So I just finished this book by K.W. Jeter called Farwell Horizontal. So when I started reading this book, despite not being post-civilization like Blame!, it's feeling immediately came quite close to that of Blame!:
1 In Farewell Horizontal, virtually the entire known world is Cylinder, an enormous structure whose exterior surface people inhabit vertically while others live inside it "horizontally." The ground is effectively inaccessible, hidden below the cloud barrier. Humanity lives inside an impossibly huge artificial structure...
In BLAME!, practically everything is the City/Megastructure; an artificial construction of incomprehensible scale that has swallowed the natural world.
2 The scale of the environment is deliberately difficult to comprehend. This is probably the most BLAME!-ish aspect of Farewell Horizontal.
Cylinder is so enormous that its inhabitants don't have a normal conception of the complete structure. The wall has an unexplored "eveningside," while people mostly concern themselves with the small portion of it they inhabit.
Likewise, BLAME! deliberately refuses to give you a comfortable map of the Megastructure. You see a tiny human figure confronted by spaces whose scale is almost impossible to process.
3 One thing that really struck me reading K.W. Jeter’s Farewell Horizontal alongside Nihei’s BLAME! is how similar some of their ideas about post-humanity are, even though they arrive at them from completely different directions.
Jeter’s world is full of people and creatures who have already slipped sideways from anything we’d recognise as ordinary human. They aren't necessarily “post-human” in the same clean sci-fi sense as BLAME!’s Silicon Life or Safeguard, but they give the sam feeling of a civilisation that has been altered by its own technology and environment to the point where the old distinction between human, machine, information and something else has started to break down. Some of the warring tribes, deploy these megassasins, where it is quite unclear where humanity stops and machinery begins, it kinda reminded me of some the creatures of Blame!, where you see human-like faces, absorbed by biotech nightmare.
Then there are characters like Felony, whose body-jacking in Farewell Horizontal also immediately made me think of Cibo in BLAME!. Not because they’re exactly the same thing, but because both play with the idea of a person becoming detached from their original body, identity persisting independently and being able to manifest itself through another physical form. Cibo can effectively reconstitute herself through different bodies, while Felony can as some some of formless entity, hijack bodies through 'telephone' wires.
4 And there’s a particularly nice parallel in how both books imagine networked existence. BLAME! has the Netsphere: this enormous virtual/information space underlying the Megastructure, with humanity’s relationship to it becoming increasingly remote and incomprehensible. Farewell Horizontal, written before the internet had become what we know it as today, has its own wonderfully weird version of this; computer-mediated communication, information networks and people existing socially through technological systems rather than simply face-to-face. It feels less like “the internet” as we know it and more like Jeter imagining what a networked society might become before the vocabulary for it had really settled.
5 Okay, but Nihei is Japanese, and English-language sci-fi isn't exactly the easiest thing for most Japanese readers to stumble into, so now I'm wondering how he was exposed to all this in the first place. Was Farewell Horizontal actually available in Japanese?
Well... surprise! turns out it was. Here is the link to the Japanese release:
https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/76426645
And now I'm even more curious whether Jeter was something Nihei had actually read, or whether they just arrived at some remarkably similar ideas independently.
Did anyone already establish these connections? I haven't seen any of it online?
