Review: Great North Road (2013)

Peter F. Hamilton, Great North Road (Pan Macmillan, 2013, 1104 pp.) 

This review first appeared in Foundation Vol. 43, No. 118 (Autumn 2014), pp. 135-140. It's been very slightly amended. Thank you to Andy Sawyer, Maureen Kincaid-Speller, Paul March-Russell, and Tony Keen.

There is a body in the Tyne, and its autopsy suggests extraterrestrial incursion. When the case lands on Detective Sidney Hurst’s desk, so do the nebulous agendas of innumerable civil, political, military and corporate elites. Meanwhile, through the shimmer of Newcastle’s stargate, a military expedition strikes out into the vast unexplored jungles of St Libra, Sirius – oblivious to a mustering ecological cataclysm – in search of sentient life. Among them is civilian advisor Angela Tramelo, fresh from serving twenty years for a brutal massacre which she has always maintained was the work of an alien life form; her team is headed by Colonel Vance Elston, the same spook who twenty years earlier tortured her and suppressed key evidence at her trial. We can expect that people on this trip will get crabby. 

The relationship between crime fiction and science fiction is an extremely intricate one. Any work which is serious about synthesizing the two tends to discover its own distinctive pattern of complements, affi nities, tradeoffs and contradictions. Ronald Knox’s fourth ‘fair play’ commandment for Golden Age crime writers (‘No hitherto undiscovered poisons may be used, nor any appliance which will need a long scientific explanation at the end’) suggests one way in which friction may emerge. To hide its solutions in plain sight, the clue-puzzle relies heavily on implication, on a shared social consensus. As often as not, it is not really until the last page of an sf novel that the reader knows enough about its world to start making clue-puzzle-style guesses about its secrets.

Great North Road is not particularly concerned with fair play. Data is supplied in whatever order is presumed to be most exciting. For much of the time, the novel solicitously stokes the possibility that Angela Tramelo really is responsible for the brutal massacre for which she’s been imprisoned. Eventually the backstory becomes interspersed through the main storyline, gradually rolling towards this alarming incident. The pattern of interleaved linear timelines is well established: but when we expect to find Tramelo either exonerated or recast as antihero, instead we confront … an ambiguous aftermath. We have skipped the massacre. Tramelo is scrabbling in panic, slicked with blood, her contribution still indeterminate.

It is especially awkward that Great North Road sustains such indeterminacy whilst we pay frequent visits to Tramelo’s consciousness. Of course, many crime authors invite us to peer into characters’ heads without letting us glimpse their guilt or innocence. Guilty people are often experts at having innocent thoughts. But there must be a difference between allowing leeway for sleights-of-hand and excusing authors for withholding whatever they feel is convenient. So how might we formulate that difference? You could say authors should not artificially keep things from their readers. But that’s only a mildly satisfying way of capturing it. Literature is artifice through-and-through: why does only some of it strike us as illegitimate?

Another approach holds that crime fiction should offer a consistent epistemology. That is, good crime fiction takes a stance on what knowledge is and how it can be achieved. As we read, we learn what happened, but we also learn something about learning itself. The electrifying story tacitly establishes parameters within which many other stories are feasible. Disclosures in Great North Road, by contrast, often seem artefacts of its formal idiosyncrasies. They give us very little that is portable or expandable. Sitting and waiting for it to be your turn to know is not a convincing model of how knowledge is produced. Readers work patiently and attentively through a towering stack of pages. Just like the police investigators they depict, we may be tempted to skim, but risk missing something important if we do. The meticulousness and staying power which the novel requires of us are the same virtues it valorises in Detective Sidney Hurst and his team.

It is interesting that the novel’s dazzling socio-technological premises – interstellar wormhole tech, shapeshifter implants, an elite dynasty of clones, longevity treatments, drugs you take by banging them on your neck – don’t radically reorganize its police procedural dimension. The novel does explore how detection is transformed by a regime of sophisticated forensics and ubiquitous surveillance and archiving. With all this advanced kit, must we basically watch our protagonist click ‘solve’, our only source of narrative tension the progress bar moving to 100%, with its cryptic contour of humps and downhill stretches?

But that is familiar territory for police procedurals with a contemporary or near-future setting. In C.S.I., as in Great North Road, the detection function is distributed across a network of experts and technologies. The middleranking officer occupies the hero slot, though not in quite the same way as the classic sleuth. In integrating a variety of specialist perspectives, the managerial perspective is only primus inter pares, not a transcendental arbiter of salience. There is no subject who experiences every stage of the solution, nor could such calculations in principle be fully performed within human experience. This partial decentring of the detective is mirrored by a partial decentring of criminality; there is a heightened interest in its systemic context, and a decoupling of the execution of social justice from the determination of legal culpability.

Great North Road does not, thankfully, trouble us with the professional fetishism or the glossy state triumphalism of C.S.I. The atmosphere is perhaps more closely matched by The Wire (2002-8). Hurst must bargain, cajole, orate, gain leverage, bend rules, cash in favours. There are no faces, no heels, only tweeners. The priorities of individuals seldom harmonize with those of their job description. Bureaucratic and technological systems don’t function as they should. Great North Road is uninterested in fair play conventions; nor does it seem fully committed to exposing the systematic context of its criminality. The politicking, loopholes, glitches and mercurial surges of social complexity tend to be dictated by storytelling imperatives, rather than providing storytelling with its scope and materials.

John Doe sloshing downstream, for instance, may be a reputable way of opening a contemporary police procedural yet it is unclear why anyone in 2142 should take such pains to put John Clone in the Tyne. The gangland body disposal team can anonymize cyborg corpses and hack into municipal surveillance systems. With relatively comprehensive surveillance of public space, shouldn’t we expect such well-resourced criminality to shift to private space? Is melting a bit of meat and bone in a private apartment really beyond them? But the body is not put in the river by gangsters, to sink without a trace; it is put there by Hamilton, to be found.

The way of life shown in Great North Road is not always minutely reflective of its social, economic and technological infrastructure. There are exceptions, but to sloganize somewhat: Far Future Tech, Near Future Customs, Manners, Mores. This incongruously contemporary cultural atmosphere is not necessarily uncomfortable. A proudly Geordie stargate is, in and of itself, a very fine thing to contemplate. Moreover, it’s possible that this atmosphere has not accumulated by unexamined failures of the imagination, but rather been deliberately wrought, as a self-styled clear-eyed provocation that some things never change.

Exhibitions of extrapolative rigor are one widely acknowledged tactic by which science fiction negotiates its mandate. An awkwardness can cling to tacit claims of rigor when the axioms rigorously worked upon are conspicuously a legacy. New space opera is often spotted proving its seriousness by how responsibly it sponges off a trust fund established by cyberpunk. Less well attested but equally important is the tactic of exclusionary rigor. Here what is necessary is that nothing break the spell. The grizzled capsule pilot who, engrossed in the archipelago of an approaching asteroid field, so much as carelessly sparks up a Camel is in peril of losing his legitimacy as an image of our future. Superfluous innovations are as risky as superfluous relics. Just as nothing must improperly last, so nothing must improperly change.

In Great North Road not much seems to have changed about the aesthetics, habitus and culture of corporations, the military, and the police and prisons. No doubt such choices are mixed up with extrapolative worldbuilding to some extent. But I suspect that how plausible they are is fundamentally a wager about their aesthetic intelligibility. In other words, their plausibility solicits preferences and associations formed independently of the novel’s future history. If men in green fatigues with machine guns don’t look out-of-place milling around in front of a stargate, then that has little to do with how probable that scene really is. It has everything to do with the saturation of the contemporary imagination by images of prevailing military institutions.

There is another front, also closely connected with taste, on which Great North Road doesn’t play it quite so safe. One effect of the central mystery is to pose the question: is ‘the alien’ – in the sense of a monstrous, sentient extraterrestrial organism, perhaps the hegemonic trope of science fiction – still a legitimate sf figure? Or is the alien now a spell-breaker, rather like a rocket or a UFO? Eight hundred pages in, we still do not know for certain if we are reading a story with aliens in it. Instead, we are treated to a pageant of proxies. It is as though we are asked, will clones do instead? Or, genetically modified humans; won’t they do? Cybernetically enhanced people; will they do? Extraterrestrial plant life, surely it will do? Then there is the Zanth. The Zanth is a sort of kaleidoscopic reality glitch, akin to an ecological catastrophe. But it receives the kind of treatment typically reserved for Heinlein’s ‘Bugs’ or Wells’ Martians. It even gets called an alien threat. So, will it do? What, exactly, do we need an alien for? And how badly do we need it?

In its collusion with the spectacle of multinational corporations and standing armies that just keep on standing, Great North Road invites a critique of ideology, but it does make fairly safe wagers vis-à-vis evoking a convincing and immersive future history. The ‘ET or not ET?’ business is a bolder bet, but one which pays off. The alien that might be in this story could even be read as knowingly retro-futuristic, a nod to the far-fetched hominids of an earlier era, some horror confined to the shadows because budget is too low to show it in the light. We may realize we do miss this alien and are prepared, after all, to make some allowances.

