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Jet lag and an interesting book…a fatal combination for hopes of a good sleep the night before flying back to my own time zone.  Back in Lexington, it’s around 10:10PM, the earliest I ever think of going to sleep unless I’m sick; here it’s three in the morning, and I’ve been awake since seven.  Dog, god of the Egyptians, only knows what time my body will think it is when I step off the plane tomorrow at 11:30 AM six and a half hours after getting onto it at ten.

The title of this post refers not to anything I’ve learned about how Peter F. Hamilton used to spend his summer vacations, but to the title of an interesting book of his I was unfortunate enough to attempt to use to put myself to sleep.  The book is Peter Hamilton’s Misspent Youth, which I had assumed to be new, since I hadn’t seen it yet in the States; I didn’t suspect otherwise until an infodump revealing that the music and movie industries had completely collapsed in 2009.  Collapsed, in that they ceased to exist.  Wow, thought I, pretty agressive forecasting for a new book, before finally thinking to check the copyright page.  2002, meaning that he wrote the infodump probably in 2000 or 2001, when information still wanted to be free and Napster was going to lead us to a brave new world. Hmm – an obvious occupational hazard of writing seriously-intended near-term extrapolation based on current events.  All that can be said of that failure of extrapolation is that Mr. Hamilton has excellent potential as a venture capitalist.

Misspent Youth is very different from anything else I’ve read of Peter Hamilton’s – I used to think I’d read everything of his (the Night’s Dawn Trilogy three times, I swear).  It’s essentially Mundane SF – earthbound, no nano-magic.  The technical extrapolations he makes are entirely reasonable; the hardest stretch, the restoration to effective mid-twenties youth, is the result of a trillion-euro program to restore a single man in a one-shot process.  All of the reviews on Amazon.com and nearly all of the reviews on Amazon.co.uk express disappointment in the book, largely, I feel, on this basis.  His other books describe high-tech futures with grand scale, titanic motions of populations, and world- or galaxy-spanning derring-do.  This book is largely about a rich man fucking up his family; one review even notes disappointedly that it’s “character-driven,” as if that would be bad thing.   It’s largely character-driven, which I think is a great step for Peter Hamilton (Britain’s No. 1 science fiction writer, the book’s cover informs us) to the extent that it’s true, but not wholly, which is actually what I wanted to discuss.

What I find charming about the objections that most of the reviewers made is that in their adorable SF-centric approach to the book they seem to have missed exactly one half of the point of the book.  Yes, it’s an exploration, in occasionally moving detail, the reality of the conceit that youth is wasted on the young — as it turns out, it’s partly because they’re generally too wasted themselves to take advantage, and partly because it takes the experience of years to learn how to really fuck things up.  But how is it that of six of its most motivated readers, those who took the trouble to review it on Amazon.com, three of them from the UK, only one was able to notice that the book is a passionate diatribe against the EU? With particular concern paid to the ills of Britain ever joining it?  It’s not at all subtle. 

Let me put it this way.  The EU causes triffids.

This book is a political statement every bit as clear as Orson Scott Card’s Empire (no link, I’d prefer you not buy it).  Here is a list of things that are bad:

• GM plants (they cause triffids)
• Unlimited storage and bandwidth, without the soothing cushion of monopoly power enforced through patents (causes death of apparently the entire entertainment industry, with a long and loving lament for the days when copyright allowed science fiction authors to make big bucks)
• Content-wants-to-be-free zealots (they foist unlimited storage and bandwidth on an unsuspecting world, to the particular detriment of SF authors)
• The EU (taxes, one-shot rejuvenation projects focused on the wealthy [particularly problematic since they foster otherwise inexplicable resentment on the wealthy], taxes, Brussels, continentals coming to London and burning it down in anti-pseudo-Davos protests, taxes, loss of sovereignty, taxes, and Brussels.  And GM plants, which cause triffids)
• Global warming (makes it rain a lot in London.  Also, you can’t drive decent cars any more)
• Globalization (it makes Davos come to London, then continentals come to protest it, and burn down the city)

I could go on.  All of the above are things that Peter Hamilton is concerned about.  Other things that he’s not so concerned about:

• Recreational drug use (Sure, the young get wasted and piss off their girlfriends.  But it’s easy to stop cold turkey, and people who complain about everyone having small portable drug-synthesis machines that can synthesize open-source versions of uppers or Viagra [technically, not an upper] are pickle-puss spoilsports )
• Global warming (makes it rain a lot in London.  Also, you can’t drive decent cars any more.  But don’t mistake him for Kim Stanley Robinson)

All in all, Hamilton’s politics don’t fit into any easy categories, at least to my American eye – for all I know, the above list could make him a bulletproof Tory, and I’d have little more knowledge of that than whether he’d make a good Whig.  I’ve read a criticism of Hamilton that “he’s never met a corporation that he didn’t like,” which to me has always seemed an oversimplification – does he appear to like the Earth corporations in Fallen Dragon? At all? – but in this book seems unapplicable entirely. 

• A foursquare proponent of corporate virtue would mention GM foods in a book like this only to emphasize their importance in feeding the world, clothing our children, paving our roads, and my, they’re tasty, too. 
• An unambiguous corporate champion would, in a book like this, have its characters marveling at the foolishness of prior generation’s bootless panic at the perils of global warming, not complaining about the changes that have already occurred in the 2020’s.

Again, he’s no Stephen Brust, and he’s especially not Cory Doctorow.  Hamilton’s pages on the death of the content industry come right out of the RIAA playbook for the 2001 season. 

Misspent Youth is a complex and interesting book.  It’s rare to find an SF book that is so open about its opinions on current politics, while still trying to be a novel; I think an American equivalent to its major theme might be a novel that attempts to advance the abolition of the Electoral College for instance, or term limits for Supreme Court justices, without descending entirely into ridiculous polemic (cf the aforementioned Empire, by the aforementioned Orson Scott Card). 

Even more interesting, though, I believe, is the reaction of Peter Hamilton’s fans to it.  They didn’t notice the politics.  Character driven? Much of it is about as character-driven as Paul Revere’s account of the Boston Massacre, and for similar reasons.  I’m baffled.  How could anyone not notice this?

I’m still thinking a lot about Jason Stoddard’s thoughts on the necessity of marketing SF to people who read BoingBoing.  Boingers would get the politics in this book in a second – most of them would disagree with most of them (as it were), but they would understand the issues.  And I think that insofar as the evolution of the EU is part of the trend to globalization, many Boingers would even find common ground.

But I’m not trying to market Hamilton to Boingers; I’m amazed that SF readers don’t read BoingBoing.  Is it a real-world, interacting-with-people thing? By which I mean, BoingBoing is largely impressed with people who find new ways to interact with other people and the world at large, and SF readers are largely people who, er, tend not to do that.  (Wait a minute, Cory Doctorow is an SF writer? I know that, putz.  But how many of Xeni’s readers are buying Cory’s books?) 

It’s an important question for Jason’s marketing strategy – if the traditional SF readership doesn’t read BoingBoing (and few SF readers I know do), then Jason’s strategy seems to mandate moving on from them.   I hope we can bring everyone with us.

SF readers: feel the Boing!