Double Vision

I'm a little late on this one. It took me a while to track down a copy here in the States. Thanks, JN!

Tricia Sullivan’s latest novel Double Vision, so far only available in the UK from sci-fi imprint Orbit Books, tells the story of twenty-five year old Karen “Cookie” Orbach as she spends time in two radically different realities. In the world she calls home, suburban New Jersey circa 1984, Cookie is overweight, lonely, and submissive. She plays Dungeons & Dragons, overeats, and reads romance novels during her spare time. But she has a peculiar ability: when she watches TV, she hallucinates and witnesses another existence entirely, one in which a futurisitic all-female army battles tirelessly on a distant planet against a giant entity known only as “The Grid.” The Grid resembles a labyrinthine forest that pulses with life and light, a structure that moves and reconfigures itself with the intensity of a ferocious animal. It emits pheromones and powerful aerosol intoxicants that take control of the human nervous system. It can regenerate dead bodies and incorporate trash and machine parts into its structure. For reasons that become clear throughout the novel, Dataplex, a large corporation, pays Cookie good money to sit in a small room with a TV, observe this war, and then report back to them.

It’s not quite accurate to say that Cookie simply witnesses this other world; she participates in it as well, occupying the body of a sort of biological kite that has been outfitted by the soldiers with reconnaissance gear and sent to fly above the Grid. It is from the perspective of this creature, called Gossamer, that we follow a dual plotline involving one unit’s attempt to locate a missing high-ranking officer. With the help of Machine Front, a computerized command database, the unit travels through the Grid. They are under constant danger of attack by golems, creatures the Grid produces whenever it subsumes a human body. These drones are difficult to deal with; killing one produces nine in its place. And yet, despite the dangers they face, the women of the unit are surprisingly naïve and careless. They discard candy wrappers and copies of Redbook in the Grid, forgetting that it can turn their rubbish into weapons. They complain and cry constantly, lamenting the bad luck that brought them to such a terrible place. They hardly seem like soldiers at all. When they do communicate effectively, it is usually about pop culture back on Earth; at times, these sections of the novel feel like episodes of I Love The 80’s!, as the women prodigiously reference everything from Thriller to M*A*S*H to Ghostbusters.

The abundance of these bizarre references to the commodities of Cookie’s mundane life eventually lead her to discover the true nature of her employment at Dataplex: speculative advertisement research. When she hallucinates in front of the television, Dataplex plays her tapes of new ads, whose products are somehow incorporated into the world of the Grid. Through a process that Sullivan leaves vague, Cookie can predict which ads will work and which ones will not. Companies pay Dataplex well for access to Cookie’s prophecy, and thus the war with the Grid is connected with the very different war of capitalism.

And it’s the machinations of capitalism, not alien warfare, that form the ideological heart of this novel. As she flounders among the strip malls of New Jersey, trying to reconcile her two competing realities without developing full-blown schizophrenia, Cookie becomes skeptical about development and civilization. She wonders “how a piece of land that was once a forest full of wildlife and Indians could become so loaded with abstract thought. Road engineering. The mechanics of cars. Architecture. Wiring schema, sewage, plumbing” (207). In her own innocent way, she articulates some of the basic problems and sacrifices that come with late capitalism and its attendant social structure. She mourns the loss of a vaguely bucolic, pre-capitalistic serenity and oneness, supposing that everyone would be happier without “rows and rows of houses, and buildings, and roads” (107) and yet she realizes that forsaking the dreary confines of civilization also means forsaking the technological benefits upon which she has come to depend. This dependency is taken to the extreme in the world of the Grid. Machine Front, an apex of technological sophistication, has complete control over the human army and tells each soldier exactly what she should be doing at all times. And the soldiers gladly relinquish this crucial responsibility; Machine Front authority gives them more time to read Ladies Home Journal and gush over Cyndi Lauper. Sullivan makes it obvious that these people would not survive for five minutes without the help of Machine Front. Cookie comes to understand that she participates daily in humanity’s slow march towards enslavement to its own products, and yet she doesn’t know what to do with this understanding until the very end.

So far, all of this is old hat for the sci-fi genre. Sullivan’s strengths lie in her ability to push further, to represent in the Grid what it means to be caught up in capital. The Grid offers itself as a visceral analogue to the relationships and networks that govern capitalist economies. Just as capital cannot circulate and grow without certain inputs and carriers (raw materials, labor, emotion, desire, etc.), and just as it is meaningless and impotent when not moving from one place to another, so does the Grid demand new man-made products and restructure itself incessantly. There is no such thing as stability in either system. The generative economy of the Grid is also obscene in much the same way as the subjects of capitalism desire their financial growth to be. Just as one Golem can become many in a fantastic surge of excess occurring at death, so does capitalism hinge on the fantasy of “easy money,” on the potential for a well-invested small sum to explode into a fortune, seemingly out of nowhere. And when one soldier ventures underneath the Grid into a surreal metropolis called the SynchroniCity (ahem, the Police?), she marvels at the supreme inclusiveness of the network of commodities displayed there, saying “it goes on and on, an unspooling web of connections where everything leads to everything else, into language and through math and out again, behind the stars and under the sea” (206). Escape from this web seems impossible; it has even begun to speak through us, compromising our ability to even articulate the problem.

So how do Sullivan’s characters deal with the webs and currents they find themselves caught in? On the Grid world, a certain semi-human group discovers how to use the Grid itself as a way of resisting the army’s imperial desire. They capture a human missile and hook it into the SynchroniCity, which then starts to “unpack” its technology and extract all the forces that went into its creation. They “turn the missile inside out and…draw out everything that it implied” (206). And this is what makes for the hallucinatory nature of this city; it is filled with the physical manifestations of the developmental stages of the missile and the civilization that wields it. “The cart horses that pulled the wood that fuelled the fire that Copernicus wrote by are in that [missile]” (206), and consequently they appear in the Grid. Cookie’s rebellion, on the other hand, is relatively docile and simple. She quits the job that she believes to exploitative, and she attacks the karate instructor who disgraces her friend. She receives a short jail sentence but rather than buy her way out with a good lawyer, she decides to take a break from normal life. She learns to assert her agency and resists what she determines to be unjust. And she might not be capable of influencing the world beyond this limited scope.

It is the juxtaposition of these two instances of revolutionary gestures that finally forms Sullivan’s “double vision.” Cookie’s modest resistance in her daily life coupled with the purely aesthetic, supernatural resistance in the Grid world provides a template for revolution in general, Sullivan seems to suggest: one must cultivate a utopian ideal alongside everyday strategies of change and progress. And yet this novel is sad because there is such a huge gap between the utopian and the quotidian, and because Cookie is frankly not ambitious enough to extend beyond her personal circumstances and make a universal proclamation that could actually benefit others. In the end, Double Vision may not loosen any shackles in our world, but maybe I’m asking too much of it. As a commodity, it served its purpose: while reading it I forgot, if only for a while, about our long slow march into the future.