team when hunting or battling foes.

Leaving his mountain home, he arrives on the plains and rescues a stranger named Arskane. They are put to flight by rat-like “Beast Things,” which were once confined to abandoned cities but are now venturing into the countryside.

To meet this threat Fors helps unite three suspicious groups of people, and it is here that Daybreak, like Red Planet, offers a moral. The groups are mountain-dwelling knowledge-seekers (Whites), plains people on horseback (native Americans) and drum-beating newcomers (Blacks) who have been displaced by a natural disaster. It's a well-intentioned but somewhat clumsy device.

Donald Wollheim, an influential editor at Ace Books, estimated that by 1971 a million copies of Daybreak had been sold.

As with Heinlein, my other favourite Nortons all came early in her SF period: Star Born, Galactic Derelict, The Last Planet, and Star Guard.

Mortal Engines

A robot-themed collection (hence the title) selected by the translator, Michael Kandel, who in the intro divides Lem's work into three categories:

  comic-satirical fantasy
  realistic SF
  philosophy

About half the stories in this volume come from the Polish collection, Fables for Robots, which fall into the first category. They are light and silly reading, with titles like:

“Three Electroknights”
“How Erg the Self-Inducing Slew a Paleface”
“Tale of the Computer that Fought a Dragon”

They're sprinkled with whimsical terms: thinking powder, a knot in space, an ultradragon, an antimatter blunderbuss, a supernova extinguisher.

Characters plug their heads together to wrestle with a problem, and make remarks such as, “Something feels wrong inside, I must have blown a tube.”

The stories are very similar to those in The Cyberiad, though without (at least not in this edition) any of Daniel Mroz's delightful illustrations.

Consciousness Is Suffering

In the intro Kandel refers to his editorial strategy as being “a general progression from light to dark, from comic to tragic, from robot to human.”

This progression begins with the final three stories in the group mentioned above. They are more a little more weighty than the rest:

 "Automatthew's Friend”
  King Globares and the Sages”
 "The Tale of King Gnuff”

The next two stories, “The Sanatorium of Doctor Vliperdius” and “The Hunt” reunite us with two of Lem's favourite characters, Ijon Tichy and Pirx. “The Hunt” is a refreshing change of pace, as it not only falls into the category of realistic SF, but also features Pirx's distinctive voice. (It also appears in More Tales of Pirx the Pilot.)

The final story, “The Mask,” is the longest at nearly 50 pages, and together with “The Hunt” takes up more than a third of the book. Elements in it reminded me of Zelazny and Kafka, Alien and Terminator. I found it rather heavy going despite some fine turns of phrase. The ending is ambiguous, unsettling, and therefore typically Lem.

It is the most clearcut example of Kandel's remark that Lem is similar to Dostoevsky in the belief that “consciousness is suffering.”

Ijon Tichy

The Star Diaries (321 pages)

Ijon Tichy is the hero of this collection of absurd, fantastic, playful, and satirical tales. Many are as cartoonish as the Jetsons or anything on Saturday morning TV. Indeed, one of Tichy's forbears has his head flattened by a steam roller.

Tichy flies about in a jalopy of a rocketship. It has a rudder, and needs new brakes and a paint job. He cooks his meals on the atomic pile, and when he passes too close to a star he climbs into the refrigerator to cool off. When he runs out of fuel he dives his ship into a volcano, causing an eruption which propels him back into space. Someone goes by riding on a meteor.

Some of the supporting cast are robot friars, feral furniture, intelligent potatoes, edible space ships, dogs in spacesuits, and "interstellar vagabonds known as Gypsonians" who hire themselves out for the cleaning of moons, and whose children throw stones at comets.

Time Travel

Voyage 7 – The ship becomes packed with so many versions of Tichy they have to form committees in order to make decisions.

Voyage 12 – He uses a time machine to speed up evolution on a primitive planet, but breaks off a knob and sets it in reverse, causing him to revert to a baby.

