Jorge Luis Borges, page 1 of 2

Every ten years or so, I read a cyberpunk classic, basically for nostalgic purposes. Snow Crash (first published 1992) is one of the A-list classics of the genre, though I’d not read it before. As it was written in the nineties, I wouldn’t consider it part of the first wave of cyberpunk, but this does mean it has a lot more chance to get its future technology predictions right (people have “personal phones”, for instance, whereas William Gibson has said that anyone coming to Neuromancer nowadays might think its lack of mobile phones a subtle plot point, rather than it being down to the fact that he’d not thought of it). But I think you can find enough about what the novel got right/wrong elsewhere on the internet, as it’s one of those books beloved of the net’s tech communities, and much talked about online.

And in a way, that angle — what it got right, what it got wrong — can sort of blind you to other interesting aspects of the novel. Early on in reading it, for instance, I thought it felt more like the work of Thomas Pynchon (or the two novels of his I’ve read, anyway, Inherent Vice and The Crying of Lot 49). It had that lightly humorous, or constantly ironic, tone throughout, as though to underline the fact that this isn’t meant to be taken as a serious prediction of the future, but more as literary play. As much as it’s predictive science fiction, it’s a postmodern novel, a thing whose reality is meant to be taken as literary rather than literal, playing with ideas about language and narrative and how they work with the virtual worlds of computers.

This playful/postmodern aspect comes to the fore when the novel’s protagonist — who’s called Hiro Protagonist, so there’s some in-your-face literary self-consciousness right there — gets a series of info-dump-style lectures from “the Librarian”, a piece of software used to interface with the massive store of data owned by the Central Intelligence Corporation. These info-dumps are, like Hiro Protagonist’s name, so blatant about what they are, that there’s none of the awkwardness of the “As you know…” type speech that usually marks an info-dump. They just are what they are, delivered with no apology, so they work.

The story is set in an uncomfortably close future (uncomfortably, because I suspect if I worked out what year it was, it would already have passed) where the United States as a governed nation has pretty much turned into a series of franchises. The Mafia, for instance, is now a franchise operation, with outlets as regular as MacDonalds and 7-11s throughout the nation’s cities. Similarly with religions (Reverend Wayne’s Pearly Gates, and the NeoAquarian Temple), countries (you can become a citizen of Mr Lee’s Greater Hong Kong and be welcomed in any of its “franchulates” — franchise consulates, I’m guessing), as well as services like prisons and so on. If you’re rich enough, you live in a ring-fenced “burbclave”, policed by one of the many independent policing firms to have replaced the actual police.

The two main characters are Hiro and YT. Hiro starts the novel as a pizza delivery man for the Mafia, but when he fails to make his latest delivery in the required thirty minutes, walks away from that job (and his crashed car) and returns to his usual work as a hacker, gathering info and trying to sell it through the CIC’s digital Library. Hiro is thirty years old, and as his father fought in World War II, this is probably a way to work out when the novel occurs. YT, on the other hand (those initials stand for “Yours Truly”), is fifteen years old and working as a Kourier, delivering packages via a techno-skateboard, mostly powered by magnetically “pooning” herself onto passing motor vehicles.

The plot proper kicks off when Hiro’s friend and fellow (though more successful) hacker Da5id is given a dose of a new “drug” called Snow Crash — and not in the real world, but in the virtual reality of the Metaverse. This “drug” consists of a black and white, seemingly random bitmap image which causes his brain to crash and put him into a coma. Someone, it turns out, has found a way to hack the human brain, and Hiro and YT set out to find out who, and how, plus a little bit of why.

The how goes into the origins of language, the myth of the Tower of Babel, and the workings of Sumerian culture. The idea is that humans, being receptive to language, are capable of being programmed — not by the languages we speak, but the more basic types of signal that are an inherent part of our neural set-up, the equivalent of machine code in a computer as compared to higher level programming languages:

“We’ve got two kinds of language in our heads. The kind we’re using now is acquired. It patterns our brains as we’re learning it. But there’s also a tongue that’s based in the deep structures of the brain, that everyone shares. These structures consist of basic neural circuits that have to exist in order to allow our brains to acquire higher languages. Which is to say, someone who knows the right words can speak words, or show you visual symbols, that go past all your defences and sink right into your brainstem.”

