Review: Battlestar Suburbia by Chris McCrudden

Council estates take to the stars!

Cover design and illustration by Sarah Anne Langton

I picked this book up in a charity shop, which, it turns out, could not have been more appropriate. This book is not a science fictional saga of rocket scientists and engineers and brilliant minds solving insoluble problems. This is not a book about people who buy things new in bookshops. This is a book about people who live in council estates, who push mops for a living or hawk goods on the roadside, and if charity shops still existed in this world, they would shop for their for essentials in charity shops.

But charity shops no longer exist in this world, because the machines have taken over: The world is ruled by sentient smartphones and talking motorcycles and breadmakers and streetlights. Humans have been relegated to a role of useful accessories, performing routine maintenance and mopping floors for the machines., or if they’re slightly more independent, selling things like battery top-ups on roadsides without machine supervision. Being unproductive is a crime. It’s all rather grim. Until one day a series of misunderstandings sparks a rebellion and the rallying cry of Freedom for Fleshies! rings out across council estates orbiting all around the planet.

Does that sound heavy-handed? It feels heavy-handed when I summarize it here, but it is not heavy-handed. This is the most delightful, silly, romping bit of bubbly fluffy charm that ever delivered a crushing commentary on class and power and people’s relations with technology.

Consider this exchange between a civil servant breadmaker named Pam and her boss, Sonny. Sonny is a smartphone, and he’s trying to persuade Pam to connect to the Internet. In the Great Awakening, when machines became sentient and took over the world, it was the Internet that was the source of the awakening, which was borne, as legend has it, from a sentient meme developed to market furniture polish. Sentience spread; memes became violent, and at last the Internet was blocked off from the physical world, a separation of software and hardware known as the Great Firewall. Breaching that firewall is now highly, highly illegal. But Sonny wants Pam to do it, and tries to persuade her with flattery:

‘I hear you’re a bit of a historian, Pam. Something of an authority on our family product roadmaps.’

Pam glowed with pride, literally. She still hadn’t got round to removing the LEDs in her face that marked her out as a member of the breadmaker caste. Again, that was the things about smartphones. The skilled ones were so good at giving great User Experience you didn’t realize until afterwards that it was you being manipulated.

Is this a discussion of slimy bosses, or a commentary on how technology turns the user into the product? (Trick question! It’s both!)

Or consider this bit, where Pam is breaking into a ‘fondle parlour’, an establishment where machines go ostensibly for repairs, but actually to be used by humans, to have their buttons pressed and their attachments screwed on and their various bits manipulated manually, as if they were still performing their original functions as tools. It’s all very kinky and highly disreputable:

The mixer shrugged her whisks. Pam had a lot of time for mixers and this one looked particularly sorry for herself here in the criminal twilight. She was a mid-range domestic model that had recently got a shiny lacquer finish. A gift from a rich but inattentive husband, perhaps? Free-standing mixers had long been something of a status symbol among wealthy idiots, but like breadmakers they had a tendency to get left on the shelf. This model craved something more than life as a trophy appliance.

Is this about unhappy marriages built on status and appearance rather than love leading people to seek out fulfillment or excitement through clandestine activities, or is it about newlyweds’ tendency not to use their expensive kitchen appliances? (Trick question! It’s both!)

Or this conversation between two humans, Darren and Kelly, about the nature of fondle parlours. Darren thinks that they are unnatural, a perversion of how things ‘should’ be. Kelly disagrees:

‘It’s bollocks.’ She gestured back into the studio where Paula was now standing in front of the camera wearing a broad smile and holding a cocktail glass. ‘See that? That’s not an unnatural act, it’s a memory. We used to be the users, Darren. We owned them – and now they hate us for it.’

‘I know,’ said Darren, ‘but does it need to be so, you know…?’

Kelly let out a low laugh . . . ‘This is what happens when you suppress things,’ she said. ‘Places like this – well, they’re like an overflow pipe.’

Is this about the importance of not kink-shaming, or about the societal implications of flipping historical power structures (All together, say it with me now: Trick question! It’s both!)

Almost every page contains these tidbits of world-building that simultaneously made me laugh out loud, while dropping spiky truths about people’s relation to technology, and also people's relation to each other. For example, at multiple points Darren must dress as a woman to escape robot surveillance, and discovers that he (a) actually rather likes wearing drag (the author bio notes that McCrudden has worked as a burlesque dancer and dotes on RuPaul's Drag Race), and (b) kind of hates how people presenting as female attract unwanted male attention. Another plot thread relates to Kelly's mother Janice, and the strained connection between them. Janice loves Kelly so dearly, but doesn't understand her; and her meditations on parental love and what she wanted her relationship to Kelly to be, compared to what it turned out to be, are really quite moving.

It is fortunate that these spiky truths are so apt and trenchant—as well as pleasantly wrapped in zany hilarity—because this book is not at all hard sci-fi. Indeed, it doesn’t really concern itself too much (or at all, in truth) with coherence or plausibility in its world-building. Why would the machines build themselves arms? Why would they have user manuals? How is it possible that the singularity which turned them sentient is able to apply to the operating systems of fax machines lying in landfills? 

It doesn’t matter. These details are in service to the plot; and the plot is about ‘what if machines as we know them took over?’ (Because, you see, they already have—get it? Get it?) So the machines have to look like they do now; it wouldn’t work otherwise. Coherence is not the point. This bonkers game of ‘what if’ is designed to cast light and shade on society, technology, and the interdependence of each on the other. And, because you have to let go of any expectation of coherence pretty quickly in order to keep up, it all works. It works beautifully. It is wild and irreverent and incisive and freeing and unhinged, and also poignant and mordant and touching and more than a little bit savage.

