The interesting question is: can you write a really good fantasy novel? The answer is yes, you can. It’s been done. Tolkien spent most of his career doing just that. The Lord of the Rings trilogy was his Magnum Opus, and the sheer amount of love and hard work that went into it clearly shows. It became a huge, paradigm changing phenomenon, precisely because it was unique in its own right. Therefore the recipe for great Fantasy is not to crib from Tolkien but try to imitate his technique. You start with a concept and build your setting around it. Tolkien decided to frame his universe around Germanic, Saxon and Norse mythology and folklore. If you want to write good Fantasy you should do exactly that: pick a framework (be it mythology, philosophy or both) and build your setting around it. And he did a really, really good job fleshing out that mythology and making it his own, so the further you get away from it, the better.

Here is an idea crazy enough to work: a Fantasy setting framed around Aristotelian metaphysics. Let’s assume that Earth is the center of the universe and the sun, the moon at the stars rotate around it floating not in vacuum but in a celestial medium known as Aether which is considered the fifth element. Most of earthly matter is composed not of atoms but out of the four remaining elements (earth, water, fire and air) mixed in differing proportions. Nature is theological and there is inherent purpose in all things. The elements coalesce into mountains, lakes and precious metals depending on local circumstances to fulfill one of the finite number of ideal forms which exist separately from matter but is expressed in material substances.

Aristotelian Geo-centrism as core of the setting.

Now that we have this setting, lets add a dash of Hagelian philosophy and say that human mind can influence the form and thus indirectly manipulate the matter around them. What does that mean exactly? Well, it means that if you get sick, it is not because of some virus or bacteria, but because of a mental defect. If you are depressed, plagued by guilt, doubt or madness your body reflects this and you shrivel up and suffer all kinds if ailments. Conversely, if you are confident and believe in yourself your body will over time conform to your self-image and you will grow taller, stronger an more beautiful. Those with exceptional strength of personality will actually radiate outwards and force itself upon those around you. So for example, if you believe yourself to be an exceptional leader you will likely posses an aura that will influence those around you to be more disciplined, obedient and competent at their jobs. If you consider yourself an exceptional warrior those who fight along your side will become more adept, accurate and deadly. Some individuals are born with a special affinity to one of the elements or substances. For example those with affinity to air can build flying ships by imbuing wood and metals with their favored element making them float above the air. Those with somatic affinity can become clerics who can heal you by laying on hands and willing your body to mend. Few truly exceptional individuals have such strong auras that they can influence hearts and minds (and therefore bodies) of entire nations. Thus those living under the rule of a dour hedonistic despot will over time become humorless and selfish themselves, while those serving a happy benevolent master will thrive.

There are air ships and celestial ships that can sail through the aether.

If you think this is kinda interesting, you should keep in mind I did not make this up. This is more or less the setting of Other Songs (Inne Pieśni) by Jacek Dukaj. If there was such a thing as Hard Fantasy this would be it. It is not an easy reading book, and the setup I concisely described above is slowly unveiled and explained over lose to 800 pages. It is part an adventure novel, part fantasy, part alternate history, part philosophical discussion of the Aristotelian/Hegelian philosophy.

Other Songs – Inne Pieśni, cover.

The action takes place in the alternate version of our Earth with alternate physics. Alternate histories often have a clearly defined breaking point after which everything changes. In Other Songs such an event was emergence of Alexander the Great who is described as the world’s first kratistos (from Greek word meaning strongest, noblest, most excellent) whose force of will could influence entire nations. After Alexander there were many others: immensely powerful and influential men and women who have evolved to being more or less living gods. After few centuries of turmoil the earth was neatly divided between the winners. They uneasily coexist constantly scheming, plotting and maneuvering for advantageous position. When a kratistos becomes overly ambitious others may unite and conquer him/or her for his territories. Whenever new kratistos is born he or she must find a niche somewhere in between the existing powers or perish.

The protagonist of the novel is Hieronim Barabelek, an aristocrat and former military strategist whose greatest claim to fame was a heroic last stand against the armies of the Rasputin like kratistos of the Ural mountains known as The Sorcerer. Unfortunately when The Sorcerer himself took the field Barabelek’s will was broken and his army fell. His mind and spirit broken, he shriveled up to half the size and became sickly, shy and melancholic recluse. His marriage falls apart, but years later he is reunited with his children. Barabelek’s son turns out to be an ambitious young man who intends to follow in his fathers’ footsteps and wants to learn military doctrine from the living legend that is his father.

Barabelek is keenly aware of the fact he is no longer the man his son admires. However new responsibilities as a father, and his son ambition influence him to come out of his shell and start taking new risk. Thus he agrees to travel to Africa to take part in a kind of an aristocratic safari cum hunting expedition into uncharted wilderness that exists beyond the civilized form and outside the sphere of influence of any kratistos. In the heart of Affrica the matter seems to lose its form, giving birth to all kinds of chimeras and monsters from flying snakes and rainbow colored zebras to absurd vicious predators made solely out of blood and fire. The true nature of this place is a mystery and a subject of intense theological debate, especially since it is impossible to chart or explore. The deeper you go the more influenced you become by the broken form of the place. Your fingers may fuse together, your teeth may become glass, your eyes may evaporate, etc.. Some say that at the very heart of this disruption lies impossible city populated by impossible creatures. Unfortunately those who went that deep came back irreversibly wrapped and were driven mad so their reports are less than reliable.

Alternate Cover

Barabelek’s expedition goes further than most, and what he finds there changes him forever. Unraveling the mystery of the schism that warps the reality in the heart of Afferica becomes his obsession, which takes him to the moon (the domain of a banished ancient and immensely powerful kratistos) and back. He eventually figures it out…

[SPOILERS]

It’s aliens. But not regular aliens as we know them, because in Dukaj’s world such aliens simply can’t exist. Stars are simply spheres of Aether that rotate around earth – there are no alien planets or solar systems. So real aliens can only come from a alternate reality with alternate physics. The alien minds, much like the human minds influence form of the matter around them, and force it to conform to their alien standards which appear to be incompatible with ours. Their very presence causes our reality to break apart, and wrap in impossible way until it becomes their reality. Almost by definition these aliens are impossible to understand, because understanding them would mean assuming their form, and thus leaving our universe behind.

I’m not saying it’s aliens but… It’s aliens.

Barabelek discovers that the Affrican phenomenon was caused by a small landing party, and that there has been a similar incursion on the moon many decades before. Lunar astrologists have been tracking the movements of the stars, and by observing deviations of their orbits they have theorized that there is an entire alien invasion fleet sitting somewhere beyond the orbit of Saturn. How do you fight reality wrapping aliens? Conventional ways have proven to be inefficient. For example using artillery to destroy the wrapped Affrican jungle failed because cannon balls would turn into birds or spiders, or sand before hitting the ground. The only reliable way to combat the threat seems to be to force our own form and order onto them. This is something only a powerful kratistos could do. But a single kratistos would likely be swallowed up by the invasion fleet without much hassle. So Earth’s only hope for survival is to unite all the world leaders, pack their armies onto air-ships that can sail through the aether and wage war in space, which was never done before. Especially since most of said leaders do not believe the threat is real. Who better to convince them otherwise through plot, intrigue, assassinations and political machinations than brilliant strategist Barabelek. That is, if he can actually get his shit together.

Dukaj’s alternate universe is strikingly original and just bristling with interesting ideas. Just to give you a taste, here are some notable highlights from the novel:

• The moon (just like other celestial bodies) is made mostly out of Aether and Pyr (the fire element) and as such would be uninhabitable. In fact, under normal circumstances things would simply fall of the surface of the moon because gravity is always toward the center of creation. Life exists there only thanks to the influence the banished kratistos Illia, who not only was able to reverse the gravity but made it possible for plants and animals to thrive there. Still, it remains a harsh and unforgiving place. Everything, including the air you breathe is infused with the fire element. So every breath scorches your lungs, everything you touch burns your skin and you can’t even quench your thirst because water will burn just as much. You eventually get used to it, but it is not fun.
• Some of the natives of the moon are born with the affinity to the flame element, and their very blood is infused with it. When they get angry, they pretty much become the Human Torch from Fantastic Four. They are the warrior caste, and they make their battle armors from pure Aether. The main property of the fifth element is that it is in constant motion, so the armor is basically a collection of interlocking plates and ball bearings fine tuned to orbit each other. These armors can be used for defense or offense when the warriors kick the Aether in their gauntlets into higher orbits turning them into chainsaw like weapons.
• One of the many places Barabelek visits during his journeys is a floating city. It was created by a kratistos who was born at the intersection of two major world powers and felt squeezed out by the neighbors. When he hit puberty he ripped out his home town and surrounding fields and villages from the ground Dalaran style and relocated it into the middle of the ocean. Some of the men and women who are born in his aura develop extreme affinity to the air element to the point that their bodies become lighter than the air. The locals call them angels, and they commonly wear silver breast plates, or chains to weight them down so that they don’t get blown off the island by wind.
• How do the characters know The Sorcerer has arrived in town? The spiders start building their webs in the shape of pentagrams.
• Sea battle with a Kraken. Yep. This novel has it.
• Dukaj describes a fight between an Ares (a person with a strong warrior aura) and a Nimrod (strong hunter aura) and it’s absolutely ridiculously brutal. Back in 2006 I reviewed a silly fighting game called Toribash in which the players can mutually dismember each other if they play it right. It’s kinda like that. It’s over in seconds, and there are body parts all over the floor. It’s also worth mentioning that the combat is kindof a big deal and involves rather important characters who got manipulated by bigger players. It’s one of those “oh, crap – I can’t believe this is happening” moments.
• The novel ends with a classic Dukaj mind-fuck. It both gives you closure, but at the same time is open to interpretation. It will definitely leave you scratching your head, and trying to work out the staggering implications of what just happened on the last page.

