Fantastic Metropolis

1. Confluence’s Place

For the well-versed SF reader, perusing Paul J. McAuley’s Confluence brings a complex sense of recognition. There is an immediate recognition, of countless allusions to earlier works of SF and Fantasy, of genre tropes revised and reorganized; Confluence is a sort of Valhalla of speculative fiction, populated richly with familiar literary ghosts expertly revived. But there is a more general and deliberate recognition also, of an authorial will to greatness, to the production of a masterpiece. Confluence emulates its predecessors not only by quoting them, but also by replicating their genius: it succeeds in being a Great SF Novel, perhaps the most impressive long essay in the genre to emanate from Britain in the 1990s.

There are several ways to go about the attempt at greatness in SF, but one method in especial has yielded many favorable results: writing a Grand Planetary Romance, with a dying fall. The form is timeless, its far future displacement a reasonable guarantee against the obsolescence that overtakes all imagined near futures; and its exotic coloration facilitates a texture of Science Fantasy, that enticing mingling of scientific rigor and mythic splendor. Consider Vance’s Dying Earth quartet, Wolfe’s The Book of the New Sun, Aldiss’ Helliconia, Paul Park’s Starbridge Chronicles, and Ian Watson’s Books of Mana, those well-regarded multi-volume exercises in world-building, replete with descriptive intricacy, elegant baroque invention, and ironic formal stateliness. None of them will die soon; they can be reread endlessly, their monumental fascination never exhausted. The temptation to add to their ranks naturally seized the ambitious Paul McAuley; and he has succeeded, without qualification.

In his thousand pages, divided more or less equally into Child of the River (1997), Ancients of Days (1998), and Shrine of Stars (1999), McAuley exploits another advantage of the Grand Planetary Romance, its ability to amount to a compendium of allusion, that already cited and more immediate engine of recognition. Grand Planetary Romances are set on ancient worlds, ones suffused so utterly with antiquity that they are dense summaries of everything; in describing them, the author will naturally allude to everything, or at least to the past totality of genre. And coming late to the game, McAuley inevitably refers not only to all of SF, echoing many of its subgenres and literary highlights, but to the earlier Grand Planetary Romances specifically. Before considering how he departs from and transcends his models-Confluence’s more important, and very real, mark of distinction-his text’s elaboration of references should be considered.

2. Confluence’s debts

The setting of Confluence is the eponymous world, artificial and vast. In McAuley’s scheme, it is the creation, millions of years hence, of the Preservers, our distant descendants, who, obeying the trajectory of many of SF’s godlike races, guide the destinies of less evolved species before rising into a higher cosmos, never to be seen again. The lesser species, in line with the far-future confections of Cordwainer Smith, are animals uplifted to intelligence; they are left to inhabit the great flat expanse of Confluence, their trajectory a slow and cyclical one deeply reminiscent of the Asia of old (see Aldiss, see Park), their civilization ritualized and formally cadenced (see Vance), and their hope of escape from the languor of the cycle dependent on the intervention of a (perhaps) divinely inspired wandering messiah (see Wolfe). The ten thousand bloodlines of Confluence live along or near the banks of a Great River (see Philip José Farmer), where they very gradually find fuller awareness; each bloodline will sooner or later undergo an awakening from docile animal to more assertive human consciousness, a process that usually entails a Change War, in which those transformed beat up on their more retarded kinsmen. The remnants of the Preservers’ technology are everywhere evident (see Wolfe): intelligent machines maintain the world’s paradoxical integrity, mechanical artifacts are present wherever one digs, and the massive black hole through which the Preservers ascended is prominently visible in the night sky. But the pre-industrial tenor of life on Confluence changes very little, a stasis supervised by the fanatically conservative bureaucracy (see Park, Aldiss) centered in the great city Ys (see Wolfe’s Nessus). But ripples start to beset the pond (see Clarke’s The City and the Stars).

Confluence has begun to face civil wars. In the first, thousands of years in the past, various intelligent machines rose up in revolt (see John Milton), destroying much habitable land and most of the infrastructure whereby the peoples of Confluence could access the recorded wisdom and counsel of the Preservers. The regime faltered, but survived, regaining control. But in the quite recent past, as recounted in McAuley’s prefatory story ‘Recording Angel” (1995), a human expedition from before the age of the Preservers returned from a futile search for intelligent life in the Andromeda Galaxy; one of the crew (all of whom are clones of a single original) played the Serpent’s role, sowing seeds of doubt among some of the bloodlines and occasioning a bigger and more enduring revolt in consequence. By the time of the trilogy’s action, the rebels are in command of large areas; they and the bureaucrats of Ys are essentially reaching stalemate; the moment for intervention has arrived.