Voyage 20 - He is recruited by his future self to head up a project to improve history with disastrous results. Mars is burnt to a crisp.

Strange Societies

Voyage 13 – A political allegory about a repressive regime that convinces people they are fish, and another where everyone wears an identical mask and individualism is forbidden. People are interchangeable right down to the family level, with mothers, fathers, and children trading places every day.

Voyage 23 – The planet of the Whds is so crowded its people reduce themselves to their constituent atoms to order to get some sleep at night, and to travel by mailing themselves in a cassette. "Look out, you’re spilling my daddy," Tichy is warned by a youngster. When he tries the process, there is an error of some sort and he is reconstituted as Napoleon.

Memoirs of a Space Traveller
Further Reminiscences of Ijon Tichy (153 pages)

The rather convoluted publishing history of these stories is mentioned in a note at the end of Star Diaries, which appeared in English in two volumes, the second being this one, Memoirs of a Space Traveller. It contains two further voyages as well as several stories of the mad scientist variety.

Voyage 18 - Tichy creates the universe using a chronocannon. Two of the members of his team are Lou Cipher and Eve Addams. The universe, a scientist declares, "is an illegal loan of matter and energy." It is a "Debtor to Nothingness."

Voyage 24 – A planet runs into a multitude of civic problems when machines put people out of work. A Governing Machine is created to restore harmony, which it does by transforming people into "solid beautiful durable forms" and arranging them into "pleasing symmetrical designs."

Mad Scientists

Denser and more serious in tone, these stories are rather like thought experiments about the nature of perception and reality. Tichy visits a number of scientists whose misshapen appearance is representative of their unbalanced attempts at playing god. One creates a synthetic soul, another electronic brains in boxes ("Leibnizian monads") unaware of the true nature of their existence. A third has secretly been replaced by his own clone, and a fourth creates a fungoid creature that begins experimenting on the scientist.

The Washing Machine Tragedy

This story appeared in The New Yorker and describes the development of advanced washing machines. They mend and iron clothes, then progress to doing the children’s homework, interpreting dreams, singing lullabies, eventually becoming less capable of performing their original duties. Some are weaponized and associate with criminal elements. Others end up on the streets panhandling. Illegal parts factories spring up, and self-defence courses teach people how to defend themselves using a canopener or a pair of pliers.

Let Us Save the Universe
Ijon Tichy decries the ill-effects of cosmic tourism -- billboards and space garbage, graffiti on asteroids, comets without tails. Women exceed the speed limit because they will age slower. The impact on fauna in a Preserve is particularly harmful, and the story morphs into an illustrated bestiary of weird creatures whose lives have been disrupted by human contact. One is a bird called the sribblemock:

...the counterpart of the terrestrial parrot, except that it writes instead of talks. Often, alas, it writes on fences the obscenities it picks up from tourists from Earth. Some people deliberately infuriate this bird by taunting it with spelling errors.

The Futurological Congress (142 pages)

According to the translator's note at the end of Star Diaries, this novella was also part of that original collection.

It takes place on Earth and begins in Costa Rica where Tichy is attending a futurological congress. There is much unrest, which is combated by the use of a calming drug in the water of the hotel where he is staying, and which results in a hallucinatory experience involving giant rats.

When he comes to his senses he finds that he has been cryogenically preserved and resuscitated in the future where society has solved its problems chemically. It is a pharmocracy in which people vote on the weather and eat books instead of reading them. Poets use sonnetol and "children learn their reading and writing from orthographic sodas." Tichy is told, "We keep this civilization narcotized, for otherwise it could not endure itself."

Ijon Tichy appears in at least one other book: Peace on Earth.

Links

Tichy's adventures became the subject of a German TV series loosely based on Star Diaries. If you go to Youtube and do a search for Ijon Tichy, you'll find a few episodes with English subtitles. His rocket ship is a coffee press.

Lem's Official Site
Ijon Tichy Raumpilot