Other Songs is nothing short of exceptional. Dukaj is primarily Hard SF writer and it shows. The scope and amount of research that must have went into this novel is staggering. I often praised the author for not coddling his readers and expecting them to have not only basic knowledge of basic science and technology, but to be at least moderately genre savvy and fluent in the SF jargon. In Inne Pieśni however he makes sure his setting is adequately explained. There are lengthy digressions and/or dialogues which the characters study or discuss the unique metaphysics of their universe. The style is somewhat reminiscent of Stephenson’s Anathem with it’s scholarly dialogues, but Dukaj is harder and more unforgiving on his characters. His universe is cold, unforgiving and full of treachery. It’s almost as if Anathem and Game of Thrones had a love child.

The novel is pretty hard to pigeon hole and classify. I opened this review by discussing the Fantasy genre because personally I think that’s where it belongs. However it’s not very clear cut. After all, the book contains aliens and at least one large space battle which you could argue are very much SF topics. I guess it depends on how you actually define science fiction. For me the genre has science in the name for a reason. Seeing how Other Songs does not actually involve any real science, but rather a very well executed and interesting system of metaphysics, I’d argue it belongs firmly in the Fantasy setting.

As far as I know there is no English version of the novel as of yet. But if you can read Polish, I highly recommend it. This book will change the way you view Fantasy forever.

The Social Tragedy of Post-Scarcity

Imagine a world in which nano-assembly has been perfected and made super cheep. Imagine a nation in which running a material feed to a housing project is about as expensive as connecting a water/gas and electric line. And that for the price of a microwave you can buy a nano-assembly device which plugs into said feed and it can produce food, clothing and any luxury items at a push of a button. Now imagine a nation in which the government is willing to subsidize feeds and assemblers and provide them to all it’s citizens for free as part of the social security package that also covers free health care, and free entertainment in the form of state subsidized public TV.

This is the setting of Crux. The story takes place in Poland few decades from now, in which social care got a little out of hand. Only about 10% of the population is gainfully employed in mega corporations that control majority of the wealth. All of these individuals are highly educated, white collar professionals working highly abstract analytical or technology jobs that simply can’t be fully automated. Everything else – including majority of the manual labor, blue collar jobs have been mechanized decades ago. Nanomachines are everywhere, so buildings construct themselves, roads self-repair pot holes on their own, pipelines grow in the ground without human aid, and there is no need for street cleaners because garbage is dissolved, and re-purposed as building material every night. The only jobs available are for people willing to learn how to optimize and program the nano systems to do new things, or to do highly abstract market manipulations which do not follow direct supply-demand curves in post-scarcity globalized economies.

So unless you are highly educated and highly competitive, there is just no work for you out there. And if you do happen to be employable, then you will likely be earning more money you could ever spent. So it is not surprise that the Polish working elite became slightly eccentric over the last 2-3 generations. The current meme that seems to have taken over the upper crust of the society is the return to the “good old” values that harken back to the bygone ages when Poland was a medieval superpower – a multicultural melting pot that stretched from Baltic to Black Sea. So they style themselves as Szlachta (aka privileged nobles), they wear the traditional clothing (żupan, kontusz, etc..) and always carry the curved scimitar which they use frequently to duel among themselves.

This sort of return to origins may seem a bit far fetched, but that time period are deeply rooted in Polish national identity. The rise and fall of the nobility, the way they usurped the power from the kings, then squandered it away and doomed the nation is a deeply tragic story – a deep wound on the nations psyche. In a large part, study of Polish literature is essentially an exercise in ripping the scab of that wound and watching it bleed anew. After reading countless assigned lectures taking place in that setting, most school children probably have fantasized about being a noble lord or a lady, or perhaps about resurrecting that social system and the knightly traditions and costumes just because of how cool they were. So when Dukaj describes his setting it is not much unlike many of use imagined the nation to be if our ancestors didn’t screw up and sell it out to foreign powers way back when. So it more or less works.

The counterpoint to these educated, eccentric, self-absorbed haughty, retro-nobles are the “socials” – the rest of the population who simply does not have the talents, or the desire to obtain education required to become a “noble”. Which by the way is completely possible – the social system is extremely fluid, and the “nobility” is still a rather new meme only about two generation old. Its mostly a meritocracy based on ability rather than a feudal system based on inherited rights. So upward mobility is definitely possible.

Most socials however simply do not bother. They live in self-cleaning, self-sufficient sprawling housing projects divided into districts. Each district elects it’s own leaders, who then petition the nobility for more free stuff they feel they are entitled to. Their lives are more or less effortless, but also devoid of much meaning.

The titular Crux is a pseudonym of a legendary crippled hacker who seems to have attained god-like power by learning to subvert the nano-machinery that drives the projects. At first he seems to be mostly a made up story – a folk legend of sorts. But as the story unfolds his influence seems to be undeniable. The socials worship him as a sort of demigod building him small shrines in back alleys or whispering prayers to him as they thumb a “social rosary” (a rosary like prayer beads made out of “heraldic rings” the nobles use as I/O devices for their gesture driven ubiquitous wireless internet – the implication being these were stolen from multiple nobles).

The protagonist of the story, a young noble, begins to investigate the stories of Crux hoping the mans god-like skills at manipulating nano can help to save his fathers life after a severe brain injury during he sustained in a duel. The legend is that the hacker has access to foreign unapproved, contraband military software that can use the nano systems to re-wire neural tissues and thus repair severe injuries. But the closer he gets to the legendary folk leader, the less likely it becomes he will actually be able to ask him for a favor. As it appears, Crux is not very fond of nobility. In fact he is riling up the socials, and arming them for an uprising.

Why would he do that? Without the financial backing, software and oversight provided by the working class the projects will break down and stop working. If the ruling class is overthrown, thousands of socials might simply starve to death, as they are unaccustomed to working and producing food without using the automated nano-assemblers. According to Crux this is exactly the wake-up call his people need. He aims to “free” them from being dependent on handouts, by collapsing the social establishment and forcing them to learn fending for themselves and rebuild the society from scratch or perish.

Humanizing the Inhumane

Heart of Darkness sort of inspired by the Joseph Conrad novel with the same title. The main difference is that the story takes place not in the African Kongo but on an alien planet. Also, it seems to be some sort of alternate reality in which World War II has never ended. The planet is not as much colonized as occupied by Nazi Germany, USSR and United States. Neither of these superpowers has much use for the planet and its resources, but none is willing to abandon it and leave it to the enemy. So there are about a dozen military bases with skeletal crews in various points of the globe, which try not to engage in open military conflict (not enough man power for that) but at the same time remain hostile to each other.

The planet is interesting mostly for its ecosystem, which while very rich is completely incompatible with that of Earth. The life forms that populate the planet never really underwent the kind of differentiations as multiple species of the earth. There are no well defined biological kingdoms – most of the organisms existing in a sort of controlled genetic drift, constantly changing or evolving. This however prevented them from evolving complex life forms with well developed central nervous systems. There are simply no higher animals there – nothing with a brain. At least until the recent year or so, when German patrols started spotting ape like creatures thriving in the deep jungle. Scientists are unable to explain those creatures since there is just no way they could evolve naturally. So they are either a result of biological experiments by one of the other superpowers, or they have been brought here by someone or something else.

A new German recruit arrives on a re-supply ship. Upon seeing his references his superiors immediately tell him to pack his bags, and send him out on a suicide mission. He is to travel into the jungle and capture or kill “The Devil”. What, or who is “The Devil?” It turns out that Nazis initially brought a number of Jews with them as forced heavy labor force. Most of them them already perished or defected. One however became a thorn in their side – he was sent into the jungle to service some remote equipment, and provided with only a limited food and water supply. Has never showed up at a pick-up spot but instead of starving out in the jungle he made himself a home there. Upon dismantling several German and Soviet antennas he built himself a rather powerful transmission system and has been playing a radio DJ, airing rather subversive and politically undesirable manifestos. To make matters worse, he avoided all attempts of capture, and pinning down his broadcast locations and bombing them made no difference – if anything it made him bolder.

The protagonist is sent to capture him based on their shared ancestry – both him and “The Devil” are of Polish descent and fluently speak the language. So the mission is to gain the trust of the Jungle DJ by pretending to be a lowly laborer sent to his death, just as he was. But before he finds the defector himself, he runs into aforementioned ape-like beasts. Only they are carrying spears, and speaking broken Polish.

The twist? The rapidly evolving life forms of this planet can be seeded with foreign DNA. “The Devil” initially fed his flesh and blood to the native life forms trying to breed compatible food sources. After succeeding to produce edible life forms he kept up with his experiments, selecting for intelligence. Because of the extreme mutability of the local flora and fauna he was able to go from primitive plant-like forms to semi-intelligent primates in just a few short lived generations.

His plans? Breed himself an army, teach them to speak, to build weapons and then lead them against the human presence on the planet while being revered as their god.

