Counter Culture

Imagine a  highly stratified world in the not-so-distant future, administered by a super-elite, where the vast majority of the population live in ‘cities’ under constant surveillance, isolated from the natural world, eating ground up insects and other ‘health’ foods, delivered by drones in boxes, living regimented lives beginning with compulsory daily exercise sessions, reliant on joyless, AI generated content for ‘entertainment’, with real, personal artistic experimentation being discouraged and requiring special permission?

That this is not really that hard to imagine at all is one of the aspects of Tim Bragg’s new novel The Mirror that makes it so timely and disturbing.

The novel is of course a work of Science Fiction, or, more precisely, because SF writers and readers love to divide and sub-divide, of ‘soft’/social/dystopian SF. That is, it takes the world as it currently is, and the current direction of travel of that world, and posits from that a future world that is as believable as it is frightening.

My thoughts on futuristic/dystopian SF have long been that it is probably better to err on the side of caution if you are to set dates. Nineteen-Eighty-Four clearly seemed a long way off when Orwell wrote his celebrated novel (leaving aside that we know he was writing from his knowledge of the totalitarian systems recently, and in some cases still at work in his own time, and simply reversed his year of writing the book, ‘1948’, to get ‘1984’), but the real ‘1984’ is now almost forty years in our past. Similarly, there are SF film classics such as 2001: a Space Odyssey, the future in Back to the Future was 2015, we have had British television series’ such as Space 1999, or UFO, which was made in 1970 and set in the distant land of 1980…For this reason, I have always said that if I were to write a futuristic novel I would locate it at a point in the future which nobody now living could ever reach, save for the real-world achievement of immortality, which incidentally is one of the themes of The Mirror.

However, in this case, the fact that the main action of the novel takes place in 2073, a mere fifty years hence, works precisely because the author has created a world that is all too visible in embryo in the world we see around us, and in the pronouncements of very powerful individuals, and very powerful supra-national bodies whom I have no need to mention here.

Indeed, it could be argued that the author is being unwisely optimistic in believing it will take so long to reach a globalised system which serves to benefit nobody but a miniscule elite…

Or, for those of us who take optimism just a little bit further, perhaps we should dare to hope that when we reach the real 2073, people will have read this novel and novels like it, and be in a position to say ‘Yep, that’s where we were headed, if my father/grandfather etc had not done taken the action that they did…’

There are a lot of ideas and concepts in The Mirror, too many to mention them all. But ideas in a novelistic format are useless without a story, and fortunately the novel has a strong, and believable, plotline, or rather ‘plotlines’, upon which to hang these ideas and concepts.

The primary of several story threads concerns two girls, Mia and Karella (though the use of the word ‘girls’ is problematic for reasons I won’t go into here, for reasons of not giving away too many spoilers), as they prepare for the time of ‘The Resort.’ This is an event that all young people must attend around the time that they reach age of sixteen. Although all adults have themselves attended their own ‘resort’ at a similar age, none will speak of what happens there, other than that it is something to be looked forward to, something to be enjoyed, and through which the future course of their lives will be set by the all-seeing, all-knowing elite.

It is also something that is unavoidable.

Again, without giving too much of the story away, I will reveal that the ‘resort’ is also the first time that most of these young people will be introduced to the mysteries and wonders of sex for the first time, though even in this high surveillance society, not all prior experimentation is preventable, or even always necessarily discouraged.

As it turns out, for reasons that the reader must discover for themselves, only one of the two girls we follow through the course of the novel will get the opportunity to attend the resort. For her friend, life, if such it can be called, is to take a very different course…

Rather than revealing too much of the various strands of the story, I will simply try to give some idea of the sort of book the reader can expect, and to touch briefly on some of the themes contained within.

