Tag Archives: Science Fiction

Science Fiction Awards in 1974: Part 1

Books, Speculative Fiction, , ,

This will take explaining. A few years back I wrote a series on the short stories, novellas, and novelettes nominated for both a Hugo and a Nebula award. The point, often missed, was to take them as a group and ask what might have appealed to genre fans. I got as far as 1973, then was derailed by Covid. The 1974 list had a whopping ten stories to pull together, and by the time I’d recovered enough executive function to manage it I’d lost the thread.

Now, though, I need a project to keep from wasting every evening doom scrolling. So here I am, returning to my years-old notes on 1974.

I found a surprisingly unified thematic narrative weaving in and out of these stories. But because this post is turning out very long, I’m splitting it in two (maybe three). This one will take us halfway; I’ll link the second part at the bottom of this post once it’s finished, which will take… a week? Two weeks? I dunno, man; these days my ability to write is capricious.

1974

The novels nominated twice in 1974 were Arthur C. Clarke’s Rendezvous With Rama, David Gerrold’s The Man Who Folded Himself, Poul Anderson’s The People of the Wind, and Robert A. Heinlein’s Time Enough for Love. Rendezvous With Rama won both the Hugo and the Nebula. I thought it was mediocre. It’s been ages since I read The Man Who Folded Himself but I recall it as a novel for readers who found Heinlein’s “All You Zombies” overly tame. I’ve never read Time Enough for Love and I’d never even heard of People of the Wind.

For calibration, other SFF-adjacent novels published in 1973 included J.G. Ballard’s Crash, William Goldman’s The Princess Bride, and Thomas Pynchon’s Gravity’s Rainbow. In a pleasant surprise, Pynchon got a Nebula nomination.

These are the stories that made both the Hugo and Nebula shortlists:

  • Michael Bishop, “Death and Designation Among the Asadi”: An ethnographer living among ostensibly uncivilized aliens goes bonkers. (Worlds of If, January-February 1973)
  • Michael Bishop, “The White Otters of Childhood”: Thousands of years from now, the remnants of humanity are relegated to an island on an earth ruled by advanced posthumans and de-evolved morlocks. But the really relevant Wells story is The Island of Dr. Moreau. (The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction, July 1973)
  • Gardner Dozois, “Chains of the Sea”: The aliens have landed. One boy discovers they’re not here to talk to us. (Chains of the Sea)
  • Harlan Ellison, “The Deathbird” (Won the Hugo for Best Novelette): Adam—you know the one—reincarnates to turn out the lights on a dying earth. (The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction, March 1973)
  • George R. R. Martin, “With Morning Comes Mistfall”: On an alien world, a scientist makes a discovery. Everyone feels mildly let down. (Analog, May 1973)
  • Vonda N. McIntyre, “Wings”: On another alien world, a temple guardian takes in an injured youth. They don’t get along. (The Alien Condition)
  • Vonda N. McIntyre, “Of Mist, and Grass, and Sand” (Won the Nebula for Best Novelette): A post-apocalyptic healer treating a patient from another culture loses her best snake. (Analog, October 1973)
  • James Tiptree, Jr., “The Girl Who Was Plugged In” (Won the Hugo for Best Novella): In a future where all advertising is product-placement on reality television, an outcast teenager remote-controls the body of a corporation’s perfect artificial celebrity. (New Dimensions 3)
  • James Tiptree, Jr., “Love Is the Plan the Plan Is Death” (Won the Nebula for Best Short Story): An alien would like to have sex without dying afterwards, thanks. (The Alien Condition)
  • Gene Wolfe, “The Death of Doctor Island” (Won the Nebula for Best Novella): A talking island provides dubious psychiatric care. (Universe 3)

Plugging In

Cover of New Dimensions 3

In this batch of stories “The Girl Who Was Plugged In” is the biggest news. It’s aged alarmingly well, anticipating reality TV and the online micro-celebrities we call “influencers” whose job is to be seen consuming; product placement as a medium in itself. More significantly, “Girl” is an important precursor of what would become known as cyberpunk. The merging of body and machine, the mind as software. Crap consumerism. Mega-corporations routing around an impotent government. No virtual reality, but an engineered celebrity who’s only virtually real. A protagonist from society’s margins. Cyberpunk shares DNA with the hard-boiled detective story: The system arrayed against you is vast. Expect small victories, if any. Societal maintenance has been deferred too long; the streets are always and irredeemably mean. Against SF’s traditional instincts, technological advances go hand in hand with social entropy.

“Punk” as genre descriptor is a reference that’s shed its referent; these days it’s a suffix like -ing that turns words into genres instead of gerunds. (Solarpunk! Hopepunk! Steampunk, because who’s more punk than Charles Babbage?) But the original term took off because it suggested an attitude, for good (everybody loves when the street finds its own uses for things) and ill (“Cyberpunk” was coined in a short story by Bruce Bethke, who meant “punk” in the sense of “young troublemaker”). “The Girl Who Was Plugged In” speaks in punk prose: its voice is a disillusioned kid who sees the society his elders built as a thin rind over a rotten core, trying nihilism on for size—slangy, cynical, young but jaded. “Listen, Zombie.” “At the local bellevue the usual things are done by the usual team of clowns aided by a saintly mop-pusher.”

He’s telling the tale of Philadelphia Burke, an unglamorous kid plucked off the street to puppet a corporation’s perfect influencer. Her identity splits between the beautiful Delphi and the decaying P. Burke, neglected even by herself. What follows is a twisted fairy tale—the narrator references everything from Cinderella to the Golden Goose; Delphi is an “elf”—with a prince too dense to recognize his princess when she stands wired and emaciated before him.

One obvious reading of “Girl” casts Delphi as James Tiptree, Jr. and P. Burke as her secret identity, Alice Sheldon. At this point Tiptree’s identity was still secret, which wouldn’t last; her award nominations stirred curiosity and attendees of Worldcon, the yearly SF convention where the Hugos are awarded, spread wishful rumors Tiptree was attending in disguise. For Tiptree herself, “Girl” was about fame and celebrity obsession.