But Great North Road makes another wager which is neither bold nor really pays off. Just as corporate life has proved robust, and standing armies are standing in pretty much the same pose we left them in back in 2013, so too gender institutions have changed very little. The drip-fed revelations of Tramelo’s past, for instance, ooze sleazy glamour and gratuitous fan service. As we try to conceive of a credible 2140s, we may want to ask – as a rough benchmark – how have gender and sexual politics changed from the 1880s to the present day? Yet Great North Road gives us a deeply binary and subtly hierarchical world, peppered with hokey truisms about boys and girls, men and women, husbands and wives. 

Complexity is added, however, in the form of Hurst’s sidekick, Detective Ian Lanagin. We first meet Lanagin on duty, flirting with a pair of scantily clad lassies: ‘I’m in there, man. Did you see those lassies? Up for it they were, both of them’ (9). Lanagin is a manifesto for cyborg misogyny, who abuses police data systems to stalk his targets and devise his pickup strategies. As an institutionally fostered social type, and a case study in police sexuality at the intersection of voyeurism, chivalry and clout, Lanagin is one of the novel’s subtler achievements. But the resolution of his plot arc is unacceptable. When Lanagin meets his match – gorgeous, rich and, discomfitingly, class-inflected – revisionist implications ripple back across his previous frightening behaviour. Boys will be boys, seems to be the official line, but some day they all grow up and settle down. Lanagin’s emasculation is apparently being played for laughs. Are we soon to meet the predictable evolution of this comic character; grumbling, doting Lanagin under-the-thumb? Luckily, a monster slashes his throat out before we have to discover.

Great North Road is tricky to place ideologically. On balance, my impression was one of discreet Middle Englishness. Granted, the capitalism it portrays is one of corporate misdeeds, cronyism, corruption, decadence and precarity. Teamwork, even to the point of sacrificing oneself for a collective, rises and disports itself rather elegantly above this mire. But for all that the novel’s capitalism resembles our own, it is an embroidered version of the current regime. There's a kind of literary centrism at play here. What a left-wing reader could just about celebrate as a prophetic satire, a right-wing reader can still regard as a boundary flag – as a pathological and dysfunctional extreme implying, the relative moderation of our contemporary status quo. Perhaps Sid Hurst was a bit of an Ian Lanagin himself in his day! But now he is a decent, family man, doing what he has to do: possessive individualism and civil, vocational and familial privatism. We are supposed to like him, his long-suffering wife Jacinta, and their two impertinent kids. So if Hamilton is trying to please everyone, I think he catches the right-wing reader’s eye oftener.

That said, thoroughgoing Middle Englishness could never really survive an act of imaginative expression of such scale and ambition. There is ultimately a great deal to like about this novel. There is merit in the bare fact of being able to turn out 1,000-plus pages of proficient prose. Certain economies of scale kick in: a plot thread simply left hanging long enough then seized up again can feel satisfying in the same way as a plot twist can; and though Hamilton does not achieve the stylistic variety of, for instance, Iain M. Banks’ space opera, by the end of the novel a diverse grandeur has gradually accumulated.

There is some excellent interplay between passages of deliberately arduous information and often bloody action sequences. The St Libra narrative strand is dominated not so much by military science fiction as military logistics science fiction. The fine grain elaboration of its material culture is another of its admirable features, albeit at times a bit Top Gear. Hamilton is particularly proficient at contriving tense scenarios by layering together mundane and extraordinary mishaps. Sometimes the slow, detailed mode is also deployed as a crucible of tension in its own right. The plodding early phases of the expedition employs that mode, gradually establishing a potent sense of remoteness. There is a real sense that small decisions or acts of neglect can have tremendous consequences. The Zanth in particular is used sparingly but thrillingly; the novel’s closing sentences are excellent. Part of me was left wondering, however, whether Hamilton could have cast his exacting eye a little oftener in the direction of the human (posthuman) heart? Or indeed, what might he have written had he permitted himself complete absorption by his unfolding material, bringing to bear his considerable talents – his comprehensiveness, his copia, his evident interest in pacing and his skill at convergence – in a manner less attentive to his presumed readers, and to their presumed appetites for worlds and thrills?

Kim Stanley Robinson's Ministry for the Future

I liked and highly recommend Kim Stanley Robinson's The Ministry for the Future (2020), a big and miscellaneous quiltwork of a book, filled with vignettes, mini-essays, lists, and prose-poem riddles. It lays out a guardedly optimistic vision of the next few decades, and shows humans (and many other actors) mitigating and adapting to the climate crisis that is currently unfolding.

You could call it solarpunk, delivering a promise that genre intermittently delivers: gritty and realistic hope, integrating technological innovation with real economic and socio-political change. The Ministry for the Future is fiction, of course, but it often holds the interest in the same way non-fiction does. It is about us, it is about now. It exemplifies a kind of hard science fiction that is worth wanting, borrowing and synthesizing from across STEM, social sciences, arts and humanities, and other forms of expertise.

The Ministry for the Future gathers up numerous utopian sparks from contemporary radical and progressive projects and -- like a Magpie for the Future -- arranges them into a pleasing heap, rather than some rigid causal sequence. It is a novel filled with judicious gaps and uncertainties. About some ideas, the novel is enthusiastic, and about others it is lukewarm. For the most part, this is a book that doesn’t want to take things off the table. It does frame a few hopes as false hopes, perhaps: the notion that billionaires may start to show compassion and rationality if petitioned persuasively enough, for example. And while it has a lot of time for myriad diverse economy practices, including those of an anarchist cast, it ultimately sees governments, law, and central banks as key actors in any credible positive future. 

But not through their being seized. I'm especially interested in the novel's themes of violence and revolution. When we think of revolutionary violence (and maybe even when we try to put it into practice) we usually think of two things. There are protestors throwing things at lines of riot cops, as military vehicles rumble closer in the distance. And then there's the well-organised armed coup, seizing the state apparatus. So this sets up a lot of questions about how the two things might relate. But maybe these questions are sometimes red herrings. Because really, this is a rather narrow imaginary, one enthusiastically embraced by right wing media, but one which The Ministry of the Future tries in its own gentle way to dislodge. 

Because the actual histories of successful radical social change usually reveal a much more diverse array of tactics. If there must be a default way of thinking about the role of violence in revolutionary activity, maybe a good candidate is "militant self-defense." Many activities in Ministry's optimistic narrative fit this definition. I.e. one way the people in this book defend themselves is by conducting their paramilitary operations in secret. So secret, in fact, most of the time even the reader doesn't find out about them! They don't storm in trying to seize state power. Another way they defend themselves is by targeting the infrastructure and logistics the enemy is using to kill them. They presumably have fierce debates about what is and isn't acceptable (rejecting nonviolence doesn't mean "anything goes"). 

State power is still absolutely crucial to Robinson's optimistic vision, but he doesn't foresee seizing it. There are two prongs here. One, there is a vast and plural uprising which doesn't attempt to unify itself, but rather embraces a diversity of tactics, including paramilitary action aimed primarily at multinational corporations. Two, there is an intense, grinding badgering of states, and especially their central banks, to begrudgingly take more radical action than they otherwise would have. This sometimes involves gritting our teeth and putting things in terms they can understand. How can you have stable currencies if you don't have civilisation? Let them put the cart before the horse, if it will stop us all from riding off the cliff.

Stylistically, this won't be for everyone. Notes from meetings, flat and largely vague eye-witness accounts of extraordinary events, infodumps, mini-articles on topics in political economy, a giant list of names of organisations ... this is a book which has a very particular, very strange relationship with "boring" and "exciting," and how desirable these two things are, in what proportions and in what rhythms. It sometimes makes me think of grindy games, where what you are doing is certainly work, but oddly compelling and absorbing, and it draws you along in a way that mere entertainment might not. For some people, nyway. Others may find the whole thing a bizarre imposition.

Sometimes representations of nationality feel a bit cringe. Especially Ireland. The novel seems to have a sense of Irishness, or of a plausible Irish person's sense of their own Irishness, which I don't recognise anyway. I'm also not sure how credible I find Mary mentioning "some good" in the British Empire, and perhaps Stan's not aware what a right-wing talking point that is in these isles? But the grinding insistence on the reality of nations, ethnicities, and cultures is admirable, even if it sometimes generates awkwardness.

A longer review will appear in Stir magazine, focusing a little bit more on the novel's political economy.

Mind Seed review

This review originally appeared back in Interzone 272.

Mind Seed
Ed. David Gullen and Gary Couzens
T Party Books

Nine stories, mostly originals, by members of London writers’ group the T Party. The anthology is in memory of Denni Schnapp, who died in 2013. An introduction by Denni’s husband John Howroyd tells us a bit about her life. The last story, “Mind Seed,” is her own.

Perhaps there are two kinds of tale of possession. One kind is all about craving a uniform community. It’s about fear of interlopers, fear that others are secretly fundamentally different to you. Helen Callaghan’s “Sex and the Single Hive Mind” is closer to the second kind. It’s about craving plurality – desiring to become, under the rubric of compassion, fundamentally different from yourself. (Even if you don’t become, as Callaghan’s protagonist(s) puts it, “nice people”). It’s an engaging, agile opener, sparkling with sleaze rather than polish.

