Tales from the Bitface

Ken Liu is best known (to me at least) as the translator of the first and third volumes of Liu Cixin’s ‘Three-Body Trilogy’. But he’s an accomplished SF author in his own right.

All That We See or Seem (described as the first of a series, because of course) is a cyberpunk story, in the sense that it’s set in the near future and concerns hacking. The lead character, who goes by ‘Julia Z’, was a member of hacking group as a teenager, and after it got broken up and the leaders arrested, she is trying to live on the right side of the law.

But that’s all backstory, with details revealed to us gradually as the main story needs them. In the book’s present, she is approached by a man whose wife has gone missing and is seemingly being held to ransom by a criminal gang. Piers wants Julia to use her skills to find his wife, Elli. Elli is an ‘onierofex’, or dreamweaver: a talent in a new form of entertainment where people enter shared dreams. The mechanism for this is not entirely clear, but it involves scanning the participants brains in some form.

There are gangsters after them, of course, and we’re off. One thing that struck me about this is, you recall the ‘capable man’ stories of the so-called Golden Age of SF? The heroes of Heinlein, John W Campbell, or Doc Smith stories, who could turn their hand to just about anything the plot required?

Well Julia is very much a ‘capable young woman’, in what feels like a surprisingly similar vein. As a hacker, she can do smart things with computers, of course. But she also turns her hand to smart-drone design; counter-surveillance (OK, that’s kind of computer/hacker-related); and ultimately intrusion, in the form of breaking into an enemy base.

It’s all convincingly done, don’t get me wrong. While you’re reading it, you’ll mostly believe it’s all plausible, she’s convincingly drawn. But looking back, wow: that’s quite some capability.

It’s good, though. I recommend it.

I’m perhaps reading with too much of a modern writer’s eye these days, because I was constantly thinking, while reading this Penguin Popular Classics edition of Persuasion: it’s all telling, no showing at all!

Which is not entirely true, and I’ve also commented in the past on these pages, that we shouldn’t treat that instruction as sacrosanct anyway. There are plenty of times where telling is the best way, the right way, to approach part of a story. We call it storytelling after all. And this is Jane Fucking Austen!

So yes, there is a sense at times that we’re skating across the surface of things, not really seeing the interiority of Anne, except when we are; and there are times when the narration switches from close-third-person to omniscient, in a way that can be slightly confusing: are we getting Captain Wentworth’s thoughts here, or is it Anne projecting what she thinks he’ll be thinking?

But I still sat up till 2 o’clock finishing it.

The oddest thing is the way how some dialogue is rendered. There’s a lot of free indirect speech, including in places where I would have preferred actual, reported speech (and as I write I realise that’s probably the main cause of the slight disconnect I felt). But there are some parts where direct and indirect speech seem to be merged in the oddest way.

Here’s an example from chapter VI:

Mary deplored the necessity for herself. ‘Nobody knew how much she should suffer. She should put it off as long as she could;’

The section in quotes is clearly meant to be Mary’s dialogue, but the ‘she’ in question is Mary herself. There are numerous examples like this throughout the book, but it’s far from all instances of reported speech. Just at the end of the paragraph immediately before the above, we have :

Mary, who, on having occasion to note down the day of the month, exclaimed, ‘Dear me, is not this the day the Crofts were to come to Kellynch? I am glad I did not think of it before. How low it makes me!’

Similar formulation, but conventionally structured. Now there’s no absolute ‘correct’ way to render speech. Everything we use today is a convention. But I don’t recall that kind of formulation in Austen before. I would say I don’t recall seeing it anywhere before, except I think there was a similar instance in my recent reading of Moby Dick. But a singular instance in a long book like that feels like a genuine mistake, whereas here it was surprisingly frequent.

My minor gripes aside, it deserves its place in the literary hall of fame.

Took me a few months to get through this, and with a couple of interruptions — actually three. Why the interruptions, given I really enjoyed it? It’s a dense work, if not fantastically long at some 530 old-school paperback pages in the Penguin Popular Classics edition I have. Sometimes I felt like reading something a bit easier.

Which suggests it’s hard work, for which it does have a bit of a reputation. But actually it’s mostly not. But that ‘mostly’ goes to the heart of what’s so fascinating about it.

Mention Moby Dick to most people and they’ll think of the eponymous white whale and the infamous monomaniac Captain Ahab. Which is fair enough. But most of the book is not actually about Ahab and his obsession or quest at all. There is one early scene where he insists the whole crew take an oath to hunt the titular whale as their highest priority — it chomped off his leg, and he’s out for revenge, after all. But before that, and for much of what follows, Ahab hardly features in the story.

It’s the last fifth or so, maybe quarter, where he comes to the fore and we get the real hunt for Moby Dick.

Most of the rest — by far the bulk of the novel — consists of Melville’s, or the narrator ‘Ishmael’s’ — disquisitions on life, humanity, philosophy, religion, the sea, sailing, and of course, whales. ‘Call me Ishmael’, though, that famous opening line:¹ it tells us we’re getting a first-person narrative. Which is true in part.

But it isn’t long before Ishmael — or Melville — sets that aside and tells us what’s going on in another character’s head. And then we’re off to the modernist, if not postmodernist, races, because this book cheerfully switches between first and third, turns into a play script or a dictionary, and generally uses any writerly techniques of Melville’s/Ishmael’s choosing to say what needs to be said.

It sounds, and could be in hands of a lesser writer, chaotic. If a first-time author today submitted such a manuscript to an editor — or to a friendly writers' group — they would be advised to go back and decide what one type of thing they wanted to write, and to focus on that. And watch their persons and tenses.

Here, though, it feels to me incredibly modern; almost avant garde.

It was published in 1851.

I loved it.

And not to forget: it’s also very funny in places.

Its major flaw is its total absence of women. There are no female characters at all. (Maybe a proprietress of a boarding house in the earliest, land-bound chapters.) Which is not surprising given the environment in which it’s set.

Another oddity to me, and I plan to look this up, is that one chapter lists and describes the forms and habits of the various types of whale. But the blue whale, which I believe is still the biggest, is not mentioned. Is it possible the species was unknown to whalers in Melville’s time? That seems odd. Moby Dick is a sperm whale, which to Ishmael (and the other Nantucket whalers) is the king of the beasts.

Also you’ll often see the title rendered with a hyphen, as Moby-Dick. I don’t know why, as the whale is always named without it, and the edition I have doesn’t hyphenate the title, so that’s how I’ve presented it.

I’m off now to read lots of articles about it.