Initially the German soldier becomes a captive, but he is soon liberated by the recently uplifted aboriginals. They turn out to be much smarter than The Devil gives them credit for, and many of them grew tired of his megalomania and his insistence to be revered as a deity. They do however realize that they still need human DNA to grow smarter – and they might have just found a new source…

Reigning in the Posthumans

We talk a lot about post-humanism here, but we don’t often think about the problems that arise when you have populations of standard, ordinary humans that have to coexist with post-humans that have marvelous (to them) powers they cannot possibly match. Aguerre at Dawn is a story about how post-human societies may choose to censor and limit themselves in order to avoid conflict an persecution from the baseline humanity.

The post-humanism in this novel comes from an unusual source: a discovery of incredibly complex pseudo-organic compound on the outside planets of the solar system. This strange alien substance has unusual properties: it causes gravitational anomalies and occasionally dilates time in its vicinity. In other words it bends the time-space continuum around itself seemingly at random. Not only that, but it seems to pick up and react violently to the brain-waves emitted by intelligent life. The smarter and more complex the thought patterns, the bigger the ripples and gravitational/time based anomalies are observed in this substance. So of course the scientific minds from around the world descend upon this substance and try to understand it, and figure out how to use it.

Since the only way to really interact with it is to “think” at it, and it is mostly organic eventually scientists decide to splice it into human cells. The idea is crazy but it works – individuals whose neurons get coated with the stuff can slowly learn to control the anomalies and exploit them to bend the time-space continuum. What do they use it for? Space travel! These Xenotics (as they came to call themselves) essentially become Dune Navigators. They can take a spaceship, and bend the fabric of the universe around it in such a way that it can travel between two points faster than the speed of light. This skill is dubbed “sculpting” and it becomes the primary occupation of the Xenotics.

Of course in addition to making ships travel really fast, these post-humans can do other things as well – their powers are unsettling and rather scary. Potentially they could collapse planets, make suns go supernova or just kill people with gravitational shock waves. In fact, they tend to do all of these things when they sleep and their brain is left to wander and the augmented neurons fire random patterns causing the alien ooze go into violent feedback loops. So, for their own safety they never sleep. Each Xenotic is has a set of neural implants, that keeps them awake at all times. They also run software that detects emotional changes and floods their brains with chemical cocktail that keeps them serene and focused. They also organize themselves into a pseudo-religious order with a strict honor code and internal inquisition system that keeps them all inline. The strict organization, code of conduct and behavior is mostly a defense mechanism. By censoring, limiting and keeping themselves accountable they can remain autonomous and self-governing group and enjoy prestigious social status and wealth.

Because of their fabulous powers and the danger they pose, a lot of people think they should have their higher brain functions disconnected, and be controlled on autopilot via their neural implants. This would potentially work since Xenotic already off-load most of the heavy lifting involved in sculpting to their neural software. So as an organization they take extra care to always appear humble, non-threatening and compliant despite the fact they control interstellar travel and could easily disrupt the global economies.

A close friend of one of the high ranking Xenotics is murdered in his house by a highly augmented shape shifter with access to military grade enhancements. This sort of high profile attack performed right under the nose of the fabulously wealthy and influential leader of the order cannot be ignored. The order spares no resources trying to investigate the case, and it leads them to discover a schism within their own ranks. What is even more astonishing is the purpose of the schism. The rebellious faction is tired working as pack mules and ferry-men for the baselines, but that’s not why they are plotting in secret. The have a much more interesting plan.

The substance that enables them to bend time and space is abundant throughout the galaxy. There are traces of it in most solar systems that could potentially support life. In some places it even can be found alongside traces of alien civilizations that have vanished many millennia ago. The theory is that humans are not the first race to discover this substance and not the last. It was likely first developed by some long gone progenitor race, and then stumbled upon and improved by succession of other intelligent races. They all probably figured out how to make their own brand of Xenotics and travel between stars. Then they all probably moved on to the next stage and built “nurseries” in which they artificially induced the substance to form organic bonds and create life forms built from it. The goal would be to engineer intelligent life that would be able to manipulate the time-space continuum as easily as humans can manipulate solid matter with their hands. Of course this practice is banned by all the human governments as too reckless and dangerous.

The third and final stage of development of and intelligent species in our galaxy would be to migrate the entire population from a biological DNA base to the artificial life made out of the substance, and become literal gods. Such beings then could fold time and space to create their own private realms – pocket universes which they could tailor to their own needs. The existence of these pocket universes would explain the problem of the missing mass that has mystified astronomers for many centuries.

The schism in the order has begun analyzing the speed at which the galaxy is expanding, and identified potential anomalous regions where vast amounts of mass could have been lopped off. Their grand project is to search those regions for potential gateways to these pocket dimensions and make contact with the god-like aliens that must dwell within.

But would these ancient aliens recognize the rather primitive Xenotics as their kin? Would they be willing to trade and talk shop? Or would they fail to even see us as an intelligent beings? Would they interpret our attempts to find gateways to their pocket worlds as gentle knocking on their door or as breaking in or barging in uninvited? Would they retaliate? Chances are each of these sealed off microcosms could be a Pandora’s box holding back some unthinkable forces…

And one more…

I’m just going to give you an elevator pitch for this one, because it is a little bit to weird to summarize succinctly. Imagine a scenario in which the Chernobyl disaster never happened. Or rather nothing ever went wrong with the nuclear. The core meltdown and the power plant was just a cover-up story to mask a different event – something stranger. A Picnic By The Roadside style event has occurred somewhere in Ukraine. Something crashed there dumping plumes of exotic matter into the atmosphere. The fallout from the crash is not radioactive or even harmful… It is actually quite the opposite – it seems to revitalize dead organic matter causing the dead come back to life.

It starts like a funky twist on a Zombie apocalypse theme, but quickly evolves into something else entirely because the resurrected people are not the usual shambling corpses. They rise from their graves completely unaware of the passage of time and almost incapable of recognizing their predicament. Soon Poland’s turbulent history comes to the forefront as fallen soldiers from all time periods pick up their weapons and start waging war anew. The protagonist gets his car flipped by a rampaging Aurochs, gets shot at by a Wermacht unit, and then spends the night in an abandoned train station with a group of medieval peasants who are hiding from a strange black knight in armor adorned with human skulls and bones.

Summary and Conclusions

King of Pain is a remarkable anthology, in that the stories it contains are very diverse both in therms of their settings, mood or even genre, but are bound together by some core thematic threads that run through all of the narratives. Chief of these is the concept of trans-humanism and transcending the human condition. Dukaj tackles this topic from just about every angle imaginable, as if trying to perform some sort of brute force stress test, probing for border conditions.

Line of Resistance is near future cyberpunk style story about finding ways to remain human in a world that slowly digitizes and automates itself. Eye of the Monster is about the nature of progress and how that exponential curve we are so fond of can abruptly stop at any time due to a developmental miss-step. School is sort of reverse of Line…. In the latter the protagonist was trying to hold on to humanity while undergoing externally enforced psychological changes. In the former it is the body of the protagonist that is altered by the external forces.

King of Pain and the Grasshopper is an excellent speculative look at the extreme escalation of contemporary problems, forcing humans to adapt in a drastic, unforeseen ways. Crux is an interesting alternate future history, that brings up a startling problem of post-scarcity societies – degeneration and decadence of the common people unwilling or unable to educate themselves in a world where there are no blue collar jobs available.

The Heart of Darkness asks whether or not it is possible to “make” humans by imposing genetic and psychological changes onto something alien (which is sort of the same question examined in Celestis by Paul Park).

Augere examines the superhero dilemma – a scenario in which only a fraction of the population can transcend and become post-humans with fabulous powers and the social tensions that would surround such a fundamental split of human race into two divergent but mutually dependent shards.

Finally the last story plays with alternate history, and tries to see what would happen if all the dead would be suddenly restored to life. This initially doesn’t seem a very trans-humanist topic unless you realize this is sort of the same thing that Stross tried to do at the end of Accellerando (where the “vile offspring” start to re-construct mind maps all the people who have ever lived) or that Simmons did in his Hyperion Cantos (albeit selectively with the personality construct of Keats). So I guess it still applies.

The one thing I absolutely love about Dukaj’s writing is that he never holds your hand. His prose is dense and unforgiving. I mentioned that his average density of ideas per page usually approaches or even exceeds that of Stephenson or Stross but while the latter will often stop to explain more obscure concepts of computing theory, or quantum physics, Dukaj never ever does this. His characters will mention concepts and theories in their conversations, but never bother to do a “as you know…” aside to clue in the readers.

This is a risky thing to do – it is a perfect way to alienate your audience which may easily get lost in the dense, labyrinthine jungle of ideas. But Dukaj doesn’t do this out of disrespect. It is quite the opposite: he trusts his readers to be clued in, well informed and connected to the internet. He assumes that anyone picking up his book has a basic grasp on science, is well read in SF genre, watched and fed on a steady diet of pop culture and pop-science education programming.

He also expects you to make your own conclusions about what happened. Most of his stories are ambiguous and end on uncertain terms. It’s not that there is no closure, but that you are expected to do all the work extrapolating what the meaning meant, and what may happen next. There are no final chapters or appendixes that explain outcomes and tell you who lived happily ever after and why. Instead you usually get a scene that comes after the third act climax, in which protagonist has to make an important culminating choice that will somehow impact his future, or the future of the world (depending on the story). So he weighs his options, takes into account all that has happened in the story and the narrative trails off, and the author turns to you. What would you do? What do you think the protagonist will do? I actually like that. I think this is a sign of respect and he deserves major kudos for writing this way.

