Gareth L. Powell - Hive Monkey (2014)

"You humans are far too irresponsible and squabblesome to be allowed free rein."

'Hive Monkey', the follow up to Gareth L. Powell's 'Ack-Ack Macaque', serves as a reminder of just how effective a tool everyone's favourite foul-mouthed, cigar-smoking, Spitfire-flying, gun-toting primate is for exploring the interface between humanity and technology that used to be the domain of cyberpunk. It also serves as a reminder for just how much fun Ack-Ack Macaque is, and how Powell manages to be charming and engaging whilst he pulls the rug from under both his characters and his readers.
   'Hive Monkey' jumps straight back into the world of 'Ack-Ack Macaque', with Victoria Valois and Ack-Ack Macaque just having time to get bored of life after their adventure piloting the dirigible Tereshkova before science fiction writer William Cole wakes up to find his murdered double in his on-board cabin, plunging the cyborg ex-journalist and the artificially uplifted monkey headlong into another chaotic adventure where the fate of the world is at stake.
   One of the striking things about 'Ack-Ack Macaque' was how it played with Dickian science fiction tropes to undermine the stability of its fictional world. When Ack-Ack Macaque is rescued from an immersive virtual world only to find himself in a zeppelin-filled alternate history in which France and the UK formed a political union in the 1950s, the seasoned SF writer can't help wondering if the reality of that world is about to be stripped away, too. Like the world Michael Moorcock sets up in 'The Final Programme', the world of 'Ack-Ack Macaque' is solid enough to support the story but fragile enough to induce a healthy paranoia in the reader. 'Hive Monkey' continues this tradition by introducing multiple alternate realities and the ability to travel between them, a very Moorcockian notion. One of the alternate realities is even suggested to contain a world where France and the UK didn't unite, and jet travel developed and overtook zeppelins. This is very reminiscent of Philip K. Dick's 'The Man In The High Castle', and the tricks Dick uses to insinuate that neither of the worlds in his novel are our world. However like in the previous book, Powell uses this to create a quite effective underlying sense of unease.
   Adding to the layers of confusion and realities is the presence of William Cole, a struggling, drug addled science fiction writer wracked with grief in the mold of Vonnegut's Kilgore Trout. Paul, Victoria's dead husband digitally uploaded into the airship's computers, enthuses about Cole being a combination of Ballard, Dick and Chandler, but Cole sees himself as a washed up hack churning out generic product and dreams of writing respected literary fiction. While Cole allows Powell to engage in some good matured, self deprecating ribbing of the public image of SF writers, and kick starts the overall plot, he also plays a deeper thematic role. Alternate universes are compelling because they allow us to ask questions about how things could have turned out differently. How much of our current situation is set in stone, dictated by our character, our outlook, our perspective, and how much is it mutable, depending on the whim of chance? This is the question asked about our world at large in any alternate history, but William Cole allows Powell to bring it back down to a personal level. Cole is a mess because his wife's baby died before it was born and the grief tore them apart, so Cole was denied a loving and supporting family. The Bill Cole he meets from an alternate reality, before his death, is a heroic leader of a revolution, but in his timeline his daughter survived and was born and he got the family William never got, which forced him to mature and become a better person. By being forced into his doppelganger's shoes, William undergoes the same journey to become his better self.
   William Cole's relationship with his double is mirrored by Ack-Ack Macaque's relationship to the Leader, an alternate universe version of himself who becomes the head of a multi-dimensional cult intent on colonising different timelines. 'Hive Monkey' really delves into the sadness and loneliness that is at the core of Ack-Ack's character, and Ack-Ack is confronted with this directly in the form of the Leader. As a character, he is already bitter and cynical, so it's easy to see how this could be twisted into the megalomania of the Leader. But ultimately, Ack-Ack realises that he does have a family, in the shape of Victoria, Paul and K8. The Leader is Ack-Ack deprived of his family, a worst self whose tragedy echoes that of William Cole's.
   The technological focus this time round is provided by the Gestalt, a hive mind cult run by the Leader, who are all connected via the gelware in their brains, the same technology developed by Celeste that resides in Ack-Ack Macaque's and Victoria's heads. The Gestalt present as a democracy, but it is truly under the control of the Leader, or rather, the Founder, a female uplifted macaque from a different timeline who has been training the Leader as her protege. They represent the fear that all the democratising and utopian ideals of technology could be subverted by powers that be as a form of social control, to turn people into their mindless slaves. This would obviously be a concern to the futurists hoping to upload their minds into the internet come the singularity. However democratic a technology may appear to be on the surface, it's still something created by companies and corporations, people with agendas who may have very few scruples about how that technology gets used. With talk in the UK about regulating the internet, these issues could not be more timely.
   For all the seriousness and depth of its themes, 'Hive Monkey' never loses the sense of fun that made 'Ack-Ack Macaque' such a joy. Which is quite impressive, when you consider that Powell isn't afraid to play hardball. Ack-Ack, Victoria and William all get well and truly put through the wars here. A lesser writer might have shied away from putting William through the death of his wife twice, or ending the book with K8 still hooked up to the Gestalt. And although the gang manage to forestall the apocalypse again, the links at the bottom of the news articles that pop up again throughout the text subtly remind us that the Celeste probe is still en route to Mars, with its cargo of uploaded minds.

