The Towers of Toron by Samuel R. Delany (The Fall Of The Towers #2)

Election Day. Baby Week. The Fall of the Towers Book 2

It’s been eventful since I last wrote a blog post here… I’ve had some very big changes in my life. For example, I bought some bubble mixture, I uploaded the first episode of my long gestating new web series ready for its release this coming weekend, but arguably more important than both of those things, I also acquired a child.

I acquired that child the old-fashioned way, by which I don’t mean in exchange for an envelope of cash given to an impoverished single woman, I mean the way even more old-fashioned than that: having unprotected sex to the point of orgasm with an ovulating woman.

Such a trad, embarrassing, thing to do, I know, yes. One would hope better of an anarchist, I agree.

It feels fundamentally retrogressive just to acknowledge that it happened.

Any individual guilty of perpetuating this historic style of love making can quite fairly be accused of directly contributing to the resurgence of retrogressive anti-progressive far-right fascistic politics that is currently sweeping the world, and should be judged accordingly. (Even France is no longer immune to the far right threat, and France used to be a country with both dignity and wine, two things the rest of us have always struggled to have simultaneously.)

Yes, reproductive sex is the kind of sex – the kind of consequence of sexual activity – that all the people voting for Reform and the Conservatives (and probably by plenty of people voting Labour not with a heavy heart) today will almost certainly believe is the only one that should be permitted under law.

Yes, it is election day in England and things are noooot looking good for the future. More austerity! More social conservativism! No massive interventions to fix the great holes and problems with this terrible fucking country. Nothing at all, no hope. Nothing to vote for, but plenty to futilely vote against…

Thankfully 🙏🙏🙏, my child was born during the final week of 14 years of openly cruel Conservative rule, rather than in the first days of what is certain to be a lacklustre and non-transformative Labour government.

Being born in a political period of hopelessness and negativity, I imagine, will set the tone for this child’s entire life, politicswise. In England, at least.

Christ, it’s a bad country.

–///–

Some handsome young men who I was talking to last week (I have to stress this was in a professional setting (I spend very little of my free time talking to anyone, let alone handsome young men)) asked me what I thought would be the worst thing my child could grow up to be. My answer, of course, was “boring”, as I said to them quite bluntly and openly (remember this was a professional setting so the language would have been less fruity than I’d use here).

As I clarified to the lads, I would rather my child become evil and I absolutely hate it for its actions and/or ideologies, than that I just don’t find it interesting or compelling at all.

The boys said that that was a good answer and I felt good because I had their approval, having managed to successfully find an answer that was both “interesting/unexpected” to them while not being “woke” (most of the handsome young men I encounter in professional settings tend to be a little less progressive than I like to think I was at their age. Then again, I was briefly a member of the Liberal Democrats in my mid-20s (my biggest regret and deepest source of shame), so who am I to cast aspertions???)

–///–

What I’ve been thinking a lot about, again, (because of this moment of political toxicity and this baby’s new life), is how likely it is for the future to end up being absolutely awful.

By the time my child is 18, Nigel Farage and whatever follows him will have been in full dictatorial power in the United Kingdom for an absolute minimum of 13 years, as even if Starmer doesn’t (which I think he will) follow the lead of Macron and hubristicly call an early election, whatever follows this parliament feels doomed to be the extreme right. This, coupled with increasing and unrepairable environmental collapse, I think the best I can hope for in my child is that it becomes one of the crueler (and thus safer) warlords in the Mad Max style dystopia that is a near guarantee at this point for how the world will look by the time it is an adult.

–///–

Talking of dystopias, I just finished reading The Towers Of Toron by Samuel R. Delany.

Although not quite as successful (to me) as Out Of The Dead City was (which I read last week (and this is a direct sequel to)), this still remains an engaging and exciting text. However, there is some significant textual context that may be the reason for my gentle disappointment.

Delany was/is one of those writers (of which there are many and the ones whose work I like the most tends to fall into this category (biggest example is Malcolm Lowry)) who continue to revise their texts long after publication.

The Fall Of The Towers, the first volume-spanning series that he wrote, is an example of this.

Delany revised and revised and revised these texts. He revised these texts, the three books that comprised this trilogy, multiple times into multiple editions before finally settling on a definitive one at some point, however, that point was between the point where this edition of the second book was published and my edition of Out of the Dead City.

If that makes sense.

