麻豆传媒

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WHAT does it mean to have free will in a society where your impulses can be monitored and shaped at every level? Zed by Joanna Kavenna attempts an answer through her creation of a world in which the Beetle corporation touts one algorithm to rule them all, and a system that purports to know your actions before you make them 鈥� with legally binding consequences.

When Beetle fails to predict a gruesome killing, and compounds matters by murdering a bystander, corporate troubleshooter Douglas Varley is tasked with finding out why. The answer is Zed: the name the book鈥檚 geeks give to all the exceptions which prove the rule 鈥� and to the creeping chaos they usher in.

Detectable 鈥減recrime鈥� famously appeared in Philip K. Dick鈥榮 story Minority Report, and there are similarities here, with both works exploring the nature of autonomy and reflecting the anxieties of their times. So Beetle is positioned as a sustainable, techno-modern liberal state鈥檚 best friend, putting citizens鈥� health and well-being first. Except when it doesn鈥檛. Kavenna digs into this gap and debunks Big Data鈥檚 utopian promises in a future that seems eerily close.

Beetle鈥檚 #TimesUp-ish CEO Guy Matthias believes the best citizens are those with a single verified identity, and the best actions those that conform to past behaviour. But with Zed on the rise, he figures the problem isn鈥檛 with the system, but with people. Stubbornly resistant, contradictory people. His BeetleInsight attempts to nudge them towards better decision-making, while Bespoke, his Orwellian language, limits their ability to think capaciously.

鈥淭his is a gorgeous, tricky book 鈥� and one likely to divide readers. The prose is everything鈥�

So far, so familiar. But Kavenna鈥檚 prose is exhilarating. Reality is incoherent. Dreams, VR and lived experience all blur. Identities multiply, while true authenticity seems impossible to quantify.

This Is How You Lose the Time War, a joint effort by Amal El-Mohtar and Max Gladstone, is also an exercise in stylistic invention. The slim novella offers an exchange of letters between Red and Blue, agents caught in a struggle for domination spanning distant past and far future.

El-Mohtar and Gladstone have been promoted as part of a new wave of speculative fiction, one as interested in diversity as literary experimentation. The letters offer a dense thicket of allusions, building rapport between the opposing heroes. For example, Red is addressed as Cardinal, Cochineal, Price Greater Than Rubies, while Blue is Lapis, and web hex colour code 0000FF.

This is a gorgeous, tricky book 鈥� and one likely to divide readers. A plot synopsis is beside the point as the prose is everything. Explicit world-building and other elements of sci-fi recede so we get few details about the eponymous Time War, and the battlefields are sketched to create the mood rather than advance the plot. This latter depends entirely on the growing intimacy between Red and Blue as their loyalties are shaken. Despite the universe-spanning, the stakes are local and particular.

What the books share (and what may connect them with 60s sci-fi writers such as J. G. Ballard, Michael Morcock and Joanna Russ) is the search for a human perspective in a universe too complicated, too big, too inhuman for traditional storytelling. El-Mohtar and Gladstone choose prose poetry, while Kavenna opts for satire. In both, the realities emerge as subjective, rebellious and beautifully chaotic.