Gareth L. Powell - Ack-Ack Macaque (2013)

"Everybody loves the monkey."

'Ack-Ack Macaque' is a combination of pulpy adventure story and modern technological concerns. It is set in an alternate history Europe in which Britain and France formed a political union in 1959. One hundred years later, the world has taken on a distinctly diesel-punk tone, with nuclear zeppelins existing alongside sleek computers and tablets. This allows Gareth L. Powell to write a story with a vaguely steampunk setting that captures all the fun and action of 50's pulp adventures whilst exploring themes and ideas more usually found in cutting edge hard SF. The end result is a book that's an absolute blast and a total breeze but packs more of a philosophical punch than one might initially imagine. Also, there's a talking monkey, which science shows makes everything at least twenty percent better.
   Ack-Ack Macaque is a popular character in a MMORPG, a cynical, cigar-chomping, gun-toting talking monkey who pilots a Spitfire in a virtual World War II. Just before the centennial celebrations of the formation of the Anglo-France union, Prince Merovech, heir to the throne, finds himself caught up in a plot by radicals to free the artificial intelligence Ack-Ack Macaque from the game. The only hitch is, Ack-Ack Macaque isn't an AI, he's an artificially uplifted monkey with electronic gelware surgically enhancing his brain. Meanwhile Victoria Valois, an ex-journalist whose life was saved by replacing large sections of her brain with gelware, finds her husband murdered and the electronic back up in his head stolen, and her investigation into his death leads her to uncover a conspiracy involving Prince Merovech's mother, Duchess Celestine, and the surgeon who operated on herself, Ack-Ack Macaque, and Prince Merovech, Dr. Nguyen.
   While 'Ack-Ack Macaque' has all the stylistic trappings of steampunk, (I know said diesel punk at the beginning of the review, but I really think we as a people need to stop using '-punk' as a suffix), in the pulpy atmosphere and the retro-futurist setting, it's really cyberpunk masquerading as steampunk. The book is really about the sinister multinational corporation Celeste Tech's plan to manipulate the Anglo-France union into nuclear war with China so that its cult of transhumanists can upload their brains into new android bodies and rule the world. Mind uploading and the singularity are arguably the central theme of modern SF, but rarely are they dealt with as seriously as they here. Powell explores the existential, moral and ethical doubts that are frequently swept aside so we can vicariously enjoy the rapture of the nerds. Digital consciousness raises a whole host of ways in which people might be taken advantage of. The ability to digitally scan and upload the contents of our minds doesn't necessarily mean that the individual scanned will experience continuity, arguably what you are doing is creating another, totally sentient copy of the original. Then there is the matter of self copyright; Dr. Nguyen makes a digital copy of Victoria without her consent. Celeste Tech also plan to build an army of android slaves - this is the origin of the experiments that gave rise to Ack-Ack Macaque. Thus they have built over-ride codes into the electronic brains of Victoria and Ack-Ack Macaque, allowing Dr. Nguyen to render them helpless and servile with a few words. Rather than a utopian future in which everyone is remade equal, the singularity as imagined by Celeste Tech is simply a new arena in which the powerful will be able to exploit others.
   'Ack-Ack Macaque' also manages to subvert the expectations of its steampunk settings in other ways. From its setting you might expect all the characters to run around in petticoats, top hats and the like. Yet everyone spends the whole book in sensible, practical, modern clothes. Prince Merovech spends most of the story in a hoodie and jeans. More importantly, the book subverts the normally passive roles of female characters in the 50's pulps it draws on. Victoria is a character with action and agency, intelligent and good in a fight, who has her husband fridged to motivate her rather than the other way round, and the author doesn't dwell on her looks when describing her. Julie, the Prince's love interest, refuses to let him save her from her abusive father, instead choosing to stand up to him herself. I also like that the police are proved totally wrong in their assumption that Paul, Victoria's bisexual husband, was murdered by his gay lover. And though by the nature of its format, both of the villains are somewhat one dimensional and hysterical, I like that the book tries to add depth to Dr. Nguyen anyway. The man is a total creep and a truly nasty piece of work, but he does what he does because he sees it as part of his role as a doctor to 'fix' humanity by uploading everyone into android bodies.
   Then there is Ack-Ack Macaque himself. A larger than life talking monkey is exactly the kind of thing that falls flat on its face if you half ass it, but through Powell's commitment to his creation and the character's boundless energy, he is utterly charming and nonstop fun. Part of the reason why he works so well is that despite the daffiness of the idea Powell takes Ack-Ack Macaque seriously as a character. Ack-Ack Macaque started out as a monkey used in illegal animal fights before being artificially uplifted and placed in a computerised world he was convinced was real, where he had to experience all his comrades being killed off one by one. We understand where Ack-Ack Macaque is coming from as a character, and we sympathise with his genuinely traumatic past, so when he goes in guns-a-blazing and pulls off another ludicrous escape not only is it ridiculously fun, it matters that much more. What looks like a slight, fun idea on paper hides a darker truth. As such he is a perfect metaphor for the book that takes his name.