One Level Down by Mary G. Thompson: Review by Gary K. Wolfe
One Level Down, Mary G. Thompson (Tachyon 978-1-61696-430-6, $16.95, 176pp, tp) April 2025.
Mary G. Thompson is another middle-grade and young-adult author now venturing into adult SF with One Level Down, an efficient VR thriller with some fairly familiar elements skillfully handled and given additional punch by a memorable narrator, a megalomaniacal villain who echoes the ‘‘mad scientists’’ of yore, and a persistent undertone of psychological horror. While simulated or artificial realities have been a popular SF theme since well before Gibson’s cyberspace – even L. Ron Hubbard took a whack at it with one of his early pulp stories – it’s become something of an aging cyberpunk warhorse since being popularized by writers from Philip K. Dick to Greg Egan and, of course, Gibson himself (not to mention films like The Matrix). One Level Down is set mostly in a simulation of a colony planet called Bella Inizio, which long ago proved so inhospitable that the colonists decided to have themselves uploaded into a virtual environment designed and managed by a huge corporation called Clawhammer. The narrator, Ella Harkin, is 58 years old, but has been trapped her entire life in a five-year-old’s body by her ‘‘father,’’ Philip, whose godlike power as the colony’s founder and manager enables him to act out his abusive obsessions, which include keeping a version of his dead daughter alive and unaging.
While this plot may bear coincidental similarities with Walter Jon Williams’s classic Nebula-winning story ‘‘Daddy’s World’’, Thompson puts her own spin on it not only with her planetary setting and with Ella’s haunting and haunted narrative voice, but by giving the disturbed father powers that for all purposes border on the supernatural. At times he reminded me of another classic horror story figure, the child in Jerome Bixby’s ‘‘It’s a Good Life’’; he can’t quite send characters to the cornfield, but can simply delete the code of anyone who threatens his sense of order, including unborn children and Ella’s own beloved stepmother Samantha, who he tells her has simply moved to ‘‘the Western settlement’’ as though she were a dead pet. Ella’s only real hope lies with a visiting Technician sent by the Clawhammer Corporation to perform a kind of tune-up on the colony’s programming, mostly fixing such minor glitches as disappearing birds. But this happens only every 60 years, and if Ella fails to gain the attention of the Technician Niclaus and report her father’s abuses, she’ll be trapped for another six decades.
Although Thompson’s interest in simulated realities lies mostly in how they can serve her plot – the novella is hardly as reality-bending as Philip K. Dick or as technically sophisticated as Greg Egan – she does take advantage of their thematic implications. The Technician Niclaus, it turns out, is simply visiting from a higher level simulation, and we only catch occasional glimpses of what the reality of Bella Inizio’s planet is really like, or what really happened back on Earth to motivate the population to shift into virtuality. She also entertains the notion, popular in various philosophical debates for the last few decades, that our own reality may be no more than a simulation, and that simulated environments might outnumber ‘‘real’’ environments throughout the universe. But the question of how to escape a simulation, or to gain control of one’s own programming, can make for a narrative strategy as familiar and yet original as a good locked-room murder mystery. In Thompson’s case, it can also serve as a suspenseful and often provocative exploration of obsession, control, and the search for freedom in a world that seems to be aligned against you. It’s something we can all identify with these days.
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Gary K. Wolfe is Emeritus Professor of Humanities at Roosevelt University and a reviewer for Locus magazine since 1991. His reviews have been collected in Soundings (BSFA Award 2006; Hugo nominee), Bearings (Hugo nominee 2011), and Sightings (2011), and his Evaporating Genres: Essays on Fantastic Literature (Wesleyan) received the Locus Award in 2012. Earlier books include The Known and the Unknown: The Iconography of Science Fiction (Eaton Award, 1981), Harlan Ellison: The Edge of Forever (with Ellen Weil, 2002), and David Lindsay (1982). For the Library of America, he edited American Science Fiction: Nine Classic Novels of the 1950s in 2012, and a similar set for the 1960s. He has received the Pilgrim Award from the Science Fiction Research Association, the Distinguished Scholarship Award from the International Association for the Fantastic in the Arts, and a Special World Fantasy Award for criticism. His 24-lecture series How Great Science Fiction Works appeared from The Great Courses in 2016. He has received six Hugo nominations, two for his reviews collections and four for The Coode Street Podcast, which he has co-hosted with Jonathan Strahan for more than 300 episodes. He lives in Chicago.
This review and more like it in the January 2025 issue of Locus.
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