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Book discussion of Feersum Endjinn (Iain M. Banks):
Having read all the other sci-fi novels by Banks, I'd
originally been put off this one since it wasn't a Culture novel and was
supposed to be written largely in a strange phonetics. I'm very glad I finally
got around to reading it (after picking up several of his books cheap, second
hand) because it's a beautifully crafted, complex piece that has clearly
influenced the likes of 'the Matrix' massively and is still relevant today,
despite being written over 12 years ago.
The setting of the story is utterly unparalleled in
anything else i've heard off: a post singularity
earth inhabited by the descendants of technology and strong A.I. refusonists who still utilise some of the handy benefits
the pro-advancement (humans) presumably left for them. [tangent: though Banks has never referred in
any way to a singularity as such, and generally alludes to a pretty slow pace
of change of the societies in his books. Though this is justified because
each culture (including the Culture itself) is stuck at it's current level of
advancement for a reason: ethics in the case of the Culture, considering it
irresponsible to just up and transcend, leaving the universe in a mess] The
venue for most of the story is a an oddly scaled castle and bailey with
floors 1 kilometre high (seemingly an OTT artwork created by those who left),
now infested by normal sized people.
One such benefit being 7 lives (a somewhat arbitrary
number, but it's traditional it seems); an implant scans the state of a
person's brain at the moment of death and squirts the data off to mould the
brain of a replacement body; your last death is not entirely final either, as
your mind/soul is then left running in the Crypt where it has a further 7
'lives'.
The Crypt(osphere) is a giant,
multi-level virtual reality, where the top-most environment is pretty much a
copy of real world earth, with lower levels becoming increasingly bizarre and
uninterruptible ('chaotic'). When you die in the Crypt (or wander too deep out
of boredom) you are absorbed into the sea of all possible
knowledge/experience of the lower levels. The Crypt is obviously the
repository of countless millions of souls, therefore to maintain any kind of
individual identity, you must be
diverse/unique/smart. The souls attached to the crypt are not just human
either; some animal minds seem to be linked up directly. A skilled
Cryptographer (here meaning person who interfaces with the crypt, probably as
a profession) can hack his way into an animals brain and control them, though
the book is somewhat vague about the specifics, sometimes it seems they are
in the real world and others in the simulated.
Banks imbues the Crypt with a vague, slightly mystical
format, which contrast with current day ideas to a similar (though lesser)
degree as William
Gibson’s ‘Neuromancer
’ (the difference being that Gibson’s world is a
direct extension of our own, mere decades down the line, while Banks’ is distantly
removed and carefully set). Something he does nicely is the massive speed
difference between ‘Crypt time’ and normal time. With your mind temporarily
uploaded you experience time at about 10’000 times the normal rate, able to
have a fairly sizable adventure in the blink of an eye, gain lifetimes of
experiences in days, or, in the instance where a story strand’s main
character (Gadfium) is nearly assassinated while
having her mind duplicated to the Crypt, use the vital seconds while the
killer is distracted killing a bystander to: do some background research,
hack the controls of the building, do some extensive image processing and
analysis on her real life counterpart’s vision and plot the exact muscle
movements needed to disable the attacker effortlessly. A very cool escape
scene there.
Banks often
makes use of characters with different perception rates: human Culture
members could chemically stimulate their brains to think/react very fast to
kick arse in combat (as if in a different time frame), and more
substantially, the Culture Minds were capable of giving human level
intelligences entire lifetimes in microseconds (see the end of Look to
Windward). This brave ‘relativistic’ time use is something I’ve not really
come across much, and only in more recent novels: the ‘Conjoiners’ can think
up to 10 times faster than normal due to nanotech crammed skulls (almost
trivial really, in Alastair Reynolds’ Redemption Ark), then very recently in Accelerando (Charles Stross)
where spawning agents to lives alternative lives is standard practice in the
later half of the 21st century.
It turns
out that the hardware running the crypt simulations is the Serehfa Fastness itself (the castle building) - it’s made
of a self healing computronium.