Fox McGeever’s “Evolution” is post-apocalyptic survivalism pared down for parable-esque force. The protagonist Cara is all alone, save some invasive xenomorphs and a wombful of weird son. The indistinct mechanisms of apocalypse – silver ships and white fire – convey an aura of rapture and end-times. Like any parable worth its salt (of the earth), “Evolution” accommodates many interpretations. It could just be about the remorse of isolated young parents, trying to live up to their received ideas about what Nature intends (e.g. breastfeeding). It could be about human’s eternal capacity to adapt, and yet also to evolve new chauvinisms, new borders (“antibodies” (p.35)). In one aching image, Cara sleeps beside her husband’s body, waking with one hand on her bump and the other on his chest: this story could be about the ethics of creating new humans, when there is no world left to nourish them. Rosanne Rabinowitz’s “Living in the Vertical World” is pieced together from real ingredients of that crumbling world: maybe Bosco Verticale in Porta Nuova, Milan (or more speculatively, Dickson Despommier’s “skyscraper-as-spaceship” research and advocacy) plus a crumb of Occupy, a crumb of Maker hipsterdom, a crumb of malevolent Monsanto IP litiginousness. It finishes on a “what-would-you-do?” and hints at the relationship between social bonds and foundational acts of violence.

So far I make Mind Seed sound very serious. But it’s also great fun. Stasis pods! Ship AI! Rovers! Thrust! Identities are rickety and unsound in “Sex and the Single Hive Mind,” and boundaries between individuals are unusually permeable. So there’s a small serendipity at the frontier between Callaghan’s story and McGeever’s “Evolution”: a character called Mark appears in each story, and for a moment, they feel like they are one overlapping, overspilling person. Something similar – only it’s deliberate – occurs in the most elegant moment of Ian Whates’s “Darkchild.” With the line “Darkchild sat alone” (p. 71), identities dovetail and meld. And here’s a spoiler: Darkchild is the prisoner of a dread trinket, a sort of Cthulhic desk ornament timewaster. You wonder: is the puzzle is solvable? “Water dripping somewhere” (p.61) is Darkchild’s only stimulus, obviously reminiscent of so-called Chinese Water Torture. A drip also suggests chaos theory: the deterministic but unpredictable coalescence and collapse of liquid at the lip of a tap. Obviously to escape, Darkchild must solve this non-linear function: but how to input her answer? Via varying the rhythm of her foetal-pose back-and-forth rocking of course! I bet your average Interzone reader would be out of there in a jiffy.

Deborah Walker’s myth-like “The Three Brother Cities” doesn’t give us a critique of the creeping surveillance requirements or algorithmic hubris of the contemporary smart city, so much as the sublime thrill of cosplaying Cair Paravel or Gormenghast or Ambergris (. . . in space!). If my eyebrows weren’t zotzed by all that rocket thrust, I might cock one at the hokey gender dynamics of Owton & Couzens’s pleasantly mercurial, Golden Age-ish “Rockhopper.”Anybody stasis pod stowaways who awaken in the Twenty-Third Century, don’t fret! – it’s still 100% fine to slip into something more feminine and melt into a nearby burly chest. But listen, if you thought “Rockhopper” was the biggest jolt of gee-whizz space opera retro you’re likely to guzzle all year, that’s because you haven’t yet read Markus Wolfson’s “Alien Invaders.” Wolfson’s “Alien Invaders” is, for starters, entitled “Alien Invaders,” and it’s a heady cocktail of unload-my-space-pistol-right-in-your-tentacles capers, pulpier than a pineapple, with a twisty straw of what-if-the-true-monsters-are-dot-dot-dot-us?

Perhaps it’s the relatively cosy contributor-base that gives this anthology such bracing variety – even a genuinely unpredictable variety of varieties. There are patterns however. There’s a lot of First Contact – or at least Still-In-That-Awkward-Stage-Of-Getting-To-Know-You Contact. There’s fruitfulness, verdant abundance. No story is explicitly elegaic, but many – and above all, Schnapp’s own “Mind Seed” – take acceptance for their theme. With humour, bluntness, and effervescence, “Mind Seed” tells the tale of Leia’s cancer treatment by full brain emulation (“A toddler aged thirty-two and a half [...] I spun Leia in my arms”), and of her sister Zif’s transition from luddite-ish anti-cyborg hold-out (“stone ager” (p. 166)) to cyborg and, ultimately, to intrastellar voyager.

Several stories unite an immoderate intensity of desolation with an equal intensity of hopefulness. Nina Allan’s “Bird Songs at Eventide” is one gorgeously honed example. Humanity manifests in a detached, almost hardboiled manner. Whimsical associative shifts are deployed with clinical precision. The prickliness of the prosody, and the sumptuousness of sense-data, are self-consiously inadequate compensation for a loss without any clear boundaries: loss of a lover’s love, of a planet, of something. Meanwhile, the living cosmos teems.

Profits from the anthology go to Next Generation Nepal, an anti-child-trafficking charity supported by Denni Schnapp.

The New Voices of Science Fiction

This review originally appeared in Interzone 284 (Nov/Dec 2019).

The New Voices of Science Fiction
Ed. Hannu Rajaniemi and Jacob Weisman
Tachyon, 2019.

Science fiction is about, at least partly, the future. So here is a collection purporting to be about the future of science fiction: the future of the future. What does the future² hold in store?

This is not a collection that sets out to discover anybody or give anybody their big break: this is an assembly of very accomplished stories, mostly published in the last five-ish years in major magazines like Asimov’s, Clarkesworld, Strange Horizons, and Tor.com, written by writers whom you may well have heard of or read, and may even have seen scoop up a Hugo or a Nebula Award. They ply their speculative art using a formidable albeit mostly familiar set of tools, plus some modest formal experiments. When a story does something formally striking, it generally has a clear justification closely related to its particular premise; for example, S. Qiouy Lu’s ‘Mother Tongues,’ in which neural interfacing can directly alter linguistic cognition, is very lightly macaronic: it’s almost all in English, but studded with bits of Mandarin and Cantonese dialogue. Across the anthology, far future is out, near future is in; distant planets and ETs are tired, some planet called Earth plus the alien-within-the-human are wired. None of the stories feel out of place, although a few of them could also easily blend into The New Voices of Fantasy or The New Voices of the Weird.

Two of this guy's favourites were by names new to me: Amman Sabet’s ‘Tender Loving Plastics’ and Samantha Mills’s ‘Strange Waters.’ Sabet’s Issa is a foster child raised by a robo-mom, who turns out just fine. Mills’s fisherwoman Mika is adrift on the seas of the centuries, desperate to get back to her children and afraid to check the history books to find out if she ever will. The theme of family threads through the anthology, although I felt like it was a theme that was used more often than explored. For example, the forms of non-monogamy that already exist in the real world are scarcely represented, let alone speculative reinventions or usurpations of the family. Maybe if you’re trying to cram all that rich character-driven narrative into only a few pages, the out-of-the-box resources of trad familial resonances are hard to resist?

Mills’s story exemplifies another big theme, time travel, appearing in six or seven stories. Why so much time travel, New Voices? Well, I felt like these time travel stories emerge more from the matrix of digital connectivity and self-fashioning -- that is, from the feeling of gazing at your Facebook photos from fifteen years ago, or searching for some deeply personal experience to find a forum of folks who share something similar -- than they do from Wellsian musings over future history, or from mindfuck “which-version-of-Baby-Hitler-will-killed-your-future-grandfather?!”-type hijinks. True, Alice Sola Kim’s ‘One Hour, Every Seven Years’ explores the chaoplexic ripples of a moment in time minutely variegated again and again. But in general the deep abiding questions are not so much, “Is causation necessarily linear?” “What dynamics shape social history?” and more things like, “Who am I?” “How literally should I take the term ‘self-care’?”

Nino Cipri’s ‘The Shape of My Name’ is exemplary here, with its interest in the intimate temporalities of an evolving subjectivity within one lifetime: in gender, in memory and identity, in hope and expectation, in personal nostalgia, in loss and grief, and in the changing horizons of who and how it is possible to be. In other words, this is partly a story about everything you wish you could tell your younger self. I liked it a lot, although I felt there was room for a richer exploration of the historically changing nature of masculinities and femininities, as well as the historically changing affordances for liberation, transformation, and subversion.

Amal El-Mohtar’s ‘Madeleine,’ which maybe isn’t strictly a time travel story, forms an interesting counterpoint. It’s a science fictional writing-through of Proust’s In Search of Lost Time, especially the famous episode in which the taste of a madeleine cake dipped in tea vivifies a long lost fragment of Marcel’s memory. ‘Madeleine’ is about Madeleine, and about the strange things that are happening to her: and so it half-invites us to imagine things from the cake’s perspective. Or at least, Madeleine’s reality is so fragile, so ready to crumble and dissolve, that we start to imagine what it might be like to lack your own story, to be merely a figment, trigger, or a cache of memories implicated in somebody else’s story. At the same time, Madeleine is clearly a privileged person (packed with cultural capital, for example: I love how she brandishes the maxims of continental philosophers as talismans to banish hexes). In its own discreet way, I think ‘Madeleine’ sets up subtle dialogue between Proustian preoccupations with memory gone privately astray, and questions of collective remembrance, questions of whose experience dominates history, and whose is marginalised or erased. Who gets to have their cake and remember it?