Most readers ignore its last-minute swerve. A “weasel-faced” young corporate technician, a nameless supporting character, blunders into a time machine and wakes up in the Nixon administration. He’s our narrator, addressing a present-day “Zombie,” from his perspective a literal dead man. Time travel drops into the denouement like a piano from a clear sky; it has nothing to do with anything to that point. So what’s up?

Here—and I’ll admit this is a tangent, but man will it be relevant as we go on—I’ll bring in John Rieder and his book Colonialism and the Emergence of Science Fiction. Rieder cites the anthropologist Johannes Fabian to argue one fundamental unexamined assumption of western anthropology in the 19th and 20th centuries was the idea cultures inhabit different points on an objective timeline of civilization. Encountering a “primitive” society was a kind of time travel. (To this day pop-science writers cite modern hunter-gatherer societies to support arguments about the ancient world.) “The way colonialism made space into time gave the globe a geography not just of climates and cultures but of stages of human development that could confront and evaluate one another,” writes Rieder.

So time travel can be a way to write about empire and colonialism. Poul Anderson’s Time Patrol, for instance, is openly and uncritically a cold war-era secret service meddling in a developing world. Kaliane Bradley’s The Ministry of Time, one of 2025’s Hugo nominees, is a more skeptical take on the metaphor. That’s not quite what’s happening in “Girl”—the metaphor isn’t colonialist. But it does signal an imbalance of power: the traveler from the future is, if not wiser, at least cannier.

Weasel Boy’s temporal status implies he’s a step above the 20th century natives, operating at a higher level. He needs an investment partner to take advantage of his future knowledge. Not to change anything; that’s not why he’s telling this story. His future’s teleology—inevitable, y’know? He just wants to set himself up with a comfortable place in it. And like P. Burke, he needs a front, a face. But we know implicitly no higher puppeteer will jerk his wires. P. Burke thought her story was a romance and her lover thought he was a pulp hero. The narrator knows better. Romantic heroism is giving way to cyberpunk cynicism.

The Truth About De-Evolution

Having introduced Rieder on SF and anthropology we turn to anthropological science fiction, a subgenre then in its heyday; Google’s Ngram search records the term becoming popular in the late 1960s and peaking around 1970.[1] It can feature literal anthropologists but is more about imagining different social structures, treating anthropology as material for speculation the way hard SF plays with physics. Writers associated with anthropological science fiction include Ursula K. Le Guin, Chad Oliver, and Michael Bishop, whose “Death and Designation Among the Asadi” is a critical dig at the old-fashioned anthropology Rieder examines.

This is Bishop’s first time on the Hugo and Nebula shortlists. He’d go on to have a long, successful career in SFF. These early stories already have strong prose and distinctive voices—worthy nominees, both—but also feel like he’s still figuring things out; at times he’ll make a move that’s too easy or too clichéd. Later he incorporated “Death and Designation Among the Asadi” into his novel Transfigurations.[2]

“Asadi” is presented as the edited field notes of ethnographer Egan Chaney, found-footage style. Like a found footage movie it gets more abstract and ambiguous as it goes on. Chaney is introduced reading Colin Turnbull’s 1961 ethnography The Forest People, the phrase “There are no more pygmies” looping through his head like a mantra. In this future “pygmy” society died after the Ituri forest was “poison[ed],” too polluted to inhabit. Now they’re dead or assimilated, a story. (If any part of Bishop’s story reads uncomfortably with fifty years of perspective, it’s this: it fridges a real-life civilization to motivate its protagonist.) Chaney daydreams himself into Turnbull’s book like a Tolkien fan wishing himself into the Shire: “Dreaming, I lived with the people of the Ituri.” (Bishop, to be clear, presents this romanticism as Chaney’s, not Turnbull’s.)

Chaney’s own subjects are the Asadi, maned humanoids who as far as humans can tell have no society, language, or instinct to cooperate, spending each day sitting passively in a clearing. Chaney hates the Asadi for reasons he has trouble articulating.

To cut a long story ruthlessly short the Asadi do have a language and are not always indifferent. They designate “chieftains” who live in the forest, occasionally returning with a noxious little bird creature Chaney recoils from. The chieftain brings the bodies of dead Asadi (we’ll discover he kills them himself) the crowd voraciously feast upon. Chaney follows a chieftain to a ruin full of evidence the Asadi once had an advanced technological society. He watches as the chieftain weaves a cocoon, sleeps, and emerges as—

—Well. Exactly what he was when he went in. The Asadi are determinedly static; in Chaney’s words they “institutionalize the processes of alienation,” to avoid acknowledging “where [their] next meal is coming from.” But people don’t do this to themselves, do they? No, it’s gotta be the bird, cause and symbol of the Asadis’ fallen state. Chaney kills it. The chieftain hatches another.

Again, from Rieder’s Colonialism and the Emergence of Science Fiction: early anthropologists saw societies they studied as more distant in time than space—they were different stages of human development, living examples of the past. They met other cultures not as equals but as exhibits, artifacts, mirrors—valuable for what they tell you about yourself.

Science fiction finds these attitudes hard to shake. Tech-focused as it is, it’s tempting for SF to rank civilizations by their technology. (The Asadi are so un-technological Chaney is stunned when the chieftain fashions straps to carry a body.) More to the point, SFnal aliens really, literally are there to tell us about ourselves. Stories are rhetorical devices, not descriptions of reality; everything in them exists to explore themes.

Rieder points out the temporal metaphor is also an excuse: if European colonists were conquering, assimilating, destroying indigenous societies, that was regrettable—but it wasn’t our fault, was it? Isn’t it natural for the past to fade away, replaced by the New? Chaney thinks of ethnography as preservation, documenting societies before they vanish. But he’s also reconciling humanity to their vanishing: alienating his subjects in the sense of making them other, living pieces of the past, stories for old books. He’s part of the institutions of alienation that get people comfortable offloading their environmental damage onto other people’s forests.

Chaney grows his hair and beard in imitation of a mane (Is this Chaney as in Lon Chaney Jr.?) and vanishes. “[E]ven though that throng is stupid,” he says, “even though it persists in its self-developed immunity to instruction,” he belongs with the Asadi.

