Gnomon

"I think Gnomon is the oldest book I’m recommending today; it came out a couple of years before The Old Drift . And like The Old Drift , it’s also a story made out of stories, which again is my favourite thing in the world. One of my favourite things about Gnomon is its structure: it starts off as a murder mystery set in a very-near-future England, ruled by an AI which runs a panopticon. A lot of social problems have been ‘solved’ – so this is a utopia, which is also actually a dystopia. But from the point of view of the character that we first meet, who is a cop, this is a utopia. This woman is given the task of investigating a suspicious death. This death also takes a science fictional form, because one of the technologies that this society has is invasive mind reading – enabled through technology, not magic – used as a tool of interrogation. So a woman, a political dissident, was interrogated, and she died during the interrogation. Our first protagonist is given the job of investigating this death and finding out if it’s accidental, or if there’s something more to it. Obviously, there’s something more to it – quite a lot more to it! Her first step in the investigation is taking those memories that were recovered from the dead woman during the interrogation and replaying them. She expects to find out about this woman’s life, but she doesn’t get any of the dead woman’s memories at all. She gets memories from entirely different people in different historical periods. For example, there’s the memories of a playboy financier in the mid-twenty-teens era, our recent past, who is a whiz at stock market manipulation because he had a near-death experience with a shark, and now gets stock tips through hallucinations. That’s one sub-story that gets unearthed! Then she keeps digging deeper, and other people show up in the memories. One is an Ethiopian painter who has now moved to London, and whose daughter is writing a video game; and the setting of this video game is the world that we were originally in, the one with the cop and the AI! So now, which of these stories is the real one, and which one is telling the other? And then a third set of memories surfaces, and this one takes a huge leap backwards into time: we encounter the memories of an alchemist way back in the day of St. Augustine of Hippo. She’s actually St. Augustine’s ex, from before he was a saint; and she is also being called on to investigate a murder – in a magical chamber, which legend has it is outside of time somehow. She has to investigate using her alchemical toolkit. Eventually, she has to journey into the underworld to bring back her dead son, the son that she had with Augustine – which is the reason that they are estranged. So this is a straight up magical story – underworld and all. So the story diverges into multiple stories, and each story feels like it’s in a different genre. And then it braids itself back together, to show how and why all these stories are in this woman’s head, and what she was trying to accomplish in this interrogation: how she was trying to survive it, and how she was eventually killed. It’s a beautifully designed, very architectural story. You go deeper and deeper into memory and to history, and then you come back out, having been transformed. The overall narrative structure is a magical journey into the underworld in itself. It’s very absorbing. Like The Old Drift , it’s also a big doorstopper of a book. I think in both cases some readers struggled with that – the sheer density of the material. But if you’re into stories inside stories, and meta stories that play with the whole concept of narrative, then these books are both very much masterclass endeavours in that kind of storytelling. Yes, and I think one of the many juxtapositions that exist between fantasy and science fiction as classically envisioned is that one is future-facing and one is past-facing, right? Tolkien fantasy has a pastoral romanticism – this is not all fantasy obviously, just one of the most popular varieties. I think that’s why that impression exists, that science fiction is forward-looking and fantasy is backward-looking. I don’t think that’s actually true, but it’s definitely something that both of these books are playing with. It’s funny because, for example, the alchemist’s murder investigation is very scientific. She’s using scientific methods in her own alchemical framework. I think that’s a common thread in a lot of these books as well: you can apply scientific thinking in contexts that would not, in our world, be called scientific."