William T. Vollmann's YOU BRIGHT AND RISEN ANGELS

Oh, ants, my sisters, good old honeydew-seekers! From close up you are sticky and shiny and gristly; and your nymphs have parasitic red mites stuck to them. You are too intent upon your chewing and gathering to listen to me, but I tell you that despite my warm feelings I really do not like you, and I cannot feel sorry for you in any way because there are too many of you and you are not cute at all. You eat too much of my forests; you are a rebellious tribe, and I will destroy you; I will poison your nests with sweet-smelling traps.

Man, I've known of the existence of this book for decades. I had a vague idea of what it's about and that it was probably going to be something I would love, but I never came across it in a bookstore, back when it was new and a physical store selling physical books, or a public library, was the only way to get them, so I never picked it up for my personal collection or checked it out. Later on, online booksellers became a thing and I went bananas, just like everybody else did, but by then a lot of newer books were on my radar, and then e-books happened and then...

But really? I couldn't tell you why it took me so long to get around to You Bright and Risen Angels, apart from its still never turning up in any bookstores I've managed to hit when I've a bit to spend. And there not being an ebook or audio edition. And there being millions and millions of other books vying for my attention. 

Sigh.

But so, better late than never. And also, thank goodness for my having a few dozen high brodernist friends, many of whom are obsessed with Billy TV and his oeuvre, who selected his Europe Central as a book club read (which I loved and consider one of the best books I read this year, but I'm not ready to write about it yet and think I'm gonna read it again before I do)* and I was jolted into remembering that back in the 90s when I was temping my way around the Greater Boston area (so many bookstores! But I never saw this in any of them. And anyway, Infinite Jest happened, etc.) I was kind of always on the lookout for this big chunk of literary speculative fiction about insects and revolution and hey, online booksellers still exist, and not all of them are avatars of pure evil...

So, anyway, You Bright and Risen Angels is finally in my life. And, as I often but don't always say, it feels like it was written just for me. Well, except for all the gun stuff. There's a fair amount of gun stuff. Which isn't really for me, but I'll put up with it if an author makes it worth my doing so. 

Billy TV sure did! Though he also kind of tricked me in some pretty inventive ways, like providing a rather untrustworthy, though vividly descriptive, table of contents. As such.

This book was written by a traitor to his class. It is dedicated to bigots everywhere. Ladies and gentlemen of the black shirts, I call upon you to unite, to strike with claws and kitchen pokers, to burn the grub-worms of equality’s brood with sulfur and oil, to huddle together whispering about the silverfish in your basements, to make decrees in your great solemn rotten assemblies concerning what is proper, for you have nothing to lose but your last feeble principles.

I'm coming to dislike the phrase "late-stage capitalism" almost as much as I do all the Underpants Gnome-ish fantasizing about the neo-Nuremberg Trials that are surely just around the corner for the current crop of bigoted,  authoritarian oppressors who have come to power in so much of the world. Both memes presuppose that these regimes so obviously carry the seeds of their own destruction that it's just a waiting game for the rest of us; we don't really have to do anything. We certainly don't have to get nasty or violent. We just have to keep the popcorn ready for when the imaginary good guys who are going to swoop in and save us show up and clean house, like they did in World War II. Except somehow, we all seem to think that we're gonna get to skip the war part this time? Or at least that somebody else is going to do the arduous stuff? But on what basis do we think that?

Anyway, YBARA is an elaborate, baroque and challenging allegory of what it's most likely really going to feel like when everybody's finally had enough of the manipulations and empty promises of our current socio-economic systems that keep everyone too scared or hopeless or indoctrinated to be be willing to even imagine a slightly better world anymore. Couched as a giant revenge plot of bugs against bug zappers. 

But that sounds a bit dry and no-fun, doesn't it? But see, those are two things this book ain't, especially if you like weird shit like giant, freakishly long-lived anthropomorphic insects who have teamed up with their more conventionally sized and life-spanned brethren to fight back against human domination and destruction; like sentient agglomerations of electricity that, for their part, seek to preserve the status quo except with themselves in charge instead of stupid humans; like a handful of sinister, immortal oligarchs who both embody the status quo and believe the aforementioned agglomerations of sentient electricity are actually their willing servants and weapons; like a tiny cadre of passionate revolutionaries who were already ready to take matters into their own hands and fight, despite their paltry numbers, and then accept surprise offers of tactical, strategic and actual support from the very gnats that ordinarily would be tormenting them in swarms in their secret lair above the Arctic Circle!

