Literary theorist Georg Lukács said that novels were “the epic of an age in which the extensive totality of life is no longer directly given.”
Well, who am I to argue? But let me just say that I think it is hard to capture all that in a single novel, unless maybe you’re doing it the Russian way. But the short story collection, now there’s a way to capture “the totality of life.”
Pacotti is like Mark Paxson and a few other gifted writers of literary fiction who have this extraordinary ability to inhabit the heads of different people and show the world from their perspective. This collection is a beautiful mosaic of unique characters in varied circumstances, all written with care and empathy. Whether it’s the wife of an alcohol smuggler in Tehran, a pair of rebels in a dystopian Hong Kong, or a young boy growing up believing he will never be as brilliant as the rich kids in his class due to their chemically-induced mental advantage, Pacotti invites us to walk around in many different shoes.
Of course, I knew of Pacotti first from his work on the dystopian video game Deus Ex, and later from his prophetic neo-noir cyberpunk horror thriller Demiurge. Both of these are absolute classics of 21st-century sci-fi, and each share many things in common with the stories found in this volume.
The most obvious common element among these stories is… drugs. Not just the typical illegal kind (though those certainly show up) but all manner of mind-altering substances, both real and, at least so far, imagined. Pacotti returns again and again to the subject of chemically changing the patterns of the brain.
And yet, at the same time, he clearly isn’t just a materialist who sees consciousness as just an accidental product of a bubbling stew of chemicals. There is an implicit human core that is somewhere beyond the reach of the drugs, and that’s the part that makes Pacotti’s work so haunting. Over and over, we meet characters exposed to the most fundamentally anti-human and unnatural circumstances, but what makes the story work is the undeniable basic humanity struggling to break through.
I haven’t done a very good job describing these stories, and I am sorry for that. The power of them is a hard thing to concisely summarize; it’s more like a feeling that gradually steals over you as you read, and find yourself rooting for (or against) his vividly-drawn characters.
I liked all the stories, but probably my top three are “Evil Spirits Travel in Straight Lines”, the eerily prescient “Conversations with the Noösphere” and “Incantation.” All the stories are available on the author’s website, so I encourage you to check these out, and read the rest if you enjoy them as much as I did. Pacotti is one of the great sci-fi authors of our era, and when the history of fin de millénaire literature is written—if it is written—it will be impossible not to include his name in it.
