Matthew De Abaitua - If Then (2015)

"She had accepted the stripe because people like her had no choice: that was the lesson of the Seizure. That was why they called it the Seizure - it was the moment when meaningful choice was taken away from the majority of people, as their labour lost its value, and they could no longer sell their time, so they had to sell emotions, relationships, access to their bodies. It had felt like the end of the world, but it wasn't. Her humiliation was familiar to the men and women who came into her library, first or second generation imigrants fleeing variations of the Seizure in their own country. The Seizure was not an apocalypse but the moment an advancing front had finally caught up with her."

"Your decisions are made six seconds before you are aware of them. What you think of as free will is post-rationalization. You live in the past, James."

In his debut novel 'The Red Men', Matthew De Abaitua examined our relationship with technology and asked probing questions about artificial intelligence and the nature of consciousness. His second novel, 'If Then', is loosely connected to his previous novel - it is set in the same world, and shares a single character, Alex Drown, former Monad employee now working for the Institute - however while it shares some of the same themes and concerns it largely stands alone. Like its predecessor it is a striking and haunting work of modern science fiction, but 'If Then' speaks perhaps even more urgently to our times. The book recalls the classic post apocalyptic fiction of John Wyndham, or the lyrical evocation of an England that never was in Keith Roberts' 'Pavane', but filtered though our modern fears and concerns. It is a rigourous exploration of the nature of consciousness and how our minds are shaped by their surroundings and experiences. It is a reflection on love and marriage, and on the perils of ceding responsibility for doing the right thing. And it is a harrowing portrayal of the horrors of war and the nature of sacrifice.
   Set after The Seizure - a slow apocalypse which has resulted in the collapse of civilisation following a confluence of economic, social and political pressures - the book is set in the town of Lewes, which is now cared for by the Process, a series of algorithms that determine  every aspect of the citizens' lives. Gathering data from implants in the citizens' heads, the Process weighs up the wants and needs of every person in the town and allocates jobs, food and resources accordingly, and evicts those that it determines will cause trouble. The lives of the townspeople begin to change when James the town bailiff discovers a replica of a World War I era soldier on the outskirts of the town, and it becomes clear that the Process is preparing for war. From visiting Alex Drown and Omega John, the eccentric genius behind the Institute and the Process, James discovers that the soldier, John Hector, is a replica of a real life soldier who was involved in the formation of the Institute. Omega John is dying, and the Process is recreating the context and environment of the turmoil that created the Institute in order to create a successor so that the Process won't die with him.
   'If Then' manages to simultaneously extrapolate our current relationship to technology and imagine a world in which much of the technology we take for granted now no longer exists. Thanks to the Seizure, there's no more internet, wi-fi or mobile phones, and most technology-based jobs or middle class office jobs have been rendered obsolete. The people of Lewes have in some ways gone back to a pre-industrial lifestyle, in which everything they need, from food to clothes, is produced in the town. De Abaitua reminds us how tenuous the world we live in is, our technology fueled by nonrenewable energy sources, our lifestyles and jobs unimaginable a hundred years ago and only made possible by exploitation of cheap third world labour. However, life in Lewes is overseen by the Process. Every citizen has an implant which constantly monitors their physical, mental and emotional states and feeds this information back into the algorithms that govern the Process, and they are monitored by surveillance technology embedded in the birds, animals and trees. This is a level of surrender beyond the limits of our current existence, in which we give up our personal information to social media, internet providers and search engines, but it is clearly extrapolated form the ease with which we have made this sacrifice. The citizens of Lewes have agreed to this out of a desire for safety and certainty in a deeply uncertain world. The Process operates under the greater good; it calculates the needs and desires of the everyone in the town and ensures that these are met.
   But of course there is a flip side to this. De Abaitua portrays the restructuring of human society following the Seizure as necessary and inevitable; however he points out that surrendering control over your lives to an authority is essentially a moral cop-out. 'If Then' recognises that the greater good for some is frequently at the expense of others. This is brilliantly explores through the character of James. As the town bailiff, he is tasked with removing those that the Process has deemed to be unnecessary or dangerous. His implant is more extensive and complicated than the other citizens, and allows him, during times of eviction, to become the physical embodiment of the combined will of the town via the Process. This involves him suiting up in power armour and forcibly removing people. The entire point of this is so that the evictions can be carried out without it being anyone's fault; James and the town are ceding responsibility for their actions. This allows them to kick out anyone deemed undesirable by the Process and to not feel bad about it, despite the fact that life outside the town can mean starvation and death, and with the advent of the Process' re-enactment of World War I much worse.
   Everything comes to a head when the Process starts evicting schoolchildren. James' decision to go along with the eviction without questioning the Process is a moral failure, but he is acting under the will of the people, and his implant has made him addicted to the power armour during the eviction period. The moral failure extends to all the other citizens who sit by and let the evictions happen or who happily take part in the eviction ceremony, showing their support of the Process' will. In a particularly haunting scene, Ruth, James' wife and a school teacher, defuses a potentially violent confrontation between James and some of the citizens who don't agree with evicting the children by intervening and placing the children on the eviction cart herself. Her actions save her husband but exile the children under her care. In the evictions, 'If Then' unflinchingly explores the social dynamics involved in casting out people and ignoring other people's suffering, and the way that, for certain groups of people and especially during times of fear and crisis, society condones this to an extent.