Oh and there's also another oligarch, shadowy, sinister and remote, manipulating affairs from his base of operations on Mars? And a secret race of plant-people who can dramatically alter their own biochemistry to incorporate some industrial products and by-products to give themselves really weird superpowers like remote viewing via developing photographic film at a touch? I mean, you can't say Billy TV is unimaginative. 

All of this is related to us, by the way, by an unreliable narrator who seems to at least *believe* he is the last human survivor of the resulting conflict, who in his loneliness has programmed an elaborate computer simulation** depicting "resurrected" versions of all of the important actors in the scenario (helpfully listed for us with notes on their interrelationships and alignments in a Dramatis Personae at the beginning of the book right before its wild and rather fanciful table of contents). As he boots up his system for the latest iteration of the game, he addresses the personality constructs inhabiting it as his "Bright and Risen Angels" with a melancholy air. But is he really a lone survivor wistfully reliving the actual past of the narrative, or just a frustrated Infocom employee? Heh.

And it is because of this that YBARA often gets categorized as proto-cyberpunk. As this is really barely just a frame narrative, though, I think so promoting it is a mistake. You're not going to see any console cowboys, expensive razorgirls, or Rastafarian satellite-dwellers here,  but nor are you going to get the funky, vaguely creepy pseudo-biopunk of, say, Bruce Sterling's more interesting offerings, or the intensely insect-focused action of "antasy" works like Clark Thomas Carlton's output to date,  which I must confess to having vaguely hoped for back in the early days of my knowing this book exists.

I am by no means disappointed by what I got, for all that it does not even contain what the second half of the table of contents suggests that it will. Because what it's actually in these pages is fascinating in its own right, with its alternate history of the industrialization of the United States, its vision of cryptoterrestrials (again, rather before even most fringe communities were even really talking about certain phenomena in those terms) and its depiction of how rebels are made, not born. This is that rarity of rarities, a genuinely unique book, and one I'm profoundly glad to have finally gotten to read.

Interestingly enough, I seem to have stumbled into what feels awfully like a spiritual sequel to YBARA. Stay tuned right here to find out what it is. 

By the way, I think there's going to be a lot more Billy TV content on this blog in the new year, but don't worry: I'm pretty sure this one is still going to prove to be unique, because this guy's restless intelligence and creativity have legendarily led him never to write the same, or even the similar, book twice. Dayum!

*Yes, I'm in a book club now, at long last, halfway through my sixth decade on this warming, dessicating planet. 

**Recall that this book was first published in 1987, when most high schools in the U.S. boasted, at most, a few Apple IIes awkwardly situated in the library for a handful of nerds to play typing games on. Oregon Trail was still in the unimaginable future for most of us who weren't in the industry or attending a handful of schools adjacent to it. But guess who was working in the industry as a programmer back then? Billy TV!

Max Barry's JENNIFER GOVERNMENT

Reading like an updated Snow Crash from the point of view from the point of view of characters who actually live in our future instead of one with made-up names for corporations (and minus all the pseudo-Sumerian hive mind stuff), Max Barry's Jennifer Government is a good old-fashioned page-turner dressed up in an ultramodern (well, circa 2003, but its satire hits as hard now as it did then) "suit so cheap that it shines."

Our title character, Jennifer, wasn't always Jennifer Government. Once she was Jennifer Maher, when she worked for a marketing firm called Maher, because in this version of Next Sunday, AD, instead of corporations buying naming rights to years, they instead bestow their names on their employees in lieu of surnames. This extends even to little kids, who take on the name of the school they attend, which school is itself named for the corporation that owns and operates it; hence a character we meet even before we meet Jennifer is a school girl who rejoices in the name of Hayley McDonald's. Because of course she does. And Jennifer's own daughter (she is a single mom in addition to being a stupendous badass with a gun or judo moves) is Kate Mattel, because she goes to a Mattel school. They're really good schools, you guys. Just ask all the Barbie dolls. Which, we later learn, is one of Jennifer's nicknames, but that's not important right now.

If you can't guess already, I really kind of love Jennifer Government, you guys. She's deadly with any number of weapons or her own killer gams or fists, and her catch phrase is an all-purpose conversation stopper that works as well on her offspring as on the bad guys protesting their innocence as she hauls them in: "And yet."

And yet.

Jennifer lives in a world in which the Neoliberal dream came true beyond its dreamers' wildest desires. The United States itself has become a sort of supercorporation, and has franchised out its (heavily revised) Constitution and power structures to huge swathes of territory around the world, including, most recently, Australia (author Max Barry's own home), where most of the action of this novel takes place. There is still a cold war of sorts, but it's between competing customer loyalty clubs. Etc.