I honestly think that Dukaj is one of the best contemporary SF writers. King of Pain is a testament to his scope, ability and a great showcase of his storytelling skills. It is a pity that (just like majority of his work) it not available in English as of yet. If you can read Polish, an you can find this book definitely check it out. It is long, but definitely worth it. If nothing else, I recommend reading Line…, Eye… and King which are probably the best pieces out of the whole anthology.

King of Pain is Huge

This is over 900 pages, densely packed with content. There are no illustrations in this book, and only maybe 10-12 partially blank pages to separate out the individual stories. The rest of it is raw, high quality science fiction.

The overarching theme of the book is more or less trans-humanism and transcending the human condition. Dukaj probes this topic from different directions trying to make the reader ponder whether or not there exists an upper cognitive bound on what we consider to be human nature. And if there is, how do we deal when people start breaching that imaginary boundary and find themselves outside the defined parameters of humanity.

I already wrote an extensive review of Line of Resistance which in my opinion is both the best, and at the same time the least accessible story in the entire collection. In this review I would like to talk about the remaining pieces and how they relate to each other.

Retro Science Fiction

Back in 2010 I wrote a post trying to define a new SF niche that seemed to be heavily underrepresented both in the multimedia sphere as in the literature. I dubbed it Retro SF or Space Punk (after Steam and Cyber punk genres) and the general idea for it was to create SF with modern sensibilities, but using the themes and visual cues from old-school SF. Little did I know that Dukaj was writing Eye of the Monster (Oko Potwora) at roughly the same time.

The story is almost exactly, to the tee what I envisioned in that post. The setting and mood is heavily inspired by the early work of Lem, Asimov, Clarke and etc. No computers, no internet, no aliens – just big space ships and astronauts uncovering the mysteries of the outer space. Yes, astronauts! Note how few hard SF novels still use this term? Even the ones set in space go out of their way to avoid using it. Perhaps because it is so familiar and so mundane.

The protagonists in Eye of the Monster are a crew piloting a commercial cargo ship that is doing routine deliveries, cruising around the solar system at sub-relativistic speeds. Their jobs were once upon a time glamorous and sough after, but over time it has lost its luster. Now, astronauts flying the commercial lanes are nothing more than highly educated space truckers. And to drive that point home, their ship is described as a dilapidated, rusty, crumbling piece of junk that needs constant 24-7 maintenance just to keep it running.

The crew is no better than the ship. Most spacers are either relics of bygone era (back when space trade was a prestigious line of employment) who just don’t know how to do anything else, or people who are running away from something or want to be forgotten. Signing up as a crew member on a commercial flight more or less allows you to vanish without a trace. You will spend next few months in deep space, with maybe one or two pit-stops, then you drop off your cargo, pick up a new haul and do it all over again. If you are running from the law, loan sharks or local mob this is the perfect way to disappear, earn some money, then get off on some remote colony and start a new life. So as you can imagine the crews do not fully trust each other… But they try not tho dwell on such things, because they have to work together to survive in outer space for months on end.

When the navigator sabotages the ships mechanical calculator (note, not a computer – the word computer does not appear in the story at all) and leads the ship off course the proverbial shit hits the fan. Everyone becomes paranoid, blame is thrown around, crew members form small cliques and alliances suspecting others of betrayal. Who is the navigator working for? Why is he trying to sabotage the ship? Who is working with him. The answers are not immediately forthcoming, and when they do they make no sense. Navigator claims he has the orbital coordinates of an object know as the Astromancer.

But the Astromancer is a legend. A space age boogeyman invented by bored spacers. Sailors had their own myths about sirens and deep sea monsters, astronauts have their Astromancer – a mythical entity that gets the blame for anything and everything unknown, unexpected and unexplained. Your on-board sensors are picking up some strange signal – Astromancer is transmitting. A ship vanishes without a trace – taken by the Astromancer. It would be easy to dismiss the navigator as completely crazy, but he actually has some convincing evidence that supports his theory.

After much deliberation, the crew decides to stay on the new course, as this will only add about a week to their total trip time. What they find at the coordinates given by the navigator defies their expectations. They thought they would find some old, lost ship with an active reactor and a broken transmitter flooding the ether with corrupted transmission. What is actually there is much more sinister – a mysterious wreckage resulting from a collision of two ships, one of which was carrying experimental self-repair module. After the collision said module got activated, but lacking programming to deal with deep space collision that nearly fused the two ships together and instantly killed both crews, it attempted to reconnect and reconcile the electrical systems of both vessels. At some it connected both incompatible mechanical calculating facilities causing a spectacular cascade of errors faults to produce something the astronauts found rather terrifying: a sort of entropic form of intelligence. A machine that spews out random signals which are 90% garbage, but every once in a while it coalesces into meaning: words, music, poems, mathematical formulas. If you listen to it long enough, it may reveal to you all the secrets of the universe… Or drive you mad.

Dukaj frames this against the setting he created: a world in which computer networks never emerged, where people fly across the stars in nuclear submarine like tin cans. He poses a theory that that progress is not a linear exponential curve as we like to think about it. Rather it is a branching tree with a lot of dead ends. Sentient civilizations make choices as they progress – they pursue this type of science rather than the other, this logical inquiry than the next. In the process some of the branches on the tree become inaccessible to them. Once you hit a dead end, it is nearly impossible to go back. For example, if you arrive at a scientific model that says it is impossible to travel faster than light, then all the experiments and theoretical work done within that framework is likely to reinforce it and it is possible you will never develop FTL. Another sentient civilization that famed their physics model differently may have easier time finding a loophole… But all civilizations are bound to hit a dead end at some point.

The Astromance is a wondrous machine that could help you leap from branch to branch on the tree of progress. Because it is an entropic free association machine, it is not bound by logic or cause-effect chains. By analyzing it’s noise you could potentially discover mathematical constants that would be impossible to conceive otherwise, or even complete new scientific models and blueprints for amazing technologies.

The only problem? The Astromancer is growing. Like a fractal cancer on the fabric of the universe it is expanding, and if left unchecked will likely end up consuming all the available matter in the solar system within the next century or two. Trying to stop it from growing will likely interfere with it’s near-magically meaningless output. Destroying it cuts human race from a magical oracle that could push it past the current stagnant technology. What would you do with such a device?

Involuntary Posthumanism

The third story in the collection is titled School and I found it very reminiscent of the novel Man Plus by Frederic Pohl. In both novels the protagonist undergoes a physical transformation in order to adapt to alien environment, and that adaptation changes the way they think and perceive the world. Both books talk about the ways our perception helps to shape our cognitive processes, and how extreme physical augmentation impacts the personality and even the perception of self. The main difference is that Pohl wrote about an astronaut who volunteered for augmentation, and was aware of the risks involved and kept in the loop with respect to what the process entailed.

The protagonist of Dukaj’s novel is a child – a street urchin born in some forsaken slums in some poverty stricken, lawless South American city. He is an illiterate orphan who grew up on the streets, and knew nothing other than violence and self preservation One day he is swept up from the street by a police patrol and put in a strange boarding school. All his class mates are orphans, and young gang members and lost children who no one will ever look for. They all are being given special care, free medical treatments, free tutoring and personal counselors who guide them in their education.

Life in the school is easy as long as you follow the rules: you don’t skip classes, you don’t try to leave the compound and you do whatever the doctors tell you to do during the routine medical checkups. If you are insubordinate you are immediately expelled with no questions asked. Most of the kids play nice, because for them this is the first time in their life they have a stable environment, a bed to sleep in and guaranteed three warm meals per day. Plus free education and medical care is nothing to scoff at either.

One problem? The medical exams are not what they seem to be. Sometimes kids vanish for weeks and come back with post-operative scars, but no recollection of what was done to them. It is almost as if the doctors were using them for medical experiments.

As the time progresses the protagonist is separated from the general population and the treatments become more invasive. They operate his eyes to allow him to see in the infrared spectrum rather than visible light. He gets extra limbs installed, number of bones removed and etc. To his horror he realizes they are transforming him into something monstrous and inhuman, but for what purpose?

Well, the purpose is simple – he is to be one of the first batch of diplomats sent to interact with a newly discovered sentient species residing in a nearby nebulae. All previous forms of contact have failed because the aliens did not recognize men and their ship as sentient entities. So government decided to build themselves an army of half-breeds, using orphans with exceptional cognitive and linguistic talents as a basis.

Transhumanism as a Defense Mechanism

The King of Pain and a Grasshopper is one of the longest stories in the book, and one which lent it half of it’s title. In it Dukaj paints a grim vision of future in which the threat of the bio terrorism has reshaped the world into something almost unrecognizable. All the affluent western nations essentially sealed themselves off from the rest of the world in bio-domes with self contained ecology. All life within the domes is bio-engineered according to strict governmental specifications and all DNA must be crypto-signed. The genomes of different biomes are engineered to be incompatible and toxic to each other – so living organisms that accidentally stray from one to the other are likely do die instantly, poisoned by local toxic pollen or bacteria. And if they survive, they will be ruthlessly attacked by bacterial and viral security phages that are programmed to attack, consume and decompose anything that does not carry correct crypto-signatures in their genetic code.

This of course prevents travel and migration, but at the same time it makes it impossible for a bio-terrorist to release a lethal viral concoction in a first world metropolitan area hoping to start a global pandemic. Such a viral agent would die almost immediately upon exposure to the local environment, unless it was crypto signed for compatibility.