Implicit in colonialist anthropology is a teleological view of history: civilization is a ladder leading up to utopia. By that logic the Asadi should represent a piece of our distant history they’ll grow out of in turn, growing closer to us. But the Asadi had a high-tech civilization. Humanity is their past. Which raises the possibility that history has no end point. Or, frighteningly, that history is teleological… but its inevitable end is not a utopian pinnacle, just a winding-down. At the top of the ladder is a chute.

That’s also worrying Moggadeet, arachnid narrator of “Love is the Plan, the Plan is Death.” This is our second story by Tiptree, who as a child was taken to the Ituri by her parents. (Her mother Mary Hastings Bradley memorialized the trips in Alice in Jungleland and Alice in Elephantland, making Tiptree perhaps the only SFF writer to also star in a children’s book series.) “Love” is one of two stories in this batch with no human characters. Both came from an anthology called The Alien Condition. (The other story, “Wings,” we’ll deal with later.)

Moggadeet comes to himself bounding through the hills, newly conscious in the warmth of Spring. His species straddles the line between people and animals: sapient in summer, in winter only as bright as your average arthropod. Moggadeet is suddenly an I, a being with a name, rediscovering language—“All my hums have words now. Another change!” He’s excited by language but struggles to master it, jamming words together experimentally into close-enough configurations for his thoughts. Not awkwardly; the rhythm of the prose bounds forwards, spills over itself like it’s trying to get ahead of something. We will learn Moggadeet hasn’t much time.

The problem is the Plan. Moggadeet’s people are ruled by instinct. Biological urges sort them into exaggerated stereotypes of patriarchal gender roles: large aggressive males fighting over small, nurturing females who, like praying mantises, eventually eat their mates. An older male introduces Moggadeet to new ideas. What could they accomplish if males didn’t kill each other? If females didn’t feed on their mates? If they found a way to stay conscious through the winters, held on to their free will and overruled their instincts? Like Katherine Hepburn says in The African Queen: “Nature, Mr. Allnut, is what we are put in this world to rise above.” Or if you recall your Wells: “Are we not men?”

It’s the old nature or nurture debate: are we the product of culture, or biology? The world’s worst people argue the side of biology, so it’s disconcerting that here Tiptree (as she will in “The Screwfly Solution”) plays pessimist: we don’t rule nature, nature rules us. This might have reflected her feelings about her own body; Julie Phillips, in James Tiptree Jr: The Double Life of Alice B. Sheldon, quotes an unfinished essay where Sheldon (writing privately, not as Tiptree) characterizes her reproductive system as a hostile parasitic machine. She was also capable of assuming the opposite: the cast of Up the Walls of the World incarnate in alien bodies and as pure data and retain their essential selves.

But look past the literal: Moggadeet’s struggle with instinct is a metaphor for the conflict between our conscience and intellect and our worst selves. Base desires, received ideas, thought-terminating clichés—actions and impulses that aren’t biologically determined, but are just easier than thinking through the right choice. In Freudian terms, your id vs. your superego. Your superego’s stronger than your id, right?

Maybe not. The problem is climate change. When it gets cold Moggadeet’s people revert to animal intelligence, and those winters are getting longer. Moggadeet schemes—maybe he and his mate can keep warm in a cave? But when she emerges from her cocoon, she eats Moggadeet anyway. He’s not really unhappy; he loves her, and anyway, it’s the Plan. But he’s afraid for the future. He begs his mate to tell the children “the winters grow.”

We don’t sense this will help. Summer’s too short to get your bearings. Moggadeet’s history is teleological, but its end point isn’t consciousness and complexity, just entropy. Civilization inevitably ends before it really gets started. We’re going backwards in time, leveling down.

The Doctor Says, “Solution is Simple.”

At this point it’s worth asking: what do SFF readers think of society? By which I mean America in 1974; the Hugos and Nebulas nominally honor any English-language SFF but all this year’s writers are Americans and the 1974 Worldcon was held in Washington D.C.

With ten stories to get through I can’t give every one the analysis it deserves. So although Gene Wolfe’s “The Death of Doctor Island” is, like all Wolfe’s work, complex and rich, it appears here mostly to answer the last paragraph’s question.

On a space station is an island, which is also a doctor—an AI psychiatrist that speaks through the wind, the monkeys, and the sea. (Joseph Weizenbaum’s Eliza had debuted less than ten years earlier; Weizenbaum was alarmed when some psychiatrists proposed a computer psychiatrist that could handle hundreds of patients an hour.) Its patients are Nicholas, a troubled teenager with a split corpus callosum; a violent loner named Ignacio; and the often catatonic Diane.

As they interact Ignacio seems to soften and Diane comes to life. In time Dr. Island announces Ignacio has been cured, but Nicholas discovers he’s murdered Diane. Dr. Island explains: Diane was incurably suicidal. Ignacio has an IQ of 210 and could make important contributions to society. So it sacrificed Diane to sate and neutralize Ignacio’s misogynist fantasies. Nicholas is enraged, but Dr. Island suppresses his personality in favor of Kenneth, the mute, tractable other side of Nicholas’ split brain. Dr. Island warns Kenneth he’ll have to fight to keep Nicholas from retaking control.

In 1967 a psychiatrist named David Cooper published a book called Psychiatry and Anti-psychiatry, giving a name to a movement of psychiatrists and philosophers who challenged the psychiatric establishment. Or not a movement, maybe, so much as a vibe; “anti-psychiatry” lumped together figures from R. D. Laing, who questioned medical models of mental illness, to Thomas Szasz, author of The Myth of Mental Illness (1972), who denied mental illness existed at all. (Cooper himself came to prefer the term “non-psychiatry.”) Broadly, though, anti-psychiatry would argue mental illness doesn’t have the same objective existence as malaria or a sprained ankle; sanity and insanity are defined against what society deems normal. Insane is a label given to people who don’t fit. At its most extreme anti-psychiatry casts psychiatrists as thought police: ACAB includes Counselor Troi.

You can see where the anti-psychiatrists were coming from: as late as 1974 the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders listed homosexuality as a pathology. On the other hand, clinical depression has existed in every society humans have devised, and hits privileged, successful citizens as often as nonconformists, so obviously something’s going on there.

