introduction
by Jo Walton
I’m so excited you’re going to have the chance to read this book. For years when I’ve been talking about really good innovative science fiction, the kind of SF that widens the palette of what SF can do, the kind of questions it can ask, the space of answers it can come up with, The Fortunate Fall would come to mind. I’d mention it with a sense of guilt, knowing that if you hadn’t read it already it would be a struggle to get hold of it. But now you can.
I was lucky enough to read it when it was first published. Having said I was lucky, everyone I knew was reading it. Because this was 1996, when the internet was young, everyone I knew lived on the usenet group rec.arts.sf.written. We were SF writers and SF readers and we talked about SF all the time. We were all very excited by The Fortunate Fall and we talked about it nonstop with avid intensity. Thinking about it now, and the way it’s a cult classic, it’s possible that I know everyone who read it. Maybe John M. Ford and Ahasuerus the Wandering Jew and Dorothy J. Heydt and Kate Nepveu and Steven Brust and Nancy Lebovitz and my now-husband Emmet O’Brien and the rest of us were the only people who read it back then. It was so obviously a masterpiece, and there was so much to say about it, that I expected it to be nominated for awards and become part of the general conversation of SF. That didn’t happen—sometimes it just doesn’t, even with something as clearly great as this. It may have been ahead of its time. I’ve sometimes thought that though it came out in 1996 it was really the first SF novel of the twenty-first century—that while it’s in dialogue with Samuel R. Delany and C. J. Cherryh and William Gibson and Thomas M. Disch it’s much more reaching ahead to conversations with writers like Ada Palmer and Ted Chiang and Arkady Martine.
The Fortunate Fall is a very unusual book. There are a number of other adjectives I could have used there, like powerful, immersive, good, challenging … But when I think about introducing this book to a new set of readers almost thirty years after it was first published, what I want to stress is definitely how unusual it was, and remains. In a few ways, while still being excellent and powerful and so on, it has become less unusual over time. It’s no longer surprising to have a central same-sex couple in a science fiction novel, or for them to be female, not the way it was in the mid-nineties. This is wonderful. We call this progress. This is one of the books that helped get us to the point where we can take this for granted. Similarly, it’s no longer in any way remarkable to have a first-person female protagonist—though one as different and quirky and with such a strong voice as Maya is still unusual. She’s older than your normal genre protagonist, too; this is a story of a veteran with scars, not a kid starting out.
But neat as this is, it’s trivial compared to what really makes it unusual.
The Fortunate Fall is about the possibility of changing human nature. You wouldn’t think that would be rare in science fiction, but it is, vanishingly rare. It’s hard to address. Fiction, all of it, is about human nature, but we seldom see it changing. Yet here all of our central characters have experienced deliberate changes to what it means to be human, and to be themselves, while still being entirely comprehensible and understandable to the present-day human reader. We are plunged straight in to Maya’s viewpoint, and immediately immersed in her awareness of a quite detailed future history and personal history, of which we only see as much as we need, but which gives us the illusion of much more. Maya is a camera, that’s her job description. She has new-style implants in her head plugged in to converters for the old-style ones that connect directly to her brain. She broadcasts telepresence direct to the Net for work, her thoughts, memories, sensations, imaginings, and gets feedback from her audience. At the start of the novel she’s in Kazakhstan doing a series on a holocaust that took place fifty years before and has been almost forgotten, and she’s nervous because she has to work with a last-minute screener who for all she knows could forget to filter out the fact that Maya needs a bathroom break. And thus we’re painlessly introduced to everything that’s going to be important: the world, the Net, the history that lies between them and us, Maya, and her new screener Keishi. We take for granted the slots in her head, and only slowly come to learn what it really means for brains to be directly linked to the wider Net.
