Beyond the Bounds of Vengeance - Spirit by Gwyneth Jones

To date, Gwyneth Jones has appeared on the Arthur C Clarke Award short list six times, and won it once - for Bold As Love in 2002. Only Stephen Baxter has been nominated more times, and he has yet to win the award. If Jones' 2004 novel Life had been published in the UK, I suspect it too would have been short-listed - it did, after all, win the Philip K Dick Award for that year. As David Soyka wrote in his review of the book on on sfsite.com:

Simply, put, Life is one of the best things Jones has written. You can stop reading right now and go out and buy the book. Otherwise, you'll have to endure yet another one of these diatribes about how science fiction doesn't get any respect from the literary mainstream. Because you can't read this book and not reflect on the fact that had this been written by, say, Margaret Atwood, Life would be receiving more of the widespread attention it deserves.

In other words, Gwyneth Jones is probably one of the best British science fiction writers currently being published. So a new novel by her is certain to be one worth reading. Spirit; or the Princess of Bois Dormant is her latest. It was published at the end of December 2008.



The plot of Spirit is based on that of The Count of Monte Cristo, but it shares its universe with the Aleutian trilogy of White Queen, North Wind and Phoenix Café. The universe has also featured in a number of Jones' short stories, including 'Saving Tiamaat' in The New Space Opera (it can be read here); and 'The Tomb Wife', which has just been shortlisted for this year's Nebula Award (it can be read here).

The shape of Dumas' story is well-known: Dantès is falsely accused of treason, sentenced to life imprisonment in the Chateau d'If, befriended by a fellow prisoner who teaches him all manner of useful skills and knowledge, escapes, sets himself up in society using treasure whose location was given to him by his friend in prison... and subsequently has his revenge on those who conspired to send him to prison in the first place.

And Spirit does, in broad aspect, follow this. The novel's protagonist is also unjustly imprisoned for twenty years, is educated while in prison, escapes and uses the "fortune" she was bequeathed by her mentor inside to... Not revenge, but neither is it justice. Call it a "balancing".

Of course, Spirit is space opera - new space opera, in fact. The conspiracy which puts Dantès in prison was historical and reasonably well-known by readers. The conspiracy underlying Spirit is wholly invented; the world in which Spirit takes place is wholly invented. Which means the narrative of Jones' protagonist - Gwibiwr; quickly shortened to Bibi - must begin much earlier than that of Dantès. It must give her origin, in fact. And the conspiracy which results in Bibi's imprisonment must also be set up. It is not until halfway through Spirit that Bibi is actually sent to prison. This is not a criticism - Spirit is not about Bibi's revenge, it is about Bibi. She is "the Princess of Bois Dormant".

In the Aleutian trilogy, aliens arrived on Earth and precipitated a crisis. This led to the Gender Wars and, eventually, a World Republic. In Spirit, Jones has expanded this universe into an interstellar Hegemony of five worlds, ruled from a space station in the Kuiper Belt called Speranza. Each of the five worlds is the home of an "alien" race, although there is sufficient biological commonality between the various races to suggest Earth as a common home world in the ancient past. This is known as "having your cake and eating it". A major theme of the Aleutian trilogy was colonialism, and Earth was the colonised; but in Spirit the humans - or "Blues", as Earth is known as the Blue Planet - are the colonisers. The Hegemony also allows Jones to spread her commentary on gender and gender roles across societies that are very much other.

And there is plenty of cake to eat in Spirit. Not a Black Forest gateau or the like, not some fancy confection covered whipped cream and chocolate shavings. But a strong English fruitcake, steeped in brandy. Perhaps that's too silly a conceit. Certainly Spirit contains plenty to chew on, not just the themes carried over from the Aleutian trilogy.

Admittedly, those themes strongly season the book, making Spirit very much a thematic sequel to Phoenix Café. But there are other ingredients: the opening section, in which Bibi grows up in semi-feudal Baykonur, has a flavour of Frank Herbert's Dune. The sudden decamp to Speranza, and the explanation of the workings of the Hegemony's interstellar transit network, contains pieces of Frederik Pohl's Gateway. When Bibi is on Sigurt's World as part of a diplomatic mission, and it all goes horribly wrong, Spirit tastes almost Banksian. And there's a soupçon of Samuel Delany in the section set on Ki/An.

Also present are small nuggets of Jones' earlier works: Escape Plans - the distributed systems of that book have become virtual, or 4-Space; and Kairos - travel via Buonarotti transit-pod mimics in some respects the effects of that novel's eponymous drug.

All this is mixed in with The Count of Monte Cristo. And layered with new space opera as a mode of science fiction.

It makes for a rich and complex story; a story which, no matter how well stirred, can sometimes overwhelm the palate. As each new flavour or tang rises to the surface, so the focus of the story shifts. Bibi is not always there. At one point, for example, the story breaks away from her, simply so we can experience her ex-boyfriend laying another brick in the conspiracy which will condemn her. And in the final section of the book, the Princess of Bois Dormant has taken Bibi's place entirely.