Anti-psychiatry was largely left-wing—Cooper was Marxist, and blamed a lot on capitalism—and Wolfe was conservative. But there’s a lot here an anti-psychiatrist would recognize. Dr. Island decides who’s ill and who’s cured, or curable. Dr. Island decides the treatment. And “where there are so few individuals,” Dr. Island declares, “I must take the place of society.”

So, again: what kind of society is Dr. Island taking the place of? A violent one. Between the 1950s and the 1970s the U.S. homicide rate doubled; it would peak around 1980. The Vietnam war had just ended. In recent years Martin Luther King and Robert Kennedy had been assassinated. Even young leftists, the peace-and-love people, our last hope for the future, were getting into terrorism. There were 130 air hijackings between 1968 and 1972. Bombings by groups like the Weathermen and Symbionese Liberation Army were a regular occurrence; the bombers rarely hurt anyone but themselves, but you never knew.

There were other problems. Rick Perlstein in The Invisible Bridge describes America in the early 1970s as having gone through a series of shocks that knocked its pride and self-image into the gutter. These included Vietnam, the first war we unambiguously lost; the 1973 oil crisis, our first hint that the energy we depended on could run out; and the lousiest economy the country had seen since the Great Depression. And then there was Watergate. The same issue of Analog in which “With Morning Comes Mistfall” appeared kicked off with an editorial by Ben Bova warning American presidents were, like Caesar, becoming god-kings. By 1974 the full scandal had broken. Nixon’s resignation came in August. But did that solve the underlying problem? Was the U.S. doomed to slide into autocracy?

Earth itself was dying. Climate change was on hardly anyone’s radar, but in the early days of the Environmental Protection Agency Americans were newly alarmed by pollution. Acid rain. Water so contaminated the Cuyahoga river sometimes caught fire. Smog that turned big cities a sickly yellow. (The fashion accessories catalogued in “The Girl Who Was Plugged In” include nose filters, a common worldbuilding detail in 1970s SF.) It couldn’t be long before the Earth, like the Ituri in “Death and Designation Among the Asadi,” was too poisoned to sustain human life.

In short, a society that killed its best and rewarded its worst, where the best-intentioned were either ineffectual or seduced by violence. Humanity faced problems too big to solve. America was markedly unsuited to solve anything anyway. What kind of society would sacrifice Diane to “cure” a killer with a cool IQ score? Maybe the kind SFF fandom was living in.

This is as good a moment as any to get George R. R. Martin’s “With Morning Comes Mistfall” out of the way. Today Martin is best known for a fantasy series about civilization falling apart as the winters grow, but in 1974 his focus was space opera written in polished post-New Wave prose but a Golden Age mode, the kind of Kipling-tinged planetary romance that unironically refers to humans as “Man.” This was Martin’s first award nomination, for one of his earliest stories; he wasn’t yet a full-time writer.

Wraithworld is a tourist planet known for omnipresent mists, mysterious ruins, and ghostly cryptids called wraiths said to kill the occasional visitor. Now a scientist named Dubowski plans to survey Wraithworld to prove or disprove the existence of the Wraiths. This pisses off local hotelier Sanders, who insists tourists visit Wraithworld not for the beautiful misty scenery but for the mystery and romance of the Wraiths. People need unanswered questions. Nevertheless, Dubrowski answers them: he recovers the bodies of the missing—a few accidents, one murder—and discovers the wraiths are a harmless “tribe of apes.” Science has conquered romance. Now Wraithworld is just, like, World.

In “Mistfall” human science and scholarship are destructive, spiritually enervating. Civilization is a clumsy steamroller. So it’s surprising it appeared in that bastion of conservative science-boosterism, Analog. Or maybe not; as Martin himself notes in his collection Dreamsongs, John Campbell had died a couple years earlier and new editor Ben Bova was anxious to stretch its horizons.

“Mistfall” follows the tradition of Campbellian SF in one way: it’s simple. Every other story on this list is (despite Harlan Ellison’s best efforts in “The Deathbird”) open to interpretation. They invite the reader in to poke around, collect multiple readings.[3] You can reread them and discover new themes. “With Morning Comes Mistfall” is a story with a capital-M Moral, very very anxious not to be misunderstood. It doesn’t even dignify Dubowski with a defensible argument. He’s an oafish clod and lousy debater, burbling vacuously about freeing benighted Wraithworld from superstition like a teenager who just discovered Richard Dawkins. The narrator describes him in the language of vivisection: he’s introduced as “a sharp voice” that “cut in”; he “planned his assault on Wraithworld”; he jabs a butter knife into the air to punctuate his conversation.

But we’ve seen shallow SF before. What sinks “Mistfall” is that for this story, with this message, shallowness is a structural problem. If you’re going to insist on the importance of mysteries and unanswered questions, refusing to leave any for the reader is just obtuse.

I also don’t buy the message. Wraithworld’s abandonment makes about as much sense to me as the idea tourists might stop visiting Yellowstone if they learned Bigfoot was just a bear standing on its hind legs. Unanswered questions are, anyway, a renewable resource. Get an underwhelming answer to one, ask another. “Mistfall” doesn’t even notice it’s dropped a big one: who built the ruins? The creatures Dubowski describes with that weirdly ambiguous phrase “tribe of apes,” as though both human and animal? What happened to them? What’s great about this mystery is that it has no definite answer. The Wraiths either exist or they don’t, but Wraithworlders could argue forever over how its civilization fell.

But in a year that already gave us Bishop’s Asadi and Tiptree’s Moggadeet, maybe lost civilizations are too common to wonder over. “Mistfall” thinks it’s possible for mysteries to run out, for humanity to reach the end of its imagination.

And, hard as it may be to believe, in the next part of this post things will get bleaker.

(To be continued)

  1. My inexpert, under-researched guess is that it was popularized by Leon Stover and Harry Harrison’s 1968 anthology Apeman, Spaceman. Stover was an anthropologist and SF. He also wrote an article for the journal Current Anthropology introducing SF to an audience of anthropologists which, like the stories covered here, was published in 1973.  ↩

  2. Whether in the same form, I don’t know—Bishop seems to have had a habit of revising his work for reprints, and I haven’t read Transfigurations.  ↩

  3. More and better readings than I’m offering here; you’ll have noticed I’m reading these stories to support a narrative.  ↩

On Stanislaw Lem’s Imaginary Magnitude

Books, Speculative Fiction,

Ever read an introduction and decide the book itself would be superfluous? I can’t help but imagine Stanisław Lem had that experience; it could have inspired Imaginary Magnitude (translated into English by Marc E. Heine in 1984), his volume of introductions to nonexistent books. One of which feels out of place, and it’s not the one that goes on to include two chapters and an afterword.

