Christopher Priest - A Dream Of Wessex (1977)

"The tide was going out, and for a moment Harkman had an hallucinatory image of some bottomless drain far out at sea, into which the water was emptying, drawing back from the shore and leaving the bay sodden and bare, the muddy remains of the twentieth century scattered like shipwrecks across the land."

   In 'A Dream Of Wessex', a group of thirty-nine academics experience a collective dream of an optimistic future, by way of the Ridpath projector. The hope is that by submerging themselves in an utterly realistic and convincing version of a better future they can discover beneficial paths to take in the present. However, in the projection their conscious will becomes subsumed to an alter ego who lives in that time, and David Harkman, one of the academics, has gone missing within the projection for two years and refuses to come out. Meanwhile the board of trustees have decided the project isn't delivering results, and hires Paul Mason to redirect the projection. Unfortunately for all of the academics, and especially Julia Stretton, who used to be in a relationship with Paul, Paul is a selfish, manipulative and abusive sociopath with delusions of grandeur whose warped perspective threatens to swallow up the entire projection.
   'A Dream Of Wessex' comes at a point in Priest's career when he was moving away from works like 'Inverted World' and 'Fugue For A Darkening Island' which play games with the boundaries of genre and their protagonists' perception but can still be comfortably classified as SF, towards his later works, such as 'The Affirmation' or 'The Glamour', which have a more ambiguous relationship towards their SFnal elements.   'Wessex' still has a central SF element in its dream machine, especially in the very Philip K. Dick-esque climax, which echoes the stripping away of subsequent layers of reality and illusion that runs through all his work. Towards the end the academics in the future dreamworld have reactivated the Ridpath projector within the dream world, and the spiraling of layers of reality rivals that in UBIK or 'Inception'.
   However the narrative focus remains almost entirely on the characters, specifically the destructive relationship between Paul and Julia, which Priest explores with almost surgical precision. The dream Wessex of the future  has provided Julia with a realised escapist fantasy that she can retreat to following her disastrous relationship with Paul, one that his presence in her new life threatens. Roger Zelazny used the metaphor of a dream machine to explore the effects of an obsessive and deranged personality on another person's mind in 'The Dream Master', but that was just between two people. Paul's obsessive drive to possess Julia is so powerful it disrupts a consensus reality shaped by thirty-eight other people. Priest derives some dark humour from just how twisted and egotistical Paul is. When he enters the projection, despite being the newest member his subconscious makes him the leader of the whole project, and his projected self is sickeningly handsome, charming and loved by everyone. When Julia regains her memories in the projection, she realises that this is genuinely how Paul sees himself. Paul is also unable to share the same optimistic future that the other members of the projection enjoy. While all the academics have created the future Wessex as an island paradise, an idyllic tourist resort that is still self-maintained and governed, Paul believes this to be an unrealistic and childish fantasy, so when he joins the projection Wessex becomes a polluted oil field, bickered over by large companies. His ultimate plan is to send off all the other academics into the future a second time, using the projector in the real world, leaving Julia trapped forever with him in the projection. He is a truly loathsome character, and his ultimate fate, trapped alone in the nightmare of his own consciousness, is well deserved.
   While Julia is a more sympathetic character, she shares with all the characters in this book a tendancy towards escapism and solipsism. In the end, she escapes Paul's malign influence, but decides to stay in the dreamworld with David Harkman, who has figured out the nature of the reality they live in but has become immune to the conditioning that the scientists use to wake them and has decided to stay in the dream world. By this stage in the book, everyone has passed through at least two dream projectors, and there is no guarantee that any of the surviving characters are sharing the same reality anymore. The David Harkman that Julia rides off into the sunset with could just be a figment of Julia's imagination, or he could be the real one and she could be a figment of his. David and Julia's love for each other has led them to reject reality and their original philanthropic mission and possibly even their own real company. Inadvertently, they may both be sharing Paul's fate.
   It is entirely appropriate that 'A Dream Of Wessex' was written at the turning point in Christopher Priest's writing career, as in many ways it is a metaphor for the artistic process of writing, and specifically writing SF. Like the academics in the projection, the SF writer imagines a future different from our own to tell us an important message about the present day. The fictional worlds created by writing provide us with a refuge from the harsh realities of real life, but can also give us succour and strength. However, perhaps in the ambiguity of the ending it is possible to detect Priest's frustrations with the constricting boundaries of genre fiction, the escapism and solipsism of a clique of fans and writers who have gotten lost in their own fantasies and forgotten what they came here for in the first place.
 

