“Like those natural nuclear reactors they found in Africa, only more so”
On my way to and from Berkeley, I read Ken MacLeod’s latest book, Newton’s Wake. Although it maybe doesn’t have the superficial charms of his earlier books (the leftist transpotter element, you might call it), it’s very enjoyable nonetheless. In part, perhaps, because it returns to some of his earlier preoccupations (artificial intelligence, extropians vs. humanists), but from a slightly different angle. The background of the book seems like an excellent metaphor for our current political situation (since 1917, or 1989) — cast adrift in a world once inhabited by giants, scavenging among their sometimes seductive, sometimes deadly detritus (I suspect Ken would consider the copy of Prairie Fire: The politics of revolutionary anti-imperialism Geo gave me would be an example of both, but more of that later). Apart from which, it includes at least one spectacular image:
> A woman with long silver hair leaned against an outward overhang of the window-wall, palms and forehed pressed against it, as though contemplating a jump that the diamond plate denied her. Her face too was silver, as though coated with aluminium powder.
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> ‘Morag Higgins,’ she introduced herself, shaking hands and smiling. Teeth like steel. She sat down and helped herself to the single malt.
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> ‘Last mission I was on, I wandered off on my own.’ She tossed her silver hair back; it made a hissing noise as it settled. ‘I got … infected. Optic-nerve hack, absolute classic, should never have fallen for … Anyway. Then it makes me open up, some kind of needle gets in, right. Hours later I wander back sounding very strange. Team leader … she blows my fucking head off. End of story. Except it isn’t. Whatever it was had taken a back-up of me and stored it outside my head. Which it also had a memory of.’ She tapped her face with the glass. It rang. ‘_This_ grows back. It’s a crawling mass of steel nanobots.’
The time I wasn’t reading Newton’s wake I was mostly watching two terrible films, Are we there yet? (Ice Cube as a hip batchelor on a journey with his girlfriend’s children) and In good company. The bizarre thing about both films was that although actually made recently, they make much more sense if you imagine them being made 10-15 years ago, particularly In good company, which is based on the topical ideas that management consultancy is bullshit and ‘downsizing’ is, like, bad for the people who get fired. It’s wierd to see a film made in 2004 in which characters express surprise that they no longer have a job for life (besides which, is there a more horrifying idea than a corporate life sentence? Our campaigns against precarious employment should not be campaigns for more secure _employment_).
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