Jo is dead and someone has ransacked her apartment. The scene for Bridge is set, as Bridge - Jo's estranged and bereaved daughter - has to make sense of this mess. Working through the debris of her mother's home, Bridge finds something nasty in the fridge. Thankfully not a mouldy old plot ripe for an unwelcome warm up, but something rare: a treat that is part thriller, part literary SF, and all a nutritious contribution to a genre dominated by the sugar rush of wham bam space opera fare.
What's in the fridge is a dream worm, an elongated spool of edible thread that allows anyone consuming a piece of it to travel to parallel worlds. Or rather, their consciousness shifts from this reality into the body of an alternative version of themselves. Bridge's first trip finds her inhabiting a different Bridge out shopping in a supermarket with a child in tow. She leaps into the body of an outdoorsy social media star on an around the world trip for their YouTube channel. All of them, different glimpses of different lives if different choices had been made, or had history turned out a touch differently.
Unfortunately, as Bridge plunges into Jo's backstory she encounters people who also want the dream worm. And those who hunt down and kill anyone who uses it. Yet Bridge feels compelled to use it to connect with the other Jos in the other timelines. And what motivates the transdimensional sisterhood out to get her?
Bridge is a more engaging, interesting, and dreamily crafted novel than this violently reduced outline allows, and it raises questions about the health of SF best novel prizes that it did not garner so much as a short listed place. Perhaps one reason why had nothing to do with its quality, but its theme. i.e. It goes against the grain of much contemporary SF. As noted here several times, currently popular, pacey authors often employ a watered down Deleuzianism. For instance, MR Carey's Pandominion diptych also plays with parallel worlds, and uses conceits in which diversity and multiplicity is encroached upon by dangers that would force the beings and the cultures of his multiverse into a repressive, difference-denying unity. Similar is present in Adrian Tchaikovsky and in everything by Peter F Hamilton.
Deleuze and Guattari in their discussions of the molar and the molecular, the arboreal and the rhizome, and deterritorialisation and reterritorialisation said that one was not morally privileged over the other. Rather, their stress on forced unities was because theirs was a communist critique of capital, and were concerned with how molarity was forced upon us. Understandably, the target of Anti-Oedipus was Freudianism and the Oedipus Complex, and this was broadened out in A Thousand Plateaus. But this was context specific, and warned there was nothing positive or progressive in multiplicity in and of itself. They warned against too much deterritorialisation and molecularity as, at its extreme, it results in dissolution.
This awkward space is where Beukes locates Bridge. Bridge escapes her poor but freewheeling existence and lives for a while in the shoes of her alternate selves, but this process of deterritorialising from her reality is deleterious of her mental health - even if the thread tying her jaunts together is a search for a version of her mother. But the dream worm itself is dangerous. When someone ingests a thread, they play host to the worm and it is speculated that eggs are laid in the minds of anyone who receives an extra-dimensional visitor. It can grow and, in some cases, be seen writhing under the skin of the arms and wrists. And if left unchecked the worm can physically infect others with apocalyptic consequences. In so doing, Beukes avoids the simple juxtaposition of multiplicity and unity, resulting in a complex and satisfying story. There are no certainties, only greys. No one in this novel is right or wrong, not even the sociopaths stalking Bridge. The embrace of multiplicity is the condition for the good life for Beukes's SF peers, but there is never a guarantee. It is full of ambiguities that have to be carefully navigated.
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2 comments:
I found it an interesting book, although like so many SF books these days it could have used an editor -- at least twice as long as it needed to be.
On the other hand, I found the central character very disturbingly self-absorbed almost to the point of sociopathy, and I wondered why Beukes had chosen to represent Bridge in that particular way. Was it a subtle criticism of contemporary US culture, or did Beukes just want to appeal to a target audience?
Your condensation of its theme makes it sound like a less disjointed version of His Dark Materials.
Almost any scientist would agree (and new supporting evidence is regularly delivered) that any extreme of unity/conformity or dissolution/diversity is "a dead end" from our perspective. That's been well covered in classic sci fi. If sci fi currently seems obsessed with promoting diversity, that's simply an attempt to steer against travel towards the nearest extreme - the one which seems most threatening right now; somewhat like the mechanism used by the artificial habitats in "Incandescence" to avoid falling into the gravity wells that they surf next to. Works which are too far ahead (or behind) of their time do run the risk of going without much in the way of contemporary recognition.
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