Introduction to The Devil Delivered

Although The Devil Delivered is an end-of-the-world story, it's by no means the kind of old-fashioned catastrophe still peddled by Hollywood, in which the Earth is threatened by a single, easily understood threat -- an asteroid, or a plague of ambulatory plants, or giant flesh-eating bunny-rabbits. Something that can be blown up or slaughtered or reversed in a last-minute effort by heroes who are cheered to the rafters when the world emerges from its bunkers, blinking in the light of a brave new dawn. In this vividly-written novella, the threat is to the human race is the human race itself, and Steven Erikson refuses simple heroics, and refuses to simplify the hydra-headed consequences of total environmental collapse caused by over-exploitation of the biosphere and the rest of the Earth's resources, but confronts them head-on.

The catastrophe is all-encompassing. As in the dystopian visions of John Brunner, notably Stand on Zanzibar and The Sheep Look Up, the spew of information needed to plug us into the happening world can't be contained by ordinary narrative; its converging stories are augmented by tickertape updates, excerpts from newsfeeds, and a Greek chorus on a clandestine internet bulletin board. In the territory of the Native American Lakota tribe on the plains of Saskatchewan, as in the rest of the world, everything is breaking down all at once, a locust-swarm of calamities large and small. One strand of the story chronicles environmental destruction inflicted during the twentieth century; another describes the deepening conflict between the Lakota, who have an audacious plan to heal their land, and a brutally repressive economic bloc; in a third, a scientist observes extraordinary adaptations by plants and animals to a poisoned landscape drenched in ultraviolet light that burns through the ragged ozone layer. Slowly and certainly, they converge on an extraordinary moment of expiation and transformation.

I have to confess that just about everything I know about Steven Erikson has been googled from the internet. Formerly an archaeologist and an anthropologist, he's written a brace of contemporary novels and enough short stories to fill two collections, has previous form in the PS novella series, and is currently just over halfway through a ten-volume Big Fantasy series, the Mazalan Book of the Dead. But while The Devil Delivered just sort of landed in my lap, I'm more than happy to talk it up. Not only because its powerful story revolves around a bunch of my own obsessions, including post-colonial politics, dead zones, ecological collapse, and panspermia, but also because of the focussed intensity of Erikson's tough but ultimately hopeful vision, and his confident fusion of past and future, fact and fiction.

As more and more of what we used to think of as science fiction becomes science fact, there's a growing trend for sf writers to retreat to the golden futures of the genre's past, to retrofit good old-fashioned futures in which technology is a gift that's not double-edged, and geeks can still inherit the Earth, or indeed the entire Universe. I confess that I enjoy a lot of this stuff -- I've even written some of it -- but I also worry that if the entire genre turns its back on the real world, if it refuses to grapple with the events and ideas that shape the times in which it is written, it's in danger not only of losing its edge, but of entirely dissolving into misty nostalgia. It's in danger, like any organism that can't adapt to changes in its environment, of becoming extinct.

Many of those old-fashioned futures, the slide-rule dystopias, engineers' wet-dreams, and Gernsbackian emporia of technology, inhabited by men and women as bloodless as their machines, were unreal because they were not rooted in reality. They were as sterile and idealised as the gated suburbs to which the middle-classes retreat when they perceive that the centre of their city has become too dangerous; anywherevilles that, tailored to the commercially-driven aspirations of its purchasers, attempt to shut out the rest of the world because the world is messy, confused, complicated, and full of human mistakes. Easier to erase or ignore all that; easier to introduce some kind of gap or memory hole, a disjunction between the past and present of the story; easier to start over with a blank sheet of paper. Easier, but not better.

Like the best science fiction writers, Steven Erikson knows that if stories about the future are to be truly believable, they must be built on the solid foundation of the past, which is of course our present. And like our present, like the kind of science fiction that's the hardest to write, the near future in The Devil Delivered has been utterly and irreversibly shaped by its past. Like these early years of the twenty-first century, it clangs with the sound of the bills for the sins of the last century being paid in full. That's what its characters must deal with before they can move on; that's why it's crowded with literal and metaphorical ghosts. A windstorm strips dirt back to glacial gravel, and reveals that a farmhouse has been built over that staple signifier of accursedness in modern American horror, an Indian burial ground. The man-made mass extinction event of the present is echoed by the slaughter of the plains buffalo in the nineteenth century, the extinction of American megafauna in the Pleistocene after the arrival on that continent of human hunters (Erikson is robustly unsentimental about our ancestors; as one of his characters puts it, no savage was ever noble), and a deeper, darker event buried in a secret history of human evolution.

Ghosts and decidedly weird secret histories -- although much of its story is set in the near future, and although Erikson scrupulously details the human agencies that wrecked the Earth's biosphere, The Devil Delivered is not exactly in the mainstream of science fiction. A former farmer believes that angry spirits were loosed when his father ploughed up American Indian holy land, and must be appeased; a messianic scientist is guided by an actual ghost (the ghost of Custer's nemesis, Sitting Bull, no less); some of the science, including fast-forward evolutionary adaptation to extreme environments and a radical rewrite of human descent, is more X-Files than actual. This isn't a bad thing. Gregory Benford once said that writing really good hard science fiction is like playing tennis with the net tightly strung; that is, by playing your game within the strict limits of what is known about the way in which the universe works. Erikson, dispensing with that net, is playing another ball game entirely -- something as fast and intense as squash or pelota. He blends his gonzo bricolage of science fiction, fantasy, and horror motifs into a seamless whole that crackles with energy and is dense with information and ideas.

And most importantly, he founds his story solidly in reality. The environmental ruin and catastrophic extinctions of The Devil Delivered are what could easily happen if we don't begin to clean up our act at once; they could happen anyway, despite our best efforts, because they're already happening. We're in the middle of the greatest extinction event since the demise of the dinosaurs. Catastrophe is part of the weather report at the end of the evening news. It's in our blood and our bones. Steven Erikson's powerful, angry, hopeful story shines a brave light on the encroaching darkness.

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>This work is licenced under a Creative Commons Licence.

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