Tony Ballantyne - Interzone

Let’s waste no time: this book is incredible.  Chris Beckett has obviously decided what he wants to say and then gone ahead and done so in 250 beautifully written pages.  He has hidden a grain of truth away towards the end of the novel, a piece of original thinking I have encountered in no other work, SF or otherwise.  Not content with that, he has made characters that live and breathe, animated his world with vivid descriptions, and stitched the whole thing through with brisk dialogue spun straight from life. And all of this is propelled along by a plot that is as tight as it is gripping. 
            So what’s it all about? 
            In the near future, religious fundamentalism has swept the world.   Those who refuse to accept the beliefs of their new leaders are tried for blasphemy.  Those found guilty are tortured, or worse.  A fortunate few manage to escape to the city state of Illyria, where scientists, now unwelcome anywhere else, use their advanced technology to defend themselves from the hostile countries around. 
            However, it gradually becomes apparent that Illyria has become as fundamentalist in its own way as the world it has retreated from, refusing to accept anything that cannot be measured or proven.
            When George discovers that Lucy, a robot prostitute, has developed self awareness, he finds that neither Illyrian philosophy nor religious belief are willing to acknowledge what he has found.  His efforts to protect the developing consciousness of the machine lead him on a journey from his home to the Holy Machine of the title.
            There are few faults here, Beckett rarely puts a foot wrong. Maybe sometimes the opposing sides in the story seem just a little too black and white:  it seems a little unlikely that all the countries of the world but one should lurch into religious fundamentalism, and that this should be true of all religions- perhaps there should have been some explanation for this.  Otherwise, this an incredibly accomplished book.
     

Paul Di Filippo - Asimov's SF Magazine

One of the most accomplished novel debuts to attract my attention in some time can be found in Chris Beckett¹s The Holy Machine (Wildside, trade paper, $17.95, 242 pages, ISBN 1-59224-210-3). In its portrayal of a dystopian world, Beckett can stand shoulder to shoulder with Orwell and Burgess. In his focus on what separates (or unites) man and machine, he is cousin to Philip K. Dick. In his spiritual speculations, he reminds me of Anthony Boucher. In short, he¹s assimilated many classical influences and transformed them into a unique new vision. In Beckett¹s near-future scenario, the entire world has been swept by a variegated wave of savage religious fundamentalism known as the Reaction. One last redoubt of science and rationalism remains in the newly formed Mediterranean nation of Illyria.  Our protagonist is George Simling (note the echoes of ³simulacra² in his last name), who happens to fall in love with an android prostitute named Lucy. George¹s subsequent derangement and Lucy¹s transcendence form the bulk of the tale. Beckett beautifully and concretely evokes the mundane circumstances of George¹s transgressive odyssey while never beating the reader over the head with its larger significance. This is a book rich with pathos, misery, and hope, rather like what we all imagined the Kubrick-Spielberg film A.I. (2002) might have been.  A triumph.

Thomas Easton - Analog

A few years ago, I put Chris Beckett’s story, "La Macchina," in my Gedanken Fictions teaching anthology as an illustration of how negatively people can view science and technology that threatens their self-image. It’s not a new point to make, for as science has advanced it has upset the status quo apple cart a number of times, moving Earth from the center of the universe to the edge and from young to old, revealing humans as the descendants of apelike creatures, showing that continents float like ice cubes in a highball, contradicting the constancy of mass and time, announcing that the world was not predictable, and in the process infuriating authorities–both religious and academic–who insisted that it just was NOT so! And if it was, then saying so should be illegal. Lately we’ve been seeing the same sort of thing going on with technologically assisted reproduction (in vitro fertilization got past the "Oh! Horrors!" crowd, but now cloning is taking the heat), genetic engineering, and artificial intelligence.

That last was Beckett’s theme in "La Macchina," and his point was that if a robot acts like an intelligent, conscious being, then if we insist that it cannot be (and indeed, if it acts like one, it needs to have its memory wiped and rebooted), we look like idiots. As well as slavers and racists and sexists (who have all looked at intelligent, conscious beings in much the same way). Yet as history has shown, we can come around, and Beckett ended his story with a brief dream sequence featuring a "Holy Machine," a robot that had found a seat in a monastery where it could speak of the chain of being that stretches from inanimate matter to electronic intelligence.

The vein is clearly a rich one. It is therefore hardly a surprise that Beckett should dig deeper and in due time come up with The Holy Machine. The theme is much the same, but writ large. Where the reactionaries were local, now they have conquered all the world except Illyria, where rationalist refugees (intellectuals, scientists, and engineers) have built an enclave from which ideological insanity is barred. We see it through the eyes of George Simling, a spineless wimp who tends his mother, scarred survivor of the pogroms that created the refugees, when she overdoes her immersion in virtual reality; wonders when robots wander off; and when he finally discovers the joys of robotic sex and falls for "Lucy," begins to obsess about the hints she shows of developing self-consciousness.