It is in fact that last section where Spirit becomes less the dish of its ingredients. Dumas serves this dish cold, but Jones is less focused on revenge. The Princess of Bois Dormant sets out to redress the wrongs done to her, but also to right the wrongs done to those who suffered because of her. Chief among the latter is her son, a prince of Sigurt's World. This leads to an odd detour, following the prince's holiday on Ki/An, his trip into the marshes, and his kidnap. Later on Speranza, the prince and his companion help rescue a pair of young women from the Traditionalist roles their family intend them to play. Both women are the daughters of Bibi's enemies. Those enemies, of course, get their compeuppance, although Bibi seems to have little to do with it. One has a stroke, another is killed while trying to escape. It all seems a bit... incidental.

Not everything in Spirit works. I don't understand Jones' decision to pepper the names of the natives of Sigurt's World with apostrophes, such as her alien prince D''ffyd. If it's a joke, it soon wears thin. The many references to the French Revolution also seem to add little - despite the novel's template, The Count of Monte Cristo; despite the novel's title, Spirit, also referring to the Princess's Aleutian transit-pod, Spirit of Eighty-Nine (1789, that is). And speaking of French... Sleeping Beauty in French is known as La Belle au Bois Dormant. Perhaps my French isn't as good as it should be, but I thought the dormant (sleeping) referred to the belle (beauty) and not the bois (wood). La Princesse au Bois Dormant makes much more sense. And is especially ironic as the Interplanetary Prison Moon of Fenmu is a rocky inhospitable place, and Bibi spends twenty years there underground...

Spirit is an excellent novel. I'd have expected no less of Gwyneth Jones. I fully expect it to appear in my best novels of the year list for 2009. However, I suspect Spirit will not be on the short list for the Arthur C Clarke Award next year. It is too rich and complex a novel, and the Clarke seems to prefer works of a much stronger and more distinctive flavour. But I do think it will be on the BSFA Award short list - literate sf novels by British authors do well with the BSFA Award. And so they should.

Incidentally, 2009 should prove a good year for Jones. Spirit may have been published right at the end of 2008, but due during 2009 are a short-fiction collection from PS Publishing, Grazing the Long Acre; and a "Conversation Piece", The Buonarotti Quartet, and a non-fiction collection, Imagination/Space, both from Aqueduct Press.




(Ah well. The cake-thing seemed like a good idea at the time. But never mind...)

Days of Future Past

A couple of weeks ago Niall Harrison wrote about Gwyneth Jones' Kairos on Torque Control. Since I've long admired Jones' fiction, I thought I'd do something similar and post a review of her 1986 novel Escape Plans. This review is actually a few years old, but never mind.



I consider Gwyneth Jones one of the best British science fiction writers currently being published. So it shouldn't really surprise me to discover how good her novels are whenever I reread them. Escape Plans I first read in the late 1980s, probably soon after reading and falling in love with Kairos. When I came to this reread, I had not forgotten the story - a member of an orbital-based elite is trapped amongst the 1984-ish drones of the "underworld" (Earth) - and I'd remembered the invented acronymic language which peppered the text. What I had forgotten was how well-written the novel was, how well-designed its background, and how... well, perhaps "clumsily-plotted" is too strong a term: but the story does seem to bounce from incident to incident, revelation to revelation, without actually come to anything more than a purely personal resolution.

ALIC (apparently a computer acronym, but it's not in my OUP Dictionary of Computing) is a VENTURan, a member of a space-based society. VENTUR had originally been set up to colonise other star systems, but it never left the Solar System. And then the VENTURans ended up saving the Earth’s population from itself. ALIC (pronounced "Aeleysi") is enjoying a holiday on Earth at SHACTI, Surface Habitat Area Command Threshold Installation, a planetary facility for the VENTURans. It is located on the Indian subcontinent. At a party, ALIC meets Millie Mohun, a bonded labourer jockey, who appears to be wearing a forged identification tag. The Earth's population are, bar a minority of ruling "enableds", all bonded labourers or "numbers". Millie spins ALIC some story about being blackmailed into wearing the false tag; ALIC decides to help her. To this end, she infiltrates the numbers in SHACTI's Sub Housing (the numbers' underground hive-like city). Unfortunately, she soon finds herself trapped as a number, her VENTURan identity lost to her. And then a portion of the Sub number population rebels against their masters and the systems that maintain their habitats...

The plot of Escape Plans seems initially inspired by the story of Orpheus, who ventured into the underworld to rescue his wife Eurydice from Pluto. It is, after all, the vague feelings of desire for Millie which motivate ALIC to set out on her ill-considered journey. However, not content with this, or with Escape Plans' departure from the myth when ALIC (now Alice) finds herself trapped as a number, Jones adds a further twist to the plot. Millie Mohun, many of the numbers believe, is immortal. As the story progresses, yet another myth takes this one's place: Millie Mohun is an alien, come to Earth to deliver the multitudes from servitude. The VENTURans had already discovered that Earth is trapped in a bubble-universe, and the only world in it with life. Millie, the numbers claim, is from outside, and part of her message is to lead humanity to the galactic confraternity which exists beyond the bubble-universe.