As well as buying into the widespread (though surely simplistic) idea that the human brain is just a sort of computer, therefore it can be treated as one (can be “uploaded” onto a data store, for instance, or, in this case, can be programmed, or hacked into), this also reminded me of William Burroughs’ idea that language is a sort of parasite feeding off its human hosts, and just one more of the world’s systems of control. This, for instance, is from Burroughs’ essay “On Coincidence”:

“In the beginning was the word and the word was God. And what does that make us? Ventriloquist’s dummies. Time to leave the Word-God behind.”

Which all makes it a little bit worrying that one of the things you’ll read about Snow Crash if you do even a little bit of research online, is how much of an influence and inspiration it’s been to today’s tech entrepreneurs, who either haven’t noticed the fact that the book’s villain (L. Bob Rife, whose name couldn’t help but remind me of that other would-be mind-controller, L. Ron Hubbard) is a tech entrepreneur seeking to control the minds of the human race through hacking their brains — or have noticed it, but don’t care about hiding how much they admire the idea…

After finishing Stephenson’s novel, with no particular intent I went on to re-read some of Borges’s short stories, and was struck by how much resonance there was between Borges’s fiction and the virtual realities depicted in cyberpunk. In “Tlön, Uqbar, Orbis Tertius”, a group of people set about creating an entirely fictitious world, one which foregrounds ideal existence over reality, and begins to impinge upon the real world. Coming off reading Snow Crash, it felt like the first iteration of the Metaverse. And then there’s “The Library of Babel” with its books containing every permutation of writing symbols, meaning that some contain the absolute truth about the nature of the universe, others a slightly tarnished version of that truth, others complete lies, and still others, utter nonsense.

Who, I wonder, predicted the internet best?

After a couple of recent reminders — her sketch map for the novel appeared at the Fantasy: Realms of Imagination exhibition, and she was interviewed alongside Alan Moore at a related online event in January — I’ve finally got round to reading Susanna Clarke’s Piranesi, which I’d been meaning to do since it came out in 2020. (A publishing event that caused minor tremors in this blog, as an old entry from 2009, “Giovanni Battista Piranesi and the Three-Dimensional Labyrinth” — in which, ahem, I link to my own short story called “Piranesi” — started getting hits.)

The novel is narrated by a man who gives himself no name, but is called “Piranesi” by the only other living person he knows (whom he refers to as “the Other”). Piranesi lives in a strange world, which he refers to as “the House”, a world of vast, light and airy halls peopled by statues and birds, with sea-tides sometimes surging up from the lower levels, and rain-forming clouds in the higher. He busies himself with staying alive (eating fish and seaweed, and drinking water he collects from the clouds) while making a catalogue of the statues in the potentially infinite array of halls, as well as caring for the remains of the few dead he has found in his explorations. He regularly meets the Other, a man seeking an ancient knowledge that will give him extraordinary powers. Piranesi, though keen to help his one and only friend — though the Other, it’s obvious to the reader from the start, is not much of a friend — realises he doesn’t actually want such powers himself, and even wonders if the search may be leading them down the wrong path. As he explains to the Other:

“I realised that the search for the Knowledge has encouraged us to think of the House as if it were a sort of riddle to be unravelled, a text to be interpreted…”

Which couldn’t help come across, to me, as a reader’s warning. The mysterious nature of the world of “the House”, of Piranesi’s identity, and of the Other’s clearly our-worldly nature, were all encouraging me to read Piranesi as a puzzle to be solved. I expected it all to be a profound metaphor of some sort, a fable about the nature of human existence perhaps, and hunted for clues among the inconsistencies. (The fact, for instance, that Piranesi, who as far as he can remember has always lived in the House, knows of such things as trees, chess, lobster traps, angels, husbands and wives, even Prince of Wales check-pattern suits.)

Piranesi himself has no feeling there’s a puzzle to be solved. For him, the House is an entirely benevolent environment, to be accepted — and celebrated — as it is:

“The Beauty of the House is immeasurable; its Kindness infinite…”

“The Beautiful Orderliness of the House is what gives us Life…”

“It is my belief that the World (or, if you will, the House, since the two are for all practical purposes identical) wishes an inhabitant for itself to be a witness to its Beauty and the recipient of its Mercies…”

“The World feels Complete and Whole, and I, its Child, fit into it seamlessly…”

My own initial approach to the novel as primarily an intellectual puzzle started to turn to a slight disappointment when it was obvious the whole thing wasn’t going to unlock into some tightly-argued philosophical metaphor — but in fact that approach had blinded me to the purely emotional side of Piranesi’s story, which gained all the more of an impact when it hit home. And all the more so, considering Piranesi is a thoroughly innocent and childlike man, industrious, friendly, kind, trusting, considerate, and full of wonder at all around him in the manner of a kind of Holy Fool.

