I can't really read books anymore, but on any platform I am statutorily obligated to encourage people to read The Fortunate Fall, the most important and best work in cyberpunk science fiction.
Jo Walton has a very good review of it.
“You’re always talking about getting past people’s surfaces to what’s inside, and that’s what you call real. But you can’t just break through a person’s defenses like that; the defenses are part of the person, they are the person. It’s our nature to have hidden depths. It’s like –” my eyes searched the room for a metaphor “–like skinning a frog and saying, ‘Now I understand this frog, because I’ve seen what’s inside it.’ But when you skin it, it dies. You haven’t understood a frog, you’ve understood a corpse.”
(Cameron Reed, The Fortunate Fall, p. 157)
From an old tumbr post of mine:
It is possibly the only novel that I would consider classifying as cyberpunk which I would also identify as being one of the really great achievements in science fiction writing. I’m not sure that I can think of a better science fiction novel, at all. Some of Delany’s and Sturgeon’s short stories surpass it, but not by much.
The book is, in its setting, a peri-singularity (I may have just made up that word) cyberpunk novel with strong political/dystopian elements. It would be easy to draw comparisons to some of Ken MacLeod’s or Charles Stross’s stuff, but it’s much better than that.
In its structure, it’s hard-boiled noir. Spies, bad guys, dames, betrayal, etc, etc. It’s good noir, too, although it doesn’t feel like a Tracer Bullet comic. In the spy context it’s more John Le Carre than Ian Fleming: human relationships and emotional betrayal are more important than global schemes and personal survival.
It’s also a book about gender, sexuality, and identity, and a rather extraordinary one. And extraordinary in part because of the way it applies the peri-singularity technology to those issues – usually science fiction assumes that technology alters the world around us, and our physical bodies, but leaves the soul more or less alone – except that it may be altered (for better or worse) by its experience of these changes. The Fortunate Fall reverses that. I’d like to say more, but I don’t want to get too spoilery.
The book also – almost incidentally – excels at things like humor, pacing, suspense, dialogue, and the seemingly effortless proliferation of richly imagined ideas.
Seriously, people. Please read this damn book.
