Near-Future Fiction and The Social 'Uncanny Valley'

Recent years have seen more and more SF authors jumping the fence and venturing into more contemporary territory in order to confront more contemporary themes.  One example of this trend is Richard K. Morgan’s Black Man (2007), which looked at the role of masculinity in contemporary culture and the political estrangement of red and blue-state America.  Another example is Charles Stross’ Halting State (2007), a story that begins with MMORPGS and ends with largely off-screen electronic warfare between China and the European Union.  In 2007 Ken MacLeod also waded into these waters with The Execution Channel, an examination of the social and political costs paid for an ever-escalating war on terror.  My problem with all of these books is that they are nowhere near as smart as they need to be.


It is often said that the best science fiction is that which speaks to the present day, but aside from being a means of talking obliquely about the future, SF can also be used as the basis for sociological thought experiments.  For example, Ursula K. Le Guin’s The Left Hand of Darkness (1969), Margaret Atwood’s The Handmaid’s Tale (1985), Joanna Russ’s The Female Man (1975) and Philip Wylie’s The Disappearance (1951) all use SF as a means of talking about the nature of gender roles and the relationship between the sexes.  Similarly, Roberts’ Pavane (1968) explores the links between Protestantism and capitalism while Haldeman’s The Forever War (1974) considers the experience of returning home from war during a time of rapid social change to find your world utterly different to the way you left it.  All of these works consider social phenomena through the exploration of other times, places  and planets.


By shifting social and political commentary from the merely fictitious to the metaphorical and speculative, SF authors have given themselves sufficient distance from their subject matter to allow them to make their points without getting bogged down in detail.  For example, speculating about non-rigid sexes allowed Le Guin to talk about gender and  speculation about time dilation allowed Haldeman to talk about returning from war in ways that simply would not have been possible had they been tied to the real world.  The differences between direct and more oblique and metaphorical fictional engagement with our world can be explained by the existence of a kind of social ‘Uncanny Valley’.

If someone writes about a world that is alien to their readers then they can twist the facts to suit their purposes at will because our sense of verisimilitude is far less well attuned to fictional worlds than it is to the real world.  Because we live in the real world, we instantly sense when someone is doing something unrealistic or wrong, but in fictitious worlds verisimilitude only ever comes into play when the author transgresses their own rules.  For example, it is not unreasonable to claim that the events in the TV series 24 are completely unrealistic but to moan that Russ’ The Female Man is unrealistic because the sexes from Jael’s world would never go to war is somehow to miss the point of reading SF.


In effect, there is a trade-off.  If a writer engages obliquely with our world then they sacrifice impact for a greater leeway in getting their point across.  In practice, this means that they can set up a fictional world to perfectly illustrate their theories about our world without anyone thinking that this is somehow unfair.  However, if they attempt the same kind of manipulation in their characterisation of our world then people tend to be far more prone to calling the work ‘unrealistic’ or ‘simplistic’ as in the cases of the works of Tom Clancy or Ayn Rand as well as, according to me, the fifth series of The Wire.


As well as raising the bar on verisimilitude, the Social Uncanny Valley also raises the bar on the level of discourse.  When authors write about a fictional world of their own creation, they have an editorial monopoly.  They are not only the first reporter on the scene, they are the sole essayist and social commentator for that entire world.  They do not need to be aware of other forms of thinking about their world as there are none and they do not need to take into account what else has been said about their world because nothing else has been said.  In fact, even if authors do write about our world through their worlds, they still get credit because they are the first people to do so.  However, when authors decide to engage directly with our world by writing about our cultures and institutions, they cease to be the sole essayist.  Instead, writers are competing with not only the political beliefs of their readers but also the output of newspaper reporters, columnists, essayist for The New Yorker or Foreign Affairs and academics of all stripes. 


The two aspects of the Social Uncanny Valley combine to make it very difficult to write good near-future SF.  This is why the ideas expressed in Halting State, Black Man and The Execution Channel feel anaemic to me... the comments made in those books do not compare favourably with other books, papers and news reports on the same topics.  For example, when Charlie Stross speculates about Europe and China becoming the world’s only super-powers,  the lack of depth and analysis of the idea makes it feel less like an interesting piece in The New Yorker and more like something someone might say during a decidedly middle-brow dinner party.  Similarly, Morgan’s Black Man struggles to move beyond the political insight conveyed by the cartoon that inspired the book in the first place.  Unfortunately, Ken MacLeod’s new novel The Night Sessions falls fowl of the same uncanny valley effect as what would be neat ideas in an SF setting come across as simplistic and naïve when applied to near-future Scotland.