When I first read The Fortunate Fall, when it was new, I felt that it justified cyberpunk, a subgenre that I disliked intensely partly for its techbro focus and partly for its coldness and noir vibes. This is about brain-computer interfaces, but it isn’t cold, it isn’t distanced and ironic, and it isn’t noir. What I felt was that it was worth having had cyberpunk if we could come out the other side and have this book. Looking back, there were other books that used the brain-computer interface without me hating them, Maureen F. McHugh’s 1992 China Mountain Zhang for example. What I didn’t like wasn’t the technology, it was the aesthetic. This book doesn’t subscribe to that cooler-than-ice aesthetic, it’s warm and human even as it’s post-human. When Maya uses the phrase “locked in our separate skulls” she isn’t talking about the limitations of being human, she’s yearning and aspiring for that condition. The book, the first-person written record, is written to a world that already knows everything and has shared everything in her head when the events happened. She says, in the first chapter, that she is writing it so we, the imagined reader, will know less. When you turn back, after reading the book, to read that first chapter again, or when you reread the whole thing after a little while to let the impact sink in, which you probably will do, those words will strike you even harder.
I’m glad to say that it has dated remarkably little. Although written thirty years ago, and despite a technological focus, it contains remarkably few moments that feel outdated. On the whole this future still feels like it’s firmly set in the future. We still see very few books set more than a hundred years ahead where humanity is still on Earth and not spread out across the galaxy. This is a solid future that grows out of our past, in which Africa may be the new technological center of the world, and Kazakhstan scarred by a recent holocaust, but they’re still recognizably shaped by the history we know. This world grew out of our world. This future that feels as if it’s had another hundred years of history that are as complex and multilayered and bloody as any century of real history. Parts of it, like the Guardian regime where the Americans ran the world and ran the Square Mile camps as franchises (McGulag, the text jokes), seem regrettably more plausible now than they did when I first read it. By and large with near-future Earths, they fit precisely into pre- and post-9/11—by that classification The Fortunate Fall seems definitely post-. It’s one of the first post-Vingean books to deal with the Singularity and find interesting answers to it. Parts of this world have gone through an idea of the Singularity and humanity isn’t recognizable anymore, and in other parts … well, other things are happening. Prepare to be immersed in a big complex future history where we learn a lot about what shaped the history that led to this world, and what’s still going on, and we learn about what happens when people can edit other people’s brains to get rid of things they don’t want to see in the world, like Christianity, or homosexuality, and where feral AIs have their own ecology.
There’s a little-appreciated but wonderful thing science fiction does where it sets forth a made-up word and you can instantly figure out what it means, and in addition to understanding it, you understand something new about the world and the world-building. There’s a second-order level of this when you keep reading and later learn something more about that word and where it came from and you realise with astonished delight that your assumptions were both right and wrong. This book contains one of the best instances of this in the whole genre, a word that falls perfectly and unpacks itself even more when you learn more about it. I love it so much that I don’t want to spoil it for you. But all the words here are chosen perfectly to build their world, whether it’s hilarious: “I menued the chips’ color to a gray that matched the fabric. I stepped back and checked the effect in the mirror. The transformation was amazing. Ten minutes ago, I’d looked like a typically encrusted old-time Netcaster. Now I looked like a dangerous lunatic with no fashion sense. Stop me before I accessorize again.” Or philosophical: “We are a machine made by God to write poetry to glorify his creatures. But we’re a bad machine, built on an off day. While we were grinding out a few pathetic verses, we killed the creatures we were writing about; for every person writing poems there were a hundred, a thousand, out blowing away God’s creation left right and center. Well, Maya Tatyanichna? You know what we have wrought. What is your judgement? Which is better? A tiger, or a poem about a tiger?”
The Fortunate Fall is a very intense book both emotionally and intellectually. It is about what it means to be human and to love in a world where you can have your life path readjusted and your brain hacked with technological mediation. Read it. Let it sit for a while, then read it again. And after you’ve read it twice, then we can talk about the end.
1 ashes, ashes
“Okay, what’s this scent?”
“Roses,” I said.
“And this one?”
“Citrus. Grapefruit.”
“All right. What about this?”
“Cow shit.”
“Close.”
“Okay, horse shit.”
“Bull’s-eye. Olfactory systems are go. Let’s do hearing.”
I was standing by the River Chu, in Kazakhstan, staring at a little hill from which three naked chimneys rose. I stood alone; but a thousand miles away, in Leningrad, a woman I had never met was testing my senses. When she had finished, she would slide herself into my mind, like a rat into water. As my thoughts went out live to the Net, she would screen them through hers, strengthening my foreground thoughts and sifting out impurities, so that—if she was any good—the signal that went out on News One would be pure and clear. And when she drew herself out of my mind again, five minutes later, she would know more about me than a friend of thirty years.