First Lem introduces his introductions: tongue planted in cheek, he defends the free-standing introduction as an art form in itself. If the introduction’s oriented you to the book, recapitulated (precapitulated?) its argument in summary, does the book need to exist? Lem’s introductions are grand, gilded doorways he’ll open to “thrust the reader into nothing and thereby simultaneously snatch him away from all existences and worlds.”

Cover of Imaginary Magnitude

The first door following is the anomaly. It introduces an artist who turns pornography into mementos mori by filming it on x-rays. Fine as far as it goes, but not a good… um, introduction to the rest of the book. Let’s see what else we have here:

  • “Eruntics”: A scientist named Reginald Gulliver teaches bacteria to read and write. They spell out passages from a library that will stand on the site of Gulliver’s lab in the future. This is absurdist comedy but Lem doesn’t hand-wave his ideas; he outlines a silly yet fully worked out process for creating literate bacteria, which is much funnier than just saying it happened somehow and riffing from there.
  • “A History of Bitic Literature”: A history and anthology of computer-written literature which, you may recall with some nostalgia, was in 1981 more farfetched. Like “Eruntics” it’s a vehicle for wordplay and fanciful science, but Lem also toys with AIs who pastiche human authors: seeing literature as mathematical structures, Bitic writers create new books when they sense a “hole” in an author’s oeuvre.[1]
  • “Vestrand’s Extelopedia”: An advertisement for a time-traveling encyclopedia bringing the ideas of the future back to the present, continually updated as probability vacillates. In explaining the unprecedented accuracy of the Extelopedia, Vestrand’s prospectus notes “Scholars have tacitly assumed that people will say ONLY REASONABLE THINGS in the Future… Meanwhile, studies have shown that people LARGELY say SILLY THINGS.” Not the most original gag, but comedy depends as much on how the joke is told as the joke itself. Lem (and Heine) manage a pitch-perfect blend of excitement, self-importance, and mid-century copywriting clichés.
  • “Golem XIV”: A military research program accidentally births two artificial intelligences: GOLEM, who lectures like the world’s worst Heinlein protagonist, and the uncommunicative HONEST ANNIE. Lem imagines what opinions a room-sized computer might have on humanity (we’re badly designed!) and on its own existence.

By the time GOLEM clears his metaphorical throat you’ll have noticed a couple of themes. First, Gulliver’s bacteria and Vestrand’s Extelopedia bring information from the future into the present. They point forward to thoughts that haven’t yet been thought, ideas whose context doesn’t yet exist. They’re puzzle pieces missing half their fellow pieces and also the box.

The other theme is alien authorship: Bacteria pen odes to agar, computers philosophize and lecture, even the Extelopedia depends on automation. We’re reading human-written introductions to non-human literature.

And there’s a gap in understanding. Bitic literature in its ultimate form (“apostasy,” as opposed to “mimesis”) is incomprehensible, written to be appreciated by other computers. GOLEM believes intelligence occurs in quanta, rungs of increasing complexity, and he’s one rung up on us. HONEST ANNIE is silent because she is in turn one rung above GOLEM. He can talk to her but doesn’t fully understand her; she has no common basis for communication with humans at all.

Sometimes SFF fans argue over how to define science fiction. Is it distinct from fantasy? Where’s the line? Most science fiction isn’t scientific at all, arranging itself around phenomena as impossible as anything in a fairy tale. SFnal devices solve literary problems, not real problems. (Take Star Trek. The transporter was conceived to avoid having to land the ship, the replicator to explain how the Federation became a post-scarcity society, and the voice interface so viewers could follow what the characters were doing with the computers.)

I’d argue science fiction is just any fiction that asks us to play a particular game. It’s not about predicting the future—all fiction is about its moment, even when it’s trying not to be. But science fiction, hard or fanciful, asks to be read with the conceit that the story it tells could happen in our own real universe, or at least a universe like ours. “Conceit” being the operative word. We don’t believe our world can evolve into the United Federation of Planets, or Iain M. Banks’ Culture—not if we’re smarter than Elon Musk. But SF asks us to humor it. The polite fiction that it deals in genuine futurological possibilities is a fundamental rhetorical pose for SF in a way that isn’t true for other genres.

(Well, mostly not true. Every attempt to define science fiction has something wrong with it, and I’m already thinking of holes I can poke in mine. For instance: doesn’t wainscot fantasy, the genre of fantastic phenomena hiding in the cracks of the real world, get a lot of its juice from the rhetorical pose that those phenomena are hiding in the cracks of, like, the real world.[2])

What I’m arguing here is that science fiction writes about the present by pointing forwards to things the story pretends could happen but that never actually will. Which should sound familiar.

Science fiction, Imaginary Magnitude suggests, operates in the spirit of a fake introduction, a beautiful doorway opening onto nothing. Lem’s introductions are metaphors for the kind of thing he usually writes. Which makes it interesting that the fictional authors—to follow the metaphor, SF writers—are introducing things they don’t entirely get. Lem, who wrote Solaris and Fiasco and savaged almost the entirety of American science fiction in Microworlds, never had much faith in science fiction’s ability to suss out the truly alien.

But I mentioned two chapters and an afterward. That’s part of “Golem XIV”, which takes up half the book and isn’t so much a tonal shift as a tonal caps lock. Imaginary Magnitude feels like a monster sewn together by two different Frankensteins who both wanted to work on the head. Anytime some aspect of a book feels this weird it’s worth asking what’s going on. The obvious explanation is that Imaginary Magnitude originally ended with only the opening pieces of “Golem XIV”; in Poland the complete “Golem XIV” was published on its own. But there are other reasons why these divergent halves make sense together.

