A hidden threat to humanity’s independence and very existence energizes Machine Vendetta, one of 11 2024 novels nominated for the next Prometheus Award for Best Novel.
Both an epic space opera and a detective-driven murder mystery, the Orbit US novel by British author Alastair Reynolds is of additional interest to freedom-loving SF fans because of the intriguing implications of its quasi-libertarian world-building.
A deft SF police procedural with a twisty plot and credible characters who have legitimate reasons to mistrust central authorities, Machine Vendetta gradually expands into a wider drama about a desperate struggle to preserve humanity’s freedom.
A KALEIDOSCOPIC FUTURE
Like much of the other seven novels in Reynolds’ Revelation Space series, which stretch from roughly 2200 to approximately 40,000 AD, Machine Vendetta is set within a technologically advanced interstellar community with a dizzying array of divergent human societies.
Reynolds’ inventive world-building is kaleidoscopic in scope, depicting myriad socioeconomic polities incorporating elements of freedom, often in tension with democracy.
With brief references to previous events and relationships providing sufficient context to enjoy as a stand-alone novel, Machine Vendetta offers a powerful conclusion to the Prefect Dreyfus Emergencies trilogy, launched with Aurora Rising (originally titled The Prefect) and continuing with Elysium Fire.
Enjoyable for readers who haven’t read anything else in Reynolds’ series and billed by Reynolds as “a sort of universe within a universe,” the trilogy takes place mostly within the highly civilized Glitter Band of 10,000 city states and space habitats orbiting the planet Yellowstone around the star Epsilon Eridani.
Each habitat incorporates its own rules, customs and legal systems, with many valuing the right to privacy, self-defense, freedom of movement and personal autonomy (sometimes carried to extremes of body-mind modifications, creating such animal-human variants as hyper pigs).
A DECENTRALIZED SOCIETY OF CONSENSUAL HABITATS
What links all habitats is the common right to vote, with a vast computer network running thousands of polls daily to decide the overall actions of the Glitter Band.
That sets up the same type of inevitable tensions between pure liberty and radical democracy carried to extremes of majoritarian tyranny that many modern societies grapple with today. To that extent, at least, the political themes of Machine Vendetta are familiar and relevant – if also falling short of the fully free futures that libertarians dream of.
Russell Letson’s positive review of Machine Vendetta in Locus magazine offers an interesting but perhaps subtly misleading take on the novel’s sociopolitical framework:
“Panoply, the Glitter Band’s sole system-wide authority,… is not a conventional police force but the agency that oversees and protects the Common Articles, the overarching agreement that binds together the variegated social-legal-economic systems adopted by the thousands of polities. Under this radically volunteerist-libertarian framework, constant polling (enabled by neural implants and computer-based polling devices) allows a habitat’s population to establish any way of life… and Panoply’s primary task is to maintain the integrity of the polling machineries and protocols and to enforce a small handful of systemwide thou-shalt-nots.”
If habitats violate the Common Articles, they can be censured and at worst, cut off from all communication and trade with other habitats.
Letson’s mostly accurate description of this future’s framework falls short of what Libertarian Futurist Society members might describe as either fully voluntarist or radically libertarian. Yet, it suggests why Reynolds’ future history is of interest to libertarians and why we find aspects of it so thought-provoking and unsettling.
In dramatizing the virtues and flaws of its self-governing habitats, Machine Vendetta invites sober reflection about the nature of freedom and oppression.
In some ways, Reynolds’ Common Articles seem vaguely comparable to the Prime Directive, Star Trek’s loose (and notoriously nominal) rule of non-interference.
While their focus is different (with The Prime Directive preventing interference with civilizations outside of the Federation, and Panoply’s Common Articles restricting what it’s allowed to do inside its own territory), both are noble efforts to restrict force and limit government. Loosely inspired by contemporary liberal and libertarian ideals upheld (albeit inconsistently) by Western and modern civilization, such literary devices allow ample room for drama and conflict amid a near-utopian future.
MEMORABLE CHARACTERS
Machine Vendetta wouldn’t be so absorbing without its compelling central character.
Intelligent and honorable, shrewd in his grasp of tricky politics and bureaucracy, Prefect Dreyfus is a senior agent of Panoply, the Glitter Band’s small and thinly stretched but powerful police corps.
Narrowly focused on their mission, Panoply agents keep tabs on the various polities, stepping in only to correct major violations – especially any that undermine the right to vote or access to “abstraction,” the virtual-reality network linking habitats.
Aumonier, Panoply’s savvy administrative leader, sees the system as “a shrine to a way of living in which hyper pigs and baseline humans were considered equals, and given every opportunity to coexist, thrive and prosper. Tolerance, openness and forgiveness were the norms. It was a model of a better Glitter Band, one Aumonier hoped to live long enough to see. Naturally, it had become a target.”
While virtually all of the Glitter Band’s 100-million citizens pursue “decent, fulfilling lives, accepting the system, content with the choices available to them,” Panoply leaders, basically outsiders, view it with a somewhat more skeptical perspective.
Visiting one habitat, one female agent thinks of asking her host Minty, a genetically modified flying-monkey humanoid with a prehensile tail, “if it ever wanted more from life than the limited palette of experience on offer….Wisely she demurred. To ask that of Minty would have been futile and insulting. It had arrived at this state of being through conscious design, rejecting all but the most necessary trappings. To Minty, it was sufficient by definition.”
