Cameron Reed’s The Fortunate Fall came to my attention as a lesbian cyberpunk novel by a transfem writer, and I was pleased to find that it was about to be rereleased as part of the Tor Essentials series, so I wouldn’t have to dig through used bookstores and hope to find a copy of the original edition from 1996. it is simultaneously pensive and action-packed, its character-writing and prose are gorgeous, and it is devastating.
The Fortunate Fall combines an interest in philosophical and theological questions with the pacing and world-building of a cyberpunk thriller. the novel is set in a future Russia (ca. the early 24th century), approximately fifty years after the destruction of the global genocidal regime of the Guardians — implicitly, a dictatorship of American Evangelicals, placing the book perhaps in conversation with Elgin’s Native Tongue. its narrator, Maya Andreyeva, is a “camera” — a cyborg reporter for “telepresence” news broadcasts, where her perceptions and emotions are transmitted directly into the brains of her audience. between Maya’s perceptions and her audience is a “screener” who filters out undesired or irrelevant aspects of the broadcast in real time. at the beginning of book, Maya’s usual screener has just been replaced by the mysterious Keishi Mirabara, and while the two of them work on a story about the Guardians’ atrocities Maya finds her own secrets beginning to unravel.
all of that by way of blurb. The Fortunate Fall is many things: an exploration of theology and transhumanism; a meditation on the meaning of love; a sharp critique of the ways heteronormativity (among other structures) leads us to compress ourselves, to bracket off parts of ourselves that are inconvenient, to make ourselves smaller even before those around us use social or physical violence to cut those parts off. it is also a novel about the passage of time: twenty years ago, years of Maya’s life were blocked out of her memory, and significant aspects of her emotional life — notably, her ability to feel sexual attraction or love — were suppressed by one of the two groups of technological law-enforcers, the Postcops (apparently named for Emily Post and bound by implants to follow her rules of etiquette even when summarily executing criminals). Maya is, in a very real way, not herself — but also, even when at the end of the novel her memories are reintegrated, she is no longer the person she was twenty years ago.
the crux of the plot is Maya’s encounter with Pavel Voskresenye, a Kazakh survivor of one of the Guardians’ concentration camps — a “Square-Mile” — who was experimented on by a collaborator scientist. Voskresenye is a case study in the legacies both of horrific abuse and of the ways this abuse is swept under the rug because historical memory is inconvient. (the Guardians’ regime is repeatedly placed within the novel alongside the Holocaust; given the book’s interest in bearing witness, and in the role of media in shaping the memory of genocide, it is difficult not to also think of Gaza.) he is a visionary, but his vision is irrevocably shaped by his experience of the horrors he experienced and participated in, first as one of Aleksandr Derzhavin’s experiments and then as his unwilling assistant as he plotted his revenge. he positions himself as a new Judas Iscariot, preparing a sacrifice in order to — as in the theological conception of the Fall as fortunate — open the way to heaven, or, rather, to a new realm of human, transhuman, and other-than-human possibilities.
the real heart of the novel, however, is Maya’s relationship with Keishi. their interactions are by turns delightful — the banter! — and profoundly fraught. they clash, they make up, they clash again, and they begin, perhaps, to fall in love (Keishi head over heels, Maya to the limited extent her suppressor chip will allow). but the Fusion of Historic Nations, to which Russia and much of the rest of the world — except Africa, on which more below — is as homophobic as the United States of the 1990s, and the lack of future looms alongside Maya’s suppressed emotions. it is a novel about the ways love is shaped — and can be destroyed — by the world around us.
I was particularly interested by the novel’s portrayal — at a longing distance — of Africa, which is here a unified, liberated polity that makes heavy use of (an Afrocentric version of) Egyptian mythology and art. (Maya receives an amusing visitation from what she at first believes to be the Egyptian god Horus — until he begins explaining the warranty on some new chips for her implants.) aspects of this appear almost fantastic — I have a suspicion that some parts of this bear the imprint of Rachel Pollack’s work; I’m even more curious now to Unquenchable Fire. this was a nice counterpoint to the cyberpunk genre’s orientalist obsession with East Asia — Keishi is Japanese, but it is Africa, from Egypt to Zanzibar to Cape Town, that is the almost messianic center of this future’s technological imaginary. I do wish we’d gotten to see more of the inside of this, rather than being trapped outside it, but I appreciated it either way.
I should also note the novel’s portrayal of a radically different media landscape and conception of history: the discipline of “classics” now refers to the study of 20th- and 21st-century visual culture — Maya and Keishi regularly fall back on Humphrey Bogart references, and even Voskresenye refers to the Fantastic Four as, apparently, a common cultural reference point (though even these are being displaced by the immediacy of telepresence). print culture has been rendered nearly obsolete in the fifty years since the end of the Guardians’ reign, and 18th- and 19th-century literature is, to Maya and her world, ancient history.
in addition to the Guardians, I think we can see the influence of Native Tongue in the novel’s interest in language: human languages are juxtaposed with two computer languages, KRIOL and (of course) Sapir, placing the book in conversation with Native Tongue and Delany’s Babel-17 — among others — as an exploration of the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis, although this is very much in the background. I also think there is something of Stars in My Pocket Like Grains of Sand here, although in a way that’s difficult to put my finger on.
this book is gorgeous, thrilling, and sad, and I haven’t even mentioned some core aspects of the narrative, like the whale. but I’m trying to avoid too many spoilers. if any aspect of this sounds interesting to you, it’s definitely worth a read.
(back: main page · reviews by author · reviews by country · other reviews from the USA)