The Red Men Is Trippy, Philosophical Science Fiction

When endeavoring to read a novel by Matthew de Abaitua, it’s prudent to clear one’s schedule and alert the neighbors. His books are a heady mix of philosophical and metaphysical concepts, bizarre science fiction, and liminal imagery, seemingly designed to warp the brain even as they entertain it with odd concepts. And no book illustrates this more clearly than his debut, The Red Men, which came out in the UK in 2007 but it just now making its way to the U.S. in print courtesy of Angry Robot. Somehow, it manages to blend occultism, cosmic horror, artificial intelligences, and the darker elements of digital immortality into a harrowing, but nonetheless fascinating fable about the struggle between conformity and individuality, and one man’s fight for control of his sense of self against godlike artificial intelligences and insurmountable odds.
Nelson Millar was once the publisher of a counter-culture magazine called Porn Drugs. Now, he works for a corporation called Monad—creators of the therapeutic Dr. Easy androids as well as AI-controlled digital consciousnesses known as “red men,” tireless artificial “selves.” An executive makes the mistake of downloading her red man into a robot body, allowing it to interact with the physical world, and starts a chain of events that threatens to tip the balance between the AI and their human counterparts.

In the midst of this chaos, Nelson is blackmailed into creating “Redtown,” a simulation inhabited by red men uploaded from a working-class English town intended to allow Monad to better predict customer behavior and maybe get a handle on their freewheeling creations. As a resistance movement against Monad grows and the red men implement their own plans, the war for reality and consciousness threatens to engulf the world—unless Nelson overcome his own complacency and stop them, before it’s too late.
If the above description makes this book sound like an absolute headtrip, rest assured, it is. The Red Men is an embarrassment of hallucinatory riches and unnerving dystopia, from the bio-screens that slide their way into characters’ homes to broadcast the desires of the red men, to the occult warriors who forcibly rewrite their victims’ brains to strike back against the Monad corporation. De Abaitua’s imagination runs roughshod over everything, but to his credit, the story never turns incoherent. No matter how strange things get, he keeps the bizarre turns in a context the reader can understand, allowing the strangeness to build gradually as the plot twists. This creeping incremental insanity really got under my skin, creating the sensation of reality rewriting itself around me as the book careened toward a riotous finale and Nelson made one final, desperate gambit for sanity. As they say in the movies: whoa.

In spite of the dystopian overtones, there is not a depressing book. There is some hope in this apocalypse—it’s ultimately about the triumph of the individual, of making the decision to do the right thing for your own reasons rather than doing what someone else tells you is the right thing, or even sometimes the only thing. De Abaitua makes this choice difficult, setting up Monad as a comfortable alternative that allows Nelson to live in a style he’s accustomed to, with repercussions if he ever steps out of line; as in life, the “right thing” is often more dangerous—possibly life-destroying—and would pit Nelson against both the gasmasked resistance movement and Monad’s lethal data mining. Despite the chaos around him, Nelson remains optimistic, and relatively sympathetic, as he tried trying to find his own way out of the mess he’s living in. It’s a deeply personal conflict that ties all the more hallucinatory elements together.
Matthew de Abaitua has written three novels, all of them unusual, and all definitively his. The Red Men is no exception, a heady work of imagination and philosophy melded to a surreal science fantasy. It is safe to say that you will read nothing else like it, unless you read another book with his name on the cover.
The Red Men is available now.