A few days ago I finished reading Robert Charles Wilson's latest novel, Vortex. It is the third novel in his series that portrays a future world in which the Earth encounters a process (better to say process or agent rather than entity) that is denominated as the "Hypotheticals", originating as it did out of robotic entities that have been propogating throughout the galaxy since time immemorial. In the first book they arrived on Earch without announcing their presence and they encased it in a sort of time fold, propelling it into the future. In the end a gigantic arch was brought to Earth and this proved to be a passageway that connected the planet to other worlds.
The first novel in the series, Spin, won the Hugo award for best science fiction novel a few years ago, and it was justly earned. The book detailed this premise, and it followed the life of three individuals who had to find some way of accomodating this vast change. Perhaps the most compelling figure was that of Jason Lawton, the brilliant son who was put in charge of undertaking explorations of the spin mechanism, and who in his psychological complexity revealed the fragility as well as the triumpth of human will. This family was furthermore conformed by his sister Diana and by a family friend who lived with the family from an early age, and who was at times a distant rival as well as close accomplice, Tyler.
The premise was intriguing from the very beginning, alluding to the ways in which humans would project their hopes and fears on the intervention that had been visited upon them. This is no classic novel of first contact, for this contact will ever be frustrated. After all, it is continually asserted that the Hypotheticals have no consciousness and are instead akin to an "ecology", but I would debate this premise and would merely say that what seems to distinguish them is a lack of individuality, not a lack of self-consciousness. They (the ecology or process or conglomerate) does undertake to carry out momentous projects, and it does accumulate and salvage technologies, and it is in a continuous state of expansion, but it never reveals individual points of view. Perhaps a forest does have a form of self-awareness, if I may project my doubts on an example that comes to mind, but one that is only dimly perceivable if at all by its inhabitants.
This is a novel in which humans are forced to adapt to changed circumstances, and as such, we are made aware of a variety of responses that vary from the positive to the paranoic. We have obsessive personalities and sibling as well as paternal and social conflicts, and these manifest themselves in startling ways.
The second novel, Axis, was a little more uneven. It lacked the psychological depth that had been evident in the characters protrayed in the first novel, and the phenonomenon that forms the crux of this novel (the arrival of a cloud of Hypothetical machines whose purpose is to gather up and transmit information down the line in their network) seemed perhaps out of step with the scale of a satisfying novel. It turns out that there are not only geographical arches but also temporal arches and the Hypotheticals are revealed to consist of some mechanism or process that documents the information prevalent throughout the galaxy at certain specified time periods, in this case, at cycles of about ten thousand years. Once again, the Hypotheticals don't seem to reveal self-awareness as embodied in individual consciousness, but instead are likened to a process, one that is emblematic of evolutionary imperatives but that, distinct from what happened with anthropocentric creatures such as ourselves, has not resulted in individual self-consciousness in the Hypotheticals. This conception, as ever, proves debatable in my mind, for we must not excessively anthropocentrize conciousness such that we can recognize it only when it takes our form.
In the third novel, we are made aware of another leap in scale. The story takes place about ten thousand years in the future, and in this story we see the reincarnation of two characters we had seen in the preceeding novel. They are Isaac Dvali, the child who had been gestated and incubated with hypothetical technology, and Turk Findlay, the pilot who had been killed at the end of the second novel.
What Robert Charles Wilson does is continue to create fascinating new scenarios for human civilization. Now, humanity has used the arches to expand onto new worlds, forming a polity of worlds that are termed "cortical" democracies because they are dictated by rationality and debate. But we also have another intriguing alternative, which is the "limbic" civilization represented by Vox Central, a group of artificial islands whose citizens are networked by the implantation of nodes, and who share a common emotional and volitional consensus that is governed by what is called the "Choreophagus" (the "leader of the choir").
It is a collection of processes that helps to regulate the emotional stability of its citizens, and it was created to service a new theology that addresses an old need, that of reaching out and somehow establishing contact with entities that were personalized. It is a form of wish fulfillment for establishing literal contact with a Godhead, this being, of course, the Hypotheticals.