‘Madeleine’ is also part of a cluster of tales built on VR / simulation / out-of-body-experience conceits. ‘Utopia, LOLS’ by Jamie Wahls was very enjoyable -- a full unapologetic mash of late 2010s cutesy internetspeak and geek pop culture references with post-singularitarian ambiguous utopia in the vein of Banks’s Culture or Egan’s Permutation City. I bet some readers will find it cloying, but I was charmed. I admired Rebecca Roanhorse’s Hugo and Nebula Award-winning 'Welcome to Your Authentic Indian Experience™' for its elegantly constructed eeriness. As an exploration of cultural appropriation and the commodification of indigenous identities, however, it felt like it was often pretty broad brush. It could have been nice to dive into murkier and more conflicted aspects of these same themes?

On the cusp of 2020, we are allegedly in the early stages of a profound new wave of automation, occasioned in part by the rapid growth of machine learning AI, and the big data on which it feeds and flourishes. ‘Tender Loving Plastics’ addresses automation overtly; E. Lily Yu’s snappy and engaging ‘The Doing and Undoing of Jacob E. Mwangi’ does so indirectly, portraying a humane, post-work future in which the world self-divides into Doers (who actively participate in society) and Don’ts (who passively consume). Yu claps back a little at the knee-jerk veneration of hard work for its own sake, without totally dislodging that paradigm.

Other stories, perhaps, address automation allegorically. There is certainly a little cluster about being assimilated into something spooky and transcendent. Of these, Lettie Prell’s ‘The Need for Air,’ sticks closest to a techno-scientific register, exploring that tricksy transition to posthuman singularity, again through the lens of parenthood. Jason Sanford’s ‘Toppers’ and David Erik Nelson’s ‘In the Sharing Place’ both have a nice pulpy, slipstream-inflected vibe. Nelson’s reminded me a lot of Google’s convolutional neural network DeepDream, the one that spawns the trippy of oily-irridescent eyes swimming around in fractal puppies. The eye-mouths are calling: “What are you waiting for? Jump in!” What are you waiting for?

Sarah Pinsker’s marvellous ‘Our Lady of the Open Road’ is near-future punkpunk, which takes its sweet time and never feels slow, and is partly about the fear of being replaced by a hologram Bruce Springsteen (a Universal Fear). Luce and her band are on tour till they choke, in a US of A where there are precious few live gigs left. The nature of this technological displacement is interesting: the story assumes humans will still want humans making music -- even if we are content to have bands holographically beamed in by Amazon-esque content aggregator megaplatform StageHolo -- rather than imagining human bands being displaced by AI bands. Luce’s principled stance is emblematic of something larger, of course. Not only will Luce not sell out to StageHolo, she won’t even use a phone. Then again, Luce is no luddite: she just likes tech she can get her hands dirty with, tech that extends and empowers her, like her band kit and her van Daisy.

Still … as Luce doggedly crashed for the umpteenth time on a stranger’s slightly moist sofa, somewhere in the vicinity of a cat litter, I got to wondering. I got to wondering about automation anxiety itself as a species of Americana. The almost-lone refusenik is not the only way to represent resistance to the future decreed by Google et al., right? But I don’t believe there are any workers’ unions anywhere in New Voices. Much as I stan Luce, much as I see where she’s coming from, I’m not sure I like where she’s headed. Social and economic consequences of technological developments are never inevitable -- people matter, and the choices we make can change history -- and I feel like the story’s underlying idiom of ferocious resistance, resilience, and resourcefulness ultimately deserves better than Luce’s stoic rugged individualism, even if it comes with generous side-servings of friendship, community, and countercultural solidarity.

So I can heartily recommend The New Voices, although given how it helps itself to hype like “new kids” and “avant-garde,” I was a little wistful for a few more risks. Then again, what looks like a solid and safe strategy from the outside may well have felt fraught and conflicted from within. If the editors did feel they were taking risks, I’d be interested to know what those were? I guess if anything, some of these tales felt a bit too polished, almost as though they were ticking the boxes of what a really good piece of speculative short fiction should do. I’m looking at you, Sam J. Miller’s ‘Calved’: oh, you’re you’re going to deftly deploy ice imagery as you explore taciturn masculinities at the intersection of class, race, and sexuality, in a gritty climate change-centric near future, are you? Well, that really annoys me for some reason.

I was very grateful for the slow boil of Kelly Robson’s ‘A Study in Oils,’ the gung-ho chibi space opera japes of Suzanne Palmer’s ‘The Secret Life of Bots,’ the ‘here-is-a-robot-dinosaur’-ness of Darcie Little Badger’s ‘Robo-Liopleurodon!’, and the rough, ungainly energy of Vina Jie-Min Prasad’s ‘A Series of Steaks,’ which is very much “maybe the real getting blackmailed to 3D print boutique beef by a shadowy cartoonish villain ... was the friends we met along the way!”

Notes on three SF short stories

• 'Real Girls' by Laurie Penny (Wired)
• 'AI and the Trolley Problem' by Pat Cadigan (Tor.com)
• 'Stet' by Sarah Gailey (Fireside)

Originally posted at the Vector blog.

The 'trolley problem' is a philosophical thought experiment (and in a way, it’s also a little SF story in itself). There’s a train heading down a track where it will kill five people. You can switch the train to another track, where it will kill one person. Do you do nothing? Or pull the lever?

It gets interesting when you start to introduce variants. What about pushing someone off a bridge onto the train track, if you knew it would save five people further down the line? What if there are five people in mortal need of organ donations — and suddenly a stranger with just the right five healthy organs inside rocks up in town? Such thought experiments are generally pretty annoying. They can be a useful way to map out our moral intuitions, and identify contradictions and biases in our moral reasoning we might not otherwise recognise.

The trolley problem has been getting a lot more press recently. But it’s a new kind of fame: now it’s become a practical problem, a real challenge for AI programmers. How should we program AI to act in situations like these?

At least two stories on this year’s BSFA suggested reading list deal with AI and the trolley problem: Sarah Gailey’s ‘Stet‘ (Fireside) and (as you might guess) Pat Cadigan’s ‘AI and the Trolley Problem‘ (Tor.com). I read both stories as responses to the increasing role of AI in our everyday lives, but I also think they’re responses to the way SF has handled the trolley problem in the past. Actually, SF has long been in love with the trolley problem … and it’s a grisly, nasty kind of love. I’m talking about tales like E.C. Tubb’s ‘Precedent’ (1949), Tom Godwin’s ‘The Cold Equations’ (1954), Robert Heinlein’s Farnham’s Freehold (1964), Larry Niven’s The Ringworld Engineers (1980), and Orson Scott Card’s Ender’s Game (1985). These are fantasies carefully set up to celebrate difficult but supposedly necessary sacrifices. “Yeah but imagine a situation where you HAD to commit genocide,” *vigorously rubbing the tops of his thighs* “.. in order to avert WORSE genocide!” No thanks! — not least because that’s exactly how actual perpetrators of genocide generally narrate their actions. Cory Doctorow has a nice article about ‘The Cold Equations’ and Farnham’s Freehold which makes similar points.

In very different ways, Gailey’s ‘Stet’ and Cadigan’s ‘AI and the Trolley Problem’ deliver clapbacks to this tradition…

*

Cadigan’s story 'AI and the Trolley Problem' is a kind of whydunnit? or whatwillitdunnext? The AI in Cadigan’s story is a bit more your traditional science fictional AI: Felipe is like a starship’s computer, except this time the starship is a US military base set in desolate fenland somewhere in the east of England. Felipe is an entity, a subjectivity, an agent, like us but not like us. I heard him speak in the voice of Lieutenant Data from Star Trek: TNG. (Data-ed but not dated — in Cadigan’s hands, the trope of the calm, hyperrational, introspective AI mind remains an effective tool for exploring the present and future of real AI).

On a normal day on the open road, you probably won’t encounter THAT many classic trolley problems. It’s not really something they cover in driving lessons, like parallel parking. In fact, there’s an argument that the obsession with trolley problems is a distraction from the real issue with smartcars. Machine vision will probably never be smart enough to navigate safely in today’s traffic conditions, especially in cities … so we’re likely to see a push from developers to redesign our entire city infrastructure around the technology. Does it sound too far-fetched and dystopian to imagine a law that everyone carry their phone at all times, broadcasting their location to all nearby vehicles? And if your battery dies and so do you, that’s sad but too bad.