It is perhaps an unnecessary complication of a story which is not all together easy to parse in the first place. The setting, the use of an acronymic language, the mentions of the myriad systems, the deliberate confusion between the systems' real and virtual locations, and the metaphors used by the Earth's populace in explanation of this... all serve to richen and partly obscure the story. Happily, the prose is so well written, it pulls you along with the plot.

That Jones is familiar with India (I believe she's visited the country several times) shines through Escape Plans. For one thing, the novel's matriarchal society strikes me as a deliberate irony. In rural Indian society, females are considered a drain on family resources: girl children must be married off and dowries paid. Boy children, on the other hand, will grow up to become contributing members of the family. In Escape Plans, it is the men who are entirely useless. The Earth culture is based upon the use of humans as processors in the pervasive computer systems which run life support, law and order, communications, etc. But only women can perform this role. Men cannot do it. This is a motif Jones has used many times: the society of her Divine Endurance and Flowerdust is matriarchal; and she also turns the tables on gender roles in her Aleutian trilogy.

Having read Jones's later works, it seems to me that her depiction of technology in Escape Plans also echoes her use of it in later novels. The acronymic language used in Escape Plans disguises this somewhat, but the systems of the book are based upon a computing model which is probably more familiar now than it would have been in the mid-1980s. Escape Plans' systems are distributed and pervasive. Their real location, as opposed to their virtual location, is an important plot-point. They interconnect in a fashion not unlike the Internet - which predates Escape Plans by a couple of decades, but did not really become ubiquitous until the early 1990s.

I opened this piece on Escape Plans by stating my high regard for Jones's writing. It's an opinion I've continued to hold with each book of hers I've read - or re-read. Escape Plans was certainly worth a second look.

Rereading Favourites - June Update, Part 2

Kairos I did not expect to disappoint. If anything, I imagined I would get more from the book on this reread - it's been over a decade since I read it last and I hope I'm a more discerning reader now than I was then. Which also means, I suppose, that I had higher expectations of this favourite novel than I'd had of the others I've reread so far...

And right from the first page, the prose was as good as I'd remembered it. By the end of the first chapter, something else about the novel had occurred to me - what had been near-future science fiction was now alternate history. Kairos was first published in 1988, and it posits a future extrapolated from Thatcher's Britain. The ever-widening equity gap, the increasingly ham-fisted attempts to enforce law and order, the slow realisation that the decisions made by government were not for the benefit of the people it represented... It wasn't hard to imagine a dystopic future back then. If anything, it seemed almost inevitable.

I was going to write that we're better off now than we had expected to be - both politically and economically. But a couple of days after finishing Kairos, I happened to watch Red Road, a film set in a far-from-salubrious area of Glasgow (it's a very good film, incidentally). If Red Road is a true reflection of life in the present day for some, then for them the future of Kairos has come true...

Jane "Otto" Murray is a lesbian ex-political activist, and the owner of a small secondhand book shop. One of her closest friends, James, a gay soap opera actor of Nigerian extraction, asks her to look after a small film container given to him by his sister. Both James' sister and brother are involved with BREAKTHRU, a pharmaceutical company turned cult religion - there is, incidentally, no commentary here on cults or religions. BREAKTHRU have managed to obtain a sample of a drug, which they call Kairos. This drug allows users to directly affect the real world. There is mention of quantum theory, used to "scientifically explain" how the drug operates, but it is its effects not its mechanism which is important.

After dabbling with BREAKTHRU, Otto's lover, Sandy Brize, leaves her. Shortly afterwards, Otto's son, Candide, runs away. Someone has kidnapped his dog and demanded the film canister as ransom. But Candide runs to Sandy, taking the film canister with him, and enlists her help in rescuing the dog. Together, they head north, meet up with a posse of animal liberationists, and raid the BREAKTHRU laboratory where Candide believes the dog is being experimented upon. Throughout this period, the drug in the film canister has been affecting Sandy, who has in turn been affecting the real world...

There's no denying that Kairos is a very good book, and rereading it I can understand why it became a favourite. I've admired Jones' writing a great deal since first encountering it, and Kairos is neither the somewhat clumsy science fiction of her earlier Escape Plans nor the near-fantasy of her debut, Divine Endurance. It is a novel that feels important - less so now , of course, than it did when I first read it (which would be a couple of years after it was published). Even so, it's nice to read a sf novel that actually had relevance, even though that relevance no longer holds true. Perhaps that's one of the definitions of a favourite novel - it recaptures what you felt when you first read the book. And a definition of a well-written book must be one in which you sympathise with the protagonists no matter how little you have in common with them - and I certainly have very little in common with Otto.

I'm glad I reread Kairos. I will almost certainly reread it again. It's by no means a cheerful or fun book, although it is liberating and hopeful in its resolution. I'm going to keep it on my favourites books list.

Incidentally, my copy of Kairos is inscribed by Gwyneth Jones, To Ian, In memory of the strange sausages. She never did tell me what that means...