Postsingular

[I don't suspect that there will be anyone reading this who will need to read the wikipedia articles I'm linking to, but I'm linking to them anyway. Why? Because.]

Rudy Rucker's Postsingular is about life after two technological singularities brought about by nanotechnology, and a great deal of it is a loving account of how the street finds its own uses, so it's pretty odd to me that at least the first half of the book reminded me so strongly not just of pre-cyberpunk SF, but pre-New Wave SF. Stylistically, a lot of the first half reminds me of Isaac Asimov, almost. And it's very odd to be reminded of Asimov while reading about "evil" nants eating the world and then spitting it back up unchanged, or about how symbiotic nanotechnology allows us to see visitors from a nearby other-universe because when the nanocomputers observe them they don't collapse their quantum thingy-whatsits, and while reading a page and noticing that a good majority of the nouns are ones the author made up earlier.

But then halfway through a whole new set of characters show up, all of them members of a younger generation than the established ones, and with them comes a radically different style, a kind of Snow Crashy CivilWarLand in Bad Decliney style, all corporate and Capital Letters and cheekily direct exposition. What's even weirder is that I kind of like the first half better. That's weird because, generally, I vastly prefer contemporary SF to old-timey SF. Much as I love and admire and am indebted to Dr. Asimov, as a writer, scientist, activist, human being, and formative figure in my own childhood, if I must choose I'll choose the cyberpunks and their descendants. But in this book, when it gets all contemporary-feeling, it kind of feels like Rucker's trying too hard. Which is odd, because he's one of the founding figures of cyberpunk. I've never read anything else by him, so I don't know if this is a problem I'd always have with him or if it's just this book or what, but it was a problem.

A bigger problem was a kind of old-timey attitude about gender and sexuality that I could sense under a mask of social progressivism. A lot of the female characters (thankfully not all of them--Thuy and Kittie, for example, are awesome exceptions) fall into the pattern of the more beautiful than intelligent, driven only by emotionalism, female stereotype. And one of the major ones that doesn't, Gladax, the hyperdimensional tyrant, is an authoritarian and stupid castrating-woman figure (metaphorically, not literally). As for sexuality, all of the female characters in the book (except for Gladax, whose sexuality is never mentioned) are actively bisexual over the course of the book, while all of the men, save one, are heterosexual as far as I can tell. The one male exception is Luty, the main villain of the book. Not only is he gay, but his sexuality is stripped of him; after accidentally killing the one love of his life at age seventeen, he spends the rest of his life in demented solitude. It's even unclear whether that one teenage relationship was at all sexual, or even reciprocal--and based on the evidence, I'm guessing it wasn't.

I'm not saying that you can't have gay or female villains, or write about bisexual women and straight men. And I'm not saying that Rucker himself is a homophobe or a misogynist; I doubt he even has any more unconscious prejudice than the best of us. But there are some narratives and some story tropes that I think he has seen in the world around him and failed to fully investigate before using them.

But I'm doing that thing where I'm talking about a book I quite liked, all in all, and sounding more negative than I do writing about things I hate. It's harder for me to talk about things I hate; I get frustrated and can't think of anything interesting. With works I almost love, on the other hand, I'm very interested in the parts that keep me from embracing them wholeheartedly, and can talk about them endlessly. It's why I want to write a book about gender in Star Trek, say, or why my review of Rendition is so much longer than my review of Hatchet.

All of the ideas, and some of the writing, and most of the characters, make Postsingular worth reading. Its flaws make me want to talk about it forever.