Modern dystopian SF is often seen as being sub-divided into two main forms, based on two of the seminal works of the sub-genre. These are the out and out brutal totalitarianism of the Orwellian vision expressed in Nineteen Eighty Four, with a world based on power wielded purely for the sake of power, the ‘foot stamping on a human face, forever,’ and the gentler, more subtle but still no less ‘total’ rule of Huxley’s Brave New World, where the elite rule through a form of consent, a ‘consent’ that is formed and managed by a combination of mindless mass entertainment, state-approved drugs, and the strict control of access to information.

In contrasting the two, amongst those of us who bother to think about such matters at all, the consensus has long been that the real world of today, the world we see around us – though in some respects we can no more ‘see’ it than a fish can see the water within which it swims – is closer to the Huxley than Orwell.

The Mirror suggests, and I believe that this is becoming more and more plausible if one analyses the trends in modern society just a little more deeply, is that once we factor in the almost God-like powers promised by Artificial Intelligence (AI) and other present day and likely future technological developments, then the ‘consensual’ dictatorship of a Brave New World will almost certainly morph into the naked brutality of Nineteen Eighty Four.

One of the other main themes of the book is the question of What it Means to be Human? This was a theme dealt with brilliantly, and repeatedly, in the novels of the great Philip K Dick, and it is one that is coming ever more sharply into real-world focus as the potential of AI reveals itself at an ever more rapid pace. In dealing with this theme The Mirror manages to successfully combine the dystopian and the philosophical traditions of social SF.

There are other themes too, one of the most powerful being that of the redeeming nature of art and personal creativity. I think here Bragg is not only suggesting that such endeavours can be a road to personal freedom, but that in some respects these endeavours in and of themselves are freedom. Even if that freedom is fleeting and allusive, which anybody who has tried to write, make music, paint or engage in any form of creative endeavour will tell you is often the case, it is still an expression of an inner spirituality, or ‘soul’, or whatever term one chooses to use. Such self-expression is always a challenge to those who seek total control. The clue here is the word ‘total’ as in ‘totalitarianism’. ‘Total’ must ultimately include our inner life too. The continued existence of that inner life, especially amongst those who seek to develop a means to express it in ways that may be meaningful to others, will always be a challenge to those who seek to dominate and control.

Even the knowledge that people in the past have succeeded in creating works of genius from nothing more than their own imagination, emotions and technical skills can be a challenge to those who seek absolute rule. The effects of Mia’s exposure to the works of Bach, and her discovery of the joys of getting her own hands dirty with the raw ingredients of self-created visual art are used brilliantly to suggest this point in The Mirror. 

The means to access, manipulate and mould that which lies within, our thoughts, our feelings, our emotions, would seem now to be within reach to an extent that even the most terrible of a long line of historical despots could barely have dared to imagine.

The novel seems to offer the hope that however total the control of the elite, known as ‘ELK’ in the book, may appear to become, something, a spark of human creativity, a will to freedom, will always survive to challenge and undermine that domination.

Other readers may of course see entirely different themes in the book, or they may read it purely as an excellent, page turning, work of SF adventure.

That is fine too. As with all good SF, as with all good literature in general, the text is completed by the reader. The book takes a good story and uses it to pose a few important questions along the way. It also, as I have indicated, hints, though no more than hints, because this is not an overly didactic work, at a few answers…

What a good novel does, what a good writer does, is to create a world within which the reader may immerse themselves in for a while, coming out of it at the end feeling rewarded, and perhaps a little wiser.

These are bold aspirations for a writer, and The Mirror in, dare I say it, holding up a mirror to our own society as a warning, achieves them admirably.

And the title of this review? One of the nice, touches in the world that Bragg has built are the subtle changes to the language, some of them sinister and the result of deliberate manipulation, reminiscent of Orwell’s Newspeak, and some of them organic and relatively benign. This is also, of course, true of changes to our language in the real world. The word ‘Abundant’ is of the latter, benign category and has come to mean ‘Good.’ There are many other examples that the reader will enjoy discovering for themselves.

Enjoy!

Reviewed by Anthony C Green