Writers Read: Andrew Reid

Born in Scotland, Andrew Reid worked as a research scientist for almost a decade on projects including DNA synthesis, forensics, and

drug development. He now teaches Science and lives in Stockholm with his wife, three children, and two cats.

Reid's new novel is The Survivor.

Recently I asked the author about what he was reading. Reid's reply:

Virtual Light, by William Gibson

The first book in Gibson’s Bridge Trilogy, Virtual Light is - at its heart - exactly the kind of plot you would anticipate in an early-90s thriller: a piece of extremely sophisticated technology falls into the hands of a humble but extremely hip bicycle courier. With her on the run, it’s up to a down-on-his luck detective to find her before a more powerful and distinctly less merciful rogue’s gallery of villains do. The meat of it, however, is so much more.

Gibson earned his place in the modern cultural canon with his 1984 debut, Neuromancer. A science fiction heist novel about an augmented-human hacker strong-armed into hacking an AI so powerful that just interfacing with it can kill you, the book remains a cornerstone of the cyberpunk genre. The Bridge Trilogy, which Virtual Light opens, feels like an attempt to shed some of the weight of expectation that might have come with that accolade. The scope is less broad; instead of a globe-trotting romp that showcases the glittering peaks, it is set in a shanty town district that has sprung up in the aftermath of an earthquake that devastates San Francisco.

I have been working through Gibson’s backlist over the past year or so, and I am always struck by how real his science fiction feels. He once professed in an interview that he was not interested in “capital-F future”, and there is always a sense that no matter how wild the concept or the technology might be, the shine has already worn off. The future is shabby, lipped with peeling electrical tape, the previous iterations already crumbling under the pressure of weeds reclaiming the land, benign folded down into the strata of the past.

Trickster Makes the World, by Lewis Hyde

For nonfiction, I have been reading Lewis Hyde’s work of comparative mythology focusing on the Trickster archetype across multiple cultures including stories from the Winnebago, Yoruba, Greek, and Norse legends. I picked the book up because it was in the recommended reading list of Chuck Palahniuk’s Consider This - which I enjoyed a great deal - and the phenomena of recurring motifs in folklore appeals to me. It’s tempting to believe that there is something primal at work beneath the parallel of foolish Coyote breaking the bones of his ever-renewing cow and Loki snapping the leg of one of Thor’s goats, but Hyde arms the reader against it by threading a healthy dose of scepticism throughout. He is careful and thorough in accounting for how myths have been recorded, and have been changed with each recording, across generations. He makes no accusations, but it is easy to imagine how it would be tempting for a translator educated enough to have a passing knowledge of European mythology to use that as a framework to commit an oral tradition to a written record.

Mort Cinder, written by Héctor Germán Oesterheld, illustrated by Alberto Breccia

Frieren: Beyond Journey's End, written by Kanehito Yamada, illustrated by Tsukasa Abe

Mort Cinder is an Argentinian comic published between 1962 and 1964 about an immortal man who, whenever he dies, comes back to life; he has lived and witnessed a host of historical events - from the toppling of the Tower of Babel to the Battle of Thermopylae - and through the comic he recounts them to an antiques dealer he has met. Frieren: Beyond Journey’s End is an ongoing manga that follows a functionally immortal Elf who is retracing the path she took as part of a hero’s party, decades after the death of one of that party’s members.

Both the graphic novel and manga tread the same conceptual ground - interrogating the consequences of immortality - but move in opposite directions.

Mort Cinder as a character and a complete work reaches constantly for death; the art is stark, the panels filled with long slashes and pools of black ink that drag the eye relentlessly downwards. Living flesh is left white on the page, and Mort Cinder himself is gaunt, as though the endless cycle of rebirth has been nothing more than a curse. Death has refused him, so Mort stalks Death in turn. Untethered from time and humanity, the turn of the world seems insubstantial to him, and he becomes nothing more than a shade, waiting to be released.

Frieren, by comparison, is a celebration of life. Frieren, so long-lived that she exists in a state of ageless adolescence, is forced to mature by her interactions with the hero Himmel and his party, and - decades after Himmel’s death - must reckon with the realisation that she loved him. Bittersweet, certainly, but there is genuine joy to be found in Frieren’s nostalgic retreading of her hero’s journey: that to live in each moment, no matter how few or how many of them there are left, is what really matters.