Moxyland by Lauren Beukes

One of the horrible glimpses of mortality that mid-life crisis has brought me, is the realisation that I am not as cool as my parents.

Mum and Dad lived in London during the swinging sixties, when Dad was a groovy young newsreader at the BBC. They were never what you'd call ravers. Rock music was never their thing – Dad's fond of George Melly and Humphrey Littleton; Mum likes show tunes – and they are, despite when they lived, somewhat naïve as regards drugs. Their taste in art and culture is that of bright a undergraduate circa 1959, all post-impressionists, Leonard Bernstein and middle-brow writers. But, they really lived life. They had trendy BBC friends, went to all the latest shows and concerts, and took holidays to exotic destinations in the Med.

I've hung out with arty people and taken drugs and liked the right sorts of music, movies and books, but well, what does it all amount to, really? Mum and Dad got enormously into amateur theatre in Porirua, which seemed like the lamest thing ever when I was in my twenties, and yet they both eventually received Queen's Service Medals for their efforts and are quite highly regarded among a particular demographic. And what have I done to compare with that?

For many years, I assumed that my superiority to Mum and Dad was self-evident, a thing as natural as being young itself. That's the trap of youth, I think. When they say “youth is wasted on the young” that's surely one of the things they mean, the wasteful impatient arrogance of the young that drives them out of the nest to urgently re-invent a world that, generation after generation, refuses to change.

It's this desperate arrogance that drives the characters in Moxyland. I recognise their ambitions, because at one stage or another I have felt them all. Moxyland is a tragedy, in the classical sense, as the good are undone by their better nature while evil exults. Kendra is killed by choosing ambition before art; Tendenka dies when his idealism curdles into self-importance. In the meantime, if Kendra and Tendenka are the world's creative spirit and it's conscience, then Lerato and Toby represent the forces of vacuous self-gratification and cold-hearted corporate control. Both are the product of damaged societies. Toby has been spoiled and indulged until there is nothing decent left in him, while Lerato has been deracinated by the horror and disease of the previous century. Between them, they represent the future of Afirca.

Although Moxyland is full of racy cutting-edge culture, it's message is ultimately that of grumpy old men everywhere. The short-view of youth sees only the waves crashing in, while from the long view of decades one begins to see that these have nothing against the power of the tides. Instead of being a frightening possibility of the future, it becomes a description of the eternal way of the world.

But what do I know? This is a dystopian satire for the BoingBoing generation, what some people call post-cyberpunk, but – come on! - it's straight cyberpunk, through and through, bristling with Sterlingesque futurism and a plot reminiscent of Rainbows End. In fact, all those writers and all those books are still working away at the issues first raised by the likes of John Brunner and Norman Spinrad in the sixties. So, the New Wave keeps crashing and you keep getting knocked over by it until eventually you get tired of it and get out of the water altogether, and sit in the dunes up the beach waiting for the sunset.

Short Fiction Wednesday

Back from holiday and here's a couple of new stories for short fiction Wednesday. Had I been smart, I would have chosen the stories before I left and taken them on holidays with me to read. Never mind, though, cos I read these over the last couple of days in the little corners of the day; stories of this length are ideal for my short commute or over my sandwich at lunchtime. This, of course, is one of the great things about short stories - it's a low commitment, especially when it's all free on the internet!

Playable Characters by Eric J Juneau combines online gaming with a kind of town-vs-corporate-muscle-round-up-the-posse-western plotline to create a fun take on the fantasy quest. The situation is a clever one: in a fantasy MMO the quest that Cyril wants to complete is being squatted by Real Money Traders, who complete the various quests and sell the in-game prize items for real-world money. Cyril's stubborn desire to fulfill the quest has just the right combination of righteousness and Quixotic absurdity to carry the dramatic and humorous needs of the story.

Much of the comedy comes from the self-aware characters who can wise crack about the foibles of their users. Cyril is a great take on the put-upon protagonist of farce and his fellow characters Peachbutt and Bolbadir provide fine comic support. It's a a clever idea, and yields some great lines, but I did find myself wondering how aware these characters were supposed to be. The division between what they could and couldn't do was a bit confusing, and I was never certain about the rules of player-character-hood. In the end, I figured it was best to just not worry about it too much and enjoy the jokes.

Electric Spec looks like a great venue, too, with a regular schedule and new content four times a year. I shall definitely be checking in again.

The next story, Autumn Leaves Falling by Greg Mellor, is from Cosmos, which looks like an Australian general science magazine. A poke around their site reveals that the fiction editor is the noted Australian SF critic Damien Broderick, which confirms the Australian connection and raises one's expectations.

Autumn Leaves makes powerful use of a central image – the falling Autumn Leaves of the title, embedded in the text as a quote from TE Lawrence – to represent the SF concept, the novum again, the uploading of one's mind to a computer. The situation is complicated here by the suicide of the narrator's father, and I found his final resolution of those emotions very moving. There's a bit of a distracting swerve into the psychological effects of The Singularity which doesn't quite work and diverts the momentum away from the climactic build up that had been going on, but aside from that this is a rich and well-crafted story.

Both stories this week are solid, trad SF of the sort that grey beards like me find very satisfying. Plausible futurism and a good eye for character gives a glimpse of how we might be, if things go a certain way. Stories of this type make small observations about big changes in the world, small, human moments that capture a flash of something eternal about the human condition.

Non-dom tax status is the ultimate cyberpunk accessory

Another great article in the Guardian, this time a background piece on non-dom tax status by Stephen Armstrong.

Ultras, according to Frederico do Valle, are the world's new refugees. By Ultras, do Valle, lead consultant in wealth management at CapGemini Financial Services, means Ultra High Net Worth Individuals – otherwise known as multimillionaires. They are a growing group, these super-rich nomads, and they're on the move like mammoths in an ice age. Driving them on is their desire to avoid paying as much tax as they possibly can, while remaining within the law. Do Valle calls this "wealth preservation", and he says it is getting harder every day.

"Ultras are now basically globetrotting," he explains. "They don't want to commit, because there's a lot of uncertainty out there about tax rules and regulations. It depends how long you reside in each place before you pay tax and the laws are changing, shifting. We have one client who lives on his boat and just moves around because he doesn't want to be stuck with one tax jurisdiction permanently."

I was thinking that this way of liffe would not be possible without the amazing communications links that all that money can buy. The unamed wandering mariner likely has a hugh mega-million pound thing the size of a small car ferry with high bandwidth sattelite communications sufficient for him to play World of Warcraft from middle of the Antarctic Ocean if he cared to, let alone shoot off a few emails instructing his proxies to shut down a car plant in Sheffield or assassinate a journalist in Latvia.

The increasing speed of information exchange has led to wealth pooling around individuals. In the history of wealth and power, a rulers reach has only extended as far as they could extend their communications. Instant communications allow plutocrats direct control over more and more of their empires, and the reulting efficiencies in control have given them a tighter than ever control of their finances.

One wonders what the future holds (being a sci fi writer an all). As communications efficiency increases, there'll be more of this. Will it ever cross over to the middle classes? Can't you imagine a newly nomadic commuter class depending on complicated international flat share arrangements and tele working saving  them a few grand a year tax. My own tax bill is in the region of £20,000 a year - I could almost do with some of that back.

The only thing saving us from an anarchistic technocratic dystopia are the heroic actions of the revenue so secure what's owed! That sounds facetious, but if you think of it, they the people who go around collecting all the money that runs our schools, keeps the NHS working and the roads open, the police walking our streets and the army protecting us from foreign threats (such as they are... a topic another day).

So, let's close this with a hopeful cheer for the tax man! I hope you screw the rich bastards!