Tag Archives: science fiction

July 19, 2024 · 7:53 pm

The Long Way to a Small, Angry Planet: AI in Space

I didn’t include this one in my roundup of books I’ve read about AI lately, but it could fit. Becky Chambers wrote The Long Way to a Small, Angry Planet in 2014 and like so much good sci-fi it anticipates the questions and issues that come to matter as technology changes and humans adapt (or don’t) to those changes.

What interested me in the book was not (though M. may be disappointed to learn of it) the questions of AI sentience, embodiment, identity and rights (and I’m not sure those questions were explored with sufficient nuance – though I’m promised the second book in the series does more), but rather the ideas of family and belonging – and what is owed and required of filial relationships.

We get to these ideas by way of the Wayfarer’s crew and their relationships with one another. The Wayfarer, a long-haul tunnelling ship (at one point the reader gets an explanation of space tunnelling that I gather must make sense but I glossed over because it was too much physics and not enough anything else) plays host to an interspecies crew, each with motley (and often fraught) backstories and species-specific uniqueness. Toward the end of the book one of the tech’s, Kizzy, explains why her crew-mate, Jenks doesn’t need to thank her for helping him. Her explanation is something about why Jenks as her brother (not by biology but by choice) can’t ever get rid of her, that their relationship, unlike a romantic one, is resilient and enduring (though I take exception to her framing of a sibling relationship as not needing work or gratitude). Like so many chosen-families, the Wayfarer crew each find moments in the narrative to explain to the reader why and how they have come to the ship and to the other crew members as those they choose to spend not just time with, but to build family. Lest the reader miss this meaning, Sissix, the Aandrisk character who, as a function of her species, intentionally chooses different kinds of families over the course of her life, explains in somewhat pedantic terms the absurdity of assuming that birth equates family and the idea that instead family is a function of care and of need.

I don’t read enough science fiction to know if this is an exceptionally good or exceptionally average representation of the genre, but I enjoyed it. With an ending that felt neatly wrapped – and sufficiently open for a sequel – it did leave this reader with some hope for our earthly-human future. A feeling of hope that, given everything else you might be reading today, may be sufficient reason to pick it up.

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November 8, 2023 · 7:26 pm

The Book of Joan: Underwhelming

I have a generally favourable opinion of books that get included in the the New York Times top 100 of the year, and there’s never been a better time to read a dystopian novel that shares shattering similarities to the present but sheesh this one was a thump lump No.

Lidia Yuknavitch’s The Book of Joan is set sometime in the near future when earth has run out of resources or climate change has destroyed those resources or some combination, and what remains of humanity has taken to a space-pod where reproduction has failed and is living itself out in barbie-style bodies with ill defined purpose and organization. What is mostly clear is that scarification is some kind of marker of wealth and prestige, and so people walk around with layered grafts of scars that this reader found unsettling to contemplate.

Our protagonist, Christine, is some kind of skin grafting genius capable of writing full narratives in scars, and in some, again ill defined, way is supposed to be resisting the powers in charge of the space-pod, with the uninspired name Jean de Men, by writing the story of a powerful eco-activist, Joan (aka: Joan of Arc) onto her body.

It’s never clear how this writing is supposed to change anything, but then, isn’t that the promise of all art – that it will make some measurable change in an immeasurable way, shift culture or politics through the radicalness of its writing (or music, or art, or dance, or or or). Which, let’s be clear, I do believe art has this capacity, my problem in the Book of Joan is that the aims are so buried in science fiction uncertainty (like where are we in space, and time, and politics) or maybe more precisely that the world building is so opaque that the reader barely cares to find out if art will succeed in changing anything because the stakes of the change are so difficult to place.

Please do find yourself some comforting dystopian book that will make our current circumstances more reasonable (I cannot imagine what such a book might be), but let it not be this one.

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August 15, 2015 · 5:29 pm

Station Eleven: Why are you having a baby when the world is ending?

I’ve wanted a baby since my lady bits started twitching in my late twenties. I’ve been asked – and had trouble replying – why I want a baby. It’s a good question, and one we (collective humanity we and my partner-and-me-we) should probably be able to answer before we go ahead and have one. Enter me reading Emily St John Mandel’s (excellent) Station Eleven and feeling ever more sure that the world as we know it is ending, and that having a baby is… [enter your adjective]: risky, selfish, hopeful, terrifying, absurd, brave. Sure, when I was born in the 80s my parents must have felt a similar sense of foreboding: the Cold War threat of nuclear annihilation probably made it feel pretty scary to have a kid. And without the same frame of reference, I can’t be sure, except the arrival of disasters brought on by global warming makes the ‘threat’ not a possibility, but a reality.

