McKinney’s Timeline for Human Devolution

After reading Water City Trilogy, a sci-fi triptych out of Hieronymus Bosch, you may never look at your phone the same way again. 

A powerful parable about the illusion of free will and the poison of ego couched in a fast-paced, wisecrack-filled detective story, the novels jolly you along the road to environmental and technological disaster. It’s a swell ride, exhilarating, the prose crackling. Time and again, though, Chris McKinney is waiting around the corner to stick you with a shiv.

The series does what the best sci-fi does, fast-forwarding our rapture at evolving technologies, including Silicon Valley’s current “life extension” dream of living forever. It incorporates our species’ gullibility over messianic figures and narratives. It celebrates our talent for exploiting each other and the planet.

As a kamaʻāina bonus, it also laughs at our pretentions. Or at least those of all the business-booster Hawai‘i politicians and economic experts who’ve prophesized for decades that these islands would one day be the center of the Pacific Rim. Well, McKinney makes it happen, folks. At the start of the first book, we’re Water City, the undersea hub of the world. A world at peace, unified, harmonious. Big whoop!

Only, in Book One, set in 2142, everyone lives in “sea scrapers” deep below the waves to escape climate change. Also, as we find out in that first book, Midnight, Water City, there is no memory of Hawai‘i and no Native Hawaiians. If fact, there’s hardly any above-ground population at all, other than the jet-setting rich; a serene maternal scientist who rules the world like Prospero, granting those rich a way to double their lifespans; and a toxic dump that used to be the American Midwest full of Mad Max mutants who just love that pollution.

If this is what utopia looks like… 

In Midnight the clock strikes doom for 40 years of peace. The second book, Eventide, Water City, which came out this summer, chronicles the aftermath of the global disaster that kicks off in Water City, a.k.a. Hawai‘i. And now here comes the endgame, Sunset, Water City, the third and final volume from Soho Press, publishing December 9.

(DaShop is hosting a launch party Dec. 2 from 3-5 pm—see you there!)

How did we get here? 

When I texted Chris McKinney back in April of 2019 asking what he was working on I didn’t expect to hear that he’d taken on the future of the human race.

After all, McKinney is Hawai‘i’s hawk-eyed social chronicler, our Dreiser and Zola. Although there’s dark laughter and bittersweet poignancy in his books, we don’t go to McKinney for the usual mix plate of genial plantation comedy and gushing natural-world lyricism heightened by supernatural special effects. Certainly not for the pleasurable daydream distraction of alternative worlds.

“That asteroid was a fraud, a pretext created to establish a new world order and from there, human unity and universal peace—at the price of autonomy, thinking, and a social order weighted toward the wealthy.”

McKinney doesn’t dilute. He’s all straight, no chaser. So I was genuinely surprised when he wrote back to say he’d finished a sci-fi noir detective novel set in the future. I emailed back to ask for details. “The sci-fi novel I mentioned is actually set in Hawai‘i (futuristic Big Island, big ass telescopes, sea scrapers, no Hawaiian place names),” he replied. “The main character is a detective, it’s definitely noir, and it is a murder mystery.”

I knew he was going through a phase. A film phase, that is, something Hawai‘i’s Creative Lab encourages among local writers, which has proved to be a valuable bridge for those frustrated at hitting our local literary ceiling. Creativity needs multiple challenges and outlets to avoid staleness and entropy. (Baking and bodysurfing don’t quite cut it, but writing for THROB does.) I’d heard he’d doubled down and written and produced one of those shoestring indie films you rarely get to see. (Haole was directed by James Sereno and released in 2019.)

But sci-fi noir? Hawai‘i as a futuristic test-bed? “Is it a series?” I emailed back. His reply: “I hadn’t thought of that.” By the time he’d sold the first book to venerable New York indie Soho, it was a trilogy and their first foray into publishing sci-fi.

When I finally got my hands on Midnight, Water City a year later, in a galley from the publishers, I fell headlong into his world of 2142, one in which the entire planet is blissfully if boringly at peace—thanks to the intervention of a telescope on what is obviously Mauna Kea.

Trust Us. We’re Scientists!

Yes, do stop to savor the irony—Mauna Kea being the first of a bunch of reversals embedded in the series. Each twist seems to dare us to imagine that we might actually be wrong. Wrong in our beliefs, causes, lives. Not a cool feeling, for instance if you’re on your phone all the time, or follow TED Talks about Silicon Valley’s life-extending routines. Or, in a real third-rail situation, if you’re one of those who think shutting down construction of Mauna Kea’s monster telescope is a no-brainer.