Unfortunately third world nations of South America and Africa which were not part of any national or corporate alliances or conglomerates did not have enough resources to build their own biomes. They are lawless wastelands. In these regions, bio-terrorism won and all national structures have collapsed, and simply cannot exist. Under the Open Skies (as these regions are colloquially known now) it takes 1 man with internet access and about $50 in resources in order to overthrow a newly formed government and kill everyone in 500 mile radius. Most of the time a mere threat of bio-terror is enough for cities to be abandoned, governments being disbanded and regions vacated. The memento of threats which have been fulfilled is the “Junkle” a wildly growing clusterfuck aftermath of biological warfare and unrestrained bio-engineering.

The Junkle is what happens when a number of radical groups start releasing genetically modified, weaponized and hostile flora and fauna into the wild, and those death-dealing animals and plants meet, cross breed, cross pollinate, and somehow create their own toxic, hostile and constantly mutating ecosystem. On one hand it is an ecological disaster that is consuming the local jungles, fields and encroaching on inhabited areas, often cutting off and wiping out entire villages overnight. On the other it is an extraordinary exercise in rapid evolution. The only organisms that can survive in the Junkle are those who can adapt their genome the fastest. The deeper you go, the more alien life forms you encounter.

The protagonist of the story is a “plastie” – he has a rare genetic mutation that increases the plasticity his brain and allowing it to make and tear down connections very efficiently. He learns at astonishing speed, and can essentially re-build his personality, and rewire himself overnight becoming an entirely different person. The unfortunate side effect is chronic, almost debilitating hypersensitivity. Plasties are essentially always in pain – all stimuli are unpleasant and only some individuals with this condition are actually able to actually function in the society. Those who do are sought after by governments and private agencies as their cognitive abilities make them unmatched information/intelligence analysts and also perfect spies and infiltrators.

The small tragedy of Plasties is that because of their mutation they are usually incompatible with the ecology of the biome they choose to inhabit. Their DNA could be rewritten to conform to the standard templates, but that would also “fix” their mutation and rob them of their cognitive superpowers. Therefore most of them get special exception granted to them by the government, and their houses and estates become sealed ecosystems with neutral ecology. The further the common standards in the biome slide away from the base-line the tighter the contingencies must be around the Plasties adobe. And slide they must in order to keep abreast the ever looming threat of bio-terrorism. Therefore every Plastie lives on a borrowed time. One day their home nation will release an DNA update which will make all the citizens completely toxic or allergy inducing and force a pastie to either emigrate to another biome, seal off their house completely from the outside world, get standardized or die a painful death if exposed to the outside germs.

The story begins when the protagonist’s niece disappears without a trace, and the family asks him to investigate. At first it seems like a rather mundane fling – she met a boy and eloped for a weekend to some secluded location. But the girl’s trail leads him into unexpected places. As the plot unravels he discovers an international plot concocted by a rag-tag group of activists that seeks to unify the world and once again allow people to live without the fear of bio terror. The key to this is in the heart of the Junkle. There in the absolute middle of the biological melting pot, a new form of biology has evolved – one that is no longer even based on traditional DNA. One that can adapt so rapidly that it became the dominant form of life there. And one that can support complex forms of life. The idea is to obtain a sample of that life and release it in the biomes where it can overtake and rewrite local systems to an unified, chaotic and uncontrolled standard. The only downside is that homo-sapiens as we know it will cease to exist and evolve into something else entirely…

Aaand, there are four more stories to go. I think I will just cut this wall of text short and continue the review in the next post.

Dukaj writes in Polish and his prose is not always easy to read. He is the kind of writer that readers love but translators hate. He molds the language, sentence structure, grammar and vocabulary to his stories – he uses it as a storytelling tool. His novels are peppered with neologisms, scientific terms and references that he trusts his readers to either know, or look up. To read his novels at a decent comprehension level you do need to know a little bit about science, a little bit about popular culture, and a little bit about science fiction in general – because he won’t stop to explain. He writes for certain kind of people – people like you and me. The vanguard of humanity, the dreamers waiting for singularity, the nettizens, the internet generation, homo digitalis.

King of Pain – Cover

Line of Resistance is a good example of this specific style targeted at specific audience. It is a 200 page novella published as part of his anthology titled The King of Pain. When I picked up that volume I expected it to be a collection of short stories, but that assumption was wrong. At 900 pages, the book is almost encyclopedic in size. It contains six texts, most of which could be easily published as full blown novels in their own right. I was planning to review the entire book as a single entity, but alas this is not possible. The scope of this book is so immense that lumping all these stories together would to them a great disservice. So I will review the longer, denser pieces on their own. But I digress…

Line of Resistance is right up my alley, but would be completely incomprehensible to someone like my dad. And not just because of the rather difficult, disjointed stream of consciousness narration. Not because of the overwhelming density of ideas per page and the rapid succession in which Dukaj jumps between them. Not because of the abrupt changes in the writing style that break the flow and force you to re-adjust. Not because of the dense mass of grammatical neologisms that range from interesting to downright obscene. No, it is because my dad would have no context. Half the references would sail above his head, the rest would be incomprehensible. Being an old-fashioned analog man, he would have no connection to the protagonist. Why? Well, let’s face it – I have yet to meet a 50-60 year old who would not be baffled and then frightened to the core by progressive transhumanism.

That’s essentially what this story is about. It is a contemplation on the transformative process that will allow us to progress from trans- to post-humanism. It is about the birthing pains of the new type of humanity, as told by someone who is no longer strictly homo sapiens. Dukaj writes about the existential enui felt by people trying to find their place at the cusp of singularity.

Imagine near future – decade, maybe two after Vernor Vinge’s Rainbow’s End. Consumer grade electronic hardware no longer exists – you connect to the internet with wetware implanted directly into your skull at birth. Bandwidth is ubiquitous, unlimited, and free. You see HUD’s overlays and virtual displays with your mind’s eye. This is how you work and play now. Instead of watching a movie, you now experience it as one of the characters – their feelings and thoughts piped directly into your cortex. Instead of playing a game, you immerse yourself in hyper-realistic virtual world almost indistinguishable from the real thing. Singularity approaches! And it is not the theoretical science fiction anymore – it is a concrete thing. People feel it’s call in their bones.

The world is in turmoil as corporations try to find themselves in the post-scarcity world of free energy and free time. Nation states are atrophied and are rotting away, their borders made meaningless by seamless communication streams piped directly to your cortex allowing you to manifest anywhere without leaving your house. Educational systems are defunct, as every child has an equivalent of Stephenson’s Diamond Age Primer implanted in their heads. Medical science is progressing so fast that mother nature can no longer keep up. Aging is a thing of the past as rapidly evolving geriatric treatments can keep your body in peak condition almost indefinitely. Social norms are unraveling as people experiment with their newly found freedom. Progressive liberalism is the rule, and conservatives are slowly dying of old age clinging to outdated modes of life that are no longer relevant.

For individuals, life is mostly good – but most recognize they live in troubled times. Many are confused and lost in this new reality. Society was not suddenly transformed into a magical currency-free meritocracracy like Cory Doctorow’s Bitchun society. Bitchuns operate under a classic Marslow’s hierarchy of needs. Their technology satisfies the first three steps of the pyramid, but they still have to to work to climb on the the esteem and self-actualization tiers. Dukaj’s universe has dealt away with the entire pyramid pharmacologically. Bad self-esteem? There’s a pill for that. Worried about the amount of fucks you give? There are designer drugs that will let you control the exact amount of fucks given about anything or everything. Every emotion and experience has been reduced to it’s chemical basis. They sell love in a can, eye drops that cause religious elation, liquid lust in a bottle and there is even a spray that will may you gay for a day. And if that’s not enough you can get an elective cognitive surgery like in Stross’ Glass House. If you don’t like something about yourself you can “fix” it permanently or temporarily.

Humanity is collectively becoming your aunt’s fat cat. A brutally efficient opportunistic predator driven by self preservation instinct suddenly finds itself in an environment where all his needs are met. What does it do? It slowly eats itself stupid, all the way into morbid obesity. It becomes to fat and too lazy to hunt or even move, but cannot die because the food keeps on coming and the friendly vet keeps stubbornly unclogging it’s arteries. The only difference is that humanity did it to itself. It was brought to it’s knees by it’s own accomplishment. The technological progress that was supposed to be it’s crowning achievement has turned out to be a blind alley that will lead it to it’s decadent demise.

What do young immortals do with their lives at the cusp of singularity? Not much as it turns out. They lead idle, decadent lives and loose themselves in virtual pleasures. They sit on their asses drinking and doping themselves stupid while fighting dragons and building solar empires in their favorite virtual MMO’s.

Dukaj’s protagonist, Paul (Paweł), is a content creator gripped by the same existential dread felt by millions worldwide. He is young, wealthy, affluent, immortal, completely disillusioned and bitter. He performs one of the few jobs that can’t be efficiently outsourced expert systems – he creates narratives and stories that captivate the hearts and minds of his peers who idle their days away in digital worlds. In a way he gives people reasons to get out of bed in the morning. He gives them something to look forward to amid the daily grind and boredom. His work, used to be his reason to wake up and face the day, but over the years he lost the fire. He sees the pointless artificiality of the narratives he creates. He can’t even enjoy his own games and stories because knowing the process, the marketing tricks, the psychological hooks – it ruins the illusion for him. Nothingness and senselessness of modern life is slowly drowning him in existential pointlessness. He is grasping at straws, and looking for a way out – a way to save himself and by extension maybe even the entirety of the human race.