The Night Sessions is set in 2037 in the aftermath of a low-intensity nuclear battle that was the decisive engagement of  a continuation of America’s war on terror named ‘The Faith Wars’.  Aside from the destruction of Islamism and the bankrupting of the Western powers,  the Faith Wars also made people turn their backs on religion as a reaction against the role that religious interest groups had played in pushing America and her allies to war.  Against this backdrop, the book tells the story of a Scottish detective who has to unravel a global conspiracy by Christian hard-line elements to commit a series of terrorist atrocities which reach their climax with an attempt to destroy one of Earth’s two space elevators.

As a crime story, The Night Sessions is irredeemably competent.  Aside from a flashback at the beginning, it is told in an entirely linear manner with the detective pottering about sedately for two thirds of the book seemingly nowhere near finding out what’s going on until suddenly everything goes mad and the book is full of explosions, battling robots and senior policemen striding about the place barking orders at subordinates.  The problem is that despite supposedly being about preventing a gigantic terrorist atrocity, the book is completely lacking in tension or urgency.  When you think of someone ‘preventing a terrorist atrocity’ your mind tends to go to the likes of Bruce Willis running around in a vest, but in terms of pacing and tone, The Night Sessions is more like one of those early evening regional crime dramas that old people tend to enjoy like Hetty Wainthropp Investigates or Rosemary and Thyme. It’s a very pleasant read and it passes the time quite pleasantly but even an episode of The Bill conjures up more excitement and plot twists than The Night Sessions.


In and of itself, pedestrian plotting is not that problematic.  Many authors use a straight-forward plot as a springboard for greater focus upon characterisation and other ideas.  Indeed, Scotland has a fine tradition of crime writers such as Ian Rankin and William McIlvanney who have used their stories as a way of examining Scottish society.  Given that The Night Sessions is supposed to be about the effects of Western society turning it’s back upon religion, you would think that the book’s crime elements would allow MacLeod to focus in depth upon the realities of his future Scotland.  But rather than detailed social analysis or  evocative characterisation, we are left with half-formed and disjointed ideas that are simply not as insightful or as detailed as they need to be to support this kind of novel.


For example, the book asserts that by turning its back on religion, Western society simply stored up trouble for itself by encouraging religious people to turn to terrorism to get their point across.  This view clearly stems from the Leftist, anti-colonial view that the emergence of Islamic terrorism stems from the failure of globalisation to benefit the poor in Muslim countries as well as the West’s support for frequently brutal secular regimes such as that of Nasser in Egypt and Saddam Hussein in Iraq.  This is an intriguing hypothesis in and of itself and it is certainly the kind of idea that could form the basis for an interesting book or film about terrorism (even if it does effectively rob Muslims of any kind of political agency).  However, when this idea is transposed into MacLeod’s future Scotland, the subtleties of the view are glossed over.  Not only does MacLeod not explore the anti-colonialist ideas in any depth, he does not even explain how they might apply to his future Scotland as rather than focusing on one culture and setting, the book flits about between Christian groups in Scotland and New Zealand. The result is a trip down the Social Uncanny Valley as mostly middle class Western Christians who suffered some repression initially but who can still vote and worship in private resort to terrorism far more quickly than Muslims who endured much much harsher conditions for much longer periods of time before turning to violence.  As a study of the roots of terrorism, this is utterly lacking in any kind of detail, let alone sustained analysis and as a result it comes across as slipshod and naïve.


This problem continues with MacLeod’s society’s turn away from religion.  MacLeod suggests that following a disastrous nuclear confrontation between the forces of Islam and Israel and her Western allies, the whole world turns its back on religion.  This is simply unbelievable. If you consider the history of France, you will see that despite the French Revolution prompting the French state to turn its back on organised religion, Catholicism remained a power in French politics right up until the Second World War (where the links between the Catholic Right and the Vichy government effectively killed Catholicism as a tangible political force).  This process of slow and gradual secularisation can also be seen in American politics where religion remains a tangible force to this day.  MacLeod does not explain why his world turned away from religion, nor does he bother to explain the links between the war on terror and the American Right’s creepily apocalyptic support for Israel, which he suggests was at the root of why an out of control war lead to mass secularisation.


MacLeod has characterised The Night Sessions as :

“a crime novel set in 2037. It’s also an SF novel that asks the question: what if we finally got fed up with the influence of religion on politics, education, and law, and decided to drive it out of these areas for good?”