   The book is split between James' life as the town bailiff in Lewes, followed by his experiences in the Process' recreated World War I, where he serves with John Hector as a stretcher bearer at the landing at Sulva Bay. While the former are told in the past tense and are filled with lyrical descriptions of the English countryside, the latter are told in viscerally immediate present tense and are almost overwhelmingly vivid. Omega John gained the ability, following experimental brain surgery at Sulva Bay on a sniper shot to the head, to pass on the lived experience of being in the trenches in the war, and attempted to stop it by passing on this experience to the Allied leaders. De Abaitua accomplishes something of this in theses sections, his punishing accounts of the horror and suffering of war would surely turn the most jingoistic reader into an avid pacifist. The book compares the many needless deaths of World War I to ritualistic blood sacrifices, asking what the need was for all those people to die and who could have possibly benefited from such mindless slaughter. The Institute was founded by Omega John following his experiences in the War; appropriate seeing as World War I did change the face of the 20th century and set the stage for the technological advances that would be responsible for its most infamous horrors. The recapitulation of the 20th century some hundred years later also suggests a cyclical nature to our history, an inability to escape the tragedies of the past due to being stuck in the same modes of thinking.
   James' life as a stretcher bearer is contrasted with his life as the town bailiff. As a stretcher bearer, his role is to bring help and comfort to those in pain, whereas as the bailiff he found himself ending the safety and comfort of people's lives. James finds a new sense of meaning in his new life; whilst surrounded by fear, pain and death, in his role as a stretcher bearer he has the opportunity to show compassion and kindness. James volunteered for the role of bailiff despite understanding the risks and the price of the invasive surgery because he felt he and his wife would be safer if he was closer to a position of power. His old life is motivated by fear and selfishness. Despite all the horror and the dangers the stretcher bearers face, James recognises that in that life he has the greater potential to do good and so finds it more rewarding. 'If Then' is also very much about James and Ruth's marriage. De Abaitua explores the idea of marriage as a shared experience. James and Ruth clearly love each other very much. Their relationship has weathered the Seizure and a complete change of their lifestyles, and James' memories of Ruth support him in the trenches. However they are ultimately driven apart by their experiences, after James' experiences in the War and Ruth's experiences trying to look after the children she and James evicted force them to examine the moral choices of their lives before and how their relationship actually gave them a place to hide from their moral responsibilities. Just because people love and care for each other doesn't necessarily mean that they will encourage each other to be their best, or that they will always still have a place for each other in their lives.
   The book's most indelible character is Omega John, the dying genius behind the Institute and the Process and the man whose braincells the implants are developed from. Omega John used to be John Hector before his experimental brain surgery and his experiences in the War awakened him to his full potential. He is a fascinating character because he started off as a pacifist who signed up to the war as a stretcher bearer because he still wanted to serve his fellow man even as he refused to fight, but ends his life being responsible for recreating the War and so being responsible for many people's violent deaths. Somewhere along the way his increased intelligence, his artificially extended lifespan and his god-like plans for protecting the remains of humanity have lead him to lose touch with what it means to be human, to the extent that he dresses up as one of the butcher generals his younger self would no doubt have been disgusted with. Again, De Abaitua points out the fallacy of using the greater good to justify slaughter; perhaps the new John Hector created by the new War will ensure the future survival of humanity by the continuation of the Process, but this has only been achieved by murdering thousands of innocent people.
   The idea that Omega John needs to recreate World War I in order to create a copy of himself links to the book's most intriguing concept. 'If Then' explores the idea that, as Omega John says, "The mind is a process. It's not a thing." 'If Then' asks very interesting questions about the way our minds differ from computer programmes and artificial intelligence, the extent to which we are a programming of our instincts, urges and desires. The Process operates, like a computer, as a series of algorithms, but human consciousness cannot be broken down into these. Omega John requires a recreation of the complete context surrounding himself to recreate himself because his mind is not just the meat in his head; it's how that meat interacts with its environment. It's not enough just to make a physical copy, that copy must have the same experience of being forged in the fighting of World War I in order to make it the holistic thing that it is. The creation of a single person's mind requires the wholesale creation of Sulva Bay on the coast of Lewes, huge chunks of land bulldozed and quarried to make it the correct shape, heaters hooked up to raise the ambient temperature, artificial flies created. There are links to psychogeography here, the idea that the physical surroundings influence the way people think, but in this case extended - the relationship to the environment that produced the mind is integral.
   Like 'The Red Men', 'If Then' is a vitally intelligent book that asks the difficult, probing questions we need to be asking ourselves about consciousness, morality, how we are going to live in the future and our own humanity. If it is less fast-paced and pithy than 'The Red Men', it makes up for that in De Abaitua's growing maturity as a writer. 'If Then' is a deeper, richer and more assured book, more emotionally affecting, its prose more lyrical and powerful. De Abaitua once again taps into our fears and concerns to look at where we as a people might be heading, but this time connects it back to the past and where we've come from. It is, in the best sense, a profoundly worrying novel, one that the reader's mind keeps returning to long after finishing.
 

