Fantastic Metropolis

And here McAuley’s most significant homage commences. Without stressing the point too much (for, as indicated, Confluence’s originality is central to its success), it should be observed that McAuley owes a major debt to Gene Wolfe: that just as in Wolfe’s The Book of the New Sun, a hero presumably sanctioned by higher forces appears, who possesses great potential powers and a good deal of not-so-accidental luck; that, like Severian, Yamamanama has little clear idea of what he is doing, and so stumbles from situation to situation, always surviving in spite of himself; that the plot of Confluence therefore, like that of The Book of the New Sun, involves a progression of picaresque incidents whose connections only become apparent in retrospect; and that, like Severian, Yama (a fortunate abbreviation) can rescue his world only by destroying it. More specific parallels abound: many of the settings and set pieces of Confluence are cunning echoes of moments in The Book of the New Sun and The Book of the Long Sun; archaic terminology employed by Wolfe often recurs in Confluence; and there is a strong, and strengthening, tendency for McAuley to couch descriptions and dialogue in a manner recalling the intricate classicism of Wolfe. The Book of the New Sun summarized SF and Fantasy, and Confluence summarizes The Book of the New Sun. But with this stated, McAuley’s own achievement can be assessed, for he moves radically away from his model, exploring quite different issues to very different effect.

3. Confluence’s Principles

McAuley’s inquiry into momentous existential, scientific, and political issues is contained in an astonishingly dynamic narrative. Yama rushes about Confluence, constantly threatened by foes of many shapes and sizes; cliffhanger endings to chapters and volumes are natural when such a pace is set. Combat with ancient weapons, confrontations with superhuman antagonists, luridly improbable battles, and desperate escapes and pursuits are incessant, but they are recounted in a knotty, less than obvious manner, so that reflection pays dividends; and McAuley’s breathless action sequences are interspersed with passages of reflection, philosophical debates indicating the magnitude of the matters at stake. Child of the River, for example, argues quite tellingly the different methods by which the scholars of an ancient world like Confluence might perceive the intimidatingly deep past they must study: scholasticism, which emphasizes only written texts, contends with a curatorial perspective which stresses the eternal integrity of artifacts. Confluence is a thoroughly considered creation, and its inhabitants dispute with one another in a highly considered, and very convincing, manner. And what they dispute most is the basis of their civil war: the preferability of comfortable unending collectivism, or of drastic libertarian individualism.

The collectivists are the bureaucrats of Ys and their provincial governors, functionaries such as Yama’s foster father, the Aedile of Aeolis. Their ideology, thoroughly conducive to their continued governance of Confluence, advocates changelessness, the immemorial religious obedience of the bloodlines to the will of the Preservers and, more particularly, to the rule of the officials and priests who interpret and administer that will. The chief spokesman for these theocratic collectivists is Prefect Corin, whose humorless indefatigability is McAuley’s neat summary of the universal bureaucratic mindset. This satire is carried forward in the depiction of the Palace of the Memory of the People, the government’s headquarters in Ys: more Gothically labyrinthine than Gormenghast, it accommodates numerous Departments, whose office politics extends to open warfare as Corin’s faction expands its internal empire. Despite their terminological flamboyance, which recalls that of Chinese mandarins, the bureaucrats are gray fanatics of an Orwellian cast, inflexible and murderous in a dourly thorough way. But their adversaries are just as repellent…

Those adversaries are the heretics inspired by the teachings of Angel, the errant space traveler who featured in “Recording Angel”. Impatient with the laborious fatalism of life under the bureaucratic regime, they desire only personal fulfillment: physical immortality, and power to go with it. Their creed is a version of Frank J. Tipler’s thesis, that Intelligence will achieve godlike stature at the end of time and resurrect all the sentient beings that have ever existed. The heretics take this dubious conception to ridiculously literal extremes, imagining that godhood awaits them individually, if only they seize it, ruthlessly. They are an acute study in the mentality of right-wing anarchism, boundlessly selfish, incapable of agreement among themselves, co-operating only for immediate gain. Their leaders are suspicious rivals, including the charismatic general Enobarbus, virtual incarnations of Angel that lurk in information space, and Dr. Dismas, whose mad-scientist manner conceals his possession by one of the feral machines left over from the earlier insurrection. Their followers are confused zealots, dedicated to ambitions that few if any of them can ever hope to accomplish. McAuley’s satirical venom renders them as Thatcherites wedded to the methods of Pol Pot’s Khmer Rouge; cadres brutally indoctrinate their captives, while old social contracts and political harmonies are swept aside in the interests of “ownership”. The rebels’ reaction to the theocracy has swiftly become a nightmare of self-indulgence, a ransacking of ancient beauties with no thought beyond Profit and Advantage. In opposing the bureaucrats, Yama has definite indications of what alternatives he should avoid.

A middle road must be identified, and urgently, for the Great River of Confluence is drying up, and the world will necessarily change in some manner, either dying through the inaction of the bureaucrats or destroyed by the excesses of the heretics. As savior, Yama is a conciliator of extremes, and those extremes in essence are two models of history: the cyclical and the linear. The bureaucracy embraces the cycle: Change Wars come and go, different Departments dominate Ys at different times, but Confluence always returns to itself unchanging, like the Ouroborosian Great River. For the heretics, the only acceptable direction is a straight line, the vector of evolution by revolution, that apotheosis towards which the Preservers successfully aspired. Yama must somehow discover a shape of destiny that conserves like the cycle and yet transcends like the line, one that permits escape from the cycle’s tyranny while moderating the line’s radical egotism. Such a Golden Mean is discovered only with immense difficulty, through McAuley’s ingenuity of plotting.