As the story begins, a hapless boob named Hack Nike (tah-wang! Bullseye), an unhappy Marketing Operative for the sneaker and sportswear giant who owns his last name, blunders into a conversation between some high powered sociopaths on another floor of Nike's Australia headquarters, and the sociopaths offer him an on the spot promotion if he'll take on a very special assignment for them. They've got a dynamite campaign to capitalize on the success of the company's Cartmanesque strategy of not letting anyone buy their newest sneaker line, then only letting a very few buy it, driving demand to a fever pitch. The company has chosen to next announce that each of its Niketown stores around the USA (which, remember, includes lots more territory than just the original 50 states) is getting four pairs of the new shoes to sell, but they're actually shipping many more. The plan is to just fool their deranged fans into paying too much for sneakers they still think are totally exclusive, but the two Johns Nike whom Hack has met want to go this one better. Actually, many more better. And instead of "better" they really mean "worse." As in, they want Hack to stake out the Sydney mall where their local Niketown is and shoot up to ten customers or would-be customers outside of the store. As in with an actual gun. Because remember how once upon a time people were killing each other in "the ghettos" for coveted shoes? That was such good buzz, man. That drove everybody crazy. Let's do that, but more!

But Hack deserves his first name, and cocks it all up, partly out of queasiness, partly out of naivete, and the ensuing bloodbath draws the attention of the legendary Jennifer Government, who, for reasons we don't learn until much later in the novel, already had her barcode-tattooed eye on the Johns Nike and was ready to pounce.

Caught in the crossfire of the Niketown Incident is the aforementioned Haley McDonald's, who was there at the store hoping to make an investment in these shoes to sell later for much more than she paid, except none of the ATMs at the mall are willing to loan her the cash to do it (because of course ATMs in this world can also issue loans; since they have offered cash "advances" on credit cards for yoinks in the real world, it's really not that weird, if you think about it*). "Lucky" for her, a young stockbroker Buy Mitsui, who's been down on his luck until a friend tempted him into some insider trading that saved his bacon, witnessed her distress and decided, what the hell, he's kind of celebrating, and just gives her the money outright.

Not long after, Buy is desperately administering first aid to a bleeding out Haley and Jennifer Government is in a gun battle with mercenaries from the NRA in the background. Because of course the National Rifle Association has become a mercenary corps.

The whole novel goes at this blistering pace as we also meet the hapless-but-really-good-with-guns Billy, who kind of by accident becomes Billy NRA and is quickly mistaken for another guy named Bill NRA and gets swept up into a series of NRA operations in the wake of the Niketown Incident; Hack Nike's girlfriend Violet No Last Name until she becomes Violet ExxonMobil when the petroleum giant agrees to purchase her bespoke intrusion software for three million dollars that she has trouble collecting on; and even get a bit of goodness from the point of the view of one of the Johns Nike. The one whom Jennifer Government knew back in the day when both of them shared a last name.

For all that its milieu echos that of Snow Crash, what Jennifer Government wound up feeling the most like was a Bruce Sterling novel. Jennifer is an action hero par excellance but Kate keeps her grounded and gives her a vulnerability that makes her a more interesting and well-rounded character. By the time she and Buy Mitsui get around to getting to know each other, well, what you want to happen, happens, in much the way Greta and Oscar come together in Sterling's greatest novel, Distraction** but almost before the reader realizes what is taking place, she is off, gun in hand, to hunt her quarries in London and Los Angeles while the aforementioned Loyalty Club Cold War starts heating up. There are gun battles and chases and bizarre confrontations and the John Nike that is still standing delivers a seriously whackadoo speech in Parliament (yeah, that Parliament) that writes more checks than 75 asses could cash, let alone his.

Can Jennifer Government and her fellow operatives save the day? Will she get a chance to give John Nike a piece of her mind and/or put some holes in his hide? Will Corporate American finally once and for all achieve the entirely unregulated marketplace of its dreams? Gotta read to find out.

It's almost obscene how much fun this book is, you guys.

*Lots about this book are going to make you need a shower. Many showers.

**Which, why is that still not available as an ebook, man? It's so good! I've worn out my original mass market paperback of it even though my hands can't freaking handle paper books anymore.

Ramez Naam's NEXUS #OneBookAtATime

I think I do a pretty good job of keeping up on developments in art and science via my RSS feeds, but somehow I seem to have missed the news that Ray Kurzweil and Robert Ludlum had a bastard child together and sent him back in time to grow up as a little Egyptian boy. But, you know, I can't keep track of everything. And better late than never, on such discoveries, I say.