If the book is meant to answer that particular question then it is undeniably a failure. There is a howling void at the centre of The Night Sessions where the speculation should be.  Far from providing a satisfying answer to the question of what a secular future might look like, the book feels sophomoric and lightweight as the complex and fascinating issues that it should be engaging with are glossed over and ignored time and again.  As with The Execution Channel, The Night Sessions is the victim of a social ‘Uncanny Valley’ that demands far more of speculation about our world than it does of speculation about fictitious ones.  However, The Night Sessions’s lack of depth is not limited to social and cultural matters as even when it deals with genre tropes, it feels depressingly lightweight.

The book’s main SFnal element is the inclusion of robots.  The product of military as well as commercial research, AIs emerged prior to the last battle of the Faith Wars.  However, some of these AIs have become self-aware, leading to them being expelled from the army and having to find work in the human world.  The Night Sessions’ inclusion of AIs, robots and mecha is reminiscent of Mamoru Oshii’s classic anime Ghost in the Shell (1995) as well as its spin-off series Ghost in the Shell: Stand Alone Complex. 

The second series (or 2nd Gig) of Ghost in the Shell: Stand Alone Complex features an episode that deals with a war veteran who, lacking the money to buy decent cybernetic implants is forced to work as a driver as he is slowly driven mad by his memories and his alienation from the rest of society.  The Night Sessions features a similar character named the Lieutenant who, upon returning from war has himself altered to look like a werewolf, whereupon he disappears and lives on the streets.  While GITS-SAC sympathetically explores the alienation felt by its veteran by tapping into some of the same ideas as Martin Scorsese’s Taxi Driver, The Night Sessions’s Lieutenant is simply there to be info-dumped about by a robot who explains that he went a bit funny after the war.  Similarly, the first series of GITS-SAC features robots becoming self-aware and pondering the nature of their existence and considering whether they can actually die given that they might not technically ‘be alive’.  The Night Sessions also considers this idea as one of the terrorists is a robot moved by his religious faith but while GITS-SAC is touching and humanistic and deeply philosophical, The Night Sessions just states that there’s a religious robot and then refuses to explore any of the psychology.

By failing to engage with de-militarised AI and terrorism on a psychological basis, or shed any light on some of the social forces that might lead some groups towards secularism and others towards religious terrorism, The Night Sessions comes across as hopelessly empty, like an outline instead of an actual novel.  From an author as politically switched on as Ken MacLeod this is a real disappointment.

Comments

[Nick]

> mostly middle class Western Christians who suffered some repression initially but who can still vote and worship in private resort to terrorism far more quickly than Muslims who endured much much harsher conditions for much longer periods of time before turning to violence

Depends what you mean by Islamic terrorism, surely? Al-Qaeda is a very middle class organisation, composed chiefly of recruits from Western or else Muslim countries where they weren't exactly being persecuted for their religious views. Organisations like Hamas or Hezbollah might well be Islamic organisations, but their main focus is resisting what they perceive to be an occupying force - a nationalist rather than religious end.

[Jonathan M]

This is a complex issue, which is why I got annoyed with the book.

I don't agree that al Qaeda is a very middle class organisation. The vanguard of radical Islam is undeniably and robustly middle class and has been right back to the days of Nasser. But they also enjoy a broad coalition of cross-class support. You also have to factor into the roots of radical Islam the treatment of the early Islamists by the secular regimes in the Arab world.

Conversely, Hamas and Hezbollah are not in the least bit middle class. To characterise them as nationalistic organisations also strikes me as somewhat simplistic. Yes they have temporal concerns but then so do al Qaeda while the occupation of Palestine plays a much larger role in the world view of radical islam than a purely political issue of the Irsraelis occupying their land.

The problem is that all of this steps beyond the anti-colonialist logic of the book. MacLeod suggests that if you freeze religious institutions out of the political process then members of those institutions will turn to terrorism.

The basic anti-colonialist logic of poor + disenfranchised = terrorism is pretty simplistic in and of itself but the book simplifies this even further.

[Nick]

I haven't read the book, and I'm vastly oversimplifying of course, however I'm uncomfortable with the characterisation of Islamic terrorism as being monolithic, and with certain groups being lumped uncritically into that category. Nor do I think it's an entirely unrealistic idea that middle class Christians would turn to terrorism when faced with a degree of repression. In fact, I'd say the shift is more likely to occur in a group that was formerly influential and very recently disenfranchised than it would be in a people who've been fucked for generations.