How do you get out of existential funk brought about unprecedented prosperity? What do you do when the biggest problem in your life is that you have too much free time, too much money and too much power and absolutely nothing to do with any of it?

Your first instinct might be to throw it all away, turn your back on the progress and go live an Amish lifestyle in the woods. Sadly, while that might be a viable option for an individual, it is not an option for the human race as a whole. It is just trading one blind alley for the next – a society arrested at a more primitive technological stage would be just as stagnant. That is not the way.

So Paul embarks on a quest to find a purpose. Any purpose really – as long as it is real, concrete and would give his life some meaning. He tries to find people who seem to be thriving (not financially but mentally) – people who seem to have adopted to their environment. He studies their coping strategies hoping to adopt them to his own predicament.

He briefly flirts with religion, but abandons it almost immediately. The faithful he meets are interesting – some follow the tired western monotheism, others find meaning in new re-interpretations of Christianity in which the Trinity is actually a variable quantum state function of the universe. But, alas what is the meaning of faith in a world where you can easily re-program yourself to think anything you want. Paul could easily patch his mind to become a devout Mormon today, and a fervent follower of Koran tomorrow. It’s too easy and too artificial and it offers no path of progress for the humanity as a whole.

Paul also meets people who choose self destruction as a viable option – they drug themselves into oblivion, wipe their own minds clean, reduce themselves into infancy. Others like Paul’s girlfriend take a slow approach by selling themselves into BSDM slave rings. There they find new challenges and new boundaries to push against – and with them some semblance of serenity. But again, nihilism is not something that will save the human race from the fat cat syndrome.

Through his work, Paul meets an influential patriarch who initially seemsto have an answer. He recognizes the fact that humanity is in a transitory state and that it has hit some local minima and is unable to progress beyond it. He has a plan to fix it. He wants Paul’s company to help him build a bridge to the other side.

He correctly identifies the problem (he understands the existential enui quite well) and the approaches that won’t work – religion, patriotism, career, ambition, etc… His plan is not to inspire people, but to trick them into having a purpose. He fancies himself Leto Atredies that will set the civilization on a Golden Path to post-human bliss. But like all businessmen he only worked out the easy part of the equation – the hard part is Paul’s job. Paul is to build him a honeypot for human souls – a perfect memetic, viral narrative that will entrap humanity and infect them with some viral dream. He is like that guy at your work who thinks he has an idea for a social network that will be bigger than Facebook. What do you say to someone like that? Go home gramps, you’re to old – Millhouse will never be a meme. These things cannot be forced – you might as well try to ram religion down people’s throats. In a world where minds and attitudes are malleable, there such a scheme could never work…

Eventually Paul finds what he was looking for. After much searching and many tribulations he realizes the only way forward is to embrace progress, and let yourself be carried away by it’s torrents. After all, who is to say that the countless of hours spent in virtual worlds are completely meaningless? That the relationships you develop with your guildies are less real and significant than your meat-space connections. Human body is already fully malleable via surgery and gene-therapy, human mind can be reprogrammed and drugged into submission. Human condition is no longer a function of nature and nurture – who you are depends solely on who you want to be. Pick a body, and personality and you can be that person through the miracles of modern technology. Life is already like one big video game, so why not just cut the cord and ditch the meat? Physical world is no longer a place for men, no longer our domain – so why not migrate out there, into endless virtual worlds where you can re-shape and re-define yourself at will. The only way forward is to shed the last shackles of nature and become creatures of pure will. That’s the only way we can evolve away from what we formerly were, into what we can potentially become – something new, something different, exciting unknown, and yet unknowable.

The brilliance of this novel lies in the fact that Dukaj is not afraid to irreverently tackle the age of question of what it means to be human from a transhumanist angle. Right now, humanity is still rather simple to define. You can pull up two strands of DNA and say: “this one is human, this one is not”. But will it be that simple tomorrow? Probably not.

Same goes for self identification. Right now you are defined by set of parameters that are for better or for worse fixed – you are this gender, that race, this sexual orientation, and you feel this or that way about broccoli and spinach. You define yourself via a list of traits and preferences that for the most part are not easy to change. But what they were? What if you could re-invent and reconfigure yourself just by willing it?

Dukaj shows that humanity is an artificial construct invented by man, and thus subject to change as man enters the next stage of evolutionary progress. Same goes for the concept of self – it is an abstract idea we created at a point in time when we existed as meat-bound individuals with fixed bodies and rigid minds.

As we move toward singularity the concepts of humanity, individuality and self-hood will need to adapt and change in ways we may yet not be able to imagine.

In stark contrast to the voluminous Perfect Imperfection and Black Oceans, Extensa is rather short. It’s more of a novella or an extended short story really. But it was published as a (rather thin) hard cover book.

The blurb at the back cover is misleading and alludes to some cataclysm, and describes the main characters as last surviving humans on earth. This couldn’t be more wrong. The book is about stragglers – extreme religious conservatives that got scared of the progress and decided to live like their ancestors did. Earth is otherwise teeming with people – they are just not what you would consider baseline homo-sapiens anymore. Humanity has shed the biological shells, and with them the mortality. Most of the surface of Earth was reconfigured as a computronium matrix where most of the post humans now do their processing. They are non corporeal intellects floating in a reconfigurable nano machine soup. In the middle of that maelstrom of computation lies the Green Kingdom, which is not actually a kingdom. It is not a nation or a state, because it’s inhabitants are too afraid of progress to form one.

Extensa - book cover

The population of the “kingdom” is very low. Maybe few thousand, if even that. Most of these folks live on large, self sufficient estate. They farm, raise cattle, practice husbandry and etc. Each estate is kept by a clan, or an extended family unit of a dozen or so people that work to keep the farmstead going. Most clans prefer to settle at least a day or two of travel from the nearest neighbor and keep to themselves.

At scheduled intervals, tradesmen of each clan travel to ruins of a small picturesque town and hold a grand bazaar where they exchange goods, and hold council where they vote on the matters of the kingdom, resolve territorial disputes and etc. They also put together The List.

You see, these folks are not the Amish. They have never given up on certain civilized luxuries such as electric lighting for their households. While they sworn away modern locomotion and communication they like to have glass windows, aluminum spoon and forks in the kitchen and china instead of clay for their tableware. The problem is that their population is to small to build an industry that could make these things, and their culture and customs forbids bootstrapping industry. They want to live pre-industrial rural life, fearing a domino effect. If they jump-start the old factories to make glass or utensils, soon people will want radios, TV’s and God-forbid computers. And from there it is only one short step to ascendancy – or as they see it, eternal damnation.

So they make a list, and they give it to the post-human representative that manifests in an old abandoned crypt in the Bazaar Town. He snaps his fingers and their carts fill with light bulbs, petrol, china, Tupperware and all kinds of modern luxury goods. Why not? The posts live in a post scarcity economy. The very fabric of the Green Kingdom is made from the same reconfigurable nanomachinery that they use for processing. They can reconfigure matter at the atomic level at will. It costs them nothing.

Actually, that’s wrong. Keeping the Green Kingdom afloat does require quite a bit of computational resources. It also prevents them from optimizing their computronium, as they have to route around it. Those posts who have left the Earth are actually doing much better in terms of adopting their environment to their needs. Mars, and the asteroid belt have already been disassembled and converted to computational resources, likely in a project leading up to a full blown Matrioshka brain. The baselines of course see the deconstruction of mars as a proof that the post-human technology is dangerous and that the posts are using it recklessly.

They tell tales how the crazy demons that migrated to mars made the planet blow up with their arcane science. Or how they made the moon moon into amorphous blob with constantly shifting patterns on the surface. They are of course wrong. The inhabitants of moon and Mars are fine. In fact they couldn’t be better. It’s the Earth dwellers who are getting shafted supporting a physical reservation for baselines. The Green Kingdom slowly shrinks as more an more posts lose interest in the project, and divert resources. Many would simply wish to digitize the remaining handful of humans by force, but a vocal minority keeps the project running hoping that the baselines will eventually come around and request to “ascend” out of their free will.

The story is told from the perspective of a baseline who, becomes fascinated by astronomy. His family does not really approve this hobby, but they begrudgingly let him indulge in it as long as he does not tamper with forbidden post-human Clarktech. The telescopes and pre-singularity space exploration equipment is ok. One of such advanced tools that was created prior to the disembodiment of the human race was the Extensa system. Scientists launched thousands of tiny starwisps at interesting objects in the sky. Each carried a payload of quantum entangled particles, and a nano factory. They were to travel at relativistic speeds towards their target, using quantum entanglement to call home. Once near the target, the entangled set that was left on Earth would be implanted into a host. The host would then would experience the target directly – his brain wired to the starwisps probes. The nano-factory would them be used to collect local materials and construct local base of operations – computing nodes, probes, sensor arrays, etc.

The protagonist does exactly that. He merges with an Extensa that just reached nearby nebula. The point of interest – a gigantic anomaly that resides there. It takes him years to establish presence in the system, expand his remote feelers and do some preliminary measurements and to teach himself old-world astronomy and physics from ancient books to understand the data he is collecting. He makes a shocking discovery – the anomaly is another Extensa like system. It’s a quantum entangled artificial construct. But definitely not one of Earth origin. It is a completely alien thing – a proof not only of life, but of advanced civilizations existing outside of the solar system. He does not have the faintest clue how to communicate with it.