The novel has resonances to some classic works of fantasy. That sentence quoted above — “the World (or, if you will, the House, since the two are for all practical purposes identical)” — echoes the opening of Borges’s “Library of Babel” (“The universe (which others call the Library)…”). There’s Peake’s Gormenghast books (and perhaps a Peake’s law should be coined, stating that any sufficiently Gormenghastian structure will inevitably attract a flood). Clarke opens her novel with a quote from The Magician’s Nephew, and one of the many statues Piranesi encounters is of a faun, which inspires him to dream of it “…standing in a snowy forest and speaking to a female child” — a clear reference to The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe. Perhaps the dreams of the House are the imaginative stories of our world?

I at first wondered if there wasn’t a reference, also, to Coleridge’s Ancient Mariner, in the albatross that appears near the start of the novel. There’s certainly something of the shipwrecked loon about poor Piranesi, but maybe there’s a deeper link, too. The Ancient Mariner escapes the horrors of the “Night-mare Life-in-Death” when he spontaneously blesses the slimy creatures (which he’s at first repulsed by) crowding the oceans. Piranesi seems to have slipped into a similar state of wanting to bless everything in the world. “It is my belief that the House itself loves and blesses equally everything that it has created,” he says early on, and by this belief he blesses himself and everything in the House.

It’s perhaps a hint at how he has survived in a situation whose clearest non-fantastic parallels are to mental breakdown and imprisonment: an almost holy acceptance of the world around him, a commitment to seeing its beauty, and his own humble place in it, a radical affirmation in the face of what must also, surely, include the pains of loneliness. Set against this, the Other is all too clearly selfish, cynical, uncaring, even abusive, right from the start — and that’s before we get to know what he’s up to.

It’s a short book, but it packs an emotional punch in its last sections that made it an absolutely worthwhile read, for me.

There could, certainly, be more to the story. Two characters at least — the dark occultist Laurence Arne-Sayles, and the (surely series-ready) Sarah Raphael — feel untapped of their full potential. I’d love to see them face off. But, on its own, Piranesi is a really fine read, and one I’m glad I finally got round to.

(As one more plug, here’s that link to my own story, “Piranesi”.)

At one time I worked my way through all of Gustav Meyrink’s novels (in Mike Mitchell’s translations, published by Dedalus), and although his first, The Golem (1914), is his most famous, it was his last, and least successful in terms of sales (selling less than 3,000 copies, compared to 220,000 of The Golem, according to this article), that stuck with me.

Published in 1927, The Angel of the West Window tells a dual story. The narrator — unnamed till virtually the last page, when he’s revealed to be one Baron Müller — learns that he is the only surviving descendent of the Elizabethan mathematician, astronomer, astrologer, alchemist and occultist John Dee, when he inherits a sizeable packet of the man’s journals and private papers. Embarking on the task of ordering these papers into some sort of narrative, Müller finds occult elements starting to invade his own life. Dee’s papers describe how, early on in life, he looked into a mirror and found his reflection talking back to him, promising what sounded to be a great future, in which he:

“…shall know neither rest nor repose till the coasts of Greenland, where the Northern Lights glow, shall be conquered… He who holds the Green Land in fief, to him shall the Empire beyond the sea be given, to him shall be given the crown of England!”

Dee immediately makes plans — which include finding a way of making sure the then-Princess Elizabeth would drink a potion to make her fall in love with him, and thus ensure his kingship of England — but finds himself frustrated at every step. Elizabeth, once she is queen, toys with him, agreeing to his plans for an expedition to Greenland only to cancel them a moment later. And though she drops hints that she knows the nature of the potion Dee contrived to have her drink, and occasionally implies that the two of them have some sort of special relationship, she makes no move towards marrying him — in fact, she orders him to wed one of her ladies-in-waiting who clearly hates him.