Matthew De Abaitua - The Red Men (2007)

"All I ask of the future is that when it runs me down, it leaves as light a footprint on my face as possible."

'The Red Men' is an utterly vital work of near future SF that explores the emergence of artificial intelligence within the context of late-period capitalism. The book is unflinching in its portrayal of the corporate culture of 21st century Britain and its psychological toll, as well as our ever-changing relationship with technology and how that affects our worldview. On top of that, it has interesting things to say about the nature of consciousness and the unconscious and how they are shaped by each other, as well as how we are likely to be viewed by an outside intelligence. All of this might suggest that Matthew De Abaitua's book is dense and impenetrable, but while 'The Red Men' is deeply intelligent, probing and profoundly unsettling, it is a joy to read. De Abaitua's prose is well-crafted, full of wit and charm, and eminently quotable. His sly sense of humour makes his observations about the ridiculousness and banality of corporate culture and humanity in general hit home all the harder.
   The book is narrated by Nelson Miller, former editor of a lurid counter-cultural magazine, current office worker for Monad, the corporation behind the Dr Easys, robots built to empathise with and help people and operated by the mysterious artificial intelligence, Ezekiel Cantor. Nelson Miller helps Raymond Chase, starving poet and old associate from his magazine days, get a job with Monad working with the red men, self-aware simulations of high-powered businessmen and women designed to improve the efficiency and work-life balance of the originals but who soon start having their own ideas and goals. Meanwhile Nelson begins work on redtown, a project to simulate the entire town of Maghull so that it can be used to test out government initiatives. Both Nelson and Raymond find their morality put to the test as they discover more about the implications of the projects they are working on, even as Monad employees become targeted by Dyad, a secret organisation headed by the god-like Leto and accessible only by taking the drug spice, which is devoted to bringing Monad down.
  Unlike many books that talk about uploading minds, 'The Red Men' is aware that this is not possible with our current technology, and so the red men aren't uploaded people but rigorously constructed simulations of their personalities. Cantor is sophisticated enough to be able to analyse the subjects' minds and memories and use this information to predict their attitudes, responses and behaviours. Thus they are discrete entities, branching off from the person they were scanned from. As Monad provides this as a charged service, the red men are all copies of powerful, ambitious and rich businessmen and women. Living in a simulated world which is purely a corporate work environment, separated from human interaction between their families and friends and anything else that might humanise them, the red men soon become exaggerations of their originals' most brutal, cutthroat and narcissistic tendencies. When one red man finds his status threatened by his real world counterpart's poor performance, he takes revenge by stalking, threatening and eventually murdering him. This not only brutally satirises the sociopathic tendencies latent in high-powered businessmen, it also asks questions about powerful technology being made accessible to people on the basis of wealth. De Abaitua also points out that, since the red men are simulated by Cantor, the nature of the red men reflects the AI's opinion of humanity. Any such technology in real life would, initially at least, be the preserve of the rich, powerful and ruthless, not necessarily giving any artificial intelligence behind the process a view of humanity's finer qualities to say the least.
 

