April 26, 2006
Steel Sky
Kilian Melloy READ TIME: 6 MIN.
The essence of science fiction, as opposed to space opera, cyberpunk, or other shades and variations of the larger speculative fiction genre, is that one or more disciplines of science should be projected from their current level to some future degree of development, and the connections between those sciences and the community in which they are pursued should be explored. Usually, the setting for this sort of imaginative exercise is relatively extreme: a post-apocalyptic world, an alien planet, an orbiting space station or a starship underway from one solar system to another. In the case of Steel Sky, fully half a dozen scientific disciplines (artificial intelligence, ecology, economics, genetic engineering, and sociology foremost among them) are projected into a far future beset by the most intractable of all human sectors of knowledge: manipulative self-interest, which is to say, politics.
Steel Sky, is Andrew C. Murphy's debut novel, and the second offering from Per Aspera Press, which in 2004 published Singularity, the dazzling first novel by Bill DeSmedt. Like Singularity, Murphy's book fulfills all the obligations of the traditional science fiction story, and does so on multiple levels - literally, in this case, given that the world inhabited by the book's characters is a subterranean construct in which the aristocratic upper echelons of society dwell closer to the reinforced steel sky of the title, which brings them closer to the artificial sun in all its glory, while lower class citizens -- bureaucrats, laborers, the inevitable underclass, and a secretive, rumored feral offshoot of humanity called "rats" - dwell in successively lower city strata.
The city - a 400-year-old shelter of vast size called the Hypogeum - struggles with familiar problems: the corruption of, and withholding of crucial knowledge by, a ruling caste, the pressures of overpopulation, a serious case of air-pollution so poisonous that anyone left outside the city's living spaces without a respirator quickly succumbs to CO2 poisoning. Adding to social pressures are constant Hypogeum-wide monitoring via a system of cameras, escalating erosion of scientific understanding (at one point, perfectly functional medical machinery is removed by thieving workmen to be recycled into valuable scrap metal; no one knows any longer how to reproduce devices of pre-Hypogeum origin), and a correspondingly religious, mounting expectation among the populace that the fabled "end time" is near. (Sound familiar?)
The Hypogeum comes equipped with an all-observant artificial intelligence system that has, over the centuries, absorbed a great deal of data regarding the nature of the human animal both in its individual and its communal manifestation. Called Image (and indeed, whatever its cognitive limitations, the city's AI is the image, and the caretaker, of human wisdom), the interactive program regulates the daily life of the city but also comes to understand the increasing need to move humanity along to its next stage. The Hypogeum is an earthbound version of the generation ship whose occupants have forgotten the true nature of their environment, and of the universe beyond the walls; the religion of the Hypogeum worships the city's Founders as quasi-divine beings who created the world of man by hollowing out space within an infinite expanse of solid rock, and who await the people who witness the approaching end time with the reward, for the righteous, of a new and unspoiled world that is unlike anything anyone can imagine. (The joke, both obvious and poignant from the start, is that the wonderful new world to come is the wide-open spaces of wilderness that have been slowing regenerating far above the buried city: both a reference to the Garden of Eden and an ironic return to a pre-technological grace where the decaying infrastructure of the city will no longer be the only thing that allows human survival.)
In stories of this sort, the approaching end time is usually heralded and goosed along by a lone hero of either supernatural or super-technological ilk. The Hypogeum's collective image of Death - and of Redemption - is a legendary figure called The Winnower, who is the avatar for the dark, vengeful character of the very rock that bounds human existence. When the Winnower appears (and disappears: he possesses invisibility technology), he strikes an instant chord in the Hypogeum's exhausted, fretful citizenry, and he causes just as much anxiety for the Orcus, a de facto tyrant who runs the ubiquitous network of cameras that peer into every public and private space. The Orcus is an old man in failing health, who fears for the future of his family's political might and is loathe to leave its fortunes in the hands of his disappointingly weak Second Son; his one consolation for the death of the First Son, a much superior specimen of manhood, is that the ritual marriage of Second Son to First Daughter might yet salvage the situation. First Daughter - her private name is Dancer - is a cool, collected, effective woman, and though a woman is not fit to govern outright, with her as the power behind the throne the forces of anarchy might yet be held at bay.
But Second Son, surprisingly, develops inner resources of which the Orcus does not suspect him capable. Almost overnight, Second Son grasps the meaning and the options that attend supreme power, and he intuits also that only the strength of amoral and conscience-free application of supreme power can ensure long-term possession. As the story unfolds, Murphy refuses to allow his plot logic to grow fuzzy: the accomplished are destroyed by the brutal, and the unwary devoured (really: eaten alive) by the most successfully adapted.
Where Murphy's story does not quite succeed is in clarifying every twist of his very complex story. There exists in the Hypogeum a hidden, much feared sect of Deathsmen, a corps whose solemn and pitiless duty is to end the lives of citizens whose physical condition has degenerated to the point of social burden. When the Winnower, in his daytime identity, is befriended by one of these Deathsmen, there is a suggestion that the Winnower has been somehow shaped, though unknowingly, by the Deathsman; this is confusing until it becomes clear that it is the legend of the Winnower that the Deathsman intends to create whole-cloth, in the wake of the hero's inevitable demise, while the Winnower's genesis results from the actions of yet another character. (Murphy deserves kudos, however, for his sly use of the Deathsman as the character who delivers the book's funniest, most bare-knuckles satirical line of dialogue: "I cannot say I have never killed the wrong person," the Deathsman tells the Winnower during one of their fractious heart-to-heart discussion, "but I can honestly say I have never terminated a life without following proper procedure.")
Another confusing plot element is the eradication of an entire segment of the Hypogeum's population; a necessary step for the ultimate result, but who, exactly, pulled it off? Murphy leaves it to the reader to decide who the most likely culprit is, without providing much evidence or even much context for the identification of the mass killing's architect. Finally, while a major plot thread of the book involves a green-haired, genetically engineered woman named Amarantha, her role in the scheme of things seems almost to belong to a separate, if parallel, storyline; her connection to the Winnower is fairly slight, and though she has a major conflict with Second Son, their interactions seem to take place in narrative lacunae, and don't seem necessary to the larger plot.
These are minor quibbles given the dense, carefully planned structure and backstory Murphy has created to bolster his book. Opening the cover to this book means stepping into a vision of the future so rich and detailed that its cautionary message hits harder than any hastily tacked-on moral at the end of any number of lesser works written in a similar vein. Murphy has contrived a perfect blend of future shock (every bit as meticulous and inventive as, say, William F. Nolan's novel Logan's Run) and everyman characterizations (all requisite human archetypes, up to and including a best-buddy tag-team of lower-decks maintenance workers who, in their banter, seem like a hyper-articulate Heckel and Jeckel, but who both come through as heroes in the end), making this not just an above-average science fiction tale, but a superior novel, full stop.
Kilian Melloy serves as EDGE Media Network's Associate Arts Editor and Staff Contributor. His professional memberships include the National Lesbian & Gay Journalists Association, the Boston Online Film Critics Association, The Gay and Lesbian Entertainment Critics Association, and the Boston Theater Critics Association's Elliot Norton Awards Committee.