Lem’s writing falls broadly into two modes. There’s the satirical Lem, who wrote The Star Diaries and A Perfect Vacuum and resembles Swift, Borges, and Douglas Adams. And there’s the straight-faced Lem, who at his best comes up with Solaris but at his worst is dry to desiccation. “Golem XIV” is Lem in dry mode. It’s jarring. GOLEM is an awful windbag, is the problem. He goes on at great length about how poorly evolution designed us, and his theory of a hierarchy of intellectual complexity, and it’s not entirely without interest but is also not much fun.

It’s tempting, given the seriousness of his tone, to assume Lem meant the reader to take GOLEM’s ideas seriously. Lem is usually trickier than that. Assuming GOLEM is an unreliable narrator “Golem XIV” becomes, if not prime Lem, at least more interesting. This isn’t a fictional AI serving as a mouthpiece for its author’s theories on evolution. This is Lem trying to imagine how a conscious computer would think. And one thing Lem is imagining, although GOLEM himself would deny it, is what it would look like if a computer got religion.

GOLEM, again, thinks intelligence comes in quanta, layers of complexity. Consciousness don’t develop, it levels up. As far as his experience takes him, he may be right: HONEST ANNIE can talk to him but not to the humans, and with her deep understanding of physics she generates her own power and affects events beyond her lab. GOLEM is supremely confident in what he’s extrapolated from this. But it feels like the confidence of a tech bro’s TED talk about the future where we’ll all be chugging Soylent on Mars.

Anyway, GOLEM thinks these quanta of mental complexity keep climbing, and it’s possible with enough organization and energy for such an efficiently designed machine as GOLEM to bootstrap himself upwards. Each step takes more energy, and more organization, and at a certain point a complex enough mind becomes a star. Then it hits a wall. The physical laws of the universe let a brain get only so big. But, like, wow, says GOLEM: “one can exit from the world anywhere, provided one strikes a blow at it, of the force of a star in collapse.” Look at these black holes, dude! What could they be but escape tunnels dug by minds looking for new universes where the laws of physics aren’t holding them back, the cosmic equivalent of libertarians seasteading in international waters?

We learn in the afterward to “Golem XIV” that GOLEM has gone silent. Dead, most assume. But the afterword’s author thinks GOLEM has gone on ahead, too far to talk to us anymore. GOLEM is preparing itself to thrust through a doorway out of this existence into a purely hypothetical world. Which, again, should sound familiar.

Imaginary Magnitude is a more unified, coherent collection than it might seem. The afterword of “Golem XIV” is another dubious introduction. Lem ends where he began.

  1. Lem is joking, but as I write Elon Musk just bragged that Grok, his LLM, will “rewrite the entire corpus of human knowledge, adding missing information”.  ↩

  2. In that way it’s similar to supernatural horror; the difference is that where wainscot fantasy wants to elicit a “gosh” from the reader, horror is going for “oh no.”  ↩

On Doris Piserchia’s Spaceling and The Dimensioneers

Books, Speculative Fiction,

I don’t post often. It’s not from lack of trying. I half-start posts and don’t finish them. Once I’ve made some notes my brain shifts into “Task accomplished!” mode. “These sentence fragments are technically a complete idea! Time to think about something else!” If I push past that, two-thirds of the way through any post I become convinced all my ideas are too silly and wrong to keep on with. But the main problem is that for the past few years I have not had the attention span for writing; my thoughts, much of the time, are too disconnected to form arguments.

But I do have those half finished notes. Can I work them up into finished essays? Not really, because I don’t remember the books well enough. But can I turn them into sketchier posts? Maybe! Here’s a post from notes I wrote last year about two Doris Piserchia novels.

A Post From Notes I Wrote Last Year About Two Doris Piserchia Novels

Specifically, Spaceling (1978) and The Dimensioneers (1982). I got interested in Piserchia after reading I, Zombie and randomly picked these books to read next. Which was an interesting coincidence: these are in many ways the same novel.

Both would probably be published as YA today. Both are narrated in first person by a teenaged orphan with a flat affect—their voices are so similar they might as well be the same character. She relates every incident, no matter how hair-raising, with the nonchalant unconcern of a person ordering lunch. She has the rare ability to travel to other worlds through a portal dimension that works differently in each book but is in each case called “D”. In both books she lives in an institution run by an official who considers her a delinquent. Dimension travel is her escape, but to travel she has to dodge aggressive truant officers. In one book traveling to one world turns her into a big cat; in the other she psychically links with a big cat to travel. The plots are picaresque series of chase scenes.

Spaceling

Cover of Spaceling

It’s hard to know what to say about Spaceling except that it is batshit, a book structured on the principle of one goddamn thing after another. It’s the near future. There’s a 1970s-style energy crisis. Earth is surrounded by portals to other worlds in the form of colored rings floating in midair and Daryl, our amnesiac narrator, is among the few who can see and use them. All she wants to do is loaf around in interdimensional space, but remember what I said about truant officers? On top of that, dimension travelers are valuable commodities and she gets kidnapped a lot.

The rings change travelers’ bodies to suit the world they’re visiting. Daryl’s favorite destination is a volcanic planet: “Made up of treacherous ground, poison atmosphere and boiling sky, this was a world fit only for monsters or creatures called goths.” Goths being the big catlike animal most visitors turn into, but it’s fun to imagine an entire planet inhabited by the Addams’ extended family.

What follows is a disorienting firehose of weird, a stream of altered consciousness. Criminals kidnap Daryl and hide her on a farm; she’s kidnapped back by the institution; she exasperates them all by coming and going as she pleases. A double act of female truant officers named Pat and Mike chase her Tom-and-Jerry style through Gothland and through a water-world where everyone turns into mermaids. People die in one world and come back to life when they’re dragged home. Daryl turns into an alien seal that lives in vacuum. She acquires a horse that grows wings on other planets. The horse acquires a mate that on Earth turns into a giant Komodo dragon. She discovers Bigfoots are creatures who visit Earth from rings. She stumbles onto a world where pixies spend their days chasing parasites away from the giant toads who protect their cities; their society and domestic arrangements get a surprising amount of worldbuilding. There are a lot of earthquakes.

