Nostalgia Night at the Old-School Science Fiction Buffet

Cassandra Khaw, The All-Consuming World

Someone is scouring the galaxy, executing old forgotten criminals, the dregs of the post-humanist economic underbelly. Technology specialist Rita, and her hired gun Maya, realize they’re in this unidentified vigilante’s crosshairs. So they do what any reasonably well-informed cyborg criminal masterminds would do: get the old gang back together. This isn’t easy, since some of their fellows haven’t forgotten the old wounds and betrayals of their last, disastrous job.

Cassandra Khaw’s first novel reads like a literary catalog of allusions, callbacks, and nostalgia. How one responds will likely depend on how one feels about Khaw’s source material, and also how one feels about those sources being so transparently displayed. One could make a drinking game of identifying the donor parts that comprise this Frankenstein’s Monster of speculative literature. Nor does Khaw conceal these allusions, spray-painted big across the surface.

Maya, who has died and been reborn in a succession of augmented clone bodies for centuries, absolutely loves Rita, her “scientist.” We know because she tells us repeatedly. When Rita sends Maya into no-win situations to recover the Dirty Dozen’s lost children, Maya acquiesces, despite her misgivings. After all, last time the Dirty Dozen fought together, two of their number suffered deaths so catastrophic, even their advanced technology couldn’t help.

I remember reading these basic premises decades ago. Khaw’s jacked, technologically augmented protagonists come directly from cyberpunk, especially Pat Cadigan and Bruce Sterling. Not even tangentially, either: Khaw uses terminology pinched wholesale from Sterling and, with occasional words changed, William Gibson. Khaw’s repurposed Sprawl Cowboys might make speculative fiction readers very comfy, because they challenge seasoned readers minimally.

Moreover, Maya’s picaresque adventures collecting her team’s survivors feel very familiar. The first is now running a Fight Club so specific, its leader Ayane clearly thinks herself Tyler Durden. (An orphaned misquote reveals Khaw pinched David Fincher’s movie, not Chuck Palahniuk’s novel.) Another has squelched her past and remade herself as the galaxy’s most celebrated pop star, a trope found in countless Japanese anime through the years.

One by one, the Dirty Dozen’s barely half-dozen survivors gather on their old ship, nerving themselves, however reluctantly, to fight their unidentified enemy. But as they begin recounting narratives of their former mercenary careers, we start seeing truths these characters have willfully forgotten. Rita has deliberately pitted them against each other, sent them on suicide missions, and otherwise poisoned the well which this supposed sisterhood drinks from.

Cassandra Khaw

It takes until around the novel’s halfway mark before one character voices something I’d suspected for a while: these women (some of whom stopped identifying as women after their retirement) aren’t unified, they’re trauma-bonded. And, as they demonstrate their bizarre admixture of reverence and fear of Rita, it’s clear they have Stockholm Syndrome. As you’d expect, everyone realizes this but themselves, because the sick seldom realize they need healing.

More important, I realized something these characters didn’t: Rita regularly withholds information, and lies as easily as breathing. Their mission’s entire premise turns on the expectation that someone’s killing old mercenaries. Except we have no evidence supporting this premise, besides Rita’s word. Since we, and they, know Rita lies, the question becomes: when will everyone realize their entire mission is fabricated bullshit?

Khaw, a professional RPG designer whose résumé includes Dungeons & Dragons, performs the old Dungeon Master’s trick of framing their narrative through careful omission. We’re assured the Dirty Dozen are outlaws but, in the best cyberpunk tradition, that law is distant and poorly defined, apparently for sale through mercenaries like, say, the Dirty Dozen. We know certain characters are dead because an inveterate liar told us so. Pieces don’t add up.

Meanwhile, Khaw just keeps setting the scene, and setting the scene, and setting the scene. Rather than a singular story, Khaw regales their audience with a succession of vignettes on a theme. Again, like the separate nights of a game campaign. Because the story isn’t unified, our experience isn’t the action, but the characters. We read because we want the characters to learn and grow over the succession of events in their experience. Which, sadly, they mostly don’t do.

I don’t hate this novel. I particularly love Khaw’s narrative voice, a beatnik prose-poem banter that doesn’t so much inform us of events as immerse us in circumstances. But somewhere around page 200, I realized Khaw was still clearing their throat, still introducing characters and scenes for a story that’s always just about to happen. And, I realized, I no longer cared. Roll me a Natural One, I’m done.