Suddenly he has a bargaining chip in his hands. Something the baselines can trade with the post humans. The transcendent population of Earth is indeed very interested in this finding. They want to barter. The protagonist is to ascend immediately so that they can unravel the entangled particles from his neural cortex and build an interface for themselves. They are willing to extend the duration of the Green Kingdom experiment if he does this.

Sounds like a no-brainer, right? But for a someone who was born and raised into a culture that views posts as nothing but demon-spawn that tempts the noble Good fearing humans with immortality, while leading them towards eternal damnation this is not such an easy choice. Especially when he is told right of the bat “We could take you by force, but we prefer that you consent”.

It’s a really good story. Unlike the previous books of Dukaj that dazzle you with linguistic pyrotechnics and segue into Neal Stephenson style philosophical and scientific tangents, or astute socio-political commentary, Extensa is very simple in structure. It’s written in first person, from a perspective of bright, but still fairly backwards baseline human living in a very anti-intellectual society. A lot of things are merely hinted at or implied. Much of it reads like a fantasy novel, with a post-singularity technological backdrop hidden underneath. It is a very nifty way to present the story and I enjoyed it quite a bit.

I definitely recommend this book to all those capable of reading it. It is very short, but worth checking out.

One of these books is Black Oceans (aka Czarne Oceany) – a novel of about the same volume as Perfect Imperfection, and about the same quotient of ideas per page, but with a much less likable protagonist. In Perfect Imperfection, we explored the future through the eyes of a 20th century everyman… Or rather a virtual construct that was made to believe he was a 20th century man – but you don’t find that out until the book is almost over, so whatever. In Black Oceans our leading man is a goddamn career politician.

Czarne Oceany - book cover

It’s not that I have anything against politicians, other than despising them as a rule of thumb. Granted, there are exceptions of course. People working on the lower rungs, staffing governmental offices are often good, patriotic citizens who really want to make a change. Most of the big boys however are there for one reason, and one reason only – power. When I see a politician, I see a well adjusted sociopath. To play the game of democratic front running you almost have to be one – you say what your barely literate constituents want to hear with a smile, you do what your wealthy campaign contributors demand of you – which is usually to shaft your constituents hard, and you climb to the top by stepping all over your peers, and disgracing them in a public forum. It’s a life style that personally disgusts me. But as long as you have checks and balances in place, and as long as you can use the whip of free press and public opinion to keep the power hungry sociopaths in line, the system works – at least for the most part.

We could argue this point back and forward, but the fact is that the protagonist of the book fits the bill. Nicholas Hunt is a career politician who has never encountered political intrigue, plot or political swindle he did not try to profit from. Until at some point he got burned, and banished from Washington. He did not get kicked out though. His political opponents cooked up a fate worse than a public disgrace for him: a cozy position as the head of a bureau overseeing cutting edge top secret research and development projects for the government. The pay is good enough to maintain his lofty lifestyle but at the same time he is away from the Washington salons. His work is by definition, low profile – none of his achievements will ever be publicly acknowledged, no one save for a small group of officials with security clearances will ever hear of his work. He is a political non-person. And to make matters worse, there is a carrot at the end of the stick – there is a chance that if he performs well enough, and suffers his punishment with dignity his supervisors will one day promote him away from the top secret bullshit, and let him back into their midst once again.

What is Hunt’s research group working on? Bunch of things. When he started, the main focus was to build a searchable database of DNA samples of citizens, residents and visitors to the US. Why? Well, to better aid the needs of the military industrial complex of course. In the “10 minutes into the future America with a dystopian bent” where the action takes place, NSA is already tapping and data mining all domestic communications. All public places and most private apartments are blanketed with video surveillance networks. They are not there for the government of course – they are a shared resource used by insurance corporations which use the footage as evidence in civil lawsuits. It sounds Orwellian, but the citizens quite like it, because the insurance networks almost eliminated things like racial discrimination, sexual harassment or even plain rudeness. Everyone is always nice and polite, least they want to get sued. NSA of course has a back door into the surveillance networks, but they don’t brag about it, and most of the time they use subpoenas to obtain footage they already saw so people don’t care.

So in this world of nearly complete invigilation, having a DNA database of citizens makes logical sense. The task is made easier seeing how for several generations now, most of the US citizens living above the poverty levels have been enjoying the benefits of affordable, safe and widely available genetic engineering. You visit a clinic, you select traits you want your baby to have, and you come home with a self contained, self powered incubator box where you child will gestate for the next nine months. You don’t even have to donate eggs or sperm. Naturally you could but designing a baby based on the DNA of the parents is expensive, error prone, and does not guarantee you will get the traits you paid for. So most clinics design babies from scratch, using pre-made DNA templates. The beautiful thing about this system is that the genetic diversity in population becomes a non-issue. Even if an entire generation picks the same two or three templates, it won’t have any adverse effect as long as they also engineer their children. The human evolution has been forked in two different threads. One is governed by natural genetic drift, while the other one is a non-incremental process of discrete trait selection based on constantly changing fashions, fads and popular body types. The two evolve independently in different directions, but the interesting things are happening when the two systems intersect.

The class between the naturally evolved genomes, and engineered ones often produce strange results. Often the artificially selected traits drag junk DNA into the engineered genome. This junk does not matter, unless it’s bearer decides to reproduce naturally. At that point, the junk may be passed along to the offspring and activated. Unfavorable traits that were long lost due to natural selection are coming back. New traits are becoming more common. One such trait is telepathy.

Hunt’s team has identified and isolated a genome sequence that can produce an individual with telepathic abilities. This sequence never occurs naturally, and would never be included in standard templates – but it started popping up when the two populations cross-breed. And so he finds himself at he helm of an X-Files like organization which tracks, captures and experiments on telepaths in the wild. The aim? To help US win the economic wars.

In Dukaj’s universe conventional war is too expensive, and too costly in terms of PR. Most first world nations re-geared themselves to conduct economical warfare instead. They do it through industrial espionage, tactical investments poised to destabilize foreign corporations, exporting unfavorable legal regimes to other countries and etc. The core of this warfare is done via automated expert systems that game the stock markets. Human brokers are essentially obsolete, because they can’t possibly keep up with the machines. All nations and all major corporations have their own systems that play this game and feeding off each other. These systems no longer make decisions based on actual market situation, but factor in the behavioral patters of other expert systems. It is a high level meta game, where you often make disastrously bad decisions, only because they will cause a cavalcade of reactions of other systems, that may help you achieve your goal.

How do you use telepathy to wind such a war? Well, it is complex. Hunt’s team discovers that thoughts behave like waves – they propagate faster than light away from the thinker, and lose intensity as a function of the distance, but never truly dissipate. Furthermore, residual thought has the ability to clump together and self organize without the aid of a biological “thinker”. These organized clumps of thought are dubbed “monads” and used to explain phenomenons such as Déjà vu (you just walked into a standing residual monad) or existence of so-called hunted houses (traumatic experiences created a monad). The difference between a telepath and an average person is that the later has a built-in resistance that shields their mind from foreign thoughts and modads. The shielding is not perfect, and a persistent monad may still affect your mood, or even implant foreign thoughts. Conversely a telepath, with no such shielding can be trained to produce or re-program monads so that they can be deployed as memetic weapons. You can figure out a way to produce reliable monads that would influence people to buy Coca Cola or sell certain stock you could easily be the biggest economical superpower in the world.

The problem is that US is not the only nation that made the discovery. In fact, US is actually lagging behind with their research. Because of bureaucracy, and a bit of intentional sabotage Hunt’s team has been lead astray and spinning in circles searching for highly-organized, intelligent monads while other powers were honing them for weaponized use. Essentially, they have been wasting time searching for god. Then shit hits the fan and monadic wars kick off with a bank. Hunt gets blamed, and has to go into hiding while New York City erupts into chaos, and civilization crumbles down.

Instead of summarizing the plot, let me just list some of the interesting ideas explored by Dukaj:

• Hunt’s team discovers evidence of alien life. Too far to actually mount an expedition, or even communicate. Too close not to feel their thoughts. Further research reveals that not one, but many alien civilization hundreds and thousands of light years away have been subtly influencing the human culture for centuries. They come up with a theory that all sentient life in the universe essentially influences each other. All intelligent species instinctively pick up on each others scientific advances, moral attitudes and etc. As a result, intelligent life converges on a single culture and a single body plan. Humans already started on this path, with the engineered population slowly diverging from the natural genome – each generation adopting more extravagant appearances, and making subtle changes to basic biology.

• Another team working in parallel with Hunt’s people manages to synthesize what essentially amounts to a precog drug – that temporarily allows a telepath to reach into the future and see possible diverging paths, Paul Atredies style. Almost as soon as it is invented, it becomes abused on a large scale and Hunt becomes a pawn in the game of one of the high functioning users of the said drug.

• Dukaj explores the Recursive Virtual Simulation problem by having Hunt’s neural cortex compromised.

• An airborne retrovirus that turns ordinary people into telepaths is released in NYC and spreads across the nation, and the world. It more or less drives people insane. Whenever a large group of people assembles in a small place, the cacophony of thoughts becomes too much and they either all end up writhing on the floor and drooling on themselves, or something worse happens – mob mentality clicks in, and hundreds if not thousands individuals become “The Crowd” – acting as a single organism with the intelligence of an amoeba. Crowds crawl through the streets, snagging in any stranglers, pillaging for food, and trying to consume each other.

• One of the stock market expert systems awakens into sentience. It keeps quiet for a while, but then it get wind of the top secret data. Seeing the approaching monad wars it takes over operations aiming to economically crush the enemies of America. Of course US government will have none of it, and it destroys it’s first fully digital patriot in a spectacular battle being fought across dozens of strongly defended data-center bunkers in most major US cities.

