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i-o
by Simon Logan
(Prime, $12.00, 110 pages, paperback; January 2002.)
This is a strange and original book, likely to appeal very strongly
indeed to some  and
completely repel others. According to its form and its cover copy it's
a collection of short stories, but the stories are so much of a piece
-- even though not overtly linked -- that it's hard to see the text
as other than a series of windows out onto a uniquely bleak, definitively
mechanistic worldview.
The typical narrator here is a brutally cyborgized individual -- presumably
originally human but just as plausibly originally machine, or perhaps
always a mixture, perhaps even without a physical machine component
but nevertheless so dehumanized that fleshliness is irrelevant -- forced
by unnamed, unknown, unknowable masters to persist in a self-destructively
banal, repetitive task that, at least from the narrator's limited knowledge,
is no more than an exercise in terminal futility. The passions these
creatures display amid devastated landscapes of emotional barbarity
are at one and the same time derived from human ones and quite divorced
from them.
Here are a couple of brief extracts that seem to me to epitomize the
book and that may explain, by example, more clearly the ethos of the
whole:
The machine was perfect, as it always had been, the production
line endless and unflawed. It built the builders, an endless stream
of mass-produced gods, their own creators, their own destroyers. ["partofit"]
and
In a few hours she will be screaming and clawing once more
at her pneumatic prison but for now she is as peaceful as depression
itself. The great steel rods that breathe for her slide in rhythmical
patterns all around the massive contraption, hissing at me and spewing
hot greasy steam at odd angles. Rusted cogs turn in aged circles, grinding
against one another, sparking. Differently coloured fluids pulse through
thin copper veins.
I kiss the glass before her lips and whisper a prayer of
solitude to her as she stirs ever so slightly on her ice-white pillows.
["iron lung"]
This is a short book, which is a good thing; the intensity of Logan's
vision is such that it's hard to take more than a short book's worth
of it. By its end you may find yourself revelling in revulsion, laughing
with hatred, as if somehow your emotional reactions had been unplugged
from their appropriate areas of the brain and then the plugs replaced
in all the wrong sockets. It's a matter for individual readers whether
they'll enjoy such a mentally dislocating experience. In the end this
particular reader couldn't decide one way or the other, but was left
filled with admiration for Logan's ambition in achieving this effect.
Aside from those deliberate irritations that Logan deploys as instruments
in his grating, rasping, tearing orchestra of the dehumanized imagination,
there's one irritation that this book could have done without: unusually
for Prime, the text is appallingly proofread. Perhaps the only proofing
was done by a computer spellcheck ... which would have a certain thematic
appropriateness but is inexcusable nonetheless.
You won't forget the ambience of this book in a hurry, although the
details of the different events and scenarios within it soon become
blurred one with another. You may wish you had; and you may decide to
avoid i-o rather than risk such an outcome. What fantasy should
really be all about is taking such risks.
Review by John Grant.
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