[Jonathan M]

I'm not wedded to any particular model. I'm not even all that interested in whether or not the events in The Night Sessions are all that plausible (I don't think they are but YMMV), but I do think that in order to comment upon these kinds of matters you need a certain level of engagement with the different ideas.

Your views have to attain a certain level of sophistication and I think that that level increases with worlds that are more familiar to us.

My problem with the Night Sessions is that there is no complexity here and minimal engagement. Ken MacLeod might well be absolutely spot on in his understanding of the nature of terrorism, but if you can't convey that engagement through the text then you really should not be commenting on these kinds of matters directly.

[Evan]

Looking at it from a technical perspective, I wonder if a lot of the issues that you're talking about are caused by the overly close focus on the main police detective in the scotland branch of the story. I read the book a couple of weeks ago, but I seem to recall that he was the viewpoint character for the best part of the book, and as he isn't particularly well drawn and has a problematic relationship with religion, he may not have been the best one to illuminate the complexities of the situation without either major rewriting or endless info-dumps.

It strikes me, though, that near-future SF has never been particularly well done or popular. Your theory is a good articulation of why, I think. Perhaps there just isn't the room to balance the three elements that you need.

That said, it could very easily be argued that it was the spaceworker robots all along leading the religionists along the garden path to terrorism to achieve their own ends. It's more plausible an explanation than disenfranchisement, but it isn't clear enough that that's the case to say.

[Nick]

Yes, as I said I haven't read Night Sessions, but I'd say your broader point applies to Halting State and Black Man, which I have. Praying you're wrong about season 5 of the Wire, mind.

[Jonathan M]

Hi Evan :-)

Actually, that was the line of attack that I wound up not using in the review as while I've read a bit of crime fiction and am reading more at the moment, I wasn't as sure about it technically.

Essentially, a lot of crime fiction comments upon the world outside the characters by having very deep characterisation that involves the characters being deeply invested in the world around them. That way, you can focus on the small scale and still be commenting upon the large scale. It's a technique I think Gibson used in Neuromancer but pointedly didn't use in Spook Country.

By contrast, Ferguson is a very two-dimensional character. He feels regret about what he did during the times of repression but there's never any detail about what exactly went on. I mean, are we just talking stopping people from going to church? harassing the religious or people being disappeared because of their faith? the book's a bit nebulous on this and so it didn't feel real to me... regret is based upon specific actions, not "oh I was part of wide-scale harassment and oppression".

I think you're right that, had MacLeod focused more closely upon the main characters and invested them more in the world then he would have had room to explore the way in which the religious were oppressed, the reasons for people turning their back upon religion AND (via skulk) the mindset of the robotic AIs and a) how they felt about being demilitarised (an issue touched upon) and b) what their wider views were on the nature of the universe.

It's easy to lambast a book for weak characterisation but I think the characterisation here is evidence of a failure to come to grips with one of the most basic techniques of good crime fiction.

The best example of this is Massimo Carlotto's The Goodbye Kiss. It's a book that focuses incredibly closely on the main protagonist (it's a first-person narrative) but the story is told in such a way that because of what the character does and who he does it to, we get a great idea of the book's real target: The nature of Italian society and the fact that it's willing to let a complete sociopath get to the top as long as he lets people on his coat-tails and he looks nice in a suit.

[Niall]

Similarly, Morgan’s Black Man struggles to move beyond the political insight conveyed by the cartoon that inspired the book in the first place.

I don't think I've seen this cartoon -- where/what is it?

[Jonathan M]

Hi Niall :-)

This one :

http://homepage.univie.ac.at/horst.prillinger/blog/p3/jesusland.jpg

[Niall]

Ah, right! Thanks. I hadn't mentally filed that as a cartoon. I can sort of see your point, but (not surprisingly, I imagine ...) I think there's a lot more to Black Man than just that landscape.

[Jonathan M]

Hi Niall,

I agree that there's more to it and I think that Black Man is probably the best of these Near-future books as a result but I still think that there was room for the book to say more.

For example, the theme of masculine traits and the social construction of what is considered an appropriate set of characteristics could have been linked up much more effectively and a lot more could have been said about it.

[Nasser Marghalani]

with all due respect, but I am Nasser Marghalani and I am not the president of Egypt... Jamal Abdul Nasser was the one.
don't rely on Wikipedia Mr. SF diplomat....

Peace.

[Jonathan M]

My sincere (if amused) apologies. I shall modify the piece.

[Nader]

I've read MacLeod and Stross, but haven't got to those books yet.

I certainly think there's something to this "social uncanny valley" idea-as well as the fact that we are seeing those authors writing in this space now.