Meanwhile, a number of peculiar characters enter the narrator’s modern-day (i.e., 1920s) life. Lipotin, a trader in antiquities — whose nickname, Mascee, is oddly the same as that of an antiques pedlar known to John Dee — provides him with a number of occultly significant objects, including a locked Tula-ware puzzle-box and a green-glass mirror, while the Russian Princess Assja Shotokalungin drops by, wanting to buy from him a certain antique spearhead, which she seems sure he owns, even though he doesn’t.

For me, the Dee part of the novel works so much better than the narrator’s. Dee’s story is all about how his promised glories are constantly denied him, and how he turns more and more desperately to the occult, only to meet with a constant cycle of repeated promises, delays, more promises, and ultimate frustration. He enters into a partnership with Edward Kelley, an ex-criminal (his ears have been cut off as punishment for forgery) who provides Dee with a small amount of powder that can turn lead into gold, along with a book that describes how this powder might be used to make the Philosopher’s Stone. But the book is in code, and the pair soon use up their small stock of powder in making the gold they need to continue their studies (and to fund Kelley’s dissolute lifestyle). Kelley, though, can summon the Angel of the West Window, an awesome, otherworldly presence (with something of a demonic air: “the thumb on the right hand pointed downwards, it was the left hand thumb”) that promises to teach Dee the key to the book’s cipher, though always tomorrow, or the day after tomorrow, never today. (It does, when their need is at its most dire, replenish their stock of powder, so they can make more gold, and continue their desperate studies.) Along with Dee’s second wife Jane, the pair leave England for Prague, where Dee wants to see what the Emperor Rudolf II, who claims to be an alchemical adept, can teach him, but Rudolf is paranoid, controlling, and on the edge of madness. Then the Angel of the West Window declares that Dee must share his beloved wife with the lecherous Kelley.

In between reading of Dee’s troubles, the narrator finds himself at the centre of an occult battle for his soul, fought between forces he only gradually comes to understand. On the one hand, there are the Gardeners, a group of enlightened beings who provide the occasional prod on his path to illumination; on the other, there’s the Goddess Black Iaïs, who “rules the realm of anti-Eros, whose power and extent no-one suspects who has not himself been initiated into the mysteries of hate”, and who wants the antique Spearhead of Hywel Dda, once in the possession of John Dee. Despite all this being a clear parallel to Dee’s story, the narrator comes across (to me, anyway) as almost wilfully stupid in being unable to tell what’s happening to him, and as a result, his part of the story seems mostly about him being shunted from one incomprehensible event to another. There’s a lot of occult talk and mysteriously significant events, but no real human-level drama, as there is with the Dee tale, and all of the narrator’s gains feel like something given to him, rather than something he’s earned.

It eventually emerges that the narrator is to experience the fulfilment of what was promised, centuries ago, to his ancestor John Dee. Dee got the nature of that initial promise wrong, interpreting it wholly in terms of worldly gains, when it was meant only in spiritual terms. (“Green Land” is used, in the novel, to refer to the land of the dead, and of the spiritually enlightened, and it was this land that was promised to Dee, not the land of the same name that exists in the material world.) By the end of the book, I found it difficult to accept that the narrator had done anything to earn his spiritual elevation — he’d seemed to learn no lesson, having merely been batted about between occult forces like a spiritual tennis ball that just happened to end up on the right side of the net.

Reviewing The Angel of the West Window in 1936, Jorge Luis Borges called the book “a chronicle of confused miracles, barely salvaged, from time to time, by its poetic ambience”. (Of Meyrink’s literary career as a whole, Borges says: “His books became acts of faith, and then of propaganda.”)

It didn’t, to me, feel that Meyrink was merely peddling some occult system. At times, the supernatural events that happen to either Dee or the narrator felt genuinely weird and shocking (in particular, the pronouncements of Bartlett Greene, with whom Dee shares a prison cell near the start of the novel) rather than being contrived. The best parts — the Dee parts — actually seemed to be all about how, the more enticing the promises of the occult are, the more empty, frustrating, and soul-destroying is their effect. It might have been better simply as Dee’s story, with no modern counterpart, but by the end, despite often tedious passages in which many supposedly significant things were happening but no real meaning emerging, The Angel of the West Window does, nevertheless, work a little literary magic.