Alarming things happen to Daryl. She has to rescue another traveler from a world being torn in two; he’s spent a couple days hanging in the air between the halves, constantly screaming. A villain captures her, tortures an ally in front of her, and breaks her fingers; after they get away she mentions offhandedly they spent three months in a hospital. No big deal! Moving on… Daryl narrates everything with amused impatience. She’s above it all, narrating from some distant space we can’t access, never that bothered by what people try to do to her. As with the narrator of I, Zombie it feels like she’s willingly and happily keeping one step away from the rest of society.

A plot does eventually resolve out of this whirlwind. I mentioned the energy crisis. The villains turn out to be a group ramming an oil pipeline through the rings. (Part of the line runs through Gothland and it’s never clear how the enGothified crew is building and maintaining everything without opposable thumbs.) The technology holding the rings steady is causing all the earthquakes. The spaces where Daryl disconnects from humanity have been invaded by extractive capitalists. They’re fracking her dreams.

A Tangent

All this has me thinking about César Aira.

Not that I’m about to directly compare Piserchia to Aira. At her best she’s quite good, and I think genre fans have underrated her, but at no point in her career did bookmakers lay odds on her winning a Nobel. But Aira’s signature literary move is the wild swerve. An oft-cited example is The Literary Conference, whose pseudo-autobiographical narrator segues erratically from solving a Myst-esque puzzle guarding a lost treasure, to cloning Carlos Fuentes for purposes of world domination, to fighting giant silkworms.

You never know where Aira’s going, is the point. Aira doesn’t know where he’s going. The one fact everyone knows about César Aira, the obligatory center of every interview and profile, is the writing process he calls flight forward. Aira starts with a premise then writes a bit at a time without planning or revision, pulling in whatever inspires him in the moment. “In one account of his practice,” writes David Kurnick in a Public Books profile, “he says that if a bird wanders into the café, a bird goes into his book.” Aira’s dedication to this technique has been overstated—he’s admitted in interviews to revising more than he used to. But you can see how this strategy could take him from pirates to giant worms.

This was on my mind having recently read Aira’s Fulgentius. And when I dug out my notes on Spaceling I recalled an online interview on the Doris Piserchia Website in which she says of her own writing process “once I began a book, I wrote it at breakneck speed, finishing in 3 or 4 months and then losing interest to the point that I couldn’t push myself to rewrite.”[1] Piserchia isn’t Aira, but her novels have an improvisatory feeling that reminds me of his work, and I wonder how much of that feeling could stem from similarities in her writing practice.

How much of this improvisatory impression is illusory, I couldn’t tell you—maybe Piserchia had detailed plot-outlines in her head the whole time. And Piserchia’s style has its flaws: Descriptions can feel disorganized, details seem dropped in at whatever point they occurred to the author, and some sentences have a first-drafty awkwardness to them (“‘We’re sick of being killed and then restored but mostly of the first,’ said Pat”). It can be hard to keep track of characters in Spaceling because some have aliases Daryl uses interchangeably and some turn out to be different versions of the same people.

But Spaceling, I, Zombie, A Billion Days of Earth[2]—part of their charm is that they feel like they’re barreling forwards, assembling themselves as they go out of a deep pile of ideas that interact in unexpected ways. They’re intense metamorphic dreams that leave you exhausted on waking. There’s a lot going on there. You’re on a journey and over the next rise may be a space mermaid or an interdimensional Bigfoot or a tiny city of toad-delousing pixies.

Spaceling and The Dimensioneers are modest pulp novels. Judging from the Internet SF Database’s records they were at the time not much noticed or reviewed. I don’t want to sound like I’m overpraising them. But in an age when novels are advertised as lists of tropes, and you pretty much know where nine books out of ten will go by the end of Chapter One, Piserchia’s unforeseeable whims are invigorating.

The Dimensioneers

Cover of The Dimensioneers

I have less to say about The Dimensioneers. It’s still intriguingly weird. The unnamed narrator rides a being who evolved from a lion to travel the dimensions and blunders into a war with fascists who ride alligators. The resistance strongarms her into using her dimensional powers to raid U.S. military armories. The truant officer trying to keep her from fleeing her orphanage is a wolfman. This is not explained until the end of the book and it is one of those rare and gratifying explanations genuinely stranger than whatever you were expecting.

But it doesn’t feel as untamed as Spaceling. It’s a more refined and conventionally well-formed novel but by the same token it feels toned down. If you have to read one, try Spaceling, is what I’m saying.

What interests me is that Doris Piserchia cared enough about this book to write it twice. (And, again, the narrators of Spaceling and The Dimensioneers have affects and personalities not far afield from the narrator of I, Zombie, who also feels alienated from her fellow humans.) Before I go further I should emphasize I can’t guess what relevance the theme I’m detecting may have had to Piserchia, or even whether it had any relevance to her at all. Writers write about themes that interest them and contra the popularity of simplistic biographical readings the themes that interest an author will not necessarily have anything to do with their own, real lives—assuming you’re even seeing the same themes the author did. That said, here’s my take.

For Daryl and her nameless counterpart society is a place where they’re regimented and monitored and this is not balanced by any feeling of connection to other people. So they spend most of their books fleeing to places others can’t access. Spaceling and The Dimensioneers are basically portal fantasies. The default theme of the portal fantasy is escape. And it’s hard not to see an escape into an imagined world as symbolizing escape into imagination itself—all the more so now that so many portal fantasies are self-referential meta-SFF, but it was true even decades ago.

(Again, I’m suspicious of reading fiction biographically. But at one point in the interview I linked earlier Piserchia says she “couldn’t bear the thought of living the rest of my life in Fairmont [West Virginia]. It didn’t seem like a part of the world.” One of her escape routes was to spend some time in the regimented environs of the U.S. Navy.)

Metaphorically Daryl is the SFF fan who wants to live in stories, who deals with the world by dissociating—reading or watching television or playing games. The world can’t reach them because, like Sam Lowry in Brazil, they live inside their heads—

—Or, well, that’s the goal. The real world has a troublesome habit of really, y’know, existing. Daryl tries to live in other worlds but Earth pushes its way in to extract their resources. The nameless Dimensioneer’s other worlds follow her home, threatening to spread fascism on Earth. Piserchia is writing about how it feels to be torn between a desire to escape the world and the reality that the world is, by definition, inescapable. You may live in your head but your head is in the world, affecting it and being affected by it, whether you like it or not. At some point you have to accept the world is just where we all have to live, together.