But Cadigan’s story says, hold on, maybe we are surrounded by trolley problems after all? Maybe we choose to construct our world out of negative sum games? What if more and more data gathering and analysis makes these relations more and more visible? The true ‘cold equations’ are probably nothing like the fantasies of Godwin and Card. Markets, corporations, and governments can all be likened to AI programs, and we know how they’re programmed: to relentlessly sacrifice the many vulnerable for the few privileged. Felipe’s refusal of their logic kind of reminds me of the elegantly straightforward ethics of the utilitarian philosopher Peter Singer. Often our ethical conundrums aren’t really as complicated as we make them out to be … we know what the right answer is, and we overstate the complexity to hide our self-interested actions.

‘”Felipe . . .” Helen sighed. “Felipe, you must not kill our people. People on our side. People who are fighting to—” She was about to say make the world a safe place, but it sounded lame even just in her head. What, then? Fighting to prevent an enemy from attacking us? Fighting to rid the world of terrorism? Fighting to defend people who can’t defend themselves? Fighting to free the enslaved and the downtrodden?’

Spoilers: OK, personally I felt ‘AI and the Trolley Problem’ wound up satisfyingly, but some folk in the comments disagree. I guess this is a story which turns on two reveals — the reason Felippe destroyed the ground control station, and the reason Felippe isn’t talking to anyone. Maybe Cadigan could have been a BIT more heavy-handed about pretending that they were connected … having everyone running around working like they’re living in the early days of Skynet? Then when they aren’t connected, that might feel like more of a twist in its own right. Even better if the reader could be persuaded to have almost forgotten about the Cora incident by the time it becomes relevant again — but maybe that’s asking the impossible. Overall, I felt it was timely and slick. The setting was great: a cosy yet chilly atmosphere evoked with economy, mainly through the actions and relationships of the characters. More SF should be set in US military bases. There are enough to choose from: something like 600 outside the US, across 70ish countries. (Those we know about).

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If you didn’t already know what stet meant, you’d probably gather its meaning by the end of ‘Stet’: disregard a change proposed by the editor. It’s a Latin word that means “Allow it” or “Let it stand.” Compared with Cadigan’s story, Gailey’s ‘Stet’ is more directly informed by contemporary AI research, especially machine learning. This kind of AI research isn’t so interested in replicating minds: it’s more like the offspring of computer science and statistics, crunching huge data sets to find useful patterns that humans would never be able to see for ourselves. Our inability to see them, in fact, proves to be a big problem. This algorithmic ‘reasoning’ is opaque, unintuitive, and not something we can interact with though a philosophical dialogue, however strange or uncanny.

Is there a word for a story like this, that purports to be a document or documents? — in this case, the draft textbook entry with a copyeditor’s comments and the author’s responses? Apparently ‘epistolary fiction’ is supposed to cover all this kind of stuff, but with writers telling stories in wiki talk pages or Kickstarter pages, the inkpot-and-quill vibe of ‘epistolary’ doesn’t feel quite right. Not sure about ‘scrapbook story’ either. (Then again ‘digital’ comes from counting on your fingers and toes, so maybe I just need to give the vibe time to change).

‘Stet’ is a story about resistance and about saying no; it’s about solitude and loss. The voice is wrought in grief and venom, although there is somehow also bleak humour here as well, both in the bumbling inadequacy and emotional awkwardness of the editor who tries to contain Anna, and a few other touches (I bet Elon Musk DOES call his autobiography Driven. Driven: What Makes The Muskrat Guard His Musk). I even wondered if the ‘woodpecker’ thing might be some sort of weird ‘got wood’ porno pun, since people don’t really spend all their days gazing at rare woodpeckers online, but they do look at lots of stiff dicks … I’m definitely reading too much into it. Maybe the woodpecker just had an unlikely viral friendship with a piglet. With its mixture of erudition and boiling-but-controlled personal witnessing, ‘Stet’ has the energy of a virtuoso Twitter thread (maybe the kind that ejects interjecting mansplainers with enough kinetic energy to reach escape velocity. No more trolly problem).

Introducing any automated process, but perhaps machine learning in particular, into decision-making can create serious ripples in the way responsibility and accountability work. Anna is desperate to find responsibility, and maybe a semblance of justice, in a system which thoroughly disperses and confuses it. She even makes the intriguing provocation that we are responsible for the unintended outcomes of the data we generate. After all, who else is there to be responsible? Our machines don’t just hold up a mirror to our nature, so that we can trace in fine detail what we attend to, what we care about: the image can now step out of the mirror and start to act in the world alongside us.

“Per Foote, the neural network training for cultural understanding of identity is collected via social media, keystroke analysis, and pupillary response to images. They’re watching to see what’s important to you. You are responsible.”

The idea has a kind of appealing theological relentlessness to it.

But it also makes me think there is special providence in the fall of a woodpecker. Even if he can’t wonder what is past the clouds. Could cherishing an endangered woodpecker be part of a necessary ecological consciousness which ultimately ameliorates suffering and averts death on a massive scale? But I wouldn’t and shouldn’t suggest such a thing to Anna, or write a smug short story where the equations are carefully calibrated to produce that result. And anyway, am I just overstating the complexity of this moral question?

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Laurie Penny’s ‘Real Girls’ is perfectly paced and well-woven with wit and whimsy. It’s part of a series for WIRED imagining the future of work. It’s only wee and worth a read. Also, here is the Androids and Assets podcast talking about the series as a whole.

'Real Girls' is partly a story about talking – or chatting – and the word ‘talk’ lurks behind the title, which recalls both GIRL TALK and REAL TALK. Because of the theme of the series, the title perhaps also recalls WORKING GIRLS. And the title is kind of mischievous – more on that in a moment.

OK, some quick thoughts with mild spoilers. ‘Real Girls’ bristles with zeitgeist like a theme anemone, but maybe its prime frond is (as indicated by its epigraph – “When your robotic lover tells you that it loves you, should you believe it?”) THE LIMITS OF AUTOMATION.

Here’s one common take on the current wave of automation. Robots are capable of many, but not all, of the tasks currently done by humans, and doing them more cheaply. If handled wisely, ‘more cheaply’ could also mean more sustainably, efficiently, reliably, safely, and beautifully. So we can expect permanent, structural technological unemployment, within certain natural limits. But this technological employment won’t really touch sectors where affective or emotional labour is really important. 

In particular (the analysis goes) the heartland of human competence is care work, something robots are just intrinsically terrible at. Then there are the various contested territories of sex work, art, literature, culture, education, and ‘services’ broadly construed, which will all probably see partial automation. We’re not quite sure yet what robots can and can’t do in those zones, but as they gradually come up against more and more natural limits, those limits will determine what human jobs finally remain. 

Then, to soak up the surplus labour, we can expect that these remaining jobs will multiply and transform a bit (see for example the massive shortages of mental health services in the UK currently); that some new jobs looking after the robots will materialize; that all jobs will be more intensively shared (shorter standard hours, plenty of gig work, perhaps supplemented by a Universal Basic Income); that logistics and geographical location will play a greater role in shaping this sharing (see Deliveroo); and that activities previously undertaken for non-monetary reasons will be converted into paid work (e.g. household labour and what is sometimes called ‘socially reproductive labour,’ and aspects of leisure and voluntary activities). You can see this set of assumptions about automation reflected in the way contemporary SF often tantalisingly teeters between its concern with narrow AI and strong AI. It’s like we’re wondering: is strong AI just a jigsaw of narrow AI pieces? Are there some jigsaw pieces in the pile that are intristically human? (See the comments on the trolley problem stories, above).

Some elements of this future narrative are present in Penny’s ‘Real Girls.’ Charlie, the protagonist, is a precarious digital affective labourer, paid to pretend to be somebody’s girlfriend online. But ‘Real Girls’ also has some clever touches, which convey a much more nuanced idea of automation and its relation to human work. For starters, Charlie isn’t really pretending to be somebody’s girlfriend. He is (maybe in more ways than one) pretending to pretend. That is, Charlie is being employed to imitate an AI girlfriend: “a lot of lonely people liked the idea of having a robot girlfriend who was always on call and had no feelings of her own, a remote algorithm that could shape itself to your particular needs—they’d seen it on TV. But the technology just wasn’t there yet.”

This subterfuge is one way ‘Real Girls’ shows us that the uncertainty about what constitutes ‘human work’ isn’t just a phase we’re living through, a question that will eventually be answered. Such questions are a permanent and pervasive feature of contemporary technologized society, where every encounter you have with anybody or anything might have involved automated decision-making somewhere you can’t see. (See Cathy O’Neil’s Weapons of Math Destruction, and a lot of critical data studies). The questions themselves have agency, they do things: you don’t get to the facts by clearing them away, because they themselves are facts.

Likewise, ‘Real Girls’ doesn’t give us a world where machines simply slip into roles previously occupied by humans. The set of available tasks is not some given, transhistorical invariant. As another SF writer, Tim Maughan, has suggested in both his fiction and non-fiction, the assumption that plasticky Christmas tat was probably made by machines is part of what makes it palatable to consumers. If they were to even glimpse the worker who hand-paints thousands of plastic Santa eyeballs each day, they might well forswear that falalala shit for life (or at least go crusty and local with it). In the same tranche of writing, Maughan also looks into the automation of logistics — enormous container ships algorithmically packed and unloaded. So that’s one example of how automation can actually create opportunities for unrewarding and repetitive human toil, rather than replacing it.