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.

4. Confluence’s Plot

The manic pace of Confluence conceals the text’s lessons even as it reveals them; but Yama, however headstrong and error-prone, does learn them. Having set out to solve the mysteries of his own existence-prominently how it was that he, a member of a long-dead lineage believed responsible for Confluence’s construction, could appear suddenly as a Moses-style foundling floating on the River-Yama is pursued by both sides in the war. Prefect Corin and Dr. Dismas are aware that Yama has an innate ability to control machines, to communicate with and instruct anything from the town of Aeolis’ docile “watchdogs” to the huge feral war machines that linger in space near Confluence. Either party could win the war with Yama’s assistance, and both initially hope that his youthful pliancy will allow him to be captured and tamed. But his command of machines is a deus ex machina; he can escape virtually any trap, virtually any captivity. And so he leads the hunters on a long and merry chase, acquiring allies and increased wisdom along the way.

McAuley employs all the resources of the adventure quest genre in telling this story: there are Yama’s boon companions, a loyal young sidekick and a gruff female mercenary; there are stock wily or arrogant villains, such as a monstrous star-sailor Yama stalks to his lair; there are inevitable melodramatic confrontations with the same villains, who always orate at length before Yama escapes or destroys them; there are abandoned cities, sinister shrines, a staircase down the world’s edge, ancient ships of the River and of space, horrible betrayals, amorous interludes, battles fought with weird baroque weapons. All are recounted with formidable gusto and fine polish. But amidst the tumult Yama assembles vital clues: the urgent need to conserve the past and so understand it; the folly of philosophical inflexibility; the value of integrity; the rational foundation of authentic wisdom; the necessity that any resolution of the world’s ills embrace and incorporate the interests of the many. Sometimes merely a questing hero driven by the exigencies of survival, Yama becomes steadily capable of being far more: he is even Christlike at times, bringing a benison of higher awareness to the indigenes of Confluence, beings who cannot Change in the manner of the bloodlines. The clues build into an answer, an answer to the dilemma of the cycle and the line.

This answer is intrinsic to the climax of Confluence’s plot. Without giving too much away, it can be said that Yama, moving about in time as Severian does in THE URTH OF THE NEW SUN, unleashes forces that promise the peoples of Confluence new beginnings on new worlds; thus the linear principle is indulged, in a far more constructive way than the heretics envisaged. But a compromise is being struck: the cycle exacts its price, as Yama is obliged to accept an existence that is a self-recursive loop in time, a sacrifice that sets all others free. And the bloodlines are going forth to repopulate the Galaxy that the humans abandoned when they ascended into their black hole; a greater Cycle is coming round again, as galactic history resumes. Ouroboros lives on, even if the Great River does not.

5. Confluence’s Novelty

But this grand and elegant resolution is not the whole story. Even as he mimics the strategies of Gene Wolfe, McAuley gives his predecessor a grand comeuppance. In an interview with the present writer, McAuley has observed that he structured Confluence as a progression from Fantasy (Child of the River) through Science Fantasy (Ancients of Days) to Science Fiction (Shrine of Stars). This turns The Book of the New Sun on its head, for whereas Wolfe implies a divine miraculous Providence behind the material appearances of this cosmos, McAuley rebuts the explanations latent in myth and religion, asserting rationality, the secular rule of cause and effect. Yama explodes myths as he emerges from the mists of Fantasy; the theistic aura surrounding the Preservers is dispelled by his investigations; and McAuley cannily sets conventions of Fantasy at war with those of Science Fiction, a conflict only SF can win. In this light, baptism becomes an infusion of nanomachines; Dr. Dismas’ alchemical contrivances acquire a much more probable gloss; and as McAuley has emphasized, when a heroine out of Sword and Sorcery encounters a flying saucer at the close of Ancients of Days, she inevitably perishes. Confluence is a breaking of the chains of theocracy in literature as much as in the world; it is Science Fiction triumphant, the pupil audaciously and successfully defying its teacher, Fantasy. This is Confluence’s most cogent claim to originality.

After the agency of magic in Vance, after Wolfe’s ornamental Parousia, after Aldiss’ utopian mysticism and after Park’s majestic surrealism, McAuley adds a potent dash of rigour to the formula of the Grand Planetary Romance. Sweeping, captivating, and finally very much itself, Confluence is Paul McAuley’s masterpiece, and a masterpiece for all SF.