Hold that thought. Because in Midnight 40 years of world peace brought about by Mauna Kea’s uber-TMT is about to come to an end. First a murder opens Pandora’s Box. And our noir-detective narrator is on the case. He’s an 80-year-old life-extended bent ex-cop who sees murder in colors, even before it happens. A useful knack, and a curse.

But he’s never seen anything like the gruesome vivisection of his employer, Akira Kimura, the scientist savior whose big-ass telescope spotted the asteroid coming to destroy us, thus allowing her heroic intervention with an even bigger-ass space laser named Ascalon.

Akira Kimura is revered. People around the world name their children Ascalon after her laser. Who would kill God?

Well, there are suspects. It seems that while Kimura was unifying the world in a kumbaya embrace, important dissenters who questioned and might’ve stopped the telescope and laser were assassinated on the down-low by none other than our cask-aged, still spry detective. It was such a dirty business he’s been having second thoughts, especially since activists killed his first wife and children in revenge.

Following Kimura’s murder a second shock unhinges the world. The laser scar she’d left in place across the sky, in a Pink Floyd-style flourish to remind Earthlings to be excellent to one another and never question science, vanishes.

The culprit/murderer is Akira’s bizarrely, genetically modified daughter Ascalon Lee. Like the creature from Alien only hotter, she has lethal and evolutionarily superior capabilities, able to shape-shift and control other people’s behavior and minds. Also, a very spicy tail. Soon she and the anti-hero shamus are engaged in a head-spinning battle of words, weapons and double-crosses. Nice people die. The human world disintegrates.

Good triumphs, but our anti-hero’s victory over Ascalon is qualified by his discovery that her mother, his employer Akira Kimura, Earth’s science god on high, is also a monster. That asteroid was a fraud, a pretext created to establish a new world order and from there, human unity and universal peace—at the price of autonomy, thinking, and a social order weighted toward the wealthy.

That makes him a monster, too. One who will do anything to protect his second wife and their daughter, also named Ascalon after the laser.

Becoming Un-Human

The Water City Trilogy has the serene confidence and stirring invention we hope to get from our world-building narratives. It’s also is a capper of sorts to McKinney’s six social realist novels published by Bennett Hymer at Mutual (The Tattoo, The Queen of Tears, Bolohead Row, Mililani Mauka, Boi No Good and Yakadoshi: Age of Calamity). Those books laid essential stepping stones for Hawai‘i’s next literary generations.

In novel after novel McKinney has seemed unable to shake a moral obligation to surface the details of what our self-regarding and sanctimonious political and business elite do to keep the rest of us down, particularly those who are the worst off. Now, he seems to be saying, our troubles and challenges come from who controls tech and genetics and our response to climate change. It does make sense to set the story here, given the quantum boost given gene-splicing by the Big Island’s own Nobel Prize winner, Jennifer Doundas, whose CRISPR tool enables everything in the Water City Trilogy.

If Book One, Midnight, gives us a world at peace, unified and whipped into a bland human humus, Book Two, Eventide, gives us the world eight years after everything broke. Much weirdness has ensued, but it’s oddly familiar. Half of the action take place in The Great Leachate, a.k.a. the Midwest. McKinney’s vision of this spaghetti Western/Westworld/Mad Max destruction derby is a singularly demented comic riff. It’s also on point.

For instance, here’s a scene in The Great Leachate that made me think of Florida today, and Cormac McCarthy’s The Road:

“I pass the aquarium. Through the murk, I look at moldy, toy plastic sea life spread like gravel on the bottom. Suddenly, a little girl’s face pops from the murk and presses against the glass. She’s missing both eyes. Poor kid. I wanna pull her out of the murk and bring her home, too, but I need to…get the fuck out of here before these people start sniffing at me and think, Finger lickin’ good.”

For those humans who haven’t cast their lot with the mutants of The Great Leachate, the mandatory tech accoutrement is an iE, a floating combination smartphone, computer and surveillance tool that hovers by one’s head. “DNA encrypted to its individual user, the sucker can store an almost endless amount of data,” McKinney’s elderly ageless detective narrates. Thanks to iE we also have Thought Talk, person-to-person telepathy.

The heart of the second book, though, are those genetically modified Science Gods who turn the rest of us into their pawns and playthings. In one corner we have Akira Kimura, ego-tripping mass manipulator, a sort of Zuck Jesus who’s casually raptured 99% of humanity. In the other corner there’s Ascalon Lee, a female Elon with a spiny tail, the better to gut you with.

