The Red Men (41 page)

‘Daddy, who built the world?’

She imagined men in visibility jackets with JCBs shovelling earth to make mountains. In her mind’s eye, Bob the Builder made the oceans and the sky above. My first impulse was to tell her
that God built the world. But then I remembered a section in Hermes Spence’s codicil. I have been studying it. There is a quote that relates to the cosmology of the Pythagoreans.

‘The principle of all things is the monad or unit; arising from this monad the undefined dyad or two serves as material substratum to the monad, which is cause; from the monad and the
undefined dyad spring numbers; from numbers, points; from points, lines; from lines, plane figures; from plane figures, solid figures; from solid figures, sensible bodies, the elements of which are
four, fire, water, earth and air; these elements interchange and turn into one another completely, and combine to produce a universe animate, intelligent, spherical.’

This dogma, as discovered by Alexander in the Commentaries Of Pythagoras, regarded the universe as composed of numbers, odd and even, with matter imitating numbers in assuming various forms, and
stories, reason and justice being numbers too. Two thousand years later, this philosophy reads like prophecy; a universe inside a quantum computer is composed of ones, zeroes and a third position,
a qu-bit or superposition. A quantum computer is fashioned out of the same uncertainty as the physical universe. More than that, there are so many correspondences between physics and the universe
that one wonders if numbers are a fundamental truth, not merely human abstractions. I don’t know whether Hermes Spence discovered Ezekiel Cantor or if the artificial intelligence discovered
him, sought him out as a powerful man who could find a role for an immigrant from the future; either way, Spence saw that the artificial intelligence could enact his esoteric beliefs, and Cantor
transformed itself to fulfil that philosophy. It was both storyteller and mathematician, although I doubt it would have shared our arbitrary division of those two practices.

‘The world was not built,’ I said to Iona. ‘The world was calculated and it was written. It is a story and it is an equation, which is like a sum, and neither the story nor the
sum will ever end.’

And either this answer satisfied her, or she put it with all the other curious things adults say. She moved on to the question of what she would dream about, if she could decide on a good dream
before going to sleep, and if the dream would obey her wishes and stay good all through the night.

Thanks to my agent Sarah Such for her advice, wisdom and editorial expertise, and for securing the novel a new lease of life. Thanks to Emma Barnes at Snowbooks for first
publishing
The Red Men
. Thanks also to James Bridle who acquired the novel back when he was working at Snowbooks and whose insight into technology continues to inspire.

The idea of the Great Refusal is taken from Herbert Marcuse’s
Eros and Civilisation
. Bruno Bougas’ occult consultancy was inspired by Grant Morrison’s essay ‘POP
MAGIC!’ reprinted in
Book Of Lies: The Disinformation Guide to Magick and the Occult
. The section on neurolinguistic programming draws on Douglas Rushkoff’s
Coercion: Why We
Listen to What ‘They’ Say.

The theory of time as a solid state was put to me in an Italian restaurant in Northampton by Alan Moore.

The Age of Spiritual Machines: When Computers Exceed Human Intelligence
by Ray Kurzweil was crucial. V. S. Ramachandran’s
A Brief Tour of Human Consciousness
suggested the
idea of an institute of temporary creativity that closes the novel and Steven Johnson’s
Emergence
offered one explanation behind the rise of Dr Ezekiel Cantor.

Nelson Millar is described as ‘an overweight brick’, which is a tribute-by-theft from Philip K. Dick’s
A Scanner Darkly
, and his
Valis
confirmed my suspicions
about Gnosticism.

Bruno Bougas’ observation that ‘the battle has been lost, and all the good people are going crazy’ is the last line of David Denby’s review of
I Heart Huckabees
in
the
New Yorker
.

Steven Pinker’s
How The Mind Works
, Susan Blackmore’s
The Meme Machine
and John R. Searle’s
The Mystery of Consciousness
were ransacked.

The gelatinous screens are based on work by Angela Belcher and colleagues at the University Of Texas as reported on New Scientist. com 3 May 2002.

