OC review of novel H-17 by @mada

There's an exchange in Robert Heinlein's Stranger in a Strange Land, a Socratic dialogue about sculpture, specifically about a Rodin statue called “The Fallen Caryatid Carrying Her Stone,” which ends with the reporter character saying something like:    

Wow. I feel like I've taken three quick drinks.   

Reading H-17 was like that. This short book is near critical idea mass. In the same way that SiaSL was a fairly comprehensive tour of the unconscious taboos of American culture, H-17 visits contemporary economics, geopolitics, media and journalism, terrorism, the surveillance state, international crime, and corporate culture. This is no technothriller, though. The tone is instead what I would call breezy, rather than bloody. The clever, joke-filled dialogue sounds more like a romantic comedy or an SF novel from the 1950s, and is mostly successful in navigating what Corey Doctorow calls “the infodump,” the transfer of arcane knowledge that the reader needs to make sense of the plot, without resorting to footnotes. In fact there's some frustrated meta-commentary in more than one scene on the difficulty of quickly explaining complex ideas in a socially acceptable way. People who try are labeled intense.   

Let me expand on my favorite infodump, one that wasn't just,    

“Hm. I had never heard that particular bit of trivia. Interesting,”   

but more like,   

“Wow. I never thought about it that way before. Cool!”   

which is way more fun. A lot of writers have touched on Carl Jung's theory of the collective unconscious, one of my favorites being Tim Powers in his gonzo secret history novels. They inevitably go metaphysical, and most go magical. @mada take the opposite approach, grounding the collective unconscious in everyday social interactions and in the artifacts of material culture, like the colors we choose for various types of clothing. Under this interpretation, the fact that we make bridal gowns white is not just an empty historical tradition; it is a living practice that actively shapes how we perceive the color white in any situation. The unconscious expectations of sexual and moral purity for virgin brides leak out into our unconscious associations with other kinds of “dirt,” which is why doctors wear white coats and fancy restaurants have white napkins and tablecloths. Our cultural biases are reinforced by literally everything around us.   

Wow. I feel like I've taken three quick drinks.   

Enough glowing praise. There are a few downsides to H-17. There's very little physical description of the characters, which renders them more or less interchangeable white pawns. I mean that in two ways.   

1. Although there are a couple of nominally Asian characters, the rest are all white tech-nerds or academics, even the activist protesters (who, by the way, are the most articulate stoners ever). This might be OK on Steemit currently, but it limits the audience for these fine ideas, and that is a shame. To return to the collective unconscious idea, many readers find it easier to empathize with characters who look like they do. Some unfortunately find it necessary.   
2. Even within that singular technocratic culture, the individual characters are less interesting than the intellectual chess board they are moving around on. I literally lost track of who was who, and spent some time looking back at the names, until I realized it didn't matter, because like in a lot of SF, the people are just meme-vehicles.   

According to the author's notes at the end, this “amateurish piece of fiction,” was designed as a springboard for other writing projects, which is fine. I don't normally expect the source books for a role-playing game to be lyrical, just clear. It is rather my job as a player to create a vivid and interesting character. However, I think the ideas in here are important enough to reach as wide an audience as possible, so I'd encourage @mada to be more ambitious.   

Overall, I think this is the skeleton of a pretty good full-length novel. Expand on the individual characters. Expand the world outwards beyond the Battle for Seattle and Burning Man into Black Lives Matter. And write some other stories set in this same world. I'd read 'em.   

Oh, and maybe spell out Halloween 17 for the title. Rhyming makes it sticky. Just a thought.   

Full disclosure: @mada offered 25SBD for “the first thoughtful review” of his short novel. This is my entry, or bid, or whatever we will eventually call it here.   

Randall Hayes writes the PlotBot column for Orson Scott Card's Intergalactic Medicine Show, where he promotes “minnow ideas” to other authors, trying to grow them into the“whales” of 21st century SF.