A playful romp and the onset of rebellion among the citizens of a utopia run by computers. It is about 500 years since the big “Break”, when most of humanity destroyed itself in some war or ecological disaster, and one city, Yu, was preserved and nurtured by the AIs and now comprises about 1.5 billion people. In this sort of Brave New World, people are channeled into various castes with daily life managed to maximize happiness. There is a Polytheon of gods to worship, and the Love Police and the Ministry of Pain work to assure that those who commit the crime of causing pain to others are humanely reconditioned. But this is no dark tale of dystopia. The AIs tolerate a multicaste cadre of performance artists, the Raging Apostles, who believe they are taking radically creative steps against the hollowness of this “Compassionate Society”. And it turns out they are tired of babysitting humanity and wish they would take over their own fate so they can pursue a more interesting endeavor elsewhere in the Multiverse. They conceive of a way to assess the human’s readiness.We spend a lot of time alternating between two characters. One is a man who awakes one day with no memories of his own, who adopts the name of one of the arcologies, Kilaminjaro West, and ends up joining the Raging Apostles. Through him we get a fresh view of this strange world. Our other hero, Courtney, gets shaken out of her comfortable life as a cartoonist. She becomes effectively homeless through an accidental destruction of her home in an arcology by a Love Police raid that crashes the wrong address. As she takes a tour looking for the boundaries of this world, she gets in trouble in a waste zone taken over by discarded bioengineered pets and is saved by a former government leader, who calls himself the King of Nebraska. With a race of computer enhanced raccoons, they assume a quest to get beyond the mile-high walls of their world through the tunnels and abandoned underground food production facilities of the DeepUnder. They are aided by a “cybernetic anarchist” and his sister, who can teleport over short distances. Despite the talent, they run up against warring societies of the old world order, the “Democrats” and the “Communists”. Here is a bit of the flavor of McDonald’s prose: Chiga-Chiga Sputnik-kid, Captain Elvis in neon skin-hugger and power-wheels, rides the high wires in the wee wee dawn hours when the cablecars sleep in their barns, when four A.M. TAOS gurls call the Scorpios from the high and low places; silver-maned, forgotten samurai in a world with honor without swords; out on blue six through the vastnesses of Great Yu. …If the Love Police ever catch Chiga-Chiga, he will be seeing the remainder of his yearlong walkabout from the inside of a Social Responsibility Counseling Center learning that words like “danger” and “thrill” cannot be allowed to have any meaning in the age of the Compassionate Society. But Chiga-Chiga Sputnik-kid is too fast, too young, too shiny for that, isn’t he?This book is a re-publication from its first appearance in 1989, which pre-dates the Internet and our current splurge of epic fantasy and post-apocalyptic scenarios. It reminds me a bit of the playfulness of Gaiman’s underworld of “Neverwhere”, the heroic quest in Mieville’s “Railsea” to scope out a future civilization’s boundaries, and the human revolt against the smothering utopia controlled by AIs in WALL-E. I was glad to experience some the roots for McDonald’s talent that wowed me with his recent “River of Gods” and “The Dervish House.” Ultimately, the humor didn’t ever send me over into laughter, and I was disappointed in how much he resorted to spelling out all his messages instead of just showing you through the plot. It doesn’t quite achieve the fun and excitement of Stephenson’s “Snow Crash”, though it seems to have a comparable ambition. Fellow sci fi author Cory Doctorow, in his introduction, puts the book on a higher pedestal in terms of its historical context: It’s important because it does to all the Sf that came before it what a Coltrane solo did to the musical conversation that had taken place among all his peers before he picked up his horn. This is a book that shows the unexpected connections between the high and the low, the serious and the frivolous, the sacred and the profane. It’s a novel that marks the end of the Cold War and the start of a too-short techno-optimistic period, and it is prescient in its shrewd guesses about where all that optimism is likely to end.This books was provided as an e-book loan by the publisher through the Netgalley program.
"And what is this thing against which we measure ourselves, this domain of values and qualities and judgments, but conscience? Art is conscience, a criterion by which humanity may measure itself and ultimately know itself. The artist should be the conscience of society.""Hope for a true creativity. Anticipating your next question, that is a creativity that goes beyond the boundaries of castes and social orders and of the Arts in general, into every aspect of life. True creativity is the truly creative life, the life that transforms every event into a creation, and thus transcends.""Pain is the sculptor of creativity. The truly creative act is not the act which seeks solely to avoid pain, it seeks to embrace it, understand it, and thus transcend it. Without pain, it is incomplete. But in a society without pain, how can there be any transcendence?”“So the Raging Apostles are there to put a little pain into people’s lives.”“And wonder. And joy. And horror. And beauty. And sexuality. And wisdom. And laughter. Yes, remember, we are the conscience of a conscienceless society.”- Joshua Drumm
What do You think about Out On Blue Six (1989)?
