Metacyberpunk Is Not Post-Modern Prose
Ever since William Gibson's Neuromancer came out in 1984 and scarfed
up the three major science fiction awards (Hugo, Nebula and Philip K.
Dick), the term "cyberpunk" has proven to be a viable term marketing
departments can use to describe any manner of speculative science fiction.
Most of these author's books, however, don't come close to Gibson's
originality in either substance or form, and Steve Aylett's Atom is no
exception.
Billed by its publisher (Four Walls Eight Windows) as "metacyberpunk,"
we are given to believe that this bizarre novel is "sheer mayhem
illuminated by wit of the first order, intense violence relieved by
startlingly original use of language." I'm not exactly sure what "wit of the
first order" is supposed to mean, but if it means a half-baked satire
using a host of characters so cliched they become a pastiche of a cliche, a
plot so inane and laughable that it barely holds up under scrutiny, and
page after page of silliness in the guise of humor, then this book may
have hit its mark.
Set in a town called Beerlight, where there is so much crime that its
denizens pay more attention to the stylishness of a crime than the crime
itself, "private defective" (no, that's not a typo) Taffy Atom is hired
to track down the whereabouts of a brain (or "squashers" as they are
called in this novel) stolen during a raid on the city's Brain Facility.
He's aided by a partner, the mysterious Madison Drowner (who makes all
the cool gadgets), and a modified sidekick that is a toothy fish. The
brain, which turns out to be Kafka's (for a series of silly puns on
"Metamorphosis"), was hired by a local crimelord called the Candyman to be
stolen by a mobster named Harry Fiasco. Harry Fiasco, though, is one
of Eddie Thermidor's boys, and tells his boss that he stole the brain
for him. As the brain becomes "misplaced" throughout much of the book,
the plot largely hinges around a cast of characters trying to discover
who is double-crossing whom and why.
There are many problems with this book. Layer after layer of plot is
discovered through dialog, great chunks of it being dropped into the
text like huge blocks of semantic concrete; more often than not, the plot
twists and turns only to serve its own internal sense of humor (for
example, after Fiasco is caught, he is electrocuted; when this fails,
another character confesses to one of Harry's earlier crimes, stealing an
apple, and Harry is freed because he no longer has "three strikes"). The
action that does take place in the present is largely a series of comic
events that do little to advance the story but seem to function as
props for Aylett's quirky sense of humor (he can go on for paragraphs
describing the history of a line of fictitious guns). Every major event in
the story, despite the author's faux omniscient voice, is revealed when
one character interviews another, a device that is extremely tiresome.
The violence, for the most part, is over-the-top and cartoonish in
nature, a milieu that becomes Other flaws include believability and
continuity. For example, we discover late in the book that Candyman's
brain was switched with Kafka's two hours after the heist. Yet for much
of the book, Candyman maintains
his own personality, and it is not until this twist in the plot is
revealed that the author starts referring to Candyman as Kafka (or K,
alternatively, as Kafka would refer to himself in his own work). At another
point in the book we spend an entire chapter following a would-be
assassin of Atom's through half a year of being stuck in a cycling time bomb
only to discover that this character is never heard from again; the
action takes up again a few days after the bomb first goes off, making the
entire chapter pointless.
This could have been an interesting book. Aylett's imagination is
about as creative as anyone's in the business, and his ideas are fresh and
full of potential. If only he had developed his characters and his
story beyond the level of a cartoon and toned down the smug, smart-ass
prose, this book could have gone somewhere. There are the makings of some
truly interesting ideas (bombs that lock victims in time cycles; guns
that fire on intuition, to name a few), but there are far too many
cliches and downright silly prose for this novel to "mean" anything. Some
may argue that Aylett's style is the bizarre, the campy, the post-modern
I-can-do-what-I-want, and without this quirkiness, much of the feel
would be lost. This may be true, but often enough sloppy writing is
written off as being post-modern because it doesn't follow conventional
writing rules. No one will remember this book five years from now, let
alone the seventeen of Gibson's.
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