I realised while reading this very enjoyable and interesting little novel why I still have a problem with sci-fi or as they like to call it to make it more respectable, “speculative fiction”. It can be very well written, it is almost always diverting in its initial premise. Both of these things apply to Roberts’ New Model Army that fascinatingly posits the rise of mercenary militias in the not-too-distant future. They are deeply connected by computer networks and this disposes of the hierarchies that have ordered armies for millennia. These “new model armies” raise havoc where they emerge and Roberts produces excellent thought-provoking scenarios about the very radical idea that is pure democracy.
It also manages to do this without what I call “Zeeing“, which is when a novelist ruins the narrative with technical descriptions of the imagined worlds he had built.
The niggling problem I still have however is how the sci-fi novelist slips so easily into something that isn’t quite lecturing but certainly is a self-indulgent digression from the story that the author worked so hard to get me interested about. In sci-fi novels, passages like this are tolerated almost without notice:
This is Homo sapiens, on the small scale, from the earliest times: eating and sleeping; fucking and fighting. Under ‘eating’ we can bracket all the activities associated with fetching food, all the hunting and the gathering. Under ‘sleeping’ we can bracket all forms of resting, lounging in the sun, starting at the trees, or the walls of our cave. Otherwise what we do, as monkeys, or hominids, or Neanderthals, or early man, in the savannahs or forests, is fuck and fight. Two things that have more in common than just alliteration. The big change is not fire, or the wheel, or language. The big change is play. Play grows into something new. Because, of course, most animals play a little, from time to time. But what makes human beings human is the way we filter everything we do through play. Fucking, inflected via play, parses not only into more elaborate and all-year-round fucking and role-play fucking and all that: it parses into dancing, and music; into art and culture and science. Fighting inflected via play parses into sport, and into politics, and religion. And soon enough we reach a time when it is impossible to simply fuck, or fight – impossible, even, simply to eat or sleep. Play, in its spiralling recherché, rococo forms, shapes everything we do. We are always playing; whether we are talking about work or leisure, about being alone or being with others, we are addicted to play,play is our complete horizon. What have I been doing, if not playing at soldiers? Playing at killing and breaking? Why else would I have enjoyed it so much, if there had been no play involved? The mistake we make, I suppose, is in thinking that playful is in some sense opposed to serious. Play owns seriousness, wholly.
There’s nothing more serious than play.
– Adam Roberts, New Model Army, p. 263-264.
If that was true, discipline in how you tell stories would be a very important measure by which to assess the success of novels.
Your Correspondent, Always wanted to see a mailbox shoot a boy