Review - Fictional Alignment by Mike French

Cover by Tony Allcock

Fictional Alignment (An Android Awakes)
Mike French
Elsewhen Press, 2 April 2018
PB, 381pp
Source - Review copy kindly provided by the publisher.

What to say about this book? There is so much in it that it's hard to know where to begin...

A sequel, of sorts, to French's An Android Awakes (my review of which, here, is quoted in Fictional Alignment) this book follows the young woman Sapphira, lover of Android Writer PD121928, after the latter is killed and destroyed on the cusp of an android rising that will overthrow the humans.

In a turn of affairs that somewhat recalled The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy, ten years later, Sapphira joins up with a mixed group of humans and androids who are trying to enact the contents of her best-selling novel, Humans. They are doing this because, as a work of fiction, it must be eradicated, but the last copy cannot be removed from the Digitised Treasury, the androids' repository of all facts.

The choice is therefore made to make the story "happen", turning it into "truth", employing time travel and enormous resources in a process rather like making a film. Since some of the episodes in the book are bizarre to say the least, this does present problems and dangers.

As Sapphira, Heisenberg, Anna Lincoln, and this others criss cross back and forward through time, encountering real and fictional characters and setting up the plot turns of Sapphira's (actually, PD121928's) story, there is plenty of scope to muse on the nature of fact, fiction and truth, the deeper realities of religion (Sapphire dreams of PD121928 being crucified on his stack of rejection letters) and much else. A summary would be impossible, but the storytelling is dazzling, veering between surrealistic scenes (the Arctic Circus, which takes place on an oil rig; the exploits of Umberto Amundsen, allegedly a descendant of the great explore but in reality, the man himself, kidnapped out of time; a noirish detective episode), dreams, and revelations about what was really going on in An Android Awakes. It takes aim at various SFF tropes (such as the tendency to fixate on women' breasts) along the way.

Rereading what I've put above, I'm afraid I might be taken as saying that the book is a bit overwhelming.  But here, I think, French comes to the reader's rescue. It is not, we are told, facts that constitute ultimate reality, but story. While the facts might indeed overwhelm, perhaps as in a Christian parable or even a Zen puzzle, it would be fatal to try to understand the sequence of events as facts, to tidy them up and make them into things that might or might not happen - even if that's exactly what Heisenberg, here, is trying to orchestrate. Heisenberg fails in that, but has the insight to see a way round the failure, the answer being to just... well, dive in, in the fashion of the Amazing Arctic Sinking Man, and let the story carry you.

Fictional Alignment is indeed at times not an easy read. Recognisably in the same style as An Android Awakes, it is also a much more complex work, one that needs some time to digest - but is still very rewarding. And it all does kind of circle round and make a certain sense in the end, -although the abiding point of this remarkable book is I think not in that sense but more in the impact it makes as you read it.

As with the earlier book there are plenty of illustrations (also by French) which have their own spare beauty and add a great deal to the text.

For more information about this book see the publisher's website here.

An Android Awakes

Image from http://elsewhen.alnpetepress.co.uk

An Android Awakes
Mike French (text) and Karl Brown (artwork)
Elsewhen Press, 2015
PB (graphic novel size), 202pp
Source: Review copy from publisher (for which I'm very grateful)

This was the strangest book I'd read in a long time.

It's not an ordinary story, told largely through text with perhaps a few illustrations.

Nor is it a graphic novel, with text and pictures deeply intertwined in the storytelling. Rather, it plays with forms. Sometimes, a single picture supplements the text. Sometimes, a series of images follow it, adding atmosphere and detail and indeed, spinning whole new lines of plot that weren't suggested in the text.

And sometimes, the pictures come first, setting up the written part.

And throughout the continuity of the illustrations cast allusions over the text, hinting or showing things never overtly described. Literally, show not tell. The illustrations therefore add a whole new layer of meaning to what would be perfectly good stories in themselves, suggesting correspondences between characters or events in the universe of An Android Awakes that simply wouldn't otherwise be there, giving the book real depth and resonance.

It is the near future. Far enough ahead that intelligent, self-conscious androids seem common - though close enough to now that it seems plausible for one of those androids to be driving a 1964 Ford Mustang Convertible. Driving, because in this book androids seem to have taken on all the roles of humans. Our hero, Android Writer PD121928, lives the life of an aspiring author, continually getting rejection letters from his publisher. The book is mostly composed of PD's stories, with some linking narrative so is in some sense a short story - and as such collections will do, it illuminates the author's life and concerns.

PD's wife Samantha has been disappeared by the publisher and he's provided instead with an allowance for prostitutes. It's as though somebody, somewhere has settled on a certain idea of the bohemian writer's life and is trying to make it real, but without really understanding the reality. So a book is rejected for being one word too long, and the reasons given for rejections actually get more  bizarre after that. One might suspect that these aren't real responses, just patterns generated by Markov chains from some immense database of rejection letters...

PD has a deadline: he only gets so many tries before he's deactivated, and as the rejections mount he becomes ever more erratic - for example giving successive stories the same number, which seems to fool the system, at least for a bit. But the stories also get better and better. They begin to refer to each other, to feature common characters and themes. Some of this reflects PD's own situation - with frequent occurrences of a lost wife or husband and references to that same car - while others, perhaps, hint obliquely at how the androids came to rule (they clearly do). The stories feature human astronauts and explorers and describe the bizarre fall of the human race. They also show glimpses of the development of androids as humans replace parts and subject themselves to gruesome augmentation processes. There are also repeated glimpses of a shadowy organisation, the Bureau of Scientific Discoveries, and of android bounty hunters stamping out conspiracy theories. Parts are distinctly noirish in tone.  Mockingbirds - rarely killed - recur constantly. Somewhere in all this, once senses, are the stories of PD himself but also of the near future world he inhabits. But it's broken, fractured, seen through a Kaleidoscope.

The stories are very good in themselves, even without this sense of a larger whole, of a wider story. Some are very funny: for example the android thief who steals buttons (including robbing banks for them) or the superhero angels who Fight Crime but are brought down by a prudish bishop who objects to their nakedness. But the connections between them are such that you'll want to read and re-read, to go back and check things, hunt through the pictures for references: this book is a ramified, knotted artefact, existing beyond the normal two dimensions of the page - or perhaps I should say it's non Euclidean, both the generator of a warped space and acted on by that warping.

I'm not really sure if it has a beginning, a middle and and end - something I was taught in O level English was the very essence of a story - however, it clearly is a story, complex, immersive and deeply, deeply weird. Reading it is a truly different experience and I urge you to draw up a cool can of oil, rest your servos for a bit, and interact with it through your optic sensors...

For more about An Android Awakes (and it's a fascinating more!) see here.