“The Water City Trilogy is our invitation to slow down and just think. Do we want more years, more lives? What happens to birthrate, then? Do we want to colonize the galaxies if we’re reduced to germs of greed and ego?”

Naturally, just in any proper myth or Marvel franchise spinoff, mother and daughter are bitter enemies. Just as naturally, McKinney finds ways to shift our sympathy from one to the other.

He also shifts narrators, once or twice giving us a taste of what it feels like to have Akira Kimura inside your head via Thought Talk, knowing your thoughts, commenting on them, giving orders. (Are you sure you want that cochlear implant iPhone?)

Akira and Ascalon Lee can also take over bodies, one of which turns out to be the detective’s daughter. Not to spoil anything, but the results are shocking.

But, by now, our detective has been given a genetic clone of his younger self—a new body, called a HusC—and is so stoked by his rejuvenation he begins to worry he’s misplaced something. His humanity. The ability to feel. To feel grief over his daughter’s death.

By Book Three, Sunset, we’re in a Boschian playland. Like a Bosch painting, you want to study every corner of McKinney’s prose. After dying a couple of times, and making his comeback in that new HusC, our very old detective is no longer the main narrator because his daughter, also back from the dead, is very much her own woman. Ascalon is now the main character and moral fulcrum, if I can mix my Archimedes.

I can’t ethically give away what happens next. Let’s just say that if you are lucky enough to escape Akira Kimura’s great rapture that disappeared 99% of the planet’s population, you become an ant-like class of cyborg serfs, Gardeners, devoted to repairing environmental damage, erasing mankind’s cities, and doing what Kimura commands via OneVoice.

And what does Kimura want? To spray the universe with voracious little eyeball-sized Kimura clones, space invaders who colonize everything they encounter. Like Pac-Man, basically.

As to where Kimura gets all those eyeballs, Gardeners volunteer to undergo a mass-reduction process, shrinking themselves down, down, down. If this seems a little much, there is a philosophical basis—think Leibnitz’s monads, or our cellular origins. I laughed in shock at McKinney’s portrayal of humans stacked in a cave like rows of stinky French cheeses, melting down slowly into their essence, an eyeball. This is some high-level shit. It’s wicked.

It also inverts our evolutionary cycle, displaying a powerful grasp of what technology is doing to us right now—and its potential down the road to dehumanize us, enchain us, and then turn us to the ends of the very few in control.

Those of us living on invasive/invader-ravaged islands like Hawai‘i may see a parable here, or a parallel. It may not feel like much of a joke, and in Book Three the laughs do get fewer. Certainly Ascalon the detective’s daughter is motivated by horror to do everything she can to free the Gardeners. She mounts a last-ditch mission to undo the slave-nation that Akira Kimura has created—and to prevent her plan to suffuse the universe with the Holy Spirit of Herself.

What happens? Well, I’m writing this review with 30 pages to go in order to keep my mind wide open. But I know how it ends. We’ll do something stupid, something human. We may even eliminate ourselves.

But before we do, the Water City Trilogy is our invitation to slow down and just think. Do we want more years, more lives? What happens to birthrate, then? Do we want to colonize the galaxies if we’re reduced to germs of greed and ego? Is AI the enemy of the species, or is it those who have gained access to our psyches using irresistible algorithms and conveniently implanted technological enhancements?

I think of all my friends who’ve had knee and hip replacements. I think of repaired hearts and regrown white blood cells. The chemo coursing through the veins of so many loved ones. The steel umbrella in the aortic artery. The listening device I sometimes stick in my ear. The suite of devices that apparently overheard a family discussion about volunteering over the holidays and cued up “Volunteers of America” and “We Can Be Together” by Jefferson Airplane on Pandora for me, which I hadn’t heard in decades. (Worth a listen in sequence here, and here.)

Not having listened to either song since the days of Vietnam war protests, I was surprised to be moved when, at the penultimate chorus of “We Can Be Together,” Grace Slick’s ice-cold bell-like voice slices through the close harmonies to ad-lib: “Up against the wall, motherfucker! Tear down the wall!” Something of that clarion self-belief animates young Ascalon the detective’s daughter’s decision to disconnect the human race from OneVoice, no matter how dependent we’ve grown.

In its way it's as momentous a decision as Akira Kimura’s to wipe out 99% of the former population. And that’s another Water City reason to pause and think, too.

Who knows? Maybe all this thinking about Water City will convince me to leave my phone behind the next time I go for a walk. If my brand-new, shiny, apple-red device will let me, that is.

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Image by Chutter.