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lhs3020b · 3 months ago

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Infinity Gate, by MR Carey

MR Carey's "Infinity Gate" is perhaps one part Charlie Stross's "Merchant Princes" series, one part Gary Gibson's "Extinction Game", one part "Everything Evyerwhere All At Once" and one part completely its own.

SYNOPSIS

Out in a world not a million miles from ours, Hadiz Tambuwal is a scientist. She lives on what could be best be described as a late-stage Earth. She has what in context is an extraordinarily-privileged life, working as a researcher at a billionaire-funded campus just outside of Lagos. Officially, the projects at Campus Cross are special Moonshot-type endeavours, aimed at finding solutions for the raft of problems that their world is sinking under. Outside the walls of Campus Cross, it's awful, and things are only getting worse. The pollution crisis is so extreme that the air itself is going bad, no-one on the evening news would be so uncouth as to utter the word "famine" but food prices are only moving in one direction, international tensions are spiralling and the whole planet is sliding into dissolution and chaos.

Hadiz responds to all of this by keeping her head down and cloistering herself into her work, to the point where she stops even leaving Campus Cross in the evenings. You'd think this would cause more problems than it does, but as time goes on, fewer and fewer of her colleagues come into work. This is a bit surprising given that Campus Cross still has reliable electricity, potable water and warehouses full of stored food but who knows what's actually going on? Not Hadiz, she's very good at being oblivious when it suits her.

She's doing research into dark energy, which she thinks there might be a way to capture and harness. If possible, this could provide the world with a clean, non-polluting source of energy and could be the first step to pulling the entire planet back from the brink of societal collapse. (Whether the billionaires who run Campus Cross are actually interested in that … well, it's not entirely clear that they are, and there may be some hints in the novel that actually the projects are not intended to save the world, perhaps merely them.)

Hadiz doesn't find a new power source - instead, she accidentally finds something else instead, namely the technology required to Step between alternate Earths. Alternate worlds exist, many of them habitable but without human life. Very excited, she thinks she's found a way for people to at least flee the dying Earth on which they live - but before she can announce the discovery to the world, the brewing international crisis boils over and the capital-A Bombs start falling like the rain.

(Interestingly, the bombing seems to completely bypass Lagos, otherwise Hadiz herself would certainly have died. Given that less important targets get nuked early on, the omission of the capital city of the most populous country in Africa does seem a little odd. If one were a conspiracist, one might almost wonder whether the billionaires had something to do with that.)

Then one day, the Internet goes off.

As far as Hadiz can tell, she's alone. She may well be the last living person on her Earth. (In fairness she seems to consider it likely that there are some survivors somewhere, but she has no way of telling if there are indeed any, for a fact.) In the absence of anything else to do, Hadiz carries on her research and starts mapping alternate realities.

Given the multiplicity of universes, it would be a bit odd if no-one else had ever had the same ideas that she has, and indeed they had. There is an entire cross-universal civilisation out there, calling itself the Pandominion, and in Hadiz's travels, she unknowingly stumbles into their territory. This in turn draws the attention of Watchmaster Orso Vemmet and his boss, who are functionaries in the Pandominion bureaucracy. Initially, Hadiz has no idea that her activities are being monitored. She finds out after she and Essien Nkanika, another human from a somewhat-less-apocalyptic timeline adjacent to her own, Step themselves into an ambush.

Unfortunately, whilst it has a high opinion of itself, the Pandominion is not a nice society. It's idea of diplomacy could be summarised as "double tap", except sometimes its Cielo soldiers are too lazy and complacent to actually bother with the "double" bit. This comes back to haunt them later on - a lot of the plot could have been averted if troopers Moon Sostenti and Lessiz had bothered to make sure that Hadiz actually was dead after they shoot her.

But it gets worse.

Shortly after randomly-not-quite-mudering Hadiz and abducting Nkanika, the Pandominion discovers a continuum populated by robots. Being the society it is, the Pandominion immediately manages to semi-accidentally start a war with them. It then turns out that the robots are themselves a pan-universal society, and one that may in fact be larger than the Pandominion itself. Whoopsie.

Much as things spiralled out of control on Hadiz's Earth, a bad situation is about to get a lot worse for the Pandominion.

COMMENTARY

This is a fast-paced, page-turner of a novel. One interesting aspect is that while the characters have agency and can make meaningful choices, nonetheless they also have limited knowledge and limited analytical power, and are very prone to making mistakes. Unintended consequences are the rule of the day here, from Hadiz herself bunkering down while her world collapsed to the gunboat diplomacy that is apparently Standard Operating Procedure for the Pandominion. Also, while the book is rather jaded about human society - we come off pretty badly in a lot of timelines! - nonetheless, it doesn't fall into the trap of lazily assuming that "different" automatically means "morally superior".

The Pandominion, frankly, is a shitshow.