The robots that wander off vanish. George discovers that they cross the border and are crucified. The Illyrian government is concerned, but not about the crucifixions. Robots are just machines, after all. If they aren’t working right, they just need periodic prophylactic memory-wipes and reboots. In other words, rationalists can be just as bone-headed as the religious idiots outside Illyria.

When the reboots become law, George steals Lucy and leaves Illyria, trying desperately to keep her true nature concealed while he encourages the growth of her consciousness. He is, of course, doomed to failure, but he grows up, becomes less of a wimp, meets other humans (including Marija, who just may be his future), and sees his actions change the world in a way neatly foreshadowed by the short story.

If Beckett can keep it up, he will soon be as well known for his novels as he already is for his short fiction.

 

Nicholas Whyte - Infinityplus

Beckett is well known to readers of Interzone as a writer of short stories. This is his first published novel, and it is a promising start. George Simling is a translator in the near-future city of Illyria, one of the few parts of the world that has not succumbed to the religious Reaction against all forms of technology. He falls in love with a sex robot which has started to develop autonomous intelligence beyond its programming, but ends up getting much more than he bargained for.

I normally hate "cute robot" stories with a deep deep loathing. This is not one of those stories. Although Lucy the robot's sluttish software is what George falls in love with, it becomes clear to us (and to him, though he has difficulty in facing up to it) that her emerging consciousness is something very different indeed. And at the same time as Lucy is making a transition from programme to personality, George's mother, addicted to virtual reality, is going in the other direction.

Illyria, George's home, is no utopia; where many an author would have automatically wanted us to side with the scientists against the wild-eyed fundamentalists, Beckett has taken a more subtle approach. Surrounded by religious statelets, the city has elevated rationalism to the point of a state cult; discussions of religion and spirituality are forbidden, and George gets sucked into the subversive Army of the Human Spirit. When the authorities start to brain-wipe the most advanced of
their robots, George and Lucy flee across a fractured Balkan landscape to a destiny that includes transformation and destruction.

The story is set in a part of the world I know fairly well, and I thought I picked up nods towards the national stereotypes of the isolated Macedonians, the laid-back Montenegrins, and so on. The fictional future city-state of Illyria obviously owes a certain debt of inspiration to the historical city-state of Dubrovnik, though it is two
countries further south. A reference to "Lake Shkroda" is presumably a misprint for "Shkodra". My one serious cavil is that the oppressively hot Balkan climate is barely mentioned - indeed one character wears an unlikely "floppy white jumper".

A couple of touches I liked: the Illyrian subversives meet under the cover of the "Mountain Club" which sounds rather like the "Sierra Club" in the infamous role-playing game "Paranoia". Lucy the robot's gaffes as she tries to be human are reminiscent of the Buffy-bot in Buffy the Vampire Slayer. I did feel that Beckett over-egged the pudding at one or two points: perhaps it's believable that George has never been kissed before he encounters Lucy, but it seems most implausible that his conception was the only sexual act of his mother's life.

But in general, this is an interesting tale well told in Beckett's sparse prose, and nicely presented by Wildside Press. Recommended.

Steve Mazey - Alien Online

In the future imagined by Chris Beckett in this, his debut novel, religion and superstition have taken hold in the souls of men throughout the globe, and more worryingly, fundamentalists have taken hold of governments around the world. Science is seen as evil, advanced technology becomes pariah-like and users of this technology are considered akin to devil worshippers.

There is one place on the planet where technologists can feel safe, one country where logic is triumphing over blind faith. It's this country, Illyria, where this story takes place, and it's to this country that all the non-religious folk have retreated, seeking sanctuary against those who would persecute them for their use of technology and belief in science.

George Simling is one of the first generation of native Illyrians, one of the first batch born in this technological society. Unlike his mother, Ruth, who knew life outside this place, George has never known anything other than Illyria, and possibly because of this isolation he doesn't look upon his society as a haven. Indeed he feels that his life is missing something. This is when he encounters Lucy. Lucy is an android prostitute, or rather one of the personalities programmed into the android body. The Lucy personality has completely captivated George Simling and he is absolutely infatuated.

This android (and indeed all robots in this country) is equipped with the ability to learn. Androids have adaptive routines which enables them to mould their responses more appropriately to any situation. The downside with this part of their programming is that occasionally the robots flip-out and wander off on their own never to be seen again. When George has occasion to travel outside Illyria, through work, he finds out what can happen to these flipped-out robots – seeing robotic heads mounted on spikes.

The Illyrian government has a plan to prevent the flip-outs. The androids are wiped clean on a periodic basis – a fact guaranteed to petrify George as it would signal the end of his beloved Lucy.

I am not the world's greatest fan of cyberpunk novels, and this book certainly touches on some cyberpunk territory. However anyone who, like me, who has a fear of books written in a pseudocode as though we are reading through the command language controlling a robot (and yes I have tried reading one - I wouldn't say anything against these - just they're not for me), can breathe easy. The Holy Machine is a book that concentrates on the human side rather than the machine, the cyberpunk elements being the background to the main story. At its heart this is a love story, albeit a little bit of a warped one (not in a sick way just misdirected).

