Engineers and Human Souls

He thought about Vaatzes; studying him so intensely for so long, finally meeting him in the empty streets of Civitas Vadanis. To the best of his knowledge, Psellus had never been in love; but if he had to imagine what love must be like, his nearest reference would be how he felt about Ziani Vaatzes, the supreme enemy. Which was strange, and more than a little disturbing, since Vaatzes was to blame for everything. He'd brought the war here, like a man carrying the plague--infected, a victim and also a predator, a weapon, an enemy. Under other circumstances, Psellus liked to believe, they'd have been friends, good friends (which was, of course, absurd, since a ranking Guild official would never condescend to mix with manual workers, outside of circumstances that in themselves precluded any possibility of friendship). Perhaps it's because I'm so isolated from ordinary people that the only one I ever bothered to try and understand fascinates me so. In which case, I'm even more pathetic than I ever imagined.
Be that as it may; the clock told him it was a few minutes to noon, at which time he was due to meet with the Strategy and Tactics Committee to discuss the progress of the war...
-KJ Parker, The Escapement (2007)

When people hear about how Empedocles built a whole physico-eschatological system based on the basic forces of Love and Strife, they tend to jump to the immediately-obvious hippy-dippy conclusion that Love is the good force of creation and Strife is the evil force of destruction. (Of course, they're in balance, blah blah blah, but we all know who we're rooting for in the playoffs.) Actually, it's the other way around. By forcing apart, Strife differentiates; what was once a glob of undistinguishable matter becomes, under the influence of Strife, a planet with people and things. Love, naturally, is the opposite: by collapsing what was once distinct, it acts as a potent force of destruction.

All this was running through my head as I was reading through K. J. Parker's Engineer Trilogy (Devices and Desires; Evil for Evil; The Escapement). Normally fantasy is a guilty pleasure for me, or at best a guilty pleasure with unexpected rewards. Parker's books are just as serious and thoughtful as any of the litrahchah I'd normally be reading, and, unlike the litrahchah, are interesting enough to keep me hooked for thousands of pages. A fantasy trilogy centered around lovingly erotic depictions of archaic machinery is unique enough in itself--but the fact that all the characters have Byzantine names and character traits makes it irresistible (and the absence of magic, monsters, and gods doesn't hurt). Parker is trying to tell a story about a theme as well as about people; unlike most of her colleagues in the business (who are all great in their own ways!) she doesn't regard placeholder themes like "loyalty" and "friendship" to be satisfactory. A work of science fiction, as brilliantly explained by Sherry Turkle, creates rules and then follows them. Parker's machines enable her to write about the rules.

Here's what I mean. The protagonist of our story, Ziani Vaatzes, is an engineer. The books follow the twists and turns of a big machine he creates, in full Deleuzian fashion, out of two dukedoms, a republic, and a tribal confederation, along with lots of cogs and gears in the form of supporting actors. The comparison between plots and machines is drawn repeatedly and insistently, and the problem of manipulating people in this engineer-like fashion is a permanent fixture of plot-significant conversations. Even if allegorical sci-fi were still in vogue, it would be much too difficult for a science-fiction writer to use machines in this way, since machines have understandably become so naturalized in the genre that it would take a ton of cumbersome work to extract them again. Steampunk aside, it is rare enough to see machines front-and-center in fantasy that their presence in Parker's work actually looks meaningful.

The plot-as-machine analogy also has a subtler, more ironic function in the books. It is clearly meant to satirize, on some level, the mechanics of a particular kind of fantasy literature: the Machiavellian intrigue-novel. There are lots of versions, and this ideal type is manifested in fragmentary form in almost every major fantasy series worth its salt, but when I think of intrigue-novels I think A Song of Ice and Fire, Feist's Daughter of the Empire, and a few others. The whole point of these books, which are probably my favorite thing about the genre, is that they evolve as a series of wheels-within-wheels: international politics, dynastic maneuvering, and personal attachments all interlock in a dense, but ultimately satisfyingly easy to untangle, webwork of scheming. In these novels, some kind of unexpected twist, a source of indeterminacy not preplanted in the minds of the conspirators, invariably becomes required--and the handiest go-to for novelists is love. Love, as a hangover from the chivalric-romance paradigm that still informs much of fantasy, generally requires no explanation or analysis at all. It's the perfect deus ex machina.

Parker, unlike her colleagues, thematizes love explicitly as the root of all apparent evil (appealingly, though not quite persuasively) and the initial point of departure for the mechanical manipulation of human beings. In other words, she confronts the traditional sentimental mode of fantasy-writing, in which warm and spontaneous love contrasts with cold and methodical intrigue, with a powerful counterargument: the total love that ignores all reason and proclaims itself the supreme justification is in fact the point of departure for the cold scheming that subjugates the entire world to love's will. The characters in the books are lovers, depicted as sympathetically as they would be in any other fantasy novel, but in practice they are monsters. An argument as unsparing as this one is hard to pull off in a fantasy setting without resorting, as GRRM and others often do, to what Russians call chernukha: bleakness for bleakness' sake, sentimentality turned on its head without being meaningfully improved. Parker's books are no chernukha. They're a hell of a trilogy.