So what does my baby-end-of-the-world-angst have to do with Station Eleven? The book narrates the post-apocolyptic world of a mix-matched cast of characters for whom the mantra “Survival is Insufficient” prompts them to not just survive, but to make and appreciate art, to maintain friendships and romances, and to form complicated relationships with ideas of past and future. It also gave this reader the scope and space to consider the [enter your adjective] of being a parent in any world, the massive responsibility and the abnegation of self called for by culture and circumstance (am I more or less likely to have a baby now? Time will tell).

With characters scattered in time and geography, the novel moves back and forward as readers are invited to piece together the events surrounding the collapse and the journies and connections of different characters (much, I might add, as one of these characters might be positioned to try to make sense of their world). We witness a magnificiently drawn setting of winter Toronto (really, not since the mostly wretched The Night Circus have I enjoyed a setting quite so much) and scenes along the north-east seaboard of North America (less brilliant than that of Toronto). Our characters are a little uneven in how successfully they’re drawn, but for the most part their motivations are well grounded in past events and rich personalities. (I would add that the narration of the lives of these characters ‘before’ the collapse is excellent – our knowledge of the imminanent end to their existence through the juxtaposition of their present adds urgency and poignancy to already great narration).

The past is captured in the creation and curation of the “Museum of Civilization” – an effort on the part of a few characters to preserve the history of the world that was lost, and to teach future generations about the cultures destroyed through their objects. The Museum is contrasted with characters who have ‘lost’ memories of the first years after the collapse. A sense that while remembering and presevation is a critical part of rebuilding culture, so too, an active forgetting (of the violence and isolation, we presume) is required for the same.

The future gestured to at the end of the novel is one of an expansion of connectivity (the lights go on again), the spread of ideas (the creation of a newspaper) and expanded travel (the networks of roads grow). It is a future, though, predicated on the tenacity and hope of its populace. The willingness of each character individually, and the groups collectively, to learn from one another and to trust one another (as in newspaper interviews and expansions of communities).

More than the (truly excellent) video game The Last of Us, the TV series The Walking Dead and the host of other post-apocolyptic futures we’ve encountered in recent years, Station Eleven calls on us to consider not only the everyday marvels and luxuries that surround our priviledged lives, but the threads of civilization that make a human life worth living: art, community, a connection to the past, a sense of hope for the future.

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June 11, 2015 · 7:20 am

Strange Bodies: Why we need the Humanities

Sometimes – let’s admit it, often – I’m asked about the purpose of the Humanities. Why not take a course in accounting? Or better yet, something in engineering? Why not, indeed.

Marcel Theroux’s Strange Bodies gives us the great, and oft repeated, justification for the Humanities: the Humanities let us explore the moral and ethical dimensions of our current (and future) worlds, with keen critical awareness and imaginative and robust analyses of complex problems. And what does that mean?

In the novel it means humans have developed the capacity to download an individual consciousness (not as far off as you might think) into a ‘new’ (that is to say, harvested) body. It means the humans involved need to work out all the philosophical and ethical implications of this new technology: who/what/where is the individual? what is the relationship among body, mind and spirit? how can one consent to a technological and biological process with unknown or unforeseen outcomes? just because we can do something with technology, ought we to? It means we read a novel to explore these questions through story in a way that lets the nuances and complexities of the questions unfold through plot and character.

We also get the book’s provocative thematic question on the relationship between immortality achieved in text and immortality in body. That is, the novel poses that all writers of all ages who have active readers have already achieved a certain kind of immortality (hardly a new argument, but a fascinating one all the same). In writing and reading we engage in a dialogue that transcends time and space. (you might want to say ‘dun dun dun’ right now – as if you’ve just realized something brand new and shocking, rather than something you’ve always known).

I admit I found the conceit of the novel exciting at first. I eagerly read the quasi-mystery, quasi-thriller as I worked to figure out how our protagonist could be at once living and dead. Midway through the book, once the urgency of the mystery resolved into the still-urgent-if-less-car-chasing-and-explosions questions of the nature of humanity, identity, memory and the soul, I was a little less wholly captivated. Call me a lazy reader, or more properly, call me one who likes her philosophy and ethics neatly packed in a story compelling in its own right. That is, I’m a student of literature, and not of philosophy.

But I’m nevertheless a proud student of the Humanities. I see this novel as a prescient and provocative call to question (if not challenge) the way we make use of technology and the way we work towards technological change that is neither good nor bad on its own. So we need the Humanities to help us make sense, to urge us to pause, to discuss, to question. And we need this book as a captivating means to do just this work.

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