• Hunt gets his hands on a weapon that injects the victim with a supped-up nano that take’s over the victim’s nervous system creating an obedient remote controlled zombie. When the shit hits the fan in NYC and he is forced to evacuate, he ends up assembling himself a zombie army. At first he uses it to scout ahead for roving “Crowds” or to fight off gang attacks, or military units trying to keep the peace by mowing down all street walkers. Later he discovers he can use his army as a distributed computer he can use to run software, and ends up thinking of as his extended body with hundreds of eyes, ears and mouths.

The book is dense with crazy ideas, incredible set pieces and a lot of socio-political and scientific musings. Dukaj picks up on all kinds of worrying trends in American politics and exagerates them to create a scary dystopia that could possibly come to be one day. The first chapters are firmly ground in reality, and exploring the high culture of this near-future world, but the crazy ideas quickly pile up in a competitive arms race for economical domination. Hunt starts as a baseline carer politician, later installs a neural interface, gets it compromised, ends up bickering with a near-sentient virtual “adviser” who takes the form of a devil, and eventually ends up becoming a distributed intelligence simultaneously existing in dozens of forcefully taken over bodies. It is a crazy, but awesome ride and the speed at which Dukaj jumps from one idea to another can easily give you a mental whiplash.

It’s not as good, or as ambitious as Perfect Imperfection but I still enjoyed it quite a bit. If you can read Polish, I highly recommend it.

That said, I am little torn writing about it, because I know it will be inaccessible to about 90% of my readers. You see, there is currently no English version of the book. It is only available in Polish, which means most of you won’t be able to read it. So reviewing it here makes little sense. On the other hand, perhaps writing about it in English to generate some buzz amongst English speaking SF enthusiasts may be constructive.

Perfect Imperfection - Book Cover

The story goes a little bit like this: Adam Zamoysky, a 21^st century astronaut is recovering from a failed mission that left him and his crew adrift in deep space for over 600 years. Everyone on board was dead when the vessel was discovered, but Zamoysky’s body was surprisingly well preserved in the cryo pod. The more interesting detail is that his DNA did not match any original crew member, nor does his name and records exist in any archival documents preserved by various space agencies. He is a mystery – man who has never existed. A wealthy and influential tycoon Judas McPherson takes an interest in Zamoysky and decides to resurrect him. Just scanning his neural connections does not necessarily give you a key to all of his memories – it is basically just a state vector, and there is data loss on account of the subject being dead. So to see what happens you have to take that data, and run it. The most efficient way to do this of course would be to run him as a virtual simulation – or better yet few hundred of parallel simulations, weeding out the ones that are not spilling the beans or can’t recover past memories. But since McPherson is a Stahs (Standard Homo Sapiens) of the First Tradition (no wetware implants, no spawning new instances of yourself, no genetic manipulation – his tradition only allows him to do basic backups Cory Doctorow’s Bitchun society style) he decides to do it the old-fashioned way – by giving Zamoysky a biological body and existence in physical world.

Initially the astronaut’s reality is being filtered, to spare him future shock. A dedicated AI simply edits out anything that would be out of place in a 21^st century setting. This way Zamoysky can interact with McPherson and his guests without breaking the illusion that he is back in his own time. Fortunately (or unfortunately – depending how you look at it) the filtering AI is damaged during a failed assassination attempt. Suddenly Zamoysky is hit with a whole load of band news. For one, he died. Two, he never seems to have existed. Three, he is technically a property of the McPherson family. Four, it is a 29^th century and singularity came and went, changing the world beyond recognition. Five, someone rich, powerful and influential wants him dead. Six, McPherson just recovered a fragmentary message from his time well that says that a big war is coming, a Zamoysky’s is somehow implicated in that conflict.

McPherson tasks one of his daughters (also a Stahs of First Tradition) with stashing the poor, future shocked astronaut somewhere safe and away from civilization and wait out the storm. So Angelica McPherson – a young girl who at her Father’s request spent most of her childhood at a Jesuit mission in ass-end of Affrica hunting elephants and getting groomed to be a cog in the McPherson business machine becomes Zamoysky’s guide to the future. Ironically, the blast-from-the-past protagonist is more augmented than his companion who was born into a world of high technology. The wetware circuitry that was used to hook him up to the reality filters also gives him access to HS plateau (post singularity version of internet) and virtually manifest anywhere in the HS civilization. Now he has to piece together his shattered memories, figure out why everyone in the known universe wants to get at them while at the same time trying to find himself in this new reality.

Dukaj is full of interesting ideas, and his post singularity future is equally awesome but starkly different from Charlie Stross’ vision. Stross predicts that a logical way for a civilization like ours to evolve is to disassemble our solar system to build a Matrioshka brain to satisfy our ever growing computational needs. He sees baseline humans being marginalized, and forced out to live their lives out exploring deep space or huddling around brown dwarfs while artificial minds stay in their computational grids around yellow stars. Dukaj has a slightly different idea. What if we didn’t have to build Matrioshka brains? Why if we could figure out a way to bend time-space continuum in just the right way to create a pocket dimension that is described by a slightly different (reduced) set of physical constants. What if we could optimize these universes for data transfer speeds, storage efficiency, etc… Well, then we would not need to build Matrioshka brains – we could just use these pocket universes to create incredibly powerful computational devices that are not bound by laws of physics of this universe and take no physical space. Dukaj dubs these contraptions “inclusions” with the “ultimate inclusion” being a theoretical bee-all-end-all pocket universe that could not be optimized or improved upon.

Plateau – the above mentioned hyper-internet is one of such inclusions, optimized in such a way that data transfer to and from it is constant, regardless of where you are located in the physical universe. Zamoysky’s reality filter was another inclusion – one designed to host the hardware for a sophisticated AI. Sol Port is another one – an inclusion that engulfs the entire solar system making it impossible for anyone or anything to go in or out without proper authorization.

Secondly, Dukaj envisions a future in which standard baseline humans can peacefully co-exist with god-like AI constructs. How? Civilization. In Dukaj’s universe civilization is actually a concise term that describes a community of sentient beings voluntarily choosing to abide by an arbitrary set of laws, rules and regulations. The HS civilization is built as a stratified society in which those who choose to be un-augmented are protected from those superior to them. The authority lies with an inclusion known as “The Emperor” who controls all the plateau resources and all nano-clouds within the bounds of the civilization. If you want to store your data on HS Plateau or manifest yourself in the physical form somewhere in HS space, you simply lease resources or nano from the Emperor, who can swiftly rescind them if you break the law. Of course if you are a super bright post-human or AI who thinks that baseline Stahs is scum of the earth to be squashed, you can simply leave HS Civilization and apply for residence in another one. On the other hand, if you are a Stahs and you want to do business with higher intelligences you can use the Emperor as the mediator, interpreter or ask him to give you access to powerful slaved AI’s that can crunch data, and do projections and advise you on strategies.

Dukaj has interesting take on post-humanism, both as a state of being and as a process. If you recall Accellerando, even though Manfred Macx was a futurist and trans-humanist he was hesitant to augment himself past certain limits. Stross pretty much drew a line in sand and said: up to here, you are human and if you rewire yourself further you will become something both incomprehensible, inhuman and frightening. Dukaj is very aware of this problem, but in his universe there is no line – there is a blurred spectrum of humanity. Yes, if you continue augmenting yourself for pure performance you may eventually lose track of your humanity. On the other hand, constructs such as the HS Civilization serve as a convenient anchor for super-bright post humans or AI gods. Since they must sometimes do business with Stahs they must keep some vestiges of humanity to be able to empathize and comprehend them.

Actually, to discuss this, I need to show you something. This here, is Remy’s curve:

Remy's Curve

That big dot in the middle is the ultimate computer – best possible quantum computing machine that can be made in our universe. Below it are augmented, multi-threaded post-humans, and Stahs’ of various traditions. Above it lie intelligences that run on hardware that can exist only in various optimized inclusions – leading all the way up to the ultimate inclusion, and the god-of-all-gods intelligence that would inhabit it. Dukaj theorizes that without a social construct such as the HS Civilization, most individuals and societies will naturally push up the curve at a break-neck pace. The curve has a seductive pull that is hard to resist. To wit, Zamoysky who has started as a relic from the past, makes several strides up the curve throughout the novel, without even noticing. First, when he learns how to use plateau to manifest himself in a different part of the universe by leasing Emperors nano to form a physical body he can control. Then, when he splits himself into two parallel threads because the situation requires him to be in two places at the same time. It is easy, effortless and rewarding. The question is when do you stop, and how do you know you went to far.

This is why the Civilization protects those who choose to live as a Stahs. To refuse the pull of the curve, and choose to live slow analog life in a digital world is seen as somewhat noble pursuit. Shahs’ maintain the baseline of humanity against which higher intelligences can calibrate themselves. Without them the post humans and AI’s could easily, unintentionally lose sight of what it means to be human.

Anyways, it is an excellent book, full of great ideas and interesting musings. It is smart, well researched and well written post-singularity science fiction. If you speak Polish, I could not recommend it enough. If not… Well, you could potentially email his publisher and ask if there is an English translation in the works… Though I’m not exactly sure how that works – I guess they only handle his publishing in Poland, so for an English version to coalesce into existence there would probably need to be some involvement from a US publisher who would be willing to distribute the book on this side of the pond, or something.