More generally, whenever automation enters some sphere of activity, its entry agitates fundamental questions of organisation and purpose – potentially in revolutionary ways, although in practice often in terribly regressive ways. Automation does not replace, it transforms. At the same time, we use residual discourse to construe our new acts: Charlie is a kind of freelance writer, and his friend who puts him onto the job is a kind of jobbing actor. And Charlie’s job – ‘pretending to be a machine pretending to be a human girlfriend’ – exists because of automation, but not in any straightforward way.

(These transformative ripples may reach far beyond the immediate work context. You can easily imagine some guy who would NEVER stoop to having a robo-girlfriend himself, but feels totally legit in comparing his flesh and blood girlfriend unfavorably to the robo-girlfriend he would at least supposedly never have. In this respect ‘Real Girls’ also resonates, for example, with Annalee Newitz’s Autonomous, in which the spread of person-like AI has the unintended consequence of normalizing human indenture).

Charlie’s job is also an example of what Astra Taylor calls ‘fauxtomation.’ Broadly speaking, fauxtomation is just automation that is not all it’s cracked up to be: automation which transforms human labour in ways which fall well short of the hype. One example Taylor offers are automatic check-out machines. This is automation, but it also creates a new form of human labour (as it happens, unpaid, albeit fun and boopy). It also creates a whole new role for a human: the automatic check-out machine whisperer, who must rush back and forth around confirming over-18 purchases, troubleshooting unruly butternut squashes, rebooting the one cranky machine again and again and finally summoning the engineer, etc. Taylor cautions that fauxtomation can reinforce the idea “that work has no value if it is unpaid” and acclimatise us “to the idea that one day we won’t be needed.” Drawing on Ruth Cowan’s work, she gestures to all those household innovations which were supposed to relieve domestic labour in fact “added to the list of daily chores for women confined in the cult of domesticity.” 

Perhaps another example of fauxtomation, even closer to what’s going on in ‘Real Girls,’ is the huge amount of human toil which often goes into training algorithms. For example, a recent BBC article gives a glimpse of a day in the life of a worker for Samasource, whose clients include many big tech names. Brenda is working on a machine vision project: “Brenda loads up an image, and then uses the mouse to trace around just about everything. People, cars, road signs, lane markings – even the sky, specifying whether it’s cloudy or bright. Ingesting millions of these images into an artificial intelligence system means a self-driving car, to use one example, can begin to “recognise” those objects in the real world. The more data, the supposedly smarter the machine.” The invisible labour is bad enough, but why is Samasource headquartered in San Francisco, when its operations are in one of the poorest parts of Kenya? We can trace this moderately exploitative relationship back through history, into the vast web of bloodshed of capitalist colonialist exploitation. Karl Marx liked to think of commodities as the mashed up muscles and nerves of workers. Perhaps when we think of all the conveniences that machine vision can bring, we should think about whose mashed up eyeballs are really doing the looking.

The story is also about the relationship between (to put it crudely) work in the "public" sphere and work in the "private" sphere i.e. housework and cooking. Charlie is kind of a humanised version of the gross deadbeat (ex-)boyfriend, a toxic softboy Becky needs to cut decisively out of her life. They have familiarity and intimacy, and maybe even a faint spark between them -- unless it's a faintly luminous globule of spilled cheese? -- but it seems like they're really just not that into each other. You really suspect that this unsustainable relationship might be underpinned by an unsustainable division of labour, and that Charlie's late rent is only the tip of the iceberg. 

Work always produces (or reproduces) at least two things: whatever you are working on, and you, the worker. Charlie is obviously kind of fallow. He needs to get out more, probably? He's probably depressed in a way that goes beyond (but takes in) having been dumped. So there is a faint hint here of crip labour and crip temporalities. Not that Charlie identifies as disabled or anything, it's more that ... yes, Becky's life is going places and Charlie's isn't; yes, Becky does all the work and mental load of keeping their apartment nice and Charlie is a standard-issue wallowing excrescence of the patriarchy; but at the same time, the story themeatises norms around work, and how working, feeling motivated to work, working in particular roles, and working to particular standards, can be tied up with feelings of self-worth. There's this intriguing moment of spillover, where Charlie's paid digital labour galvanises him into cooking a mac and cheese, so that he can take photo:

In a panic, and forgetting entirely that he could have simply searched for images, he looked up a recipe. Then he got a bit carried away going through the cupboards. The oven was cranky and hard to turn on and he burned himself twice, but the pictures alone were worth it.

Becky rolls in drunk, and is very into this mac and cheese. "Who are you and what have you done with Charlie?" The kitchen is a mess; Charlie winces; Becky tells him she'll clean it in the morning ... and later Charlie thinks back to this as a moment suggesting they might have a future together after all. I'm not sure what to think about that.

Okay, slightly more substantial spoilers now. This is where the mischievousness of Penny’s title comes in. ‘Real Girls’: we might think it’s going to be a story about the differences between real humans and artificial humans. But we also soon learn that Becky “hated it when he called her a girl, even though she was the only girl, The Girl.” Can there ever be such a thing as a real girl, when ‘girl’ itself is an artificial construct? (A construct largely, if not solely, of patriarchy. “You’re real to me,” Charlie murmurs to the sleeping Becky, a sweet but disquieting moment).

It seems like Charlie maybe discovers something new about himself during this story. We’re not sure exactly, since it is done with a skilfully light touch: Penny sensibly resists any temptation for a big, sensationalistic ‘reveal’ regarding Charlie’s sexual desires and sexual identity. But she still gives us a sense of metamorphosis, and the possibility of transformation is mirrored between micro and macro: just as Charlie is always a work in progress, so we will never discover out once and for all what it is to be human.

For a genre so invested in the non-human and the post-human, science fiction also loves to play with definitions of the human. It loves to hone in on some differentia specifica – our capacity to envision, or dream, or laugh, or do really good downward-facing-dog, or grieve, or whatever – that is supposedly what makes us truly human. But these formulae always feel reductive and awkward, like a well-meant compliment from a relative that just shows how little they know you. Humanness is not some kind of empty space left behind once technology has finished colouring in all the reality it can reach. Technology (as Donna Haraway and others have pointed out for ages) has never been opposed to or outside of humanness: it has always been part of humanness. This is something ‘Real Girls’ seems to get: it is misleading to think of automation as having inbuilt limits. Automation is not an unstoppable tide, which is going to wash us clean and show us what we really are. Automation is a high stakes set of political risks and opportunities. The question is never just, ‘Should robots be girlfriends?’ it is always, at least, ‘What is a girl and what is a boy and what is a friend and what is girlhood and friendship and romance and gender and love and sex and desire and how did all these things get to be what they are now and what could all these things be instead of what they are now?’

Fwiw, the post-human romance aspect to Penny’s story also ignited a bunch of associations for me; in no particular order: Jay Owens’ wonderful essay on her friendship with a bot (here on the Vector site); little Robby’s big date in Miranda July’s film ‘You, Me, and Everyone We Know’; the bit in Pride & Prejudice where Elizabeth visits Pemberley and starts to fancy Darcy (in a way which feels uncomfortably mercenary to many modern readers, but is after all an encounter with the post-human Darcy assemblage: his wealth, definitely, but also the taste and sentiment manifest in the landscaping, the rumours of his kindness from Mrs Reynolds); Camilla Elphick et al.’s project Spot, which explores the use of artificial agents in harassment disclosure (and where at least one user reported they were glad the chatbot didn’t attempt to seem empathetic); and various friends of mine who first met and/or got together on the internet. All of these associations, I guess, ways of being anxious for the budding lovers: will Charlie and his Boy get along, now that their technological assemblage has been so radically reconfigured?

Overall, ‘Real Girls’ a wonderfully polished, smart, and timely SF story. Obviously I was intrigued by other stories this story could have been: for example, the one which got more deeply into emergent and speculative sextech, and saw Charlie being invited to control a VR avatar? I also guessed (wrongly) that the Boy would turn out to be a neural network whom Charlie was being paid to train. What does this say about me.

I don’t think this size of story could successfully accommodate it (it's shorter than this review), but it also would have been interesting to explore a hybrid AI-Charlie girlfriend, perhaps leading into more speculation around how automation and AI can be mobilised in making the experience of work more hospitable, exciting, and just generally just; I’m quite interested in Parecon’s concept of “job complexes” — innovative divisions of labour based on ensuring workers are equally empowered — and I hope at least some writers in the Wired series have incorporated some Parecon-ish speculation into their worlds? (Contemporary SF as a whole sometimes feels a bit stuck in the utopian-dystopian axis of the gig economy). And I wondered if the mac and cheese incident could have been tweaked to allow just a teeny smidge more foreshadowing of Becky’s heart still being open to Charlie? But perhaps that would diminish the gentle twistyturniness of the closing moments.

And really: I think this story perfectly accomplishes everything it sets out to do, and perhaps a little extra. I wouldn’t change a thing.

