Vertigo (1978) isn’t from Bob Shaw’s
vintage period, but neither is it one of the less successful novels from
the 1980s, when some of the passion seemed to leave him for a while. It
concerns a much cherished human ambition — personal flight — and the
consequences for us poor infallible humans. It’s true, and many SF
authors would back this up — but people should never be allowed new
inventions, because great as technology may be, it’s always going to be
screwed up one way or the other.
So in Vertigo, Bob Shaw delivers a world
in which aeroplanes have been largely forgotten due to the dangers
posed by vast hordes of individual flyers wearing their personal
counter-gravity devices, and as an amusing aside, scores of people are
killed each month by falling objects dropped by these flyers. Folk
navigate by glowing lines in the sky called Bilasers, but unlike most of
Bob Shaw’s preceding novels, it doesn’t so much deal with the
technology as the people who use it.
Like a lot of SF, you get the sense in
Bob Shaw’s Vertigo that what you are reading is our own world, thinly
disguised, and this is helped along with the emphasis on characters, and
the hordes of typical social groups that we come across. All you need
to do is imagine what teenage gangs would be like if they had personal
counter-gravity devices, and you are half way there — because they
wouldn’t be hanging around the chip shop, but instead they’d be doing
what they do in Vertigo, and terrorising rooftops, flying here and there
while high on drugs and up to no good — such as playing chicken with
commuters.
It means that whereas you don’t get a
full on SF novel, it means that with Bob Shaw and Vertigo you get
something more akin to social satire and black comedy, in which the ills
of the world are amplified by seeing that world gone crazy with a new
technology. At heart, Vertigo is a story not unlike say the film The
Wild One, and talks about youth gangs, people’s inability to deal with
them, and the ultimate fact of those same people taking the law into
their own hands. Having said that, the passage that sticks with
everybody when reading Bob Shaw’s Vertigo, isn’t anything to do with
technology, flight or science, but is (if you will recall) a funny story
about a shopkeeper and some boxes of matches.
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