‘There will come a point in any session of TV watching with my Sweet Lady when she will say, “They wouldn’t do that,” or “That couldn’t happen,” or “Why did they do that?” Her willingness to suspend disbelief or allow a plot to unfold is only slightly greater than my willingness to change adult diapers. We both understand that it may have to be done at some point, but we are in no hurry. Mostly, I think, her reluctance has to do with a desire to see some sense of logical consistency on the part of the writer. Most fictional worlds try to hew closely to reality and so they should play by the rules. In contrast, one of the main attractions of science fiction is that we come to it with all disbelief suspended, ready for whatever rules the writer has to offer.
One of the strengths of Burton Harvey’s The Hyperboreans (available on Amazon) is that the rules of his narrative are extensions and amplifications of the ones we already know. The setting is conceivably decades or a couple of centuries into the future, but not millenia. Although technology has moved forward, society has been split three ways so that the new tools have not really been put to new uses. In fact, those technologies look close enough to what already exists to make one think that we may already have sufficient tools to achieve the Utopian state which the Hyperboreans seek as well. So if we’ve got ’em, why not use ’em?
Harvey gives us a variety of reasons: greed, lust for power, plain old lust, laziness, addiction, out and out evil. As interesting as his illustrations of amped up technology are, his illustrations of these faults can at times appear as enlarged cardboard cut outs. Fortunately, almost all of the characters get a third dimension at some point and those that don’t are satisfyingly dismembered in bursts of cinematic action. By the final scene, I believed in the world of the Hyperboreans not so much because I had bought into the fiction, but because I knew its inhabitants to be real.
Part of being real means being something of a mess, yet only Cormack McCarthy gets to sell books which end with the world in worse shape than when it began. Everybody else has to leave us with something better, but it is relief that Harvey’s happy ending is really only almost Utopia. There are questions still to be answered, and the answers that we are given don’t just come from science and technology. We get economics, physics, religion, philosophy, and good lovin’ thrown into the mix. Some answers leave us with more questions, and we need all the resources we can muster to try to sort them out. Fortunately help is on the way. The Hyperboreans are coming.