Roger Zelazny - The Dream Master (1966)

   "She said, 'What is the most beautiful thing you've ever seen?'

   Yes, he decided, he had guessed correctly. 

   He replied without hesitation: 'The sinking of Atlantis.'

   'I was serious.'

   'So was I.'"

   Poor Charles Render. Witty, intelligent, good with the ladies, nigh-on all powerful and somewhat smug, he's your typical Zelazny protagonist. But while Sam from 'Lord Of Light' or Prince Corwin from 'The Chronicles Of Amber' face their fair share of sticky situations, they unflappably come out on top. However, Render is stuck in 'The Dream Master', in which Zelazny deconstructs his go-to lead character. Suffice to say it ends particularly badly for him.
   Render is a neuroparticipant therapist who, thanks to the technological innovation of the Omnichannel Neural T & R Unit, treats patients by directly entering and manipulating their dreams.

It goes over your head like so. 

  While in the machine the therapist's and the patient's nervous systems fuse, and the therapist is able to discover and directly confront the source of the patient's neurosis. In the quote above, Render treats a patient who had become obsessed with their own dreamworld by causing the dreamworld's destruction. And there's certainly enough neuroses about to keep Render living in style; technological advances have improved the quality of life, but the combination of overpopulation and future shock are taking their toll on the human psyche, with high incidences of mental disturbances and suicides.
   In the course of his work, Render agrees to treat an ambitious young blind woman, Eileen Shallot. Shallot herself is a psychiatrist who longs to go into neuroparticipant therapy like Render, but is not allowed to do so for fears that, when she experiences sight through her patient's nervous system, she will not be able to achieve the necessary emotional distance required to retain control of the dream. Against the advice of his colleagues and his family, he agrees to help her. Unfortunately for him, Shallot is also completely insane, and eventually wrests control away from Render and traps him within her own dreamworld.
   Despite its short length, 'The Dream Master' does a number of things incredibly well. Firstly, the world building is very impressive, and is done largely through dialogue and context-setting scenes rather than by clunky exposition. Zelazny's style is always clear, engaging and slangy, but it's really quite impressive how much detail he is able to impart about the world in this story just through the characters' conversations and actions. As with 'Lord Of Light', the narrative is coloured heavily by allusions to myths and legends. This is something that naturally makes sense here, as the characters are frequently exploring the human psyche. Mythological archetypes stand for various aspects of the human character, which is where much of their resonance comes from, and having the plot involve dreams provides a very natural way for Zelazny to incorporate some of his favourite themes.
   But what makes all of this truly compelling is Render's fall from grace. Zelazny's protagonists always had a tendency towards the self-satisfied, so it's both fitting and necessary that he explore what happens when this goes too far. Render's hubris is his downfall, but when your job involves creating and destroying imaginary worlds, pride is a natural pitfall. Throughout the book, Render likens himself to a god numerous times, usually in a faintly ironic way but it's clear to see underneath it all he kind of believes in his own hype. He genuinely believes that there is nothing that he will not be able to handle, and initially it looks like everything is firmly under his control. Dr Shallot is introduced as someone who is ambitious, intelligent and engaging. She's admirable, and her plight is sympathetic. The initial scenes of Render helping her to experience a sense she's never experienced before, and the sense of wonder as her perception of the world changes, is a playing out of the conceptual breakthrough central to so much of SF. It is only as we witness more of her sessions with Render that the full extent of her insanity is gradually revealed. At the same time, the more we get to know Render himself the more we are able to see his own flaws, the ones that he is too self-satisfied to see, let alone acknowledge. This all comes together incredibly elegantly in the end. Render winds up trapped inside Shallot's dream, with pieces of him gradually being violently destroyed. Having shown us the glorious, flowering vistas of the imagination, the novel finishes on a note of nightmarish horror.