Although abuses of power can arise anywhere, of course, as libertarians well know, Panoply’s agents seem responsible and self-aware. “If we overreach ourselves, exercise our powers indiscriminately, we stand to be checked,” one observes.
For his part, Prefect Dreyfus admirably meets the “test of restraint” as he investigates a complex and growing mystery.
PHILOSOPHICAL QUESTIONS
Overall, Reynolds plays fair with his world-building. Rather than presenting a simplistic utopia, the author goes for complexity and interesting nuance that invites readers to think about the pros and cons of different degrees of self-government.
Yet, Reynold’s framework is evocative and illustrative of the eclectic meta-filter outlined by the late great libertarian philosopher Robert Nozick in his landmark National-Book-Award-winning masterwork Anarchy, State and Utopia.
In Nozick’s sophisticated view, beyond the minimum threshold of respecting individual rights and the choices of consenting adults, libertarianism, properly understood, does not impose any particular concrete vision on society. Instead, metaphorically a thousand flowers might bloom with a myriad of culturally and socially diverse societies arising and evolving within that broadly permissive framework.
Consent and non-aggression are the keys – genuine consent, not a theoretical freedom that’s sacrificed after one vote in one election – to both Nozick’s libertarian philosophy and arguably, Reynold’s Revelation Space universe. In any free society worthy of the name, citizens must be free to say no, to vote with their feet and ultimately walk away if necessary – a crucial check on corruptions of power.
Reynolds is both interesting and challenging to read, perhaps especially for libertarians, because he’s willing to push and test the limits of freedom and the messy, emerging modern liberal/libertarian order.
What are the limits of power? How much freedom is compatible with democracy? Is a habitat ethical if it sets up something verging on “voluntary tyranny”? (While not depicted in Machine Vendetta, that last question relates to a previous novel in the series that reveals a highly questionable habitat where “voluntary tyranny” makes escape impossible.)
Many people (not just libertarians) will say “hell, no!” to such tyranny. But aren’t such possibilities and boundaries precisely what SF, at its best a literature of ideas, should explore?
THE EVOLVING STANDARDS OF CIVILIZATION
Certainly, not all of the myriad habitats and societies are attractive in Reynold’s richly imagined future. Far from it!
Nor are they meant to be, given Reynold’s wisdom and realism about the perennial conflicts that can arise within any human community. His future is plausible, and all the more dramatic and compelling for its recognition of moral ambiguity and understanding that humanity has within it the potential for both decency and cruelty.
In short, law-enforcement personnel like Prefect Dreyfus will always be needed, because murder and other violent crimes will always remain a sad possibility within human affairs.
Reynold’s realistic world-building also extends to his science, which excludes the possibility of any physics-denying faster-than-light drives while exploring plausible permutations of artificial intelligence, nanotechnology and other super-advanced technologies.
In some ways, Reynolds arguably “neo-libertarian” and neo-liberal future, with its built-in ability to evolve and change, seems reminiscent of Hugo-winning and Prometheus-finalist author David Brin’s perspective of “evolutionary libertarianism” – a more pragmatic, incremental approach to the expansion of freedom Brin outlined in his seminal essay “Confessions of a Cheerful Libertarian” in the Summer 2000 issue of the former Prometheus quarterly.
Without giving away too much, the totalitarian threat in Machine Vendetta is especially insidious in its seductive power. Glitter Band humans are tempted with the promise of no longer having “to make hard choices,” of being able to “live easier, more carefree lives without that pressure” and without “the drudgery of responsibility.”
While set in the distant future, Reynolds’ cautionary tale has roots in ancient history and our oldest mythologies about those who cloak the fist of tyranny in a velvet glove.
Dreyfus advice to a stressed-out citizen hints at the novel’s broader lesson: “I’d make the most of that liberty while you still have it.”
A SUPERIOR SCIENCE FICTION SERIES
Considered purely as hard science fiction (and without regard to its degree of relevance to the Prometheus Awards), this is one of the best SF novels I’ve read in years. It was also my first Reynolds novel, and one that made me want to read more.
Focusing on the detective work and murder investigations of the continuing character Prefect Dreyfus, Aurora Rising, Elysium Fire and Machine Vendetta take place before four previously released Revelation Space novels: Revelation Space, Redemption Ark, Absolution Gap and Inhibitor Phase.
(Chasm City is a BFSA-award-winning stand-alone novel taking place much later within the same universe. Reynolds also has published two Revelation Space collections of stories.)
With less world-building than previous novels in the trilogy and series, Machine Vendetta focuses more propulsively on action. That pays off nicely as the story builds towards its climax – and a satisfying resolution of the trilogy.
Given how gripping Machine Vendetta is in its writing, plot, characters and imaginative vision of humanity’s future, more readers undoubtedly will become Reynolds fans and seek to discover more of his work – especially within his Revelation Space series.
Machine Vendetta is the first work by Reynolds to be recognized by the Prometheus awards, but hopefully not the last.
Note: Machine Vendetta is one of 11 2024 novels nominated for the Prometheus Award for Best Novel.
* Read Prometheus Blog reviews of other current Best Novel nominees, including Michael Flynn’s In the Belly of the Whale, Stuart Turton’s The Last Murder at the End of the World, Danny King’s Cancelled: The Shape of Things to Come, Wil McCarthy’s Beggar’s Sky and Lionel Shriver’s Mania.
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