It's pretty engaging stuff. George is handled sympathetically, you certainly will feel for him as he works his way through his own emotional maelstrom over Lucy – passing up the chance to date a woman he initially liked because of his desire to be with the machine.

You'll probably not see this book listed amongst awards nominations next year, but it is certainly worthy of a read.


'Velcro City Tourist Board'

The city of Illyria is the last bastion of scientific reason on Earth. After the world was swept up in ‘the Reaction’, a global religious uprising against science and all its works, the rationalists and techno-corporations that survived retreated to an enclave in the Balkans, and there built Illyria as their ivory tower and final bastion. George Simling works as a translator. He is a second generation Illyrian, born to Ruth, a woman who narrowly escaped the religionist pogroms in the US and has been psychologically scarred by her experiences. She spends most of her time in Senspace, which is a panoply of full-immersion virtual realities.

Despite its rigid and vociferous clinging to rationalist principles, Illyria has strayed into the mindset of any embattled and besieged minority – C. Gavagahn, reviewing the book on Amazon UK, compares this attitude to that of Israel – “a state not only surrounded by enemies, but with a defensive mindset shaped by horrendous persecution, a mindset that is at once understandable & self-destructive”. Illyria has also made compromises for survival that will inevitably lead to discord with its neighbours – it is dependent on immigrant labour from the religious states that surround it, but restricts the freedoms of those workers in the name of upholding its rationalist principles.

The world Beckett has built here allows for an exploration of the dynamics between religion and science as ways of seeing the world. Despite their seeming polar opposition, the similarities of their attitudes to those considered to be outsiders to the cause are carefully portrayed, and chime with the ideological antagonism that currently grips our world.

Against this charged backdrop, the drama of George is played out: his fall from grace and into rebellion against the ideals of his homeland; his disgust with the narrowness of not only religious thought, but militant rationalism also; his eventual escape from the city in the company of a robot prostitute that is incrementally acquiring consciousness; and his descent into (and eventual redemption from) guilt and madness after he judges himself guilty of her destruction.

For a novel that deals so explicitly with a classic science fiction trope, that of the ‘conscious machine’, it is also a surprisingly emotive and heartbreaking tale. Beckett achieves this by never shying from exposing George’s character flaws - which is a hard trick to pull off with a first person narrative, even one with a retrospective framework. George doubts not only the standpoints of authority but his own beliefs as well; he also falls victim to self-loathing, which he directs outwards towards the ‘syntec’ prostitute, Lucy.

Appalled and shamed by his idealist bid for freedom with what turns out to be a pale imitation of humanity (despite Lucy’s gradual awakening into consciousness), George ends up betraying her to a religious mob in the world outside Illyria that they are fleeing through aimlessly. He carries the guilt from this event with him until he is absolved of it in a meeting with the eponymous ‘Holy Machine’ at the end of the story.

The deeper questions this novel addresses are brilliantly handled, with sensitivity and original angles on an old conceit – what would occur if a machine began to acquire consciousness? This basic question flows out to embrace a slew of philosophical enquiries about the nature of the soul, of what it means to say something is alive, of the differences and similarities between religion and science, and of what happens to morality when authority is surrendered to dogma. Much of the story shines a light on modern life in the 21st century, with its themes of mutual incomprehension and intolerance.

Interwoven with the main story is that of Ruth, George’s mother. Once George has fled, and is hence no longer able to forcibly remove her from Senspace each night, she spends so long immersed in it that her body becomes irreparably damaged. Subsequent amputations and surgery mean that she is ironically unable to function in the normal world any longer and is obliged to spend all her time in Senspace, or projected into the real world by inhabiting a syntec robot ‘vehicle’. Here Beckett manages to address more complicated and contentious ideas; are we our bodies, or are we our minds, or are we our souls? The use of the term ‘vehicle’ brings to mind Buddhist concepts of reincarnation. Ruth, or ‘Little Rose’, as she renames herself in Senspace, allows us to wonder whether being apart from reality is such an appealing idea once there is no way to return, and whether constantly fleeing from the past is a path that leads to happiness or despair.

‘The Holy Machine’ is a book at once complex and simple. Approached simply as a story, it is a brisk and engaging read, with sparse prose and tiny chapters that showcase Beckett’s grounding in short fiction forms. There is no flab on the tale, but neither is it undernourished, nor concealing a mechanical body beneath human flesh like Lucy the syntec. Beckett has been unafraid to take on some very serious and contemporary themes, and treat them with the seriousness they deserve. Science fiction is often touted as a ‘literature of ideas’, and indeed this is often all many works of sf manage to be. This work, however, manages to go beyond the whiz-bang technology-obsessions of much sf, and brings the reader back to the central question that all good literature of any genre should discuss – namely, what it means to be human. An inspirational read, and a great antidote to the barrage of militaristic techno-thrillers that are saturating the market, Beckett’s debut novel shows promise of a future career of controversial yet enlightening work.

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