If I had to describe it in elevator pitch style, I might call it the Imperium of Man with mid-2000s iPod branding. It never seems to think twice about shooting first, and on numerous occasions directly makes trouble for itself by doing so. It's completely-murderous toward inhabitants of the so-called "sinkhole", that being timelines outside the region claimed by the Pandominion. Depending on how you interpret the Traskom arc, there's an implication it may even be actively-genocidal. Also, while the Pandominion cultivates a post-scarcity internal image, it does this through a particularly-warped form of paratime imperialism. Basically, there's plenty of pollution and environmental degradation, likely to levels even worse than that on Hadiz's Earth, but the Pandominion does it on worlds that don't have permanent citizen populations. (Traskom, again, is an example here. The planet is described as so ruined by Pandominion heavy industry that it's actually worse for visitors' health than Hadiz's murdered Earth(!).)

We learn relatively little about the actual character of the Pandominion regime. There is apparently an Omnipresent Council, which seems to technically be the ruling body, and it's implied that its membership are not hereditary. Whether they are elected, appointed or co-opted in some manner isn't clear. The Council exists in an awkward symbiosis with the Cielo, which is the Pandominion military. Some passages of the novel can be interpreted as suggesting that the tail is actually wagging the dog, and outside the veneer of formal constitutionalism, the Cielo is the real ruling power inside the Pandominion.

Regardless of who wears the proverbial trousers, being a Pandominion citizen doesn't seem to bring a lot of rights with it. If you are one, the main "benefit" seems to be that on a good day, the ruling elite will just about tolerate your physical presence within the region of total space that they consider theirs. On a bad day, well, anything goes, really. We see lots of people get subjected to various official enquiries and disciplinary processes in the novel, but notably none of them receive anything like any sort of recognisable due process. Justice is apparently whatever the Cielo trooper pointing a gun at you thinks it is. There's also a suggestion that education is heavily propagandised - the school that another character, Topaz Tourmaline FiveHills, attends seems to push certain narratives concerning the perfect goodness of the Pandominion and the Cielo, and the perfect badness of anyone and anything outside their sublime realm. There's also a suggestion that the arts are censored, or at the very least subject to a culture of stiffling conformity. (Topaz's mother in particular suffers because some of her work comes to be viewed as too radical for good-thinking citizens.) From what we see of the insides of Pandominion society, it also seems to be prone to moral panics, scapegoating and witch hunts.

If you want to look for the positive points, they're probably that there is apparently no gender/sex-based discrimination, and at least technically, the society is a multiethnic one, uniting multiple species that evolved on varying different iterations of Earth. Other than that, though, the Pandominion is basically a lightly-veiled nightmare. You can probably live OK if you can keep your mouth shut, but good luck staying on that straight-and-narrow. Also, depending on how you interpret one particular conversation (concerning the Pandominion's use of shackled AIs), the entire economic system might be based on slavery.

As for the robot society, well, they have their own flaws too. They apparently can't grasp the idea that organic entities could be conscious. They make no effort to communicate, and while they don't technically shoot first during their first encounter with the Pandominion, nonetheless their behaviour escalates to violence much too fast too. They also respond by launching a campaign of kidnapping and abduction on Pandominion worlds, which obviously doesn't do anything to move public opinion in their favour. Again, "different" is not automatically "better".

It's a multiverse where people are very good at making messes and oh my! the messes they make!

CONCLUSIONS

This is a novel where a lot of people make a lot of mistakes, many of them driven by their belief that they are chessmasters with infinite wit, wisdom and vision.

Interestingly, some characters do manage to pull themselves out of their most self-destructive tendencies. Essien Nkanika has a near-breakdown early in the novel when he realises that the chain of bad choices that he calls his life has very nearly led him to his own destruction. Hadiz gets a lot more effective when she finally, belatedly, realises that she needs to work with people rather than just ignore them. Topaz finally manages to take the first steps toward an exit from her own personal mess when she begins to look a bit more critically at her own society, and starts to ask genuine questions about who really has her best interests at heart.

Some other characters don't. Later in the novel, it never occurs to Orso Vemet that he's being manipulated. Baxemides, his treachorous superior, never seems to realise that her own tendency to kick down at her subordinates has directly accelerated the Pandominion's crises. The Omnipresent Council seems incapable of grasping that maybe, just maybe, they've made some mistakes.

That, I think, is the core of what this novel is about. Choice, agency and self-destruction. Who are we if not the catalogues of our mistakes?

In the above write-up I've probably made it all sound extremely grim, and certainly those aspects exist. But it's a fun novel too. The characters' stories are sometimes cringe-inducing, sometimes terrifying, but it's never boring. It also manages to go through multiple genres in one novel - post-apocalyptic, military SF, slice-of-life, espionage, even a chase scene later on! While the characters can be exasperating sometimes, you also care about them and keep wanting to know what happens next.

This was the most entertaining book that I've read this year, and I can highly recommend it. I'm looking forward to reading the sequel.

#books 2024 #Infinity Gate #MR Carey #LHS reads

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