She looked again at the old compressed-air plant. It seemed to her brighter, more electric, than the modern buildings around it, even though it was dark and their windows shone with light. It looked as if it would dissolve into sparkles if you touched it, revealing its secret, a shortcut to the next level of this game, some other Eden in some other multiverse. Maybe Towse was right to worry about the simulation hypothesis. Maybe nothing she could see was real. Was someone, or something, reeling her in? Was it Towse?
What I liked best about Ed O’Loughlin’s last novel (Minds of Winter) was its history-spanning, globe-trotting audaciousness; its fascinating, disparate threads knotting themselves into a thoroughly satisfying tapestry. While his latest, This Eden, is set firmly in the present — the action plays out right up to the moment people around the world start wearing medical masks when they venture outside — it is no less audacious, trotting itself over even more of the globe in a thrilling game of Spy vs Spy while a Doomsday Clock ticks its steady way towards midnight. Fintech, AI, Black Ops, War Games; every Deep State nightmare scenario is playing out at once and even the characters don’t know who the good guys are; please tell me none of this can happen irl. I wasn’t quite as captivated by the characters this time around, but O’Loughlin had me on the edge of my seat through most of this and I will happily read whatever he comes out with next. (Note: I read an ARC through NetGalley and passages quoted may not be in their final forms.)
There ’s an old rule of thumb in intelligence: once is happenstance; twice is coincidence; three times or more, it’s enemy action.
This quote is attributed to Ian Fleming, but this isn’t your parents’ James Bond tale. I don’t want to give any of the plot away, so suffice it to say that this is a story of an Everyman who gets caught up in “enemy action” and there are plots and counterplots, unlikely coincidences, betrayals, and subterfuge. O’Loughlin writes gorgeously as he flings his characters around the world — from drizzly Vancouver Island to the rubble-strewn Gaza Strip to the lush junglescape of Uganda and beyond — and the details of the threats to humanity are compelling because they sound all too plausible. The plot: intricate.
Maybe he didn’t understand, as Aoife did, that fictions are also a kind of war game, models that run in the mind of the reader, designed to compute not so much what might happen as how it might feel.
There is much discussion of books and philosophy and the nature of (un)reality. The themes: intriguing and accessible.
And I want for O’Laughlin to do most of the talking here, so I present some more of his big ideas:
• I just wanted to see what would happen next. You have to dabble in empiricism, every now and then, if you want to stay in touch with reality. I still believe there's a reality, by the way. I’m very old-fashioned like that.
• Some day – not, from the look of it, very far in the future – when the American empire is also a legend of decline, like King Solomon’s Mines, or the lost Christian kingdom of the great Prester John, archaeologists will trace its ruin in aerial photos of its overgrown airstrips, buried concrete floor slabs, and the acacias that grow greener over former pit latrines. But for now, burly white men still do weights in moon bases deep in the bush, and Galaxy C-5s thunder skywards from domestic airfields – in this case, Westover Air Reserve Base, near Springfield, Massachusetts – on unlisted flights to Manda Bay in Kenya, Camp Lemonnier in Djibouti, or – in this case, again – to Africa Command’s main dark site in Uganda, a fortified compound in Entebbe Airport, on the northern shore of Lake Victoria.
• He believes that some day soon, in a decade or two at most, the surging power of artificial intelligence, combined with the processing heft of quantum computing, will make it possible for those who control the technology to encode their own souls and become immortal, to live on as charges in silicon synapses. He believes you can cast a soap bubble in glass.
• Cash is our last freedom. Without it, whoever controls the machines controls all the money, and controls all of us. In The Handmaid’s Tale, they turned women into serfs overnight by transferring all their money into accounts owned by their men. Soon, that won’t be fiction: they could switch off anyone they don’t like. But as long as there ’s cash, we still have some wriggle room.
(Even before the events of the past week as I write this, O’Laughlin was definitely taking a side in defending Hamas and I’m just putting it out there):
• These guys are Hamas, Aoife. Not Al-Qaeda or ISIS. Say what you like about your old-school Muslim Brotherhood, they know how to network. And they usually stick to their deals.
I think that O’Laughlin is a very talented storyteller — I couldn’t predict where this was going, and I liked that; the ending felt earned and satisfying — and I can see this having wide appeal.