Fortunately for me, I'm not dependent on myself alone to stay on top of matters. I have people like Lee Harris and the rest of the gang at Angry Robot books on my team. And boy, am I glad they found this Ramez Naam guy.

Nexus is that rare treat, a serving of what I can only call neuropunk, a still unusual genre, the best other example I can come up with is probably Bruce Sterling's Distraction (which just happens to be one of my all-time favorite novels), though a case could certainly be made for Alastair Reynolds' Conjoiner-heavy Redemption Ark as well.* Like Distraction, Nexus concerns itself with human enhancement technology that poses some sticky ethical, legal and political questions but is out there in the world regardless, and gaining traction. But where Distraction takes place in an America that is so close to being a failed state as makes no odds, and deals at least in part with political figures who are exploiting the tech for various ends, in Nexus, the American government is still iron-strong and opposes the tech with all its military might, repressive policing and scare tactics. It's impossible, therefore, not to see parallels to the "wars" on drugs and terrorism in which our country is still engaged.

Which is where the Robert Ludlum/Tom Clancy DNA comes into the equation, for while one hero, Kaden Lane, is a neuro-hacker extraordinaire, who has, with the help of a small team, added so much functionality to a mindlinking nanotech street drug (that would be Nexus) as to make it a whole new thing, our other is a government agent Samantha Catarenes, herself cybernetically and biotechnologically enhanced to the eyeballs because sometimes to fight monsters one has to become a bit of one, who is so ideologically opposed to what Kade and his people have done that it's a wonder she doesn't claw his eyes out on their first meeting. Nexus has already shown tremendous potential as a tool for coercion, after all. The irony of a government using old-fashioned forms of coercion to suppress a new coercion tech that they don't control is addressed, but only barely; the tension is mostly between those like Kade and the ambiguous pseudo-villain Su-Yong Shu (a Chinese neuroscientist who seems suspiciously way smarter than everyone else on earth) who value its potential to liberate and enhance and transform humanity, and those like Sam and her masters, who are hung up on how much worse it could make life for those who don't choose to take advantage of its offerings. As if anyone wouldn't, am I right?

But never fear, the novel rarely sinks to didacticism. It's too busy also being an action thriller! There are lots and lots and lots of fight scenes, with everything from fists to stealth helicopters. Being the sort who twiddles her thumbs through big explosive action scenes in movies, I could have done with a bit less of this, but I understand why it was there; most other people twiddle their thumbs through the parts I find interesting. And some of the action scenes are quite important to the plot, and to the plot of the book's sequels, to which I am eagerly looking forward.

Some of my friends have complained that there is too much infodump in Nexus, but aside from the unnecessary and distracting "Briefing" interludes**, I didn't see that. Briefings aside, it was just right, balanced out by some nice character moments and some themes I wasn't expecting to encounter here, like the potential dovetailing of Buddhist practice with neurotech (most of the story takes place at a giant international neuroscience conference in Bangkok), though this last element made the excruciatingly long and over-the-top fight scenes all the more jarring.

This first novel is obviously just laying the groundwork for potential big, big stuff in Crux***, due out in September. And a lot of how I'll ultimately evaluate this novel will depend on what Naam does in the sequel. If it's just another violent technothriller with cool transhuman elements, I might be disappointed. At this point, though, I have faith that Naam has something more interesting in mind, that he's brave enough to try really exploring how tech like Nexus (which is not as far-fetched as some might think, as anyone who follows a science blog or two, or who reads Naam's non-fiction More Than Human: Embracing the Promise of Biological Enhancement [which I declined to finish because I sing in the choir he's preaching to there, and because his publisher apparently blew the editing/proofreading budget on whores and coke or something, but which you might still want to check out if that doesn't bother you as much as it does me] will know already) might fundamentally change our world. All signs point to that being the case, so far.

*In fact, one could read Nexus as a sort of earthbound version of the origin story of the Conjoiners without doing oneself any great mental violence. Har har.

**Why are so many authors relying on this device of fictitious "documentation" these days? It looks to me almost like a lack of confidence in one's storytelling chops, if not an insulting attitude towards readers who "aren't getting it." Authors, once you've earned that willing suspension of disbelief (and Naam did, right away, with a gloriously bizarre and hilarious first scene that I'll remember for a long, long time), readers happily fill in the blanks themselves. They might not fill them in exactly the way you want them to, but that's not your call! Give it a rest and just tell us a damn story.

***And I, for one, am grateful that the sequels won't be Sexus and Plexus. What whaaat?