Ryu Mitsuse - 10 Billion Days & 100 Billion Nights (1967)

Ryu Mitsuse's '10 Billion Days & 100 Billion Nights' is in it for the long haul. Starting off with the formation of our planet, and extending its narrative tendrils out to the heat death of the universe, this is a novel that redefines being truly epic in scope. In that sense, the only comparable works are Olaf Stapeldon's 'Last And First Men' and 'Starmaker', but Mitsuse's work is both stranger and more lyrical. In its mixture of hard science fiction and Eastern spirituality, it echoes the work of Roger Zelazny, in particular 'Lord Of Light'. However, at the end of the day it's very much its own beast. The cover of the Haikasoru translation has "The GREATEST Japanese science fiction novel of all time" enthusiastically emblazoned across the front, and while I've not (yet) read enough Japanese SF to comment on that, '10 Billion Days...' is certainly an engaging and thought-provoking read, that easily stands next to the best of Western SF from the same era.

Unsurprisingly, given the novel's massive scope and many narrative strands, it takes a while to set all of the story's moving pieces into motion. Mitsuse saves most of the explanation, such as it is, for right at the end, so you're kept guessing as to what's actually going on throughout most of the book. Fortunately the journey itself is a lot of fun, taking us reeling through ancient Atlantis to Jerusalem in the time of Christ and on to crumbling ruins on distant planets in the far future, and when you do figure out what's going on it's a doozy.

Basically, Plato, Siddhartha and the demigod Asura are rebuilt as cyborgs and sent to the far future, where they try to find out the reasons behind the collapse of human civilisation from the gods themselves. Unfortunately for them, they are pursued by Jesus of Nazareth, who has also been cyborgified and sent into the future, and is a blaster-wielding badass. Our three heroes are pursued by Jesus from the future ruins of Tokyo to collapsing metropolises on other planets where robots rise up against humans who have stored themselves as digital memories to another galaxies where the god-like aliens have preserved themselves in pocket dimensions to outlast the passage of time. These sequences are fantastic, and would be worth the price of entry alone. Mitsuse creates a decaying universe reminiscent of Gene Wolfe's 'The Book Of The New Sun', and as with Wolfe's masterpiece, the reader is left to puzzle out and interpret many of the details themselves, as characters are whisked through times and places they don't fully understand.

In a cruel inversion of 'Childhood's End' by Arthur C. Clarke, at the end of her journey Asura discovers that the so-called gods are giant aliens who, in order to stop humanity from ever reaching its full potential and competing with them, visited earth and planted the seeds of humanity's eventual destruction into the entire human race's psyche. These aliens were responsible for the destruction of Atlantis, and Jesus, mistakenly believing that one of these aliens is the true god, has been acting as their agent of destruction, spreading their influence across the planet. In a final act of callousness, the aliens have set themselves up as future redeemers who in times to come will save humanity, when in reality they are humanity's oppressors. Asura also discovers that she and Siddhartha are agents of a less malevolent god-like being, whose influence was simply not strong enough to prevent the destruction of the human race.

Ryu Mitsuse is asking pretty big questions here. His book is about the' nature of the universe that we live in, and the nature of god. '10 Billion Days...' asks the question, what kind of god would create a people so prone to violence and self-destructive tendencies? Mitsuse's protagonists are inspired to continue their journey against perilous odds simply because they feel they have to know, why would god doom humanity to extinction, and offer a false hope of redemption? There is an excellent scene where Asura confronts the god-like alien directly, and he responds by subjecting her to a violent psychic attack. It reminds me of the scene in Star Trek V when Spock asks the god-like alien, 'What would God want with a starship?' and gets zapped for his troubles. Both scenes show the god-like aliens as being petulant and cruel and act as the final tip-off to the audience that they are nothing like what they claim to be. (Needless to say Mitsuse handles this with far more elegance than Shatner does.) The image of Jesus as a deluded Knight Templar type is both powerful and disturbing, and the book gets a fair amount of mileage out of the fact that this is initially how Pontius Pilate and Judas see Jesus, but they cannot possibly guess how close they are to the truth because of how little of the bigger picture they are allowed to see.

The book ends tragically but beautifully. Asura's long struggle comes to an end, and she gets the answers to at least some of her questions, but she outlives the gods themselves, and is left alone on their planet, now crumbled to dust, waiting for the heat death of the universe. It is a fittingly bleak and vertigo-inducing finale.