Thanks to NetGalley and the publisher for a digital copy of Out on Blue Six!To say that Out on Blue Six is an impressive novel that thoroughly creates and intensely presents a City run by the Compassionate Society 450 years after the Break in mid-21st century in such utter horror and clarity to engulf one's psyche in a language that flows without any particular meaning in every word, yet forces a whole new consciousness when each word joins the flooding river, well, to say that would be an under
—Blue
I received an electronic copy of this from the publisher via NetGalley.This is one of the most intoxicating, wild, and imaginative science fiction novels I've had a chance to read. The introduction by Cory Doctorow compares it in terms of broad thematics to 1984 and Brave New World, with good reason, and I understand why Doctorow would return to this novel to reread again and again. McDonald writes this following two protagonists who are fighting to exist outside of the Compassionate Society, but the third person narration is almost a character unto itself, one that you can imagine speaking in a voice over to impart the mysteries of this strange universe to you as you read. That voice is above all flowing, with poetics and melody that adds meaning to this story far beyond each of the individual words on their own. This is impressive writing. However, it also requires intense concentration while reading, it is not straight-forward and simple, and the plot veers into bizarreness at each turn, though frequently with bits of humor and zeal. The text of this story is an example of literature at its purest, as a representation of the universe which this story is set, in all of its nature grandiose, yet always seeming artificial, a veneer of shine over something hidden and more base. The flowing complex structure of McDonald's latinate prose is thus peppered throughout with brief moments of Anglo-Saxon coarseness, and punctuated with repetition of simple sounds or ideas.Beyond the impressive nature of the writing, the characters are not too finely developed, they instead serve to bring schism into the Compassionate society of the story in order to bring highlight to the themes of McDonald's tale. In this respect it reminded me somewhat of a Heinlein story with its almost Messianic heroes, such as "Stranger in a Strange Land". As alluded above, the themes of this book deal with dystopia, a society that values attainment of comfort and happiness to any sort of freedom or risk. In its totality "Out on Blue Six" has interesting things to say about the nature of pain and the role of discomfort in driving things of value, art, and beauty. This novel is a fantastic find, and this edition is a very cheap option to introduce yourself to an important piece of science fiction.
—Daniel
It’s always a great feeling to find a cyberpunk dystopia that I’d somehow overlooked.Reminded me – just slightly – of Melissa Scott’s ‘Dreamships’ and ‘Dreaming Metal,’ – mostly because the story focuses on transgressive artists in a future, cyber city with strict caste rules.Here, Courtney Hall, yulp (it’s the ‘yuppie’ caste), a successful cartoonist, wants to do a bit more with her comic strip, and introduce some social satire into it. She’s given a warning – but when she resorts to using a hacker to get her forbidden cartoon out to her readers, she suddenly finds herself a wanted criminal, on the run through the underground tunnels that she never knew existed.Meanwhile, the Raging Apostles, in the chaos of a police raid, have picked up a new member. The Raging Apostles are a street performance art group, illegally made up of members from different social castes, that plans ‘flash’ style events. Their new member is Kilimanjaro West – a seeming amnesiac who picked his ‘name’ off the side of a building.I have to admit, I’ve had mixed reactions to McDonald’s work. I loved his ‘Dervish House,’ but didn’t like (at all) some of his more surreal, absurd material, such as ‘Desolation Road.’ I further have to admit that I requested this book thinking it was a new title – it’s actually a rerelease; first published in 1989. There are bits here that I could do without – I’m just not a fan of the gene-modified talking raccoons, for example. However, many of the more ‘fractured’ elements here do eventually get pulled in – some of them very effectively. I do still feel that McDonald has improved as a writer over the past 20-odd years, but there’s a brilliance and originality on display here that makes the book more than worthwhile. And hey – I totally agree with his message that art, and a bit of anarchy, are necessary for a vibrant, free society. Copy provided by Open Road Media, through NetGalley. Thanks!
—Althea Ann