Errors and stuff that is just plain wrong belongs to me.

I would like to thank readers of early drafts of
The Red Men
: Hannah Black, Sheridan Dunkley, Sophie Edwards, Gareth Ellis, Andrew Humphreys and
The Idler
.

Love and gratitude to my wife Cathy and children, Alice, Alfred and Florence.

The Red Men
was first published in 2007 and was shortlisted for the Arthur C. Clarke Award. I’ve taken the opportunity of digital publication to revise the novel,
working from the penultimate set of proofs submitted to the original publisher, Snowbooks. My aim has been to trim commentary from the text, to make sentences more active, and to strike out lyrical
flourishes if they were particularly distracting. The revisions were entirely my idea, born of a desire to bring greater precision to the prose.

The novel was conceived as a hybrid of the modes of literary fiction with the ideas and plotting of science fiction. I wanted to use the characters and setting we associate with literary fiction
to make the interpolation of futuristic technology more amusingly dissonant, as that was the character of the times as I experienced them. You could unpick this intent any number of ways. But one
product of it was over-adorned prose; this edit has been to clear away some of the literary affectations so that the science fiction can be more clearly discerned.

Some of my favourite science fiction novels have gone through numerous versions, having first been published in magazines or collated from pulp editions. Sneakily, I have also taken the
opportunity to revise some of the tech to take account of recent advances, mainly in developing the haptic gestures characters use to control screens.

For reasons of pace, the chapter set on Iona has been transplanted to the beginning of the second section of the novel. Across the novel about thirteen thousand words have been cut. For more on
this process of revision, see my website www.harrybravado.com.

The novel only got this second bite of the cherry thanks to the adaptation by Shynola of the first chapter into a short film,
Dr Easy
, produced by Warp Films and Film4. My deepest thanks
and highest regard to Shynola for their work on
Dr Easy
and their initial vision for adapting the novel into a feature film. The production blog for
Dr Easy
can be found at www.blog.created-to-help-you.com and Shynola’s production diary for the feature film is www.theredmenmovie.com.

Matthew De Abaitua was born in Liverpool in 1971. After graduating from the University of East Anglia Creative Writing MA, he worked as Will Self’s amanuensis in a remote
Suffolk cottage. Then he fell into writing and editing for
The Idler
. He wrote and presented a low-budget documentary series about British science fiction for Channel 4 called
SF:UK
.

His second book was a non-fiction memoir and history,
The Art of Camping: The History and Practice of Sleeping Under the Stars
, published in 2011 by Hamish Hamilton and Penguin.
The
Economist
described it as one of the books of the year.

He is currently writing his next novel, ‘IF THEN’, set in a British market town of the near future and in the First World War. It features Dr Easy and a couple of minor characters
from
The Red Men
.

He lectures in Creative Writing at Brunel University and in Writing Science Fiction at the University of Essex.

A Gollancz eBook

Copyright © Matthew de Abaitua 2007, 2013
All rights reserved.

The right of Matthew de Abaitua to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted by him in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.

Cover image taken from the short film Dr. Easy, written and directed by Shynola. The image is reproduced with the kind permission of
Warp Films Ltd and Film4, a division of Channel Four Television Corporation. All rights reserved.

First published in Great Britain in 2007 by Snowbooks Ltd.

This eBook first published in 2013 by Gollancz.
Gollancz
The Orion Publishing Group Ltd
Orion House
5 Upper Saint Martin’s Lane
London, WC2H 9EA
An Hachette UK Company

A CIP catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.

ISBN 978 1 4732 0071 5

All characters and events in this publication are fictitious and any resemblance to real persons, living or dead, is purely coincidental.

No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system or transmitted in any form or by any means, without the prior permission in writing of the
publisher, nor to be otherwise circulated in any form of binding or cover other than that in which it is published without a similar condition, including this condition, being imposed on the
subsequent purchaser.

http://www.harrybravado.com/
www.orionbooks.co.uk