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And to finish, just because I just read it, and it feels relevant, here is Kim Stanley Robinson, in New York 2140:

At that point, as it turned out, despite the chaos and disorder engulfing the biosphere, there were a lot of interesting things to try to latch that barn door closed. Carbon-neutral and even carbon-negative technologies were all over the place waiting to be declared economical relative to the world-blasting carbon-burning technologies that had up to that point been determined by the market to be “less expensive.” Energy, transport, agriculture, construction: each of these heretofore carbon-positive activities proved to have clean replacements ready for deployment, and more were developed at a startling speed. Many of the improvements were based in materials science, although there was such consilience between the sciences and every other human discipline or field of endeavor that really it could be said that all the sciences, humanities, and arts contributed to the changes initiated in these years. All of them were arrayed against the usual resistance of entrenched power and privilege and the economic system encoding these same, but now with the food panic reminding everyone that mass death was a distinct possibility, some progress was possible, for a few years anyway, while the memories of hunger were fresh.  

So energy systems were quickly installed: solar, of course, that ultimate source of earthly power, the efficiencies of translation of sunlight into electricity gaining every year; and wind power, sure, for the wind blows over the surface of this planet in fairly predictable ways. More predictable still are the tides and the ocean’s major currents, and with improvements in materials giving humanity at last machines that could withstand the perpetual bashing and corrosion of the salty sea, electricity-generating turbines and tide floats could be set offshore or even out in the vast deep to translate the movement of water into electricity. All these methods weren’t as explosively easy as burning fossil carbon, but they sufficed; and they provided a lot of employment, needed to install and maintain such big and various infrastructures. The idea that human labor was going to be rendered redundant began to be questioned: whose idea had that been anyway? No one was willing to step forward and own that one, it seemed. Just one of those lame old ideas of the silly old past, like phlogiston or ether. It hadn’t been respectable economists who had suggested it, of course not. More like phrenologists or theosophists, of course.  

Transport was similar, as it relied on energy to move things around. The great diesel-burning container ships were broken up and reconfigured as container clippers, smaller, slower, and there again, more labor-intensive. Oh my there was a real need for human labor again, how amazing! Although it was true that quite a few parts of operating a sailing ship could be automated. Same with freight airships, which had solar panels on their upper surfaces and were often entirely robotic. But the ships sailing the oceans of the world, made of graphenated composites very strong and light and also made of captured carbon dioxide, neatly enough, were usually occupied by people who seemed to enjoy the cruises, and the ships often served as floating schools, academies, factories, parties, or prison sentences. Sails were augmented by kite sails sent up far up into the atmosphere to catch stronger winds. This led to navigational hazards, accidents, adventures, indeed a whole new oceanic culture to replace the lost beach cultures, lost at least until the beaches were reestablished at the new higher coastlines; that too was a labor-intensive project.

Review: Peter Watts, Beyond the Rift (2013)

First published in Interzone #251.

Thirteen very gripping stories – sometimes gripping with uncomfortable vigor – including a generous helping of near-future thought experiments about neuroscience, consciousness and identity (‘The Eyes of God,’ ‘Hillcrest v. Velikovsky,’ ‘Mayfly,’ etc.). ‘The Things,’ a fanfic of John Carpenter’s film The Thing, might also be lurking in that camp. It’s ‘told from the point-of-view of the alien,’ though the story plays pretty violently with the notion of point-of-view.

Watts chooses a religious term – ‘communion’ – to describe the way the Thing’s singular self synchs with its various offshoots. Religion gradually emerges as the collection’s most pervasive preoccupation, rearing its ugly Godhead in some surprising places, like ‘The Things,’ but also built into central conceits of several stories. For instance, there’s the alternate history ‘A Word for Heathens,’ one of the collection’s highlights (even if its neuroscience feels a bit dated: Koren and Persinger’s solenoids-based ‘God helmet’ started sprouting question-mark antlers shortly after the story’s publication (research into the neurological foundations of religious experience continues – injecting radioactive isotope into Buddhists etc.)).

Two longer, fairly God-free adventures form the collection’s real backbone (or exoskeleton). ‘The Island’ is about a cyborg starship crew on a golem-esque interminable assignment, roused from cryo by their dodgy TomTom to confront an anomalous megastructure, whilst unintelligible posthuman peril teems in the mouths of wormholes in their wake. Watts traces the outlines of these venerable space opera tropes with a peremptory, almost contemptuous deftness, then fills the rest of his canvas with emergent weirdness of peculiar raw intensity. It won a Hugo: good. ‘A Niche’ is a tense, moreish tale of deep-sea geothermal engineers under a lot of pressure at work. It was absorbed into Watts’ Rifters Trilogy but still works superbly as a standalone, as indeed it would as reality TV.

In the brutal, relentless, dystopian afterword, we join Watts as he Googles himself, resists his caricature as a miserabilist or misanthrope, reflects critically on his writing (“I can’t write real villains [...] I can’t do fundamentalists very well either” (220)), sets the record straight regarding his violent, unjust and utterly lawful persecution by the US Justice System, and finally positions himself as “an angry optimist” (217/230). Despite the spiky and declamatory tone, you never get that sense of ‘like it or lump it’ which is so common when authors explore their own weaknesses.

Whilst Watts is an insightful critic (or troll) of his own work, he is also a rather sly one. Watts characterises ‘Nimbus’ as “pure unresearched brain fart” (218), a typically sharp précis – insofar as the story imagines vast, gaseous sentience emerging in the firmament of the near future, posing the provocative question: what if our planet could fart brains? – but also disingenuous. Humanity’s massacre by the wrathful-deity-cum-planetary-immune-response is the background, and Watts knows he could have plastered the foreground with feelgood. Instead he’s gone for the one about the daughter who is more-or-less indifferent to her dad’s likely suicide. Ecological catastrophe swells the generation gap into a gulf no schmaltz will traverse.

By the time the afterword is referring to the traumatised cyborgs of ‘A Niche’ as “mermaids,” I know Watts has his lung firmly in his cheek and a bioluminescent photophore lure twinkling in his eye. In short, the readers who call Watts’ work ‘dark’ probably do so for reasons different to those the afterword addresses – and I think he knows that.

First, there’s the enthusiasm for scientistic reduction of aspects of stuff which – perhaps because it’s stuff that’s intrinsically resilient to existing scientific ways of knowing, or because the stakes on a botched scientific account of this stuff are so high, or because there’s some pragmatic value in occasionally treating this stuff as scientifically inexplicable – should maybe be treated gingerly, tenderly, with a bit more negative capability. All that’s hardwired into me is an alarm bell which trills when I see the word ‘hardwired.’

Second, there’s rhetoric: Watts often relies on visceral, corporeal and violent connotations to manage the ebb and flow of his prose energy. The first page describes the “half-finished lifeboat cannibalized from the viscera of dead helicopters” (1). Sometimes it’s sexual violence – like the concluding moments of ‘The Things’ (19), or, from ‘The Second Coming of Jasmine Fitzgerald’: “The wound swallows the coroner’s rubberised hands like some huge torn vagina, its labia clotted and crystallised” (67).

We all live our lives through approximations – scientific, humanistic, other – and often what prioritises certain models at a certain moment is simply tact. Or else, it’s deliberate anti-tact. It’s the late timor mortis conturbat me of the gothic, whose object is to discomfit, disquiet, to stir up a dread-like awe. Sometimes Watts with his moralist, scientist or philosopher hat on will collaborate with Watts with his gothic or horror or thriller hat on. Tit-for-tat, Watts hats! But just as frequently, their interests collide. Then they’re hardwired to fight. And I have the model to prove it.

The Blushing Face of Day: Catherynne Valente's Radiance

This review first appeared in Interzone #263. Apparently I have a longer version of it somewhere. So it might one day without warning expand its territory.

Radiance By Catherynne M. Valente
Corsair, pb, 432pp. £7.99

Radiance is an extravagant, plush, campy, melancholy, witty, sprawling, indefatigable work of great literaturepunk. Ingenues, aviator jackets, coconuts. It’s one those neo-epistolary novels, supposedly cobbled together out of diary entries, interview transcripts, radio scripts, commercials, showbiz gossip columns, even a ship’s manifest. Actually, at first it threatens never to repeat any of these forms, yikes! But eventually the pattern emerges, phew. The novel skips about in time too, though always driving towards a definite dénouement.

Radiance is also both alternate history sf – inasmuch as it mentions historical figures, like Robert Frost, doing totally non-historical stuff, like moving to Pluto – and it is sf set in an alternate reality. The solar system it depicts is a mostly nourishing and hospitable place. Pluto has lilies, and perhaps even a path in a yellow wood for Robert to write a poem about. Explorers of Radiance will probably likewise diverge two ways. Some, nurtured and entranced by Valente’s orchard orrery, will be able to metabolise their sustenance directly from her rambunctious prose. Others will need to stay inside their space-suits and – whether or not they admire the novel through their plexiglass – will reach the final page with a sense of relief that their air supply hasn’t run out.