If it doesn’t, I’ll try again:

While reading this trilogy, I read an earlier version of book two than the version of book one that I read.

So, on a sentence by sentence level, that version of Out of the Dead City was tighter, neater, and ultimately more rewarding, than was this version of its sequel. And although the first draft obviously post-dated that book, this version of it did not.

There was a conspicuous – though not huge – diminishment in the quality of the text… Slightly less professionalised … slightly less flawless…

There were moments in this book that felt awkward, that felt kind of… hammered in… and that makes sense because this version predates (just!) the Delany who was soon to become a critical darling for 50 plus years…

–///–

As I mentioned in my comments on Out Of The Dead City, the stakes at the end of that book are huge and universe spanning.

The alien reality-leaping entity featured in that text does reappear for a bit near the beginning of (probably about a third of the way through) this text, and there is (again) a fun and exciting and super imaginative section during which the key protagonists leap through different realities, completely disparate creative, fresh, worlds, and in each one they battle this alien foe.

However, this is not the denouement of this novel – it’s a long way before that – and this narrative thread doesn’t really pick up again in the text, though presumably it will be the focus of the concluding part of this trilogy, which I will also read very soon…

–///–

What, then, does The Towers of Toron become about?

Is a war being fought on this futurized bizarre Earth? (I’m not going to describe the premise of the trilogy again. Please refer to my blog post on Out Of The Dead City if you want to see my description of that or refer to Wikipedia if you want to read someone else’s, or read the book, whatever you want, it’s up to you. I’m not the boss of you. I’m just a blogger with a baby.)

The main focus, then, is on a war that’s happening between an enemy that remains unseen throughout and – spoilers ahead – almost certainly doesn’t exist at all, because at the end of the book it is revealed that there is no war and that all the soldiers who are being sent away to fight and die are actually being implanted into a Matrix-style shared reality where they fight a war that is unwinnable (and thus also unloseable) because it isn’t real, it just exists within the mind of all of the people who have been recruited to the war effort.

Look, I understand that This Matrix style twist is not a sign of Delany ripping off the later work.

I understand how time works.

I understand on a theoretical level that a novel from the mid-1960s cannot possibly be plagiarising a motion picture from over 30 years later… however, given the massive cultural import of that later film on people of my generation, it is impossible to not feel a little bit like that’s the case, regardless of the practicalities.

Also, reading this while confused, excited and overwhelmed by the acquisition of my future warlord/lady/person child (🙏) means that maybe I wasn’t quite remembering my own understanding of the linearity of time in a way that I ordinarily would.

–///–

Many parts of the book dramatise characters fighting this war, to the point where it becomes very strange and unexpected that this reveal arrives in the final pages of the text.

Nothing really foreshadows it, though there is hefty forewarning that there will be a big revelation.

–///–

Some characters in this world are telepathic, and the most prominent telepathic character has realised that there is a big conspiracy being intentionally hidden within the mind of those at the heart of power, and also within the rest of the telepathic community, of which he is an outcast so not aware of all their secrets anymore.

That this big reveal isn’t just that there is no “enemy” and that the military skirmishes and exercises are solely “friendly fire” (which is what I had predicted would be the case), is a good twist, in that it’s unexpected, but also not a good twist in that it drops in rather deus ex machina…

In this novel about a war, then, there is no fighting. There is no travel. There is no warzone.

All of the soldier characters are just having a big shared dream and then when they die in the dream they are electrocuted to death in their Matrix-style pods and their bodies are flushed out and destroyed.

Nice.

This may well be the kind of warzone – a warzone of the mind – that my own new child might one day grow up to fight and kill within.

We can but dream.

–///–

I enjoyed The Towers of Toron a lot, but I didn’t think it was as interesting as Out Of The Dead City. As an extension of that text, I do feel like this one peaked when it had its similar but different reality/dimension spanning series of fight scenes that matched the one at the end of the previous book…

Although Delany clearly chose not to do so, the impression given from these two novels is that he could absolutely write a book length text that is nothing but fight scenes in a thousand different new realities.

I am excited and hungry to continue reading through this writer’s oeuvre this summer, and I think there is a good level of excitement, interest, and genuine literary value in these texts for it to be a good accompaniment as I continue being confused, overwhelmed, and otherwise distracted by my recent acquisition of a child.

Thank you so much! Thank you so much! Thank you so much!