In The Devil Delivered, Erikson is the devil who delivers us a tale of a grim near future that may already be at least half true. The tale is predicated upon a disastrous state of the Earth where just being outside too long can roast your brain and set in some kind of radiation sickness. Yet, things are adapting to this new environment quickly and life goes on, somehow. With this new condition of the world comes new conditions of politics and statecraft that arise. The Lakota nation is now a separate governing entity and is being intruded upon by corporations that have the power of, or more power than, most national governments. That is the best I can put the setting together without a re-read as Erikson doesn’t give us too many details about the state of the world. This story focuses more on individual actors trying to find their place and do the right thing. Nominally, this “right thing” isn’t what everyone else wants and is considered to be quite crazy.
This story was originally published back in 2005, so it makes sense that the concerns of digital data and loss of history were front and center thematically. Extinction becomes a concept not just of species and cultures, but of information as well. Answers are extinct, is one line from the many insightful thoughts thrown out to us. Erikson equates archaeological concepts with the loss of information through corporate spin and popular ignorance. He also explores the concept of manifest destiny as being just another manufactured idea by those in power to sell off genocide as a policy and practical practice. A really sobering contextualization of the human history of expansion and warfare. One character refers to it as the momentary logic of brutality. Yet, don’t be too comfortable with the concept of the noble savage downtrodden by a technologically superior society. Erikson rips that concept apart with his own savage speculation of what would have happened had the roles been reversed.
One thing that really stuck out was the concept of online conspiracy forums. Some of the dialogue in this story is placed in a format that is very much in play today. It reads like any discussion you can find in online chat platforms like “Discord”. Where a bunch of like minded individuals can get together and rant about the state of the world and, in a more sinister sense for the sake of the story, plot about what to do about it. It was quite eerie reading this, because it seems really on the mark and relevant to how information and dis-information is distributed today.
This isn’t a story that’s going to give you answers. Answers are extinct. It is going to make you re-think how you think about history, society and the possibilities of the future. Don’t go into this expecting a riveting, heroic, sci-fi, post apocalyptic tale. Go into it as a thought experiment gone wild where the devil does indeed, deliver.
