Your Vote Counts: The Prefect

Freedom
never came for free
patriots are bleeding their veins clean
that's me in the corner, singing
"God save, God save the Queen."

- "Independence Day", Brave Saint Saturn

One of the most striking things about the collected novels of Alastair Reynolds is how they highlight his ability to shift to and from, and combine, grand and intimate scales. Pushing Ice takes place over thousands of years (grand scale) - but all the action is contained within a few square kilometers. Chasm City takes place simultaneously over hundreds of years and a few weeks, using dreams and mirrored plots to pull it off. Century Rain covers roughly forty-eight hours, as does my most recent Reynolds encounter, The Prefect (2007), a very well-done policeman's tale that questions whether unfettered democracy can actually erode freedom.

Set in the universe of Chasm City, but before the plague, The Prefect focuses its action on the Glitter Band, the collection of ten thousand-odd habitats that orbit planet Yellowstone. These habitats are the ultimate expression of democratic freedom. Housing anywhere from a few hundred to a few million citizens, each is the embodiment of a distinct theme or overarching ethic. House Perigal is a center of hedonism. The Chevelure-Sambuke Hourglass is built on living out classical, beautiful fantasies, by doing things like bioengineering flying horses - the majority of the habitats are some sort of Bioshock-style state wherein artists and scientists can create without legal or ethical restrictions, with varying degrees of benigness and horror. People voluntarily go into comas in order to allow their minds to run free in virtual reality in the Persistent Vegetative State. Some citizens have even decided that their greatest freedom is the abdication of all responsibilities, and so they democratically elect tyrants to rule their lives and rob them of the need to make decisions. The inhabitants of the Glitter Band are, in many ways, the most powerful collection of ordinary people in history, because there is literally nothing they can't vote on. Elections happen every millisecond, on everything from leadership to what shape a fountain should be, and democracy is the one unquestionable quality of human existence. Even the Glitter Band's legal body, Panoply, is completely subject to the will of the people, who have democratically denied Panoply's agents, the Prefects, the right to bear arms. But that's okay with the Prefects, because observance of democratic exercise is the only law they uphold - in the Glitter Band, its the only law there is.

The Prefect launches with Panoply's discovery of someone exploiting a loophole in the voting system, followed by the unprecedented destruction of an uninvolved habitat. While young prefect Thalia Ng embarks on a twenty-four hour tour to upgrade the polling cores of four habitats in order to close the loophole, her boss, Tom Dreyfus, turns his attention to the mass-murder. Along the way, a traitor does his thing, the eighty people converted into digital format mentioned in Chasm City come into play, as does a terrible machine thought destroyed and known as the Clockmaker, and at the center of it all is the question of how much freedom is necessary for the greater good. It's a cautionary tale, as is most great sci-fi, and it's also far better than the average. This exploration of freedom is one of those ideas which, in a democratic country, is often controversial amongst academics and activists, and those are the sort of ideas that Reynolds has no problem tackling in a thoughtful manner. On a personal note, the healthy limits of freedom have been on my mind lately, and The Prefect has made a very interesting contribution to that mental stew.

Great for any with an interest in political science, and even for those who have a carpet policy against sci-fi, The Prefect is a physically short but mentally challenging read, and highly recommended by me.