What do you think of when you hear the word "bureaucrat"? Someone who is gray and dry and whose life is dusty and unfulfilled? Someone who is scarcely human because of trudging off every day to a meaningless job? A man or woman with an excessive and unnatural love of red tape? Or maybe how the worlds of Kafka, Orwell, and Joseph Heller were made much worse by faceless functionaries who only lived to serve the system?
These preconceptions are widespread, even if maybe not quite as extreme as in my examples. And preconceptions can make for a neat juxtaposition, especially in a genre like science fiction where pieces of culture can be mixed and matched playfully. How about a bureaucrat thrown into a crumbling far future society who has to fight against a semiotician so powerful he's as much as a sorcerer? Or how about a bureaucrat as the last line of defence against Lovecraftian horrors of a mathematically-induced variety?
Those are, respectively, Michael Swanwick's Stations of the Tide and Charles Stross's The Atrocity Archives. In both books the authors delight in taking a character as ostensibly neutral and bland as a bureaucrat and stacking up around them as much cheerful lunacy and creative destruction as possible.
Other things are going in these two books of course, but I happened to read them around the same time, and I was struck how they shared this essential narrative strategy. Other books have used bureaucrats as well, and I'd be curious to hear what other people have encountered.
What the Heck is Going On?
That sums up my initial reaction to Michael Swanwick's Stations of the Tide. The book intrigued me enough that I gave it another shot, and here are a few tentative conclusions.
The bureaucrat—who is never named in the book—arrives at the planet of Miranda with a simple task: arrest Gregorian, who has brought advanced tech to the planet and thus broken the rules of the bureaucrat's Department of Technology Transfer. The bureaucrat's job is complicated by the oncoming Jubilee tides—most cities will go under water soon and so there's understandable social turmoil—and by the fact that Gregorian seems to have agents everywhere. The bureaucrat can't make a move without it being anticipated. The story builds to a confrontation between the two, and unlike many books with a similar structure, Stations of the Tide's ending doesn't disappoint.
Formally speaking and in terms of the prose, this is a very impressive book. Swanwick's book is highly reminiscent of works by Gene Wolfe, in both the apparent episodic nature of the story, and the vividness of the episodes. Also, Swanwick seems to follow Wolfe's New Sun dictate of never relating a fact twice. It's easy to forget how much hand-holding goes on in a typical narrative!
Stations of the Tide echoes other SF books; in addition to Wolfe's New Sun series, as mentioned, there is, quite strongly, the feel of Joan D. Vinge's The Snow Queen. Swanwick's literary allusions also run amuck, from the constant references to The Tempest all the way to Heart of Darkness.
The title strikes me as one of many moments of perversity in the book, since it throws in a grab-bag of religious themes. Swanwick is careful with the formalism of structure—sure enough, the book has 14 chapters, inviting the reader to map the various stations of the cross to his chapters. I resisted this reading, but it's there. I saw the book as more of a cyclical thing, taking my cue from the way the echo of the first line and the last line implied a third thing that closed the cycle (I'm being vague for the sake of those who have not read the book).
Other fascinating themes pop up too. The bureaucrat finds out that the personal affects the professional, no matter what—and that figuring out your coworkers is crucial to your survival and advancement. Office politics are intense in the future! Especially when the bureaucrat transfers multiple consciousnesses into his office—a vast and squirrelly virtual construct known appropriately as the Puzzle Palace.
Another crucial theme is how the "word" is important, both in the "magic" of Gregorian and in the virtual world of the Puzzle Palace. When Gregorian or the bureaucrat speak or gesture, powerful results happen. This is a religious theme of long standing, and it comes back in Stross's The Atrocity Archive with a math/tech twist.
A third theme emphasized in the book: sex and its hold over humans of every kind. Swanwick throws in some sex scenes that are perhaps what William Gibson is referring to on the back cover: "A sinuous narrative, worldly and very agreeably perverse." I like how Swanwick's sex scenes, if a little too explicit for some, break the sense of the genre as pre-adolescent.
The bureaucrat is never named. It's just a job and he's just a functionary. Unfortunately, this also means he's a bit of a cipher. Here the reader has to take a leap and trust Swanwick to make something interesting out of a character who is chilly and unappealing at the start. The vividness of the narrative went a long way towards keeping me reading. And Swanwick has some surprises in store: the bureaucrat has everyone (including Gregorian) convinced that he will never break the rules. It makes for a glorious ending, as his stratagem and its result become clear.