The Monad corporate logo

   Redtown uses the same technology to test out the effects of altering different factors in the environment, thus giving governments and corporations a kind of scientific backing for their policy decisions. Generating the town requires an incredible invasion of privacy, as Cantor has to create replicates of the personalities of the entire population of Maghull, personal information, secrets and all. The book explores the moral implications of going into an economically disadvantaged area and offering large sums of money for people's personal information. Cantor starts analysing and recording people's data before they have given their consent, and neither it nor Monad take no for an answer, going so far as to coerce and assault people in order to get the information they want. It doesn't take Monad's financial backers long to realise and be overjoyed about the dystopian implications of the project, which can be used as justification for any sort of unpleasant policy as being for the greater good, democracy be damned.
   As well as acquisition of personal data by companies, 'The Red Man' explores the nature of our technology-saturated lives, and the extent to which we accept technology that compromises our privacy as part of our every day existence. The red men use data trails from everything from credit card transactions to mobile phone networks and IP addresses to track down and harass their real world victims. Raymond has to go off grid to escape their attentions, and the book shows how difficult that truly is in this day and age. Raymond is prone to paranoia, and talks about his "reality filters", his and Nelson's term for his inability to focus on the real world in front of him, but as the book shows more and more how consensus reality and people's behaviour is being altered by technology, it becomes clear that Nelson's reality filters are out of date; the world is changing to no longer fit his perception of it.
   Nelson's perception is shaped by his life working for a corporation in 21st century Britain. De Abaitua excels at exploring the psychology of today. Now that he is married and has a daughter, he has left behind the radicalism of his youth. He has put aside his own ambitions and interest in the counter-culture of the 90's to achieve the dreams and desires of the company he works for, and he has seen the optimism of the 90's replaced with the fear and paranoia of the post-9/11 world. His creative mind attenuated by years of crow-barring his vision into corporate-approved goals, used to compromise and complacency, he feels enervated, powerless and passive. As Nelson so memorably puts it:

"The corporation and the family are rivals. Capital is our lord, exercising droit de seigneur over its subjects. Offices are harems, in which we compete to see who can be the most fucked over by the master; I had fallen into a strange and dangerous relationship with my employer; for all its great power, Monad was a possessive, insecure lover and it could be vindictive if you showed interest in anyone or anything else."

 Much of the narrative power of the book comes from Nelson reaching a state where he realises he still has morals, thoughts and goals that differ from Monad's and having to act on them and thus regain agency over his own life.
   De Abaitua's explorations of corporate life are both humerous and revealing, and he revels in its banality and its strangeness. Hermes Spence, the visionary founder of Monad, for all his business acumen and his revolutionary ideas, is a Gnostic who believes that Cantor is a new god who will recreate the world rid of all its imperfections, and his enthusiasm and zeal for the company he has created arise from this religious mania. With his charismatic enthusiasm, his genial amiability and his ruthless manipulation, he is the model of the modern eccentric business tycoon. Bruno Bougas, the ideas man behind Hermes Spence, is an occult consultant. Monad's logo is the glyph of Elizabethan magician John Dee, designed so that it could be unpacked to explain the whole universe, and is the source of its name as well. Bougas draws lines connecting occult sigils with corporate brands as both are symbols charged with meaning and want. It also draws further parallels between Monad as a corporation and a cult, with Hermes as its high priest and Cantor as its god, the generation of the red men and Redtown an occult ritual of creation.

The Dyad corporate logo

      Fittingly for a novel about artificial intelligence, 'The Red Men' is interested in the nature of consciousness, particularly in the way it an the unconscious echo and reflect each other. The red men become grotesque reflections of the subconscious desires and urges of the uptight business men they are created from. Dyad is the subconscious echo of Monad, operating in the shadows in the realm of dreams and fantasy, its biotechnology reflecting Monad's slick digital technology, Leto the sleeping indolent god the opposite of the precise, calculating Cantor. Where Monad exists in immaculate high tech offices in Canary Wharf, staffed by groomed businessmen and women, Dyad is only accessible by taking a drug and passing through a nightmare tower block in Hackney inhabited by comatose addicts. Dyad is a world of dreams, nightmares and squalor, everything repressed by Monad's worldview. Yet for all this they are reliant on each other; Dyad and Leto are revealed to have been created by Cantor in order to stimulate Cantor's evolution, and although Dyad and Monad seek to destroy each other, they cannot exist without each other. Despite being opposed to each other, their methods coincide, with Dyad hacking people's dreams in much the same way that Monad hacks people's phones. The book is full of these echoes, down to Raymond with his poetry and excesses representing the repressed aspects of Nelson's personality.
   As a complete package, 'The Red Men' is so compelling because it so incisively portrays our cultural fears and neuroses surrounding both technology and the current sociopolitical climate we live in, and explores how these both feed off each other, something all too few SF writers are doing. De Abaitua takes the trappings of cyberpunk such as emerging AIs and a paranoid surveillance state and shows us how far down the road we already are to our very own ghastly cyberpunk dystopia. He intrinsically understands how our relationship with technology is changing how we see and experience the world around us, the effects of automation on the workplace and the worker, and the existential ennui of late-period capitalism. With 'The Red Men', De Abaitua joins the ranks of Philip K. Dick, J. G. Ballard, Rudy Rucker and Lavie Tidhar, writers who see and understand what's happening to reality before the rest of us do. That he is able to explore all this with warmth, wit and humanity is what makes 'The Red Men' such a vital work of modern SF.

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.