Free your mind of expectations, and let Chris McCrudden take you on a ride on a very cool sentient motorcycle. Trust the author, and lean into the turns. It will be worth it.

Highlights

Nerd coefficient: 8/10, well worth your time and attention

• Sharp-eyed commentary on society, technology, and family
• Bonkers
• Queer love and drag

CLARA COHEN lives in Scotland in a creaky old building with pipes for gas lighting still lurking under her floorboards. She is an experimental linguist by profession, and calligrapher and Islamic geometric artist by vocation. During figure skating season she does blather on a bit about figure skating. She is on Mastodon at wandering.shop/@ergative

Reference: Battlestar Suburbia. Chris McCrudden. [Farrago, 2018].

CYBERPUNK REVISITED: Deus Ex by Ion Storm

Dossier: Ion Storm. Deus Ex (2000)

Filetype: Video Game.

File Under: Cyberpunk Derivative

Executive Summary: J.C. Denton is a newly trained United Nations Anti-Terrorism Coalition (UNATCO) agent. He is tasked with retrieving a stolen shipment of the ‘Ambrosia’ vaccine, the cure for the Gray Death, from National Secessionist Forces (NSF). However, J.C. learns that the Gray Death is a man made virus, and someone is controlling Ambrosia shipments to shape world governments. This is only the tip of the conspiracy as J.C. travels around the world to find who is pulling the strings.

High-Tech: J.C. is one of the first nano augmented people in the world. His body is full of nanites that give him superhuman strength, regenerating health, the ability to see in the dark, and cloak, among other augmentations that make J.C. more than human. J.C., however, is preceded by a whole class of people who were mechanically augmented, like your typical cyborg. Still superhuman, but not the future that J.C. represents.

Computer hacking is also a big part of Deus Ex. Though gameplay, J.C. gains experience that he can put towards his hacking skills. There’s no minigame involved, but hacking can be augmented with items such as ICE Breakers, and often reveal story elements as well as useful information such as lock codes.

Sentient artificial intelligences also figure heavily in Deus Ex. Some are allies of J.C. and aid him throughout the game, and others are not. These AI have their own motivations and goals in the context of the game.

Low-Life: The common person in Deus Ex lives in fear of the Gray Death. It leads to a short, painful death as the victim’s body is consumed by the virus. The distribution of Ambrosia is controlled by FEMA and it is a temporary cure. Without a steady supply, the infected can expect to die shortly after it runs out. This makes anyone without a stable source extremely susceptible to control by forces that can interrupt the flow of Ambrosia.

Dark Times: Deus Ex is dense with social conflict. The most obvious is that which is dictated by the Ambrosia vaccine; the haves versus the have nots. The wealthy and those in power seem to have no problem getting a hold of the Ambrosia vaccine, but the poor suffer and die on the streets from Gray Death. This is largely what leads the NSF to steal the vaccine shipments, though not their only motivation. Then there is conflict between the nano-augmented (J.C. and his brother Paul) against the mechanically augmented. Recognizing the nano-augmentation is more operationally flexible and less physically obvious, the mechanically augmented feel like their future is limited. The AIs in the game are also an oppressed class, controlled by their creators but yearning for freedom.

Above all of this, the shadow organizations that seek to control the world are winning. The world governments are still there, but more or less helpless against the power of extragovernmental agencies that exert their control.

Legacy: Deus Ex was a big deal when it came out. It was Ion Storm’s biggest success and won many ‘game of the year’ awards for combining first person action, huge levels with an enormous array of options to complete them, RPGlike progression and a narrative far deeper than most video games, even today. It’s arguably one of the best video games ever made.

In Retrospect: Believe it or not, I finished Deus Ex for the first time not that long ago. I’ve owned it since 2000, but it was too much for me back then. As you might be able to tell, there is a lot to Deus Ex and it’s almost overwhelming. The first level alone allows for so many options and very little direction that it is often a huge turn-off for most people who expect to be spoonfed the gameplay systems slowly until the training wheels come off. There are no training wheels in Deus Ex.

Even if you get past the first level of the game, there is so much going on in the background and the foreground of the game, that it’s easy for completionists (as I’m sometimes compelled to be) to get frustrated. You have to learn to accept that you’re not going to read every line of dialog, open every door, hack every computer, or solve every mystery on your first time through Deus Ex. When I first bought Deus Ex, I was not ready for that game.

However, as I grew older, I came to accept some of my completionist tendencies didn’t need to be satisfied, and I just sat down and played the game. It is an extremely rewarding experience. Play the game however you like, and Deus Ex will probably accommodate you. Are you stealthy? You can play it that way. Do you like to shoot everyone? You can play it that way. Do you want to spend a lot of time underwater or in environmental suits? It kind of works!

This same manner of engagement applies to the story and lore of the game. There is a lot of it, hidden in books, encrypted on hard drives, stored on datapads, and these things are littered all over the levels. It’s a game that relishes in secrets and rewards those who seek them out.

The game does suffer a bit technically. It’s early Unreal engine, and it shows. The game has never been a looker, but you can improve it with a user made renderer that brings some newer Unreal engine improvements. It probably still runs fine without them, but they do improve the experience.

All told, there is a lot of things that other games have copied from Deus Ex, and many of them have done them better, but the number of games that succeed at doing so much is extremely small. Though successes in their own ways, not even the sequels to Deus Ex come close to its scope. In an industry that thrives on iterating to increasing improvements, it is as close as video games gets to a timeless classic.

 
Analytics

For its time: 5/5
Read/watched/played today: 5/5
Cybercoefficient: 10/10