Today's Reading
Ford's hackers—the Webspinners—play Websets, strange computer terminals that interact with Bell Stellar's computers on their behalf. These are played like thumb pianos, by means of up to 256 sliding levers that have to be finessed with the skill of a pianist. These bear a striking resemblance to the Altair 8080, the first successful personal computer, released in 1975 as a kit that you assembled and programmed by means of switches on its faceplate. At the time that Web of Angels saw print, the Altair was in decline, being supplanted by the Apple II Plus, which was much closer in form to the PCs that we use today, with an alphabetical keyboard and a screen, rather than blinking lights.
In 1982, two years after the publication of Web of Angels, the US Department of Justice broke up AT&T, sixty-nine years after its first action to crack down on the company to end its strong-arm tactics. At the time, AT&T's apologists reacted with horror, claiming AT&T as America's national champion, its bulwark against the ex-fascist copycats of Japan, who would surely destroy America's tech sector if not held in check by Ma Bell (the Yellow Peril scare talk of the day is eerily familiar to anyone who's listened to Cold War 2.0 hawks rant about China).
In reality, AT&T was a boot on the neck of the American high-tech sector, and its breakup—along with IBM's twelve-year-long turn in antitrust hell, which tamed the company's predatory instincts—led to the creation of the PC industry and the network era. The cyberpunk era, in other words. An era where you could have your choice of computers at home, and not just interact with the central office's switching system by means of a standardized Western Electric phone that was the only device you were legally permitted to connect to the network.
We can think of Web of Angels as a contrafactual, a cyberpunk novel for a future that never arrived, one where AT&T once again rebuffed America's antitrust enforcers, where IBM slipped out of their grasp with its killer instincts intact. It's a cyberpunk novel for a world where we never got the forty-year interregnum between the breakup of AT&T and the rise of Big Tech, in which starved and demoralized antitrust enforcers allowed the internet to be converted to "five websites, each consisting of screenshots of text from the other four" (to quote Tom Eastman).
Ford's later work makes it clear that he quickly caught the zeitgeist of the cyberpunk we know today, and ran with it. His tabletop RPG work—notably Paranoia—was far more influential on cyberpunk aesthetics and tropes than this odd, out-of-place 1980 novel.
But that just makes this novel all the more interesting. It's a parable about a dystopia we thought we'd averted, but that we now seem to be living amidst. It is exuberant in the way of first novels, and messy in the way of first novels. It's a book that gives us a glimpse of Mike Ford before the varnish had dried, when you could still see the rough edges.
Ford hated laying things out plainly—he famously told editors who asked him to be plainer, "I have a horror of being obvious." In Web of Angels, we get a glimpse of Ford's theory of mind, the extent to which he assumed that everyone had his ability to spot and assemble subtle literary puzzle pieces. His later novels are far more accessible. This one can be tough sledding.
But it's worth the work. It is bursting with tropes for a genre that never emerged, a notional "phreakpunk," in which technological ronin are pursued by a single, remorseless tech giant that has fused with and supplanted the state. It's not a precursor to Neuromancer, but rather, the sole example of an extinct parallel branch to it.
Which is to say, it's a very Mike Ford kind of book. The guy was extraordinary.
Still to be haunted, still to be pursued,
Still to be frighted with false apparitions
Of pageant majesty and new-coined greatness....
from Perkin Warbeck
FIRST MEASURE:
THE WEB
CHAPTER ONE
THE DARK LADY
The boy ran for his life, across the City Juvenal on the planet called Brass. Past lights and mirrors he ran, through blocks of shadow and dark glass, short legs running, small heart pounding, seeking a street to hide him from those that came after; for if the City would not have him he would surely die.
(Oh, said the serpent, thou shalt not surely die.)
He was blond, dark-eyed, dressed in soft parti-colored felts and high glossy boots turned down at the tops. To his chest he clutched a box covered in gray leather, resembling a large book; held it with both arms, looking more often at it than at the streets ahead, fingers spread wide to grip as much of its surface as he could.
The City Juvenal sat on the shore of the great golden sea that gave Brass its name. It was a city of colors not too bright, of sins not too black, of comfortable means and reputation. Its people took Lifespan to stretch their years into centuries, and took other things to fill up those centuries, and sometimes quietly did certain acts that ended their Lifespanned lives all at once; but this was the City Juvenal, not New Port Royal or Granmarque or Wicked Alexandria.
...
