Project Hanuman

The most obvious thing (to me) about Project Hanuman is that Stewart Hotston has read the Culture novels by Iain M Banks, and thought about what it would be like to live in that world. There are obvious parallels. Hotston’s Arcology is a far-future civilization that is proud of its progressive politics and is run primarily by AIs (actual intelligences, not LLMs), just like Culture Minds. But there are differences too.

Let’s start with the joke. Ship names are a big thing in the Culture. So in the Arcology Hotston has a tradition that ships cannot have names until they have done something worthy of one. I guess it means that he doesn’t have to spend much time making up names for the ships.

More importantly, Hotston has taken on board the criticism that, in the Culture, human beings are essentially kept as pets by the Minds. In Hotston’s world this is much more explicit. His AIs are quite dismissive of humans, and indeed of any other organic life forms that they might encounter in the universe. Most humans seem quite happy with this. Indeed, the majority of them don’t live in bodies anymore. They have uploaded themselves into a quantum version of cyberspace known as Information Space. As such they are effectively immortal.

Thirdly Hotston makes it clear that the Arcology’s progressive politics are akin to those of the late 20th Century American Empire. That is, they make a great show of imposing their views on the rest of the galaxy, and are deeply contemptuous of any civilisation that they deem politically backward. They have a particular dislike of slavery, but are blind to the fact that they keep their humans as pets.

And finally, while Banks’ society is very Western, Hotston has the Arcology based on India.

As with Banks, Hotston gets his drama by introducing people who are outside of mainstream society. Our primary viewpoint character is Praveenthi Saal (Prab to her friends) who is one of those rebels who insists on living in a human body. She works as an Interlocutor, someone whose job it is to communicate with other organic lifeforms on behalf of the Arcology.

The other main character is Kercher, a starship pilot. In Hotston’s world, pilots are not heroes. They are largely unnecessary. But there is a need to quarantine dangerous people from the rest of society, and the Arcology does this by sentencing criminals to a life as pilots.

Having spent a good deal of effort on building his world, Hotston proceeds to blow it up. The plot of the novel revolves around a race of beings who appear to match, or even surpass, the Arcology’s mastery of Information Space. They launch a sudden surprise attack and most Arcology worlds are destroyed. Prab escapes because there is a ship on the planet where she lives and it requests the help on an Interlocutor in time for her to get on board. Kercher is the pilot.

Space Opera, because it does things on a grad scale, tends to result in death and destruction on a grand scale as well. This is something else that Hotston has thought about. Elsewhere he has talked about the issue of “Who Matters?” (See also my review of When There Are Wolves Again.) Most of the people on Prab’s homeworld die, including all of her family. For the rest of the novel she is haunted by the fact that she was able to save so few.

Our heroes then proceed to Akhanda, the massive ringworld that is the home base of the Arcology. There they are given a precious cargo and told to flee. For this service, the ship is given the name, Hanuman.

The name, of course, comes from the monkey god in the Hindu pantheon. Early in life, Hanuman is cursed by a sage and forgets most of his divine powers. This is all part of Hotston’s use of Hindu mythology in his worldbuilding, but I don’t know enough about it to comment further.

The rest of the book tells how Prab, Kercher and Hanuman manage to evade their enemies long enough to give the Arcology a chance of survival. Along the way their meet a number of interesting alien races (all of whom seem to have been bullied by the Arcology in the past and are delighting in its downfall). These include a race of three-legged and three-armed, communist, slave-trading aliens known as the Otto who live on a gold-plated rogue planet. They also include a race of giant bacterial colonies called the Operand who claim to have been around for billions of years.

I very much enjoyed reading the book, though I am not entirely convinced by the ending which seemed a little contrived. Possibly I didn’t understand the philosophical point that Hotston was making. I am also hoping that Hotston writes some more books in this world. Given the somewhat apocalyptic nature of the narrative, this might be complicated, but there are, I think, some unanswered questions.

Specifically Hotston talks quite a bit about immortality and the cycle of samsara: life, death and rebirth. As I noted earlier, most of the inhabitants of the Arcology are effectively immortal, until such time as an enemy destroys their data storage and all of their backups. Hotston spends quite a bit of time discussing the need for death, but he doesn’t talk much about birth. This is shame, because Prab is not actually human. She was created by her parents within Information Space because they wished to have a child. They are royally pissed that she chose to inhabit a human body. Actual humans are quite weird enough about the children that they engender. I’d like to know more about this more extreme situation.

Title: Project Hanuman
By: Stewart Hotston
Publisher: Angry Robot
Purchase links:
Amazon UK
Amazon US
Bookshop.org UK
See here for information about buying books though Salon Futura