The story is interspersed with an episode that details an episode of conflict and unexplained revelation in the early period of human experience with the Spin mechanism. It is the story of Bose, a man who has suffered a tragic loss and who has taken the Martian biological treatment to become a "Fourth", Sandra, a psychologist at a state institution, and the vulnerable, angelic but also mysterious character of Orrin Mather, a man of humble background who is somehow transcribing a story of the far future, one that details the story of Turk and Andrea in the far future.
As is the case with all of Wilson's novels, we receive an intriguing combination of speculative and, at times, breathtaking description of evolving human society in the face of new approaches and discoveries, and an exciting story that directly illustrates how these discoveries are incorporated in a conflictive way into human consciousness. They are the same, eternal stories that have so compellingly formed a part of our cultural framework. Stories of societies in conflict, of social bonds that seem fragile, of mechanisms of compulsion as well as autonomy, and an intriguing thread that I have seen in various novels: that of the dangerous role of perverse theologies that seem like tools used by unscrupulous people to try to tyrannize human existance.
Such was the case with "Mysterium", the novel that won the Phillip K. Dick Memorial award over a decade ago, and details the existence of a parallel universe in which a theocratic institution modeled faintly on a repressive form of Catholocism held sway. Such was also in evidence in "The Chronoliths", an exciting mystery in which the appareance of gargantuan, monolithic monuments leads to the speculation about the end of the world and the possible advent of the parousia, leading to ever greater dislocations and an ever more fanatical religious group that is formed to exploit this uncertainty.
Religious authorities, because of their closed and hierarchical nature, always seem to be a source of conflict in Wilson's novels. In this case, we see such a rigid and paranoid entity in the members of Vox Central, and it points to the perception of and distrust of dogma that is in service to a prescribed end.
And this novel is also concerned with the end. In a breathtaking narration, after the human conflicts have been resolved, we see the evolution of the being known as Isaac Dvali, who becomes fully incorporated into the hypothetical network, attaining the considerable powers that have been accumulated by this process or ecology that can be described as archeological.
Isaac proceeds to the far future, and he narrates the evolution of a universe that is rapidly hurtling towards a strange ending, in which the expansion of the universe has been completed, and the bonds that held subatomic structures have dissolved. The future societies, and we do see societies and collective agencies with volition, are brought together and responses are evolved, and as such, we see a galaxy that resonates with cohesion (that cohesion that always seemed to escape human society), and in which new dimension are colonized, only to discover the existence of ever older and more powerful societies. Structure and consciousness pervades the universe even at the end of time, and the novel makes use as well of the "many worlds" speculative construct to offer a resolution to the mystery of how Orrin Mather had received this narration of the far future.
It is an ending that recalls Olaf Stapledon's seminal work, "Starmaker", and it points to a cosmology that is at both ends affirming and comforting but also, so to speak, apocalyptic. I use this term in accordance to the original meaning that refers to an "unveiling", but also consciously wish to suggest a religious aspect as well, the sense of culmination that would accompany religious ecstasy.
For Wilson's novel, ironic as it may be, also contrive to incorporate a religious experience of ecstasy that affirms the survival and the attainment of cohesion. Consciousness is celebrated, and it is breathtaking to see how this experience conforms to the contours of a out-of-body experience, quite literally in both "Starmaker" as well as "Vortex".
It is a celebration of consciousness and of the attainment of a supreme state of empathy that seems also, at times, because of problems of scale, to be oddly distant. We can imagine it, but it is hard to really incorporate it. We are beings of a much smaller scale, but the fact that we can imagine it, as well as imagine narratives in which humans in uncertain circumstances find common ground, serve to invest this novel as well as other works by Wilson with a moral and ethical grounding. And, as such, leads the reader to take into consideration the idea of a cosmology that is more personal, that is ethical and affirming rather than distant and cold, and that is, as such, a romantic conception.
Eternal Observer -- ORomero (c) 2013
Copyrights ORomero 2013
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