Web of Angels
by John M. Ford
Reviewed by Galen Strickland
Posted April 23, 2024
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I received a digital review copy of Web of Angels from Edelweiss in exchange for an honest review. Honestly, I am not sure I can write a coherent review. It is a strange book, with strange characters, living within a strange galaxy-spanning civilization. It is not a new book, but a reissue of John M. Ford's debut novel from 1980. It comes from Tor Publishing, who have reissued two other Ford novels under their Tor Essentials banner (The Dragon Waiting, and Growing Up Weightless), although this one is not on the Essentials list, which now comprises twenty-nine titles. It reads a lot like a cyberpunk tale, even though it predates Bruce Bethke's story of that name by three years, and William Gibson's Neuromancer by four. Yet I would be inclined to call it cyberpunk if not for two things. The first is the new introduction by Cory Doctorow, which I re-read after finishing the novel. The other is a passage from the book itself.
Cyberpunk and "cyberspace" deal with computers, and particularly people who have been enhanced with implants and peripherals that enable them to inhabit and interact with cyberspace. The main character says the Web he manipulates is not a computer, and Doctorow's introduction mentions the Web's progenitor, which is also confirmed by the company that controls it: Bell Stellar. Yes, the Bell Telephone Company, which for many years held a monopoly on both the telephone lines and the instruments consumers could use to access them. Before Bell was broken up into multiple subsidiaries (which didn't actually dismantle the monopoly) a group of experimenters, which in computer terms would be called hackers, developed codes that could circumvent long distance charges. In Ford's tale Bell Stellar still holds a monopoly, although no longer limited to physical phone lines. Their reach is wherever mankind has gone in space, including outside the Milky Way. Those who learn how to go beyond what Bell Stellar allows on their Websets are known as Webspinners. Bell Stellar's enforcement arm is CIRCE; Combined Intersystem Regulation and Control Executive. If they suspect their equipment has been invaded, altered, or tampered with, CIRCE was empowered to "terminate suspects with extreme prejudice." Because of that regulation, Grailer Diamede assumes CIRCE is responsible for entities he has encountered while webspinning, known as Geisthounds.
Grailer is in his late teens when we first encounter him, but his story encompasses many years, and many voyages on faster-than-light spaceships, as well as undergoing Lifespan treatments. I believe he is in his 80s at the end of the book. There are two older men who vie to be his mentor, Mr. Aristede winning out over Dr. Taliesin. I lost track of the various names they all used over the years and in different locations, so I won't mention them. Either I missed a lot of exposition, or several events were skipped over or streamlined, but other people knew Grailer under different names, and different "professions," but I couldn't tell you how many times, and to whom, he presented himself as those other personas. He is obviously very good at webspinning, since on one occasion he appeared before the head of CIRCE, but they accepted him as who he said he was at that time, and was allowed to leave without question. Aristede either told him where to go to discover information, or else Grailer took it upon himself to investigate CIRCE and the Geisthounds, who he blamed for the death of a woman he loved. I'm not going to tell you what he found, nor what he did with the information.
In one of the very first articles I wrote, I mentioned several books that were in the cyberpunk vein long before the '80s when the term was coined, and Doctorow mentions a few others in his introduction. In promoting a book (or film or TV show) many people use the term 'comp,' meaing a comparison of their work with other familiar titles. "This is like X meets Y, with a dash of Z." While reading I was thinking of how I would comp this book, and here is but one example. "If Bernard Wolfe, Alfred Bester, and James Tiptree Jr. produced a mutual clone, and the clone mated with Norman Spinrad, and their progeny wrote a screenplay intended for the Wachowskis, but they declined it in favor of their own Matrix script," it might give you an idea of how wild Web of Angels is. It is not a book I can recommend at this time, although I am sure it will appeal to others. I am not inclined to buy it, but I'll keep the review copy and may re-read it at some point. I may even read other books by Ford, the two Essential titles both being award winners. I cannot recall reading him before, but I have some anthologies that include a few stories, but they are very long anthos, and I doubt I read everything. Searches have revealed that he was highly regarded by other writers, particularly Neil Gaiman and Robert Jordan. The latter said Ford was the best writer in America. But Tom Clancy once said that of John Varley, and I have said it of Gene Wolfe. Based on this one book, I would not say it of Ford at this time. YMMV.
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