It might take a little longer to read Stations of the Tide than other 250 page novels, but the time spent is rewarded. At the end of the book, I was left with a strong piece of science fiction, one that is literarily satisfying, too ornate at the same time as it is incredibly clear.
Stations of the Tide won the Nebula for best novel in 1991. Well deserved.
Fighting Evil and Office Politics
More bureaucrats, more world-altering powers and perils . . . but The Atrocity Archives couldn't feel more different on the surface. For one thing, it's written to be as clear as possible (despite Stross's infodump tendencies). Stations of the Tide was also one unitary novel, while The Atrocity Archive, in its current publishing incarnation, is a collection of two novellas, one long enough to verge on novel length and the second much shorter.
Bob Howard is a creature cursed to suffer: he works in IT for the government. He's just an ordinary guy, except that his employer is The Laundry, a super-secret British agency. In this world, mathematical equations of specific kinds can open our universe to the depredations of cold intellects and powers from nearby universes. The Laundry coordinates with agencies in every nation around the world to suppress certain bits of scientific progress. The knowledge is simply too dangerous, and many hapless researchers get snatched from their jobs and shuffled into some secure/useless office within the agency.
The first, longer novella is titled "The Atrocity Archive." After a rambly set-up, Bob goes to California and happens to rescue a beautiful mathematician named Mo. Some kind of terrorist group wants to use Mo in a sacrifice, and the management at The Laundry want to use her as bait. Bob reluctantly goes along with the plan, and the two of them leave for Amsterdam; the bait is taken, but who has a better scheme, puny humans or intelligences who are as vast as an alternate universe and are manipulating the terrorists?
Nazis show up as the human villains of the piece. What is it with Nazis? This is something that I also run into in videogames: the only "acceptable" villains are zombies, aliens, and Nazis. It was perhaps inevitable here, since the Nazi fascination with the occult fits in perfectly (as it did in David Brin's graphic novel The Life Eaters and also in the Hellboy origin story).
The second, shorter novella, "Concrete Jungle," picks up the story of Bob's life not long afterwards. He has to investigate a strange incident where a cow has been turned to stone—could the gorgon weapon have fallen into the wrong hands? Yes, they've turned the gorgon stare into a bit of technology. You have to take this with a straight face, which isn't made any easier by Stross's black humor and tongue-in-cheekiness. He's definitely pushing this as far as he can.
Bob was angry about treating Mo like a pawn earlier; in "Concrete Jungle," he comes face to face with a much more ruthless expediency. The Laundry somehow knows of an incoming threat that is so horrible that it would justify desperate measures such as the installation of killing software in the surveillance cameras that blanket the UK (some paranoia on Stross's part perhaps?). But of course the system is like a wide-open invitation for abuse for those who want to gain power.
Stross takes this in a different direction than I was expecting. The crisis justifies the surveillance measures, but the counter-argument is simple: there is always going to be a crisis. Crises can be blown out of proportion or based on fuzzy judgments, so perhaps the default response should be a measured one rather than irrational overreaction. But Stross turns that on its head and shows what would happen in the case of a threat, real, quantifiable, and pervasive beyond anything we currently worry about in our society. It's an old theme, and a necessary one, since human history is littered with examples of the manipulation of "threats" for other purposes.
Add a impenetrable layer of red tape, and it's a bureaucratic mess with startling consequences. Stross has fun lashing out at all the hateful, petty things about office life:
In the Laundry we supposedly pride ourselves on our procedures. We've got procedures for breaking and entering offices, procedures for reporting a shortage of paper clips, procedures for summoning demons from the vasty deeps, and procedures for writing procedures. We may actually be on track to be the world's first ISO-9000 total-quality-certified intelligence agency. (53)
Some later scenes are also priceless, where a fine point of matrix management leads to the zombification of a whole office and a botched internal coup.
Bob Howard serves a similar function here as does the bureaucrat in Stations of the Tide: to show what a bafflingly ordinary and boring person might do in extraordinary circumstances. In both cases, they rise above and beyond the call of duty, with every inspirational cliché intact—cubicle dwellers of the world, rise up! Swanwick cheats a bit, since his bureaucrat turns out to have some hidden, internal advantages, while Bob is just a relatively smart guy who also happens not to freeze up during a life-or-death crisis. Those are admirable qualities too.
I liked the afterword by Stross, but you can skip this part if you like. He ignores the general advice to let the story stand on its own and explains the various narrative elements. It stands as evidence for how Stross can make such ostensibly light pieces of entertainment still feel solid and interesting (Swanwick's preparatory notes for Stations of the Tide would have been a mile thick too).
"The Concrete Jungle" won the Hugo Award for best novella in 2005.