The physical structure of the Crypt has a large influence on the internal
environment of the simulation world; Sessine (a
main character that dies for the last time in his first chapter) has to
actually dodge past big, writhing, tubey things
before wondering off around the (unreal) globe. This is a real last
millennium conception…but I’ll let Banks off.
The
culmination of the plot is complex: it turns out that the unhackable,
anonymous, amnesiac, known as Asura (an accurate name for her) is in
fact an real world incarnation of an instance of Count Sessine
that was left to run in the Crypt independently for years of real time, thus
acquiring intimate knowledge of the Crypt and pretty much all significant
goings on. She reveals to *everyone* that the chaos in the crypt that the
humans have been ‘fighting’ off, presuming it to be viral corruption, is
actually an ecosystem of A.I. (artificial life forms) that are not hostile by
intent.
Buscule, who falls (often literally) though a long series
of semi-fortunate fantasy-cyber-adventure, after being manipulated into
investigation by the faked abduction of his new telepathic ant friend
(actually a Culture-esc nanotech A.I.) by a large bird, turns out only to be
needed to scale the oxygen depleted heights of the Fast Tower to open a door
that Ergates (the ant/key) was frustratingly too
feeble to open itself. This mundane outcome in itself is a charmingly ‘down
to earth’ twist, contrasting the Ant’s extensive capabilities in manipulation
(presumably working in the background continuously to get Bascule out of all
kinds of scrapes with the opposing military, etc) with it’s
basic physical failings. They both achieve their destiny, activating the
tower’s secret lift system and equipment, allowing Asura, Gadfium
and some assorted refugee Chimerics (human level
intelligence animals) to ascend the 10 vertical miles to the secured controls
for the Feersum Endjinn,
the solution to life on Earth’s biggest threat…
…Oh! Had I
not mentioned yet that all the upset is due to a ‘molecular cloud’
‘Encroaching’ into the solar system, blocking out sunlight so badly it’s
going to kill all life, if not the sun itself. This machine is clearly
something with capabilities equivalent to a Culture ship, but Banks neatly
goes into no details to specify this, using only the title of the book to
attach to it’s capabilities, leaving this reader happily satisfied with the
title finally being explained as the last event, and leaving the novel as a
stand alone artefact, as timeless as sci-fi can ever hope to be.
Through the
story, the ‘King’ had been waging a secret ‘war’ against the splinter Clan:
Engineers, for their access to a wormhole hidden in the lower part of the ‘Fast Tower’.
The dilemma is that at the time it seems like the only escape route from the
doomed earth and the governmental folks are keen to get out while they can!
However, being rejectionists of high technology
(the ‘privileged’ in their society are the few reserved for the high flying
life, free of the distasteful chore of having Crypt communication implants)
they’d rather save they arses in the full flesh rather than use an optimised
approach that would allow everyone to be transmitted safely as digital
uploads. This is Banks once again really romping home the point that
discrimination against digital copies of people or strong A.I.s
is just as bad as the racism of old, and perhaps could lead to atrocities
even worst that those of the past! This is a recurring theme in all of his
sci-fi, with the hopeless world of Against a Dark Background being a stark
warning of a hypothetical result of absolute rejection/suppression of A.I.
Finally,
the ‘original’ version of Sessine (with no lives to
spare) sacrifices his soul in a Jesus like gesture of enlightened
selflessness to become one with the Crypt A.I. in the hopes of giving it
conscious form, with no guarantees there will be anything recognisable of
himself left to reflect upon this thereafter. I would like to liken myself to
Sessine, in that I’d consider my main strengths of
intellect to be strong ethical/moral/logical reason (i.e. wisdom). Pompous of
me, I know, but it’s a bit of an ambition of mine to take the cream of my
human experience to temper the near infinite capabilities of a transcendent
mind. I anticipate my fond smile as I briefly recall my human existence, like
someone else’s faded dream, happy that it is now barely a fraction of what
I’ve become. But then that’s just like growing up anyway (except without
being able to casually prove the Riemann Hypothesis in an idle moment,
etc).
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