The Star Fraction

The Stone Canal at Thirteen

This book may by now have readers younger than itself. First published in 1996, its imagined future had already begun to drift away from the course of history before all compasses and clocks were reset in 2001. Three of its chapters are set in the real past—in the 1970s, 1980s, and 1990s—and to some readers these must now be stranger than those set in the future. Did anyone ever think there might soon be a revolution, or a nuclear war, or that the Internet could reformat the world? Well, yes, some of us did.

See my introduction to The Star Fraction for reasons why the successive ideas—of revolution, war, singularity—so typical of these three decades made sense of their times, if not of ours. Enough already about politics and history. What strikes me, rereading The Stone Canal, is how personal a book it is. Loves and friendships that endure across decades, centuries even, are central to the plot. Weirder than that, they persist across hardware platforms and spark the gap between different kinds of minds: Dee’s physical, and Meg’s virtual, forms are human, but the minds of both are artificial.

There’s a sensibility in the book that wouldn’t, I think, have been possible before the 1990s, and which I did by no means invent. ‘All is analogy, interface,’ Wilde tells us, ‘the self itself has windows’—by which he means, Windows. Later, he falls and is caught in the arms of Meg, ‘my dear, sweet operating system.’ The distinction between human and machine is broken, in every sense. Wilde finds himself in a world whose rules he wrote, but where that distinction he knows is broken is the unwritten law that underwrites all the rest. If property rights, as the narrative voice tells us and Wilde might once have agreed, are ‘what people agree to let people do with things,’ what becomes of things that don’t agree? And if you’re one of those things, what becomes of you?

These questions weren’t new, and may in practice never arise, but the urgency with which they’re raised here isn’t redundant. Information still wants to be free. But what also strikes me, on rereading, is how the urgency is that of reliving in memory a battle long ago, whose outcome is known. Sentence after sentence has the melancholy cadence of recollection. Every character whose mind we access from within is, or has been, a machine. Everyone is counted among the dead. At some time or other, so shall we all be. This needn’t count against the hope that Wilde holds out, that we’ll make it to the ships. Some of us may yet. We can still hope to do it without becoming monsters, but not, I think, without becoming other than human.

I don’t want you to think that all that makes the book solemn. It was written out of fervent hopes and happy memories and the enthusiasm of having learned to write software as well as books. It treats all the grim stuff—the human condition, aging, loss, and death—as ultimately a solvable problem, looked back at with some nostalgia from an imagined time when it has been solved. A time when we’re all dead, yes, but since when has that stopped us from looking forward?

Brian Aldiss has argued that the first true SF novel was Frankenstein. That mythos wasn’t on my mind when I wrote this book, but looking back over it I can see how the DNA replicates: Wilde has turns at being both Frankenstein and the Creature, Dee and Annette contend to be the Bride, and they all meet the Wolfman. That’s the way to read it, as a violent romance. Because there has to be something gothic about a novel whose first sentence is (see over):