“I think it’s an E-flat,” I said.
“Yes, but what instrument?”
“Brass.”
“Be specific.”
“Do I look like a conductor?”
“It’s a trombone. You can tell by the glissando. Now what’s this?”
I had never met this Keishi Mirabara. I had no idea what she looked like. But Keishi was a screener, so for her, our acquaintance of half an hour was already long. Hooking up mind to mind, the way they do, they can only scorn the glacial rituals the rest of us use to form friendships. By the end of the day, she might already hate me—not with some casual dislike, but with a deep, dissective hatred, such as is otherwise only attained after decades of marriage. It’s bad stuff, their hatred. Their love is worse: a surge of emotion that comes at you flood-fast, overwhelming your own feelings before you’re even certain what they are. And the poor camera, who can reach out to another mind only with mute eyes and vague bludgeoning words … well, it’s like being an amnesia victim, coming home a stranger to someone who’s loved you all your life.
“All right, stop me when this stripe is the same color as the sky.”
“Now—no, a little more—yes, there.”
“You’re coming through faded, then. I’m going to split your field of vision. What you’re seeing will be on your left, and what’s coming through here will be on your right. Tell me when the colors are the same. Ready?”
“Ready,” I said. I gave it only half attention. I had done this all before.
Keishi had come in to screen for me only that evening, when my last screener, Anton Tamarich, disappeared on the day of a broadcast. It didn’t surprise me—screeners go burnout all the time—but it left me stuck going live with a screener I’d never worked with before. It’s the beginning of any of a dozen camera nightmares. You’re working with a new screener who falls asleep at the switch just when you remember something you heard once about how to make brain viruses, and a Weaver possesses the man you’re interviewing and kills you on the spot. Or some especially compromising sexual fantasy flits through your head and out into the Net and is the scandal of the week. The untried screener is the camera’s equivalent of having your fly open.
It was scary enough that—though I’d never thought I’d say it—I missed Anton. I hadn’t liked him, but I’d liked working with him. He was an informer for the Post police, and he hated me. I knew where I stood.
“Say the words that come into your head.”
“Excrescence. Trapezoid. Spark. Blanket. Bolus. Rust.”
“Verbal, go. Okay, Maya, I’m ready for link-up. Say when.”
I walked halfway up the hill, arranged myself facing the river, and started to prepare myself for contact. After all these years of having strangers in my head, it’s still not easy. I scratched my nose, adjusted the camera moistware in the temporal socket at the side of my head, and made sure for the tenth time that I really did not have to go to the bathroom.
“Relax, will you?” Keishi whispered in my ear, from Leningrad. “‘So Your Camera Has to Pee’ is chapter two in the Basic Screening textbook, and heck, girl, I’m up to chapter four already.”
At that moment gallows humor was not what I needed. Fear shifted in the coils of my intestines, like a restless snake. I would forget my lines. I would trip on a buried cobblestone and half the Russian Historical Nation would feel me break my nose. I fixed my eyes on the ground and began to hyperventilate, fighting for control.
And Keishi, knowing that anything she said would make it worse, did the only thing she could do to help. She plugged in her screening chip and patched into my mind.
There’s a sense of presence when the screener comes on line, a faint heat, a pullulation. Keishi’s feedback was clear and warm and reassuring, the strongest I’ve ever felt—as though someone had wrapped a blanket around my head. (“That’s me,” Keishi agreed. “An electric babushka.”) Maybe this would work out after all, I decided, knowing she heard the thought.
“Ten more seconds,” she warned me. “Five. Four. Three … and you’re live, girl.” I felt the “up” drug flood my visual cortex, making me strain my eyes to separate the river from the rolling hill behind it. Keishi fed the hours of interviews and research that Anton and I had done into my memory, so that the five-minute Netcast could imply a whole week’s work. And you came on line, a shadow audience that always stood behind me no matter how I turned my head.
“This is what’s left of Square-Mile-on-Chu,” I said aloud, panning slowly around from the river. You said it with me. In a single body, with the same volition, we strode forward up the hill. “Three crumbling chimneys and some scattered stones, half sunk into the ground.” I had reached the middle chimney now; I walked around it, running my hand over the cobblestones to transmit their tiled smoothnesses. “Typical Guardian construction: cobblestone instead of brick because of the thousands of hours of slave labor it took to gather the stones, carry them up here, and fit them together. The more labor-intensive, the greater the status.”
