Back in the 1990s, I was in a writing orbiter with Justina Robson, one that was run by the British Science Fiction Association. There were, if I remember correctly, five of us. We each wrote a few thousands words of whatever it was we were working on — genre fiction, obviously — and critiqued the contributions of the other four, then read their critiques of the piece we had included on the last round, bundled the lot into a large envelope, and posted it onto the next person in the orbiter.
This was how we did things before the web.
In 1999, Robson’s first novel, Silver Screen (1999, UK) was published. Naturally, I bought and read it (I’d seen parts of it before). I followed Robson’s career — which was no hardship as she’s an excellent writer. But I sort of stopped reading her after the first book of the Quantum Gravity quintet, Keeping It Real (2006, UK), not because of the book itself, which was different to her previous novels. It certainly wasn’t the first series by a writer I admire I’ve initially bounced out of. The same happened with Gwyneth Jones’s Bold As Love quintet, but I later started that again, worked my way through it, and found it to be excellent. Unfortunately, all my books went into storage before I had the chance to do the same with Robson’s Quantum Gravity.
I’d continued buy to Robson’s novels after Keeping It Real as they were published, but The Switch (2018, UK) was another one that went into storage before I could read it. Happily, it appeared on offer as an ebook soon after I’d moved to Sweden. So I bought it. Again.
Nico and Twostar are orphans in Harmony, a theocratic state on an alien world. They escape from “care” and join one of the local teenage gangs. Twostar is a genius with computers and other systems, and Nico is a gifted fighter. They catch the attention of a major gang, and move up the ladder. But they’re too good, and that causes problems between two gang leaders, to such an extent Nico is traded, and then framed for the murder of the gang leader he was traded to. His execution is faked, and he’s implanted with…
The word “switch” can mean several different things — Wiktionary gives twelve definitions as a noun, ten as a verb, and two as an adjective specific to snowboarding and skiing… Um, yes. Anyway… The Switch, however, is not switch as in Big or Freaky Friday, but switch as in a cybernetic device implanted in a person’s brain to allow them to interface with the control systems of a starship. And a switch of this type is implanted in Nico’s head after his faked execution. However, it’s not just any old switch, but one that allows him to connect to a Forged, an AI starship — thus linking this book with Robson’s earlier novels, Natural History (2003, UK) and Living Next Door to the God of Love (2005, UK) — although said Forged is something of a rogue, and the authorities are very close to deciding to destroy it.
The Switch is, it has to be said, not a book that is entirely what it seems. The world of Harmony is brutal, its vast inequality justified by a religion which champions eugenics and genetic engineering. But it’s one of the other meanings of switch that — which? — becomes apparent as the story progresses, when it’s revealed the brutality is in part a testing ground for Harmony’s genetic engineering, and the state is tolerated by other worlds only because of the quality of its genetically engineered products…
And that’s not the last switch the plot makes.
Robson states in an afterword The Switch was inspired by the science fiction of Iain M Banks. It’s certainly true Banks casts a long shadow over British sf. This is not a bad thing. The Culture novels are excellent, a high-water mark in British space opera, and arguably the genesis of New British Space Opera (which became New Space Opera when the Americans decided they wanted in on the act, even though they were still churning out the same Old Space Opera; but that’s an argument for another day). The Switch takes a very definite Banksian turn in its final chapters, as the universe of the book both opens out to a grander scale and yet also closes in on itself. It’s the space opera equivalent of that photographic trick, tilt-shift. It makes sense of Harmony, its role, its place in the universe, and what happened to Twostar and Nico.
I admit I was not initially taken with The Switch. The first few chapters suggested yet another grim neoliberal nearish-future sf tale… but I should have trusted the author. A third of the way in, and the tone changes completely as Nico infiltrates the Harmony theocracy and begins learning about genetic engineering. And then there’s that final third as the action moves way from Harmony and into the wider universe of the book. This is excellent stuff — switch and switch again, and then switch again once more.
I’m reminded of a talk John Clute once gave in the late 1980s in which he compared EE ‘Doc’ Smith’s Lensman series to Thomas Mann’s The Magic Mountain (1924, Germany). Yes, really. It was at Mexicon 3 in Nottingham. The remarkable thing about the Lensman series, he said — and I paraphrase as it’s been thirty-two years — is that with each installment of the Lensman the scale of the story expanded: planetary drug lords, interstellar criminal organisations, Boskone, and then galaxies colliding with the Arisians versus the Eddorians… Not having read The Magic Mountain, I can’t confirm the likeness. And having read the Lensman series — which was completely reorganised for novel publication — in the 1970s Panther Granada paperbacks with the Chris Foss covers, and in which the Eddorian versus Arisian conflict is introduced right from the start, the whole expanding universe thing was not something I experienced.
I’ve argued in the past (back on my old blog) that sense of wonder is in part dependent on manipulations of scale. Not just making the universal personal, but also the reverse. The Switch plays a more interesting game — not unique to The Switch, but always welcome when it appears — in which manipulation of scale is overt, part of the narrative and intrinsic to the world-building.
Science fiction is not a sitcom. It’s not the personal which forms its appeal, it’s the manipulation of the personal and the universal. That is what makes it science fiction. If it’s set on a spaceship and it’s just about the relationships between the crew members…
It’s soap opera, not space opera.
