This review first appeared in the BSFA Review issue 6 (Spring 2019)
Sweet Dreams by Tricia Sullivan (Gollancz, 2017)
Reviewed by Nick Hubble
Sullivan’s tour-de-force Clarke-Award shortlisted novel of 2016, Occupy Me, was always going to be a tough act for her to follow, even if she hadn’t been simultaneously engaged in gaining a Masters and then starting a PhD in Astrophysics. Wisely, therefore, she doesn’t attempt the same fullscale assault on the patriarchal norms of narrative in Sweet Dreams, but aims instead for something lighter, although not necessarily without an edge, and more entertaining. In her ‘Acknowledgments’, she describes Sweet Dreams as her ‘twisted homage’ to Elizabeth Peter’s Vicky Bliss novels.
Charlie Aaron is a ‘dreamhacker’, which is not as glamorous as it sounds. The first client we encounter her trying to help is a perpetually farting middle-aged woman called Mrs Haugh-Womaur, who is plagued by a recurring dream of having to invigilate a History A-Level exam in the nude while unruly students catapult plastic Angry Birds piggies at her. Charlie’s attempt to resolve the problem, by using her capacity for ‘lucid-dreaming’ her way into other people’s dreams, is thwarted first by her failure to dream in sync with Haugh-Wombaur and then by her need to vacate the bedroom in search of fresh air. This proves her undoing of course because otherwise she would not have read the message from her ex, Antonio, asking her to take on his current girlfriend as a client, which sets off a sequence of events that ends with Charlie being interrogated by the Dream Police after the girlfriend is found to have drowned herself in the bath when sleepwalking while Charlie is in a hotel room with her. In keeping with the breathless, madcap tone of the novel, this interrogation is played for laughs as becomes obvious when the conversation gets sidetracked by the question of the size of Antonio’s dick; a subject that continually arises until the multiple-orgasmic sex scene half way through the novel.
When quizzed by the Dream Police on her credentials as a ‘dreamhacker’, Charlie has only her ‘elevator pitch’ to fall back on: ‘Secret Diary of a Call Girl meets Inception!’. It is tempting to speculate that this might have been the initial pitch to Gollancz and the possibility certainly crossed the mind of this reader that Sullivan is having a joke at someone’s expense here. Whether this is targeted at the commercial demands of publishers or the tendency of critics to detect the heresy of such commercialism in the most unlikely places is open to question. The point is that Sullivan is saying that she pretty much no longer cares about such considerations. As she implied in a post on her blog in 2015, she is fed up with having her work judged as failing to meet prescriptions – by publishers or critics – of what sf is. It was not a question, she insisted, of her periodically abandoning sf, it was sf abandoning her and her commitment to a literature of possibility and imagination. Since then she has been writing sf on her own terms by pulling no punches and taking no prisoners.
So what if her heroine is a narcoleptic who ‘gets lost on the way from the toilet to the fridge’ and manipulated by just about everyone surrounding her, she is also the only person in 2020s London aware of the fact that ‘all of us fleshmuppets are dreaming and the A[ugmented] R[eality] is awake’. We are not using the virtual technology that proliferates in the novel – mostly in the form of anthropomorphised advertising – but nor is it a malevolent form of AI using us; rather, the interface in the brain between fleshmuppets and tech is creating a new ‘we’, defined by its difference from the remnants of hierarchically-constricted corporations and intelligence agencies. Sweet Dreams is a delirious mess of overdetermined narrative strands that will infuriate those obsessed with the clarity of symbolic order, but as Charlie quips to one of the novel’s power-hungry bad guys, ‘zero-sum games are so last century, mate’.
Prospective Cultures 