I panned around to view the river again, then carefully leaned against the chimney, feeling it cool and lumpy against my back. “It’s as idyllic a scene as you’ll find anywhere in Kazakhstan. You could spend hours in this place. Nature bounces back, you think, whatever humans do. The hills are leaved with grass, and laced with branches, growing the same as ever. The birds have long forgotten what happened here, if indeed they ever noticed, and are building their nests now. And the river flows on, just as it did when the word Guardian meant a good thing.”
I walked down the hill, slowly, letting the sun warm my back that the stones had made cold. It was an aggressively beautiful spring day, tyrannically perfect: the kind of day that spurs the suicide to action by its mocking contrast to her own despair. Lull them, Keishi, I subvocalized. Make them feel it.
“I’m lulling, I’m lulling” was her reply, as laconic as the mood I wished to set and as the day itself.
Walking slowly in the mild breeze, I approached the lake, reached it, and did not stop. Without removing my shoes or rolling up my cuffs or bracing myself against the touch of the water, I walked off into the muck. Skirls of shock and disgust mingled with the cold—your shock. Feedback to the limbic system, say the manuals; what it means is that what you feel, I feel. And vice versa: I took the feeling and intensified it, hurling it back out at you.
“It is a beautiful day in Kazakhstan,” I said, “and you are calf-deep in the ash of human bodies.” A second long wave of mute horror as the ash and mud cemented in around my legs, entrapping them.
“The Unanimous Army came through here in the fall of 2246,” I said when the audience had quieted. Calling on my imagination chip, I drew a sound of marching out of the white noise of the river. Then I looked up at the shadowed hillside and began to sculpt its waving grasses into men. “Imagine a solid column of humanity, twenty abreast, and so long that if you wanted to cross their path you’d have to camp here until dawn tomorrow. They have no uniforms, but wear whatever they happened to have on when they were absorbed: overalls, cocktail dresses—some are naked beneath makeshift coats. But all have the same round black chip, the size of a ruble coin, in their left temples. From time to time a memory unit passes, like the nameless man we met last week—” and here Keishi lifted a curtain from the memory “—people whose minds the Army erased and filled with its data, so the memories of the others could remain inviolate. The memory units can no longer even walk, so they are carried along—but upright, to confuse snipers. At this distance they are lost in the crowd, and you will never know them.”
By now the Army was almost as clear as reality, thanks to the imagination chip in my right temporal socket. Keishi flashed the word “re-creation” at the bottom of my field of vision, so credulous channel-flippers wouldn’t call the station thinking that the Army had returned.
“The first quarter mile of the Army consists of people who are weak or dying or otherwise of little use. Their only purpose is to walk blindly into everything and see if it will kill them. Now that they’ve marched through the Square Mile without harm, Sensors start to break away from the column: Eyes, Ears, Noses, Fingertips, each with its respective sense enhanced and all the others numbed. They swarm over the Square Mile in thousands, sniffing and prodding and tasting. They take nothing, but now and again they smear something with a fragrant paint they carry with them, or with urine or blood.
“When the Sensors return to the march, the column slows and spreads out to the width of the Square Mile. And when it has passed, hours later, everything in the camp—the barbed wire, the burnt wood, even the concrete from the foundations—is gone, digested into that great worm of meat that once was, and will soon again be, human.
“By November, every man, woman, and child over five in Kazakhstan had been taken up into the One Mind and was marching on Occupied Russia. And in 2248, when the Army software detected victory and suddenly erased itself from all its component minds, more than half the people in the world found themselves at least a thousand miles from home. It was a time of global confusion, during which millions starved or were murdered. Not many people were concerned with seeing to it that places like this were remembered.
“But is that the whole explanation?” (Okay, let’s wind it up, I subvoked.) “Or is there a deeper reason? The Holocaust and Terror-Famine both haunted the consciences of generations, yet the Calinshchina is barely remembered—why? We’ll have some answers for you next week, in the third and last part of our series.”
Copyright © 1996 by Cameron Reed
Introduction copyright © 2024 by Jo Walton
