9. CIRCUIT JUDGEMENT
10. TESTED ON ANIMALS
11. DOWN TIME
12. NEAR DEATH EXPERIENCE
13. THE COURT OF THE FIFTH QUARTER
14. COMBAT FUTURES
15. ANOTHER CRACK AT IMMANENTIZING THE ESCHATON
16. THE WINTER CITIZEN
The Floodgates of Anarchy
17. ANDROID SPIRITUAL
18. THE MALLEY MILE
19. THE SIEVE PLATES
20. THE STONE CANAL
21. VAST AND COOL
Acknowledgements
The Stone Canal at Thirteen
This book may by now have readers younger than itself. First published in 1996, its imagined future had already begun to drift away from the course of history before all compasses and clocks were reset in 2001. Three of its chapters are set in the real past—in the 1970s, 1980s, and 1990s—and to some readers these must now be stranger than those set in the future. Did anyone ever think there might soon be a revolution, or a nuclear war, or that the Internet could reformat the world? Well, yes, some of us did.
See my introduction to The Star Fraction for reasons why the successive ideas—of revolution, war, singularity—so typical of these three decades made sense of their times, if not of ours. Enough already about politics and history. What strikes me, rereading The Stone Canal, is how personal a book it is. Loves and friendships that endure across decades, centuries even, are central to the plot. Weirder than that, they persist across hardware platforms and spark the gap between different kinds of minds: Dee’s physical, and Meg’s virtual, forms are human, but the minds of both are artificial.
There’s a sensibility in the book that wouldn’t, I think, have been possible before the 1990s, and which I did by no means invent. ‘All is analogy, interface,’ Wilde tells us, ‘the self itself has windows’—by which he means, Windows. Later, he falls and is caught in the arms of Meg, ‘my dear, sweet operating system.’ The distinction between human and machine is broken, in every sense. Wilde finds himself in a world whose rules he wrote, but where that distinction he knows is broken is the unwritten law that underwrites all the rest. If property rights, as the narrative voice tells us and Wilde might once have agreed, are ‘what people agree to let people do with things,’ what becomes of things that don’t agree? And if you’re one of those things, what becomes of you?
These questions weren’t new, and may in practice never arise, but the urgency with which they’re raised here isn’t redundant. Information still wants to be free. But what also strikes me, on rereading, is how the urgency is that of reliving in memory a battle long ago, whose outcome is known. Sentence after sentence has the melancholy cadence of recollection. Every character whose mind we access from within is, or has been, a machine. Everyone is counted among the dead. At some time or other, so shall we all be. This needn’t count against the hope that Wilde holds out, that we’ll make it to the ships. Some of us may yet. We can still hope to do it without becoming monsters, but not, I think, without becoming other than human.
I don’t want you to think that all that makes the book solemn. It was written out of fervent hopes and happy memories and the enthusiasm of having learned to write software as well as books. It treats all the grim stuff—the human condition, aging, loss, and death—as ultimately a solvable problem, looked back at with some nostalgia from an imagined time when it has been solved. A time when we’re all dead, yes, but since when has that stopped us from looking forward?
Brian Aldiss has argued that the first true SF novel was Frankenstein. That mythos wasn’t on my mind when I wrote this book, but looking back over it I can see how the DNA replicates: Wilde has turns at being both Frankenstein and the Creature, Dee and Annette contend to be the Bride, and they all meet the Wolfman. That’s the way to read it, as a violent romance. Because there has to be something gothic about a novel whose first sentence is (see over):
THE MACHINERY OF FREEDOM
1
Human Equivalent
He woke, and remembered dying.
His eyes and mouth opened and he drew in a long harsh gasp of thin air. His legs kicked and his fingers rasped the sand. Then his limbs sprawled and he lay still. Each breath came quickly, as if he suspected that the next would be his last. His fingers hooked the soil as he stared upwards at a deep-blue, fathomless sky.
He rolled over and clambered to his feet and looked around. He was standing on the lower slope of a low knoll above a canal. The canal was about twenty metres wide. For a few hundred metres on either side of it, the ground was sparsely covered with grass and shrubs. Beyond that the ground was a reddish colour.
The man looked back and forth along the canal. It ran from horizon to horizon, a line of blue along the middle of a band of green, bisecting the great circle of red beneath a dome of blue. Near the top of the sky a sun shone bright and small; the man looked up at it, then raised his arm with his thumb up as if in a greeting. He moved his fist with the extended thumb back and forth, sighting along his arm with one eye. He smiled and nodded.
A few metres up-slope from where he stood, the hillside was broken, exposing the rock beneath the thin layer of soil and roots. Among the tumbled, jagged boulders lay an ellipsoid pod a metre long, half a metre across and twenty-five centimetres deep. Its upper and lower halves were identical, and reflective; between them was a sort of equatorial band where duller, hinged or jointed surfaces could be seen. The man stepped up and examined it with a wary look. Then he stooped closer, in an intent inspection, and abruptly turned away.
He ran down to the edge of the canal and stood gazing into it for some minutes. He took off his clothes – boots and socks, a padded jacket and trousers, tee-shift and shorts – and began moving his hands all over his body, as if washing himself without water. Then he put his clothes back on and walked up the slope to the pod.
He put his hands on his hips and frowned down at it. He opened his mouth, closed it, looked around and shrugged.
‘My name is Jon Wilde,’ he said. ‘Who are you?’ He didn’t look or sound as if he expected an answer.
‘I’m a human-equivalent machine,’ said the pod, in an attempt at a pleasant, conversational voice. The man jumped slightly.
‘I’m about to stand up,’ the human-equivalent machine added. ‘Please don’t be alarmed.’
Jon Wilde took a couple of steps back, his boots dislodging grit and pebbles on the slope. Clicking, grating noises came from the machine as four metal limbs unfolded from its central portion. They looked identical, with clawed digits, wrists or ankles, elbows or knees. Two of the limbs swivelled and swung downwards, the jointed extensions at their ends clamping to the ground. The machine straightened its limbs and rocked to its feet – if such they could be called. It stood at about half the man’s height, its posture and proportions vaguely suggestive of a man running in a combative crouch, head down.
Wilde gazed down at it.
‘Where are we?’ he asked.
‘On New Mars,’ the machine answered.
‘How did I get here?’
There was a silence of perhaps a minute. Wilde frowned, looked around, leaned forward just as the machine spoke again:
‘I made you.’