Refracted future a book review of The Mirror

As in Orwell’s Oceania, or the pages of Fahrenheit 451, the world of The Mirror is a surveillance society where the state strives to control thought. Like Bladerunner, there are huge and ugly megalopolises, androids, and people who might be androids. Like Logan’s Run (film version), there is a mysterious and romanticized threshold that must …

Ever since the ancients invented automata, writers have wondered about the implications for humanity and ruminated about the nature of consciousness. The Industrial Revolution would spawn increasing concern about subservience to machines and “Satanic mills.” The Great War and then Karel Čapek’s 1920 play R.U.R. (from which we get the word ‘robot, based on a Czech word, robota, meaning ‘forced labor’) made many people anxious about out-of-control technology – a theme revisited every generation since, as seen for example in the 1984 action classic, Terminator. Today, the growing sophistication of artificial intelligence has turned a trope into a cliché, the subject of articles, books, and documentaries, which often tell us more about contemporary concerns than possible futures. Musician-novelist Tim Bragg’s newest book is, therefore, in a particular idealist-nostalgic-pessimistic vein; this does not mean it is not distinctive or worthwhile.

As in Orwell’s Oceania, or the pages of Fahrenheit 451, the world of The Mirror is a surveillance society where the state strives to control thought. Like Bladerunner, there are huge and ugly megalopolises, androids, and people who might be androids. Like Logan’s Run (film version), there is a mysterious and romanticized threshold that must be crossed. As in The Handmaid’s Tale, the authorities limit fertility. Like The Matrix, almost nothing is what it seems. As in many dystopias, there is an unjust government with a privileged ‘Inner Party,’ sinister secrets, ecological impoverishment, and bleak living conditions for the lowest echelons – and, of course, ‘red-pilled’ rebels seeking to upturn the system. This highly literate author imbues all these obvious influences with his ideas.

He brings the genre up to (future) date, setting his story in 2073 and reflecting upon today’s worries about self-image, the control of data, the time we spend online, the cashless society, the food we eat (insects bulk large in The Mirror’s meals), and the erasure of the past. Every citizen wears a ‘mirror’ device, which delivers a limited range of computer-generated entertainment and information but, most importantly, allows the authorities to monitor the population. Emotions and sensations are all suspect – except those provided by pills or virtual reality, from ‘conversations’ with ancestors to sexual intercourse. There seem to be no local or national identities or even economy.

The pivotal relationship is between two girls, Mia and Karella, who are arriving at physical and sexual maturity; there seems to be no ‘transgenderism’ in The Mirror world (which is plausible, as those who are so exercised by this today will have exited the scene by 2073). Both characters are well thought-through and nuanced. Bragg’s emphasis on youthful female sexuality, however, feels slightly discomfiting, even though, of course, novelists must always be permitted to imagine themselves in guises or roles other than their own. It is, however, germane to this story because both girls are being exploited by a highly intrusive state, with Karella the subject of lifelong transhumanist experiments and Mia being viewed as a brood-mare for a eugenics program. Their every emotion is parsed for psychological significance, and there are constant interventions – for example, a dogged therapeutic insistence on treating Mia’s phobia about swimming (a happy intervention because she instilled the ability to swim matters greatly later).

Like everyone else, Mia and Karella are under the purview of a panoptical ‘Hub’ and an elite organization called Earthly Living Kingdom (ELK). Mia’s own mother is an ELK Guardian, a senior operative of a group whose sinister plans become increasingly apparent, and the mother-daughter relationship is consequently complex. Mia’s father is absent – or is he?

There are menacing ELK operatives, partly countervailed by a sub-world of gathering rebellion, led by Ned, an IT expert who convenes a secret cell to keep alive fast-fading arts – in effect, the authentic human spirit, at risk from rationalist thinking, cultural coarsening, and technological reductionism. Mia finds special inspiration and solace in the music of Bach, which, although available through approved channels, has fallen into desuetude. In 2073, those who wish to hear such antediluvian sounds risk seeming at best eccentric – and at worst, refuseniks in ‘need’ of pharmaceutical intervention or biotechnological ‘rebooting.’ Bragg has thought a great deal about the psychological benefits of music for everyone of all ages, here showing synaesthesia as a means of inner escape from one-dimensional mundanity.

He generally handles one of the perennial problems of dystopian literature well – accustoming readers to invented concepts and specially coined terminology without interrupting the narrative with long screeds of explication. He has tried hard to come up with new idioms. French phrases are unexpectedly widely used. Anglo-Saxon expletives, however, appear to have gone out of vogue, to be replaced with what seem now insipid new terms of emphasis (“sparking uterus”), which seems an unlikely eventuality – but maybe this symbolizes his surmised society’s distance from earthy realism. Some are more believable, such as “abundant,” to express enthusiasm. There is admirable restraint and wit in the conversations between the human protagonists and the Rai robots who do much of the work (and are constantly being ‘improved’ by technologists and theorists obsessed with ‘migrating’ consciousness from human to machine, and even more worryingly back again).

The Mirror is a deeply well-intentioned book—and, what is even more important, sensitively intelligent—a worthy reflection on issues that are swiftly becoming salient and that seem certain to become even more so.

 

The Mirror, Tim Bragg, Sycamore Dystopia, 2023, pb., 292pps.

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