Nick Harkaway (Corsair/Hachette)
WHAT a strange, placeless place Nick Harkaway has created in his Titanium Noir, a mix of speculative sci-fi and noir. The shoreline city of Chersenesos juts into an alpine lake – possibly an oblique nod to a future climate that has driven humanity far up the mountains.
But in this future, discussions of climate are curiously absent. There are bigger problems. Literally. That alpine lake is called Othrys, which classics nerds will spot as the name of the mountain that housed the Titans of Greek mythology.
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The Titans this time, however, aren’t pre-Olympian gods, but speciated rich people – speciated because whenever they get older than they would like, or critically injured, an exclusive, wildly expensive treatment returns them to teenage rude health. The one catch: their bodies become 20 per cent bigger and denser. Cash is the only limit on repeating the procedure, but you add another 20 per cent each time. It is a lesson in compound interest: after a few rounds, sheer scale means you cease to register as wholly human. Harkaway explicitly calls this strange new elite “Titans”.
This is the society in which Cal Sounder, a private eye, is called in to investigate shady activity that may have extra-large fingerprints. Actual police can’t get involved because when rich people own everything – which, of course, they do because the richest never die – what does “police”mean? Or even “society”? But when a Titan turns up as a victim instead of a perp, life gets extra complicated. Especially for a private eye whose love interest is on the taller side.
Old age has undergone recent redefinition. Rather than being an inescapable fact of the human condition, in some corners of science it is being recast as a chronic disease to be cured. Drugs like metformin and rapamycin are being pressed into service in trials to see if they can mitigate the ageing process.
Ethicists point to all that could go wrong, but downsides get abstract very fast. Concerns about inequality and other social consequences fade in the face of the many personal benefits we imagine for ourselves.
Harkaway has understood two things about the implications of such a development. Capturing the disorientation and social stagnation that would ensue is only possible by a fusion of the most fatalistic genres – Greek mythology and noir. You see, Cal’s role isn’t to solve crime, but to provide the illusion the game isn’t over. “There’s no game because the house owns everything,” he says. Like the mythical Cronos, who ate his children to avoid being usurped, the new Titans “eat” the future – by owning it.
Harkaway also understands that it won’t just be the bodies of the Titans that morph. Their minds will fundamentally stop being like ours: a 300-year-old will forget more than you ever remembered. So their motives will become as unfathomable as those of the primordial gods of ancient myth.
It is Sounder’s persistence – like Sisyphus, doomed to push that intractable boulder up an eternally ungrateful mountain – that gives this deeply philosophical story its oomph. So do the other characters, who, as in other Harkaway books, arrive fully formed and linger long in the memory. Luckily, Harkaway has hinted that this won’t be the last we see of Chersenesos.
And it’s a good thing, too, because I have never been so defeated by an ending. But then I went back and started the book again. Sisyphus, innit.
Sally Adee is a technology and science writer based in London. Follow her on Twitter @sally_adee
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