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.
Literary Vice 