If it weren't for the roaches, the Red Consensus would eventually smother in a moldy detritus of cast-off skin and built-up layers of sweated and exhaled effluvia. Lysine, alanine, methionine, carbamino compounds, lactic acid, sex pheromones: a constant stream of organic vapors poured invisibly, day and night, from the human body. Roaches were a vital part of the spacecraft ecosystem, cleaning up crumbs of food, licking up grease.
It turns out that cockroaches are essential for space travel. Especially, if you are a failed nation-state reduced to a national territory of an old spaceship inhabited by your remaining eleven citizens. Politics takes on a whole new meaning in such circumstances:
"I'm the President of the Fortuna Miners' Democracy, and this is my wife, the Speaker of the House."
And sometimes you can only maintain political stability through the device of a monthly orgy fueled by powerful chemical aphrodisiacs.
The three Senators, two men and a woman, looked interested. The Senate didn't see much action in the government of the tiny Democracy. They were the least trusted members of the crew and were outnumbered by the House.
Also: you will probably become space pirates, because where else does fiat lead?
The FMD still had its own banks, and though its currency was enormously inflated, it was still in circulation as the exclusive legal tender of eleven billionaires.
Schismatrix is really a collection of short stories strung together to make a novel. Each of the stories is fairly interesting on their own, or perhaps it is more accurate to say that the world of each story is fascinating. I'm still trying to figure out if the author actually wrote the same character at the center of each story, or if he just renamed the character and massaged things a little to make it seem like a continuous plot.
Our hero, Abelard Malcolm Tyler Lindsay, is a consummate diplomat, always squirming out of trouble with a quick tongue and an eye for reading people. But he always seems to end up in tight scrapes. He is almost murdered by moths when his lover crashes a hang-glider next to him in an attempt at suicide-as-a-political-statement. And then there's the time when he manages to avoid being executed for treason by another former lover, who was previously the head of the Geisha Bank and who modified herself into a building and has all her children live inside her fleshy walls. Or the time aliens show up and impose peace across the Solar system and he convinces them to rescue him from a bloody massacre on an asteroid by claiming to be an artist.
"We noticed the explosion," the alien said. "An unusual artistic technique." "We are unusual," Lindsay said. "We are unique."
Honestly, this book was so full of imaginative settings and situations,1 it could have been turned into a whole series of novels.2 I think it's worth the read, but it's a little dizzying.
Footnotes
-
Not least of which is this observation: "The Shapers, the Mechanists-those aren't philosophers, they're technologies made into politics. The technologies are at the core of it." Made me think about bitcoiners. We are kind of that aren't we? Technology made into politics? ↩
-
The author, Bruce Sterling, certainly had trouble restraining himself when it came to naming factions: Preservasionists, Mechanists, Wireheads, Sundogs, Nephrine Black Medicals, Hermes Breakaways, Soyuz Eclectics, Dembowska Harem Police, Zen Serotonin Cultists, Culture Ghosts, Gray Torus Radicals, etc... ↩