Only Forward is so good, I'm slightly afraid of it. (Only Forwards - Michael Marshall Smith)

Member Name: jdkane

Product:	Only Forwards - Michael Marshall Smith
Date:	08/03/01 (53 review reads)
Rating:

Advantages: Characterisation; excellent handling of a basically absurd situation, superb character depth under the circumstances; A

Disadvantages: Scene- setting; damned if I can work the social dynamic behind it, perhaps too parodic, but basically sound; B

Michael Marshall Smith's first novel. Hey, let's introduce another spurious categorisation system, for fun. I know this kind of approach is going out of fashion, but let's look at the process closely; if you use rigid categories, of course you will have problems, unless you encounter something the maker of which is trying to make it fit into the same system. Works beautifully, even indispensably, with bricks, nuts and bolts and suchlike, but for works of the free imagination it falls flat on it's face. The secret is to use flexible- walled, ambivalent categories, and disregard them even then.

The very worst thing a writer can do is to try to write in accordance with literary theory. At best- if it is a good, descriptive and accurate theory- the writer will be lost in the crowd; at worst- a politically inspired, fundamentally wrong- headed theory- the writer deserves to be lost in the bin. It is the proper place of theory and criticism to follow art and explain the motives behind it to it's public. So what kind of category system can we come up with for science fiction? Remember that once you have your categories- which can announce enough in itself- the place within your personal continua in which you place any given piece of work says at least as much about you and your outlook as the work itself. So fixed works of art become media of communication of opinion- become shorthand for your own mindset- and why not?

And why the hell am I rambling on like this? Simple. Only Forward is so good, I'm slightly afraid of it. Something like Stapledon's work is really too big to be worried about. In terms of life changing metaphor, it, like Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep, simply overpenetrates; you can point to the ways it is telling you it is good to live in, and be excused any attention to them because they are simply too much, too close to the genuine ethical and philosophical considerations you read science fiction to avo
id. Despite it's rather more complex, better realised, and better grounded setting, this is entirely too close to home.

A friend of mine, a medical student, read this on my recommendation, after much prompting, a few years ago; he said that if he had read it the first time, he would never had to go through the series of psychiatric evaluations that nearly resulted in his being thrown off the course. Not a bad testimony, or a bad person, really...so I promptly gave him Brian Aldiss' Barefoot In The Head. Which sent him right back to the psychiatrist. Oops. Actually, there is a double connection, because the world of Only Forward is very much like something that the citizens of Aldiss' psychedelic- bombed Europe might build in the immediate aftermath.

In terms of genre classification, you have to call it Grand Cyberpunk with major mystic elements. In terms of story modality, part Special Person, about three eighths genuine What If. The central character is called Stark, and he does a job no-one else can do; in addition to being a private eye of a sort, he helps them come to terms with their dreams. You might think that any psychotherapist might be able to do that , but not in this society, and certainly not in this way; he literally walks them through their subconscious minds made conscious metaphor and allegory. It is not as simple as it could have been; Smith clearly knows something about the unconscious mind, and "jeamland' is classic. If you always knew that following from the amount of wierdos our rational, logical civilisation throws up, a genuine mystic civilisation would be far worse, far less psychologically stable, far more looney- ridden, this is the book for you.

The society itself is certainly in need of all the therapy it can get. There are some wonderful sequences of parody in it, and some genuinely eerie landscapes, but for the main, I have to turn to Donal Graeme; `Aside from the inefficiency, It stri
kes me as unhealthy. What's the point of technological development if we just split in that many more factions- everyone hunting up his own type of aberrant mind and living with it? That's no progress.' Ò True enough, but of course, here it isn't meant to be progress. That is exactly what happened; the Britain of approximately 3000 AD (I think) is broken down into Neighbourhoods, each organised by it's denizens on a theme; highly socially improbably- this couldn't have happened by accident or the stream of half- guided accidents that make up normal life. It is, of course, a good thing that the book is close enough to reality to warrant such a criticism, rather than relying on total suspension of disbelief. Of course, there are elements of parody in what must surely be the ultimate hole-and- corner society, the scientists, the actioneers- and we always knew that management was futile, and a well aimed shaft that one- and elements of horror, with the gangland scene when you start to wonder about just who has what. Ji must be the last word in four- colour characters gone bad. This is the best way to treat an intrinsically ridiculous situation; with gusto. He and Snedd are a great double act. The gangland fight had better be intended as parody, but of what, of the impulses that go into making it so?

Stark is from the present; came there with his best friend, via Jeamland, and integrated- after a fashion. Stark as a psychic surgeon, Rafe- his closest friend, his mirror image- as a psychic terrorist. These are not cardboard characters; past they have in abundance, which despite the first- person narrative format, Stark reveals wholesale; the weight of eventful lives if anything should make him even odder than he is. Rafe is probably dead; because Stark, along with Ji, hunted him down and killed him, to stop him murdering people from the inside out. This was eight years ago. It's starting to happen again. On reading so far, you shouldn
't expect it to be that simple. It isn't, of course. Many and painful are the ways of the subconscious mind. I feel an irresistible urge to quote PKD again; a bit which I'm sure Smith is familiar with. -Later, when my personal life became complicated and full of convolutions,[...] I became educated to the fact that the greatest pain does not come zooming down from a distant planet, but up from the depths of the heart. Of course, both could happen; your wife and child could leave you and you could be sitting alone in your empty house with nothing to live for, and in addition the Martians could bore through the roof and get you.Ó If you wanted one simple phrase to sum up this novel, that would have to be it. Sorry about the extended quote, but it is a more than fair summary. The sting in the tail; it's not a mysteriously alive Rafe doing damage at all, it's Stark's memory of him and the trouble he might have caused. A very nasty, very beautiful invention, underlining the point- dubious but plausible- that beyond a point you're your own worst enemy. He has done other work, much of it in the same basically gritty but superstructurally mystical vein, but nothing so fresh or so extreme.

Imagination; a little postmodern inevitability, but thoroughly exercised on a sound footing; A-
Wierdness; high- the science is distinctly pseudo, the mysticism is much more inventive; B+
Scene- setting; damned if I can work the social dynamic behind it, perhaps too parodic, but basically sound; B
Characterisation; excellent handling of a basically absurd situation, superb character depth under the circumstances; A

Overall; dubiously trivial choice of topic knocks the top grade off; B+

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