Although the novel can be a bit blindingly dazzling, at its radiant heart is actually a fairly simple story. Indeed, it’s pretty much Valente’s 2009 short story, ‘The Radiant Car Thy Sparrows Drew’. One main character, Severin Unck, grows up every bit as besotted with movie-making as her old man, celebrated director and all-round big shot Percival Unck. But whereas Percival is a pioneer and purveyor of melodramas – especially Gothic romances and hardboiled noir – from a very young age Severin shrinks from such shlock. “Papa. This is silly! I want only to be myself!” (p.53).

So Severin becomes a documentary-maker. With a hint of YouTube vlogger – not that there’s YouTube in Valente’s vision exactly, nor even that many talkies. Nevertheless, it’s hard not to see Severin’s studied and strategic approach to being ‘herself’ – like her dad’s imperious take(s) on ‘candid’ home video – as a metaphor for social media self-fashioning. During Severin’s childhood, Christmas present might require “three or four takes of Yuletide ecstasy” (p.23), rewrapping and unwrapping till daddy yells “wrap!” They may be decopunk icons, but Percival and Severin also act like proto millennials who’d sooner let their their sundaes melt and their sodas fizz flat before they’d upload sub-par Insta pics of them. But relegating such behaviour to scientific romance allows it to be de-normalized, so it carries an aura of majestic sorrow. Turns out it’s possible to yearn for a Golden Age of a somehow more authentic and broadminded narcissistic artifice. Shallow modern living ain’t what it used to be, hashtag majestic sorrow.

Severin’s ground-breaking ouevre earns critical accolades and popular adoration, and it moves in an increasingly investigative, politicised direction. Tragically, while visiting the site of an inexplicably obliterated Venusian settlement, Severin vanishes, while several of her crew come to grisly, somewhat body horror-ish ends. Severin’s depleted expeditionary force does get a top-up. The obliterated settlement’s lone survivor is a peculiar little boy called Anchises. Many years later, with Severin MIA and Anchises is all grown up. Percival Unck, still of course grief-stricken, seeks closure by making a film about both Severin and Anchises. Does Anchises perhaps hold the key to the whole catastrophe?

It’s the chapters of Unck’s film that gives Radiance most of its forward momentum. Unck and his screenwriter Vincenza Mako keep re-imagining the project, so the film mutates from genre to genre. Valente tends to signal genre shifts by piling stuff in rather than by keeping stuff out. Her prose is chameleon-like, but the chameleon is not really a chameleon. Whenever there’s an opportunity for something cool that would give away game – “hey! That chameleon is Chameleon M. Valente!” – she goes ahead and does it anyway. Unck’s film is not, à la Queneau’s Exercises in Style, the same thing told over and over, corkscrewtinized from many angles. It’s more like that improv theatre game where a single story unfolds, but switching genre, and therefore switching direction – without ever switching its director – as it goes.

Being so interested in rewrites, Radiance poses the question, could it have done with one more edit? It is touched with radiant brilliance throughout: the frames on a cinematic reel as multiverses, the wrap party where everyone is still a little in character, the buffalo that says ‘home’ at just the right moment. Splendid bits of worldbuilding – such as the film sets where everything and everyone has to be actually black-and-white – get rushed through the frame, before they can be milked too much. (Milking, by the way, is another major Radiance theme). But perhaps the novel could have been a little leaner, especially in the first fifth and the fourth fifth? No big cuts, just a final twirl of the wrench on all those linguistic cornucopias, tightening them into witty little spliffs?

It’s also terribly unfair of a reviewer to ask for more of something, especially of such a layered, multichannel work. You can’t just add new features to novels, free from opportunity cost and knock-on consequences. But I do feel like something that’s so grandly polyvocal misses a trick by not being a tidge more satirical, even a tidge more didadic. Maybe I’m alone there? The way to this reviewer’s heart is shoving something down his throat. But when you’ve gone to all the trouble of creating such a splendid echo chamber, it seems a shame not to yell something really loudly in it.

There is the obligatory reflection on storytelling. There’s a certain kind of story (maybe called postmodern, or metafictional) which, it’s often said, loves to draw attention to its status as artifice. This is the main gossip about metafiction: as per one classic The Streets track: “you’re fic but my gosh don’t you know it.” Like a lot of gossip, this is partly true and it can be useful. In some university classrooms, yell enough about breaking the fourth wall, maybe you’ll at least break the ice. But if any reader comes away from Flann O’Brien’s At Swim-Two-Birds, or Italo Calvino’s If On A Winter’s Night A Traveler – or Valente’s Radiance – with nothing more than the conviction that it was a story, then they’ve only learned something they already knew. Even if they gussy it up, as the insight that stories are important, or that stories are dangerous, or that we give form to the world by telling stories, I suspect it’s still something they really knew all along.

Radiance does find a few reasonable reasons to talk about its own construction, reasons that go beyond self-congratulatory bibliophilia. For instance, Valente plays around with aggressive forms of storytelling – advertising, propaganda, and official gossip – all a bit vintage, so their tricks can be exposed by time’s passage.

Also, the collision between metafiction and sff in itself is pretty intriguing. I think that when Radiance does its sff, it tends to tone the metafiction down. Chipper behemoths whose japes just might be stitching the whole cosmos together are a sort of sf literary trope. So is an offworld camp beset by horrific reality glitches. So is an exotic voyage culminating in ambiguous entanglement with the Divine. But although Radiance does these tropes very well, it doesn’t really celebrate them, subvert them, or waggle its zealously-tweezed 1930s brows in a way that suggests, ‘These tropes know these are tropes.’ Apart from the really pulpy sf, most of these elements are played sort of straight – aren’t they?

And then there’s the question of visual vs. verbal storytelling. How does this manage to be decopunk rather than dieselpunk? Is there perhaps a theme here of seeing something with your own eyes, but only because you’re told to see it? “Or like a whale,” says Hamlet, and Polonius answers, “Very like a whale.” The central role of cinema also complicates the book’s claim to be a bunch of found texts. If a chapter ‘is’ a piece of film, even though it’s words on the page, is it . . . a shooting script? A treatment? A description of the film Unck actually made? Something else?

And finally: Does Anchises Count As A ‘Character,’ Discuss.

But if I were a literary theory gossip hound, I might spread the opposite rumour about metafiction. Metafiction is fiction that has all but forgotten that it is fiction. It cares so little about its status as artifice, it doesn’t even bother trying to conceal it. Why bother, when it’s so busy with actually important things? Metafiction doesn’t ‘draw your attention’ to the way it’s constructed. It just leaves its constructed-ness lying out in the open, and trusts that you won’t be tempted to gawp too much, since there’s other great stuff to experience instead. It’s busy making you feel the presence of people who don’t exist, people like Severin, Anchises, Percival, and Mary. It’s busy raising your smiles, furrowing your brows, and jerking your tears. A voiceover in Christoffer Boe’s 2003 film Reconstruction puts it this way: “Remember, it is all film. It is all a construction. But even so, it hurts.”

If Severin creates realism about a fantasy world, Valence is also creating fantasy about the real world. Radiance is chockablock with allusions – a lot of Greek myth and Shakespeare especially, with plenty of Prospero the colonist, but barely a glimpse of Caliban – and there is rather crucial octopus-in-a-top-hat who must, I reckon, be a reference to the anonymous political cartoon of 1882, “The Devilfish in Egyptian Waters,” depicting a top-hatted and many-tentacled England grabbing for Boersland, Australia, Gibraltar, Cape Colony, Malta, Jamaica, Cyprus, and so on. Radiance reaches for innumerable influences. In a spirit of generosity, inclusivity and hybridity, it weaves them together. The godforsaken floweriness of the Gothic overlaps with the seen-it-all wisecracking of the hardboiled gumshoe, and so on. But perhaps what Radiance starts to suspect is that these links are not altogether serendipitous. They may be evidence that – somehow, in some sneaky, sidelong, unseelie fashion – cultural traditions that seem diverse are all complicit in one-and-the-same project of marginalisation, silencing, and erasure.

Which is why, by the end of the novel, the thing that’s more important than ‘how stories give form to worlds’ is ‘how empires destroy the form of worlds.’

Who is it that really destroys whole villages?

The word radiance refers to the light that spills into the camera lens, and it also implies vivacity, sparkle, joy, perhaps the sun’s plenitude. But the word has another connotation, expansion. The alternate universe of Radiance is all about a territory so vast, fruitful and unpeopled, that it can simply absorb all the imperial and commercial impulses of the late nineteenth century. Instead of going to war, the empires went to space. In other words, it’s just the kind of fantasy used by colonial powers to mask and excuse colonial atrocities. For instance, it’s is the Apartheid myth of the ‘empty interior’ that the Voortrekkers entered, magnified all the way to Pluto.

Radiance doesn’t really get round to breaking the silence of empire, it does at least witness its existence, and begin to try to understand the violence and cunning which sustains it.

So what more could you ask for? The giddiness, glamour, anxiety, optimism and nihilistic tinge of Old Hollywood? The Ars Gratia Artis, ‘art for art’s sake,’ that gives the growling MGM lion his kitty collar? Cowboys, Christmas, some puke, a whodunnit, space whales? If so, I have good news for you.