"All kids, hungry but dumb, believing the hype. Nearly killed himself scaling a twelve-foot-chain-link fence for nothing. Nothing. Not a thing. Nothing in those containers but tramps and criminals sheltering from the winds that came in from Bristol Channel...there were words - hell, there were individual letters - he didn't understand, didn't even recognize, but he knew they all meant something. Something solid, something firm." (p. 146-147)
Somewhat ironically, for being a dystopian science-fiction novel, one if not the most important component of Tim Maughn's Infinite Detail are the individual characters, even more than the setting they find themselves in. Because it is what they do with the discarded, oftentimes broken materials (that seem to reflect their own physio-emotional constitutions) they find that creates the value of their atmosphere within a place where almost every interaction, social and otherwise, has become transactional, reduced to its economic function.
One of the main skills demonstrated throughout the narrative is the production of techno-music. DJs, like Tyrone and Melody, salvage old cassette tapes and vinyl records, full of fragmented sound from different histories, geographies, and memory-scapes, to create something whole from the chaos and emptiness that surrounds, whether that means listening to the music they make alone or listening - and dancing - to it with others.
"A five-note sub bass rolls out, distortion, skittering beats - some long-dead session drummer's handiwork compressed into a groove, filtered, distorted, pitched up to near twice its normal speed - at once both impossibly fast and monolithically glacial in its relentlessness. Sonar blips, piano hits, bird chirps all wrapped in infinite space of reverb, eternally echoing through waves of distorted air, filter sweeps seemingly pulling new frequencies from the silence, from the gaps between the sounds, making the sparse complex and the crowded empty. Decades of history, long lost elsewhere, but spoken on vinyl in the machine language." (p. 182)
They create these sounds, this music, in a state of urgency, sometimes emergency. Of course, where they actually are is key because of the pressure that bears down on them, holding them in individual alienation and forced to work within modes of oppression. Where they are is a place called the People's Republic of Stokes Croft, a geographical region manifested out of the apocalyptic tech/industry metropolis that constantly surveils them and uses them for big data and financial exploitation, while entire social systems crumble in the process. It is in Stokes Croft where the characters of Infinite Detail find each other, or at least convene, to do their real work, which, in this instance, is the work of artists, activists, musicians, and writers, all at least for a time free from the confines of speculative markets running on a glut of meaningless profit.
"To erase and corrupt data, wipe storage. To turn devices, whatever they were, into useless bricks of silicon and plastic. So a weapon, ostensibly designed to destroy everything, and clearly meant to flourish in the cities, crammed to their gills with millions upon millions of Internet-connected devices, from toys and cell phones and spex and earbuds to streetlights and CCTV cameras and traffic sensors and driverless cars. It was a weapon designed to take advantage of cities' overhyped, unthinking, unquestioning desire to be 'smart', to be 'always on', to be 'connected.' It was designed to be the consequence of untamed, badly planned, free-market-fueled, oversaturated urban networking, and to rip through it like a dirty bomb." (p. 215)
Amidst all this, the creation and building of community and relationships subject to either flourishing or decimation at the market's whim, characters like Mary are still able to shore up useful skills to keep the other side going, however weak. Mary is able to see ghosts within the homogenous crowds, made up of those still working within the currents of capital and those struggling outside of it. The ghosts she sees are sometimes dead, sometimes alive, always tethered to a specific place that she can visualize and experience through some strange hallucinogenic magic. She sketches them for small money, helping people, usually families, access their loved, lost ones. It seems like a small gesture, even if a source of income, but it signals towards something to be inspired by in a hopeless world, within the confines of the book and for readers both.
"It's definitely him from the picture, she can be sure of it now... he's on his knees, his arms disappearing into a mess of red that Mary can't bring herself to look at directly, she's just aware that there's a body there, motionless, a person, parts that should be there gone..."
(p. 22)
To be able to fathom life in this way, through Infinite Detail's fragmented trajectory, with almost completely spare sources of social nourishment (aside from the static and cut-up views of personal and historical memory jottingly recorded on Maughn's concept of spex), is a path to waking up from complete denial and looking at the shattered world in the face. Maughn's main characters are presented as being without relations they can feel familial with, and so they hold on to those who they are able to make meaning with in real time, which seems to be about the only thing they have left. As they fight to stay together, grasping for whatever's present or found within the wreckage, refusing to let their interactions with one another devolve and disintegrate into algorithms, the story sends a message that shares a glimmer of another possible world in the shadowy distance, given understanding this one no holds barred.
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