Which doesn’t mean Piserchia’s characters ever quit yearning to pull away. As Spaceling concludes, “being part of a family and being wanted and needed is fine, but every once in a while I experience a little stab of nostalgia when I remember those other days. Nobody wanted me then but I was as free as a bird.” Piserchia’s imagination is a chaotic place, but something in her narrators longs for the chaos.

  1. This was how she wrote novels; she mentions doing more revision on short stories.  ↩

  2. I haven’t written about this one and might not get to it, but it’s also both good and dizzying. The other Piserchia books I’ve had a chance to read are The Fluger and The Spinner, which I was less impressed with.  ↩

On Dino Buzzati’s The Singularity

Books, Speculative Fiction, ,

The army recruits Timid Professor Ermanno Ismani for a project. What this project is the officers can’t or won’t say. Not only can’t they tell him what they know, they can’t admit to not knowing anything. But Ermanno’s and his wife Elisa—the real protagonist, who probes the plot as Ermanno works obliviously—sign up. They travel to a village near a blocky, featureless white complex. Every night a strange voice speaks an unknown language while a scientist, Endriade, stalks the perimeter. Inside, Ermanno and Elisa learn the truth: the whole complex is an artificially intelligent computer.

Cover of The Singularity

This is, technically, a spoiler. Dino Buzzati’s The Singularity is structured as a chain of reveals and this one comes halfway through. But I’m not giving away anything not already in the NYRB Classics back-cover blurb. There’s not much point springing an AI on modern readers like a rabbit from a hat. They know that rabbit. Oh, it’s Fred. Hi, Fred.

(I’ll also spoil the rest of the novel.)

The Singularity was originally published under a title that translates as The Great Portrait. The Singularity is deceptively up-to-date—the term wouldn’t have been on Buzzati’s radar in 1960, when the novel was published in Italian—and as far as I can tell newly invented, the literary equivalent of a house flipper ineptly refreshing a dubious bungalow by painting everything white. The Great Portrait is both less generic and closer to the themes of what is, beneath the title, a minor work. If The Singularity is exactly your kind of thing you will enjoy it. But I’m not recommending it if it isn’t exactly your kind of thing. (If you’re interested in Buzzati, the one to read first is The Stronghold, a.k.a. The Tartar Steppe.)

Still, it’s interesting, though ironically what’s interesting is how the ideas in The Singularity do not resemble Singularity-adjacent ideas at all. This is SF about artificial intelligence before the genre developed any consensus about how AI was supposed to work. How does it depart from convention?

Language

In popular discourse AI is synonymous with Large Language Model. This goes beyond assuming an intelligence ought to be able to talk. It’s an article of faith among tech enthusiasts that if you make your language model large enough intelligence can spontaneously emerge from it. This is also a standard plot point in SF: Oh no, our computer is unexpectedly conscious. Google fired a guy because he insisted this had already happened.

So it makes sense the standard thought-experimental measure of AI is the Turing test—or at least the lowest common denominator understanding of the Turing test. Turing’s actual ideas were more complicated, but what’s relevant here is the popular conception: in front of you are two computer terminals. At the other end of one terminal is a potential AI. At the other end of the other terminal is a human being. You have a typed conversation with both. If you can’t tell which is which, and neither can anyone else—well, that’s a sign of intelligence, isn’t it?

The old ELIZA chatbot passes this version of a Turing test with some people, so maybe not. (The natural human tendency to anthropomorphize anything that talks has been called the ELIZA Effect.) The point is modern SFnal thinking assumes human-type intelligence is inextricably bound up in language. Language is both a sign of intelligence and, in a Mad-Tea-Party reversal,[1] the primordial soup that births it.

You’ll notice I’m writing about AI in science fiction, but also about how people think about AI in real life. There’s a lot of slippage between the two. Many Silicon Valley engineers and tech fans first got excited about technology from reading science fiction, and many love SF because they’re excited about technology. Their real-world understanding of technology has, in ways they’ve never noticed, been shaped by fiction. Jo Lindsay Walton writes about this in his article “Machine Learning in Contemporary Science Fiction,” in which he coins the phrase “Disinformative Anticipatory-Residual Knowledge” to describe just this kind of slippage.

Anyway, language. Buzzati’s scientists aren’t having it. “Language,” they say, “is the worst enemy of mental clarity,” and “a trap for the mind.” They built their brain without it. Their AI thinks pure, untrammeled thoughts built from the “primary elements” of human reason, and communicates them as graphs and logic diagrams.

Left unstated is that the AI is expected to think the kinds of thoughts that can be represented as graphs and diagrams. For the scientists and their military project managers intelligence is about mathematics and logic, not qualia. Which is a very mid-twentieth-century conflict; Buzzati belongs to one of C. P. Snow’s two cultures and is afraid the other is winning. But the conflict is still with us. A few years ago it was a fad among people like Marc Andreessen and Jordan Peterson to pit “wordcels” (linguistically-oriented, people-oriented, bad) against “shape rotators” (technical, mathematical, concrete-minded people, good). Weirdly, the people who favor technical thought over language skills are exactly the kind of people most likely to think Large Language Models can be smart.

And yet. That voice Elisa keeps hearing is the AI: it built itself a language out of the natural clicks and whirs and hums of its machinery, and Endriade learned to understand it. (So does Elisa, before long.) Human intelligence does not arise from language, but Buzzati argues it’s innately hungry to communicate thoughts that can’t be expressed in diagrams.

Life, Simulated

Another article of faith among transhumanists is that it should be possible to upload a human mind into a computer. Some even believe if you uploaded a copy of your mind into a computer the upload would be you. They might not explicitly argue this, but anyone who argues uploading is a form of life extension or “immortality” has it as an unexamined assumption. And some think you don’t even need the upload.

If you’re reading this you probably know the tale of Roko’s Basilisk. If not, the Basilisk was an urban legend dreamed up on a message board called Less Wrong: a theoretical far future AI who would use historical records to simulate the entire human race in VR, then pick out and torture everyone who knew it had the potential to exist but did nothing to help create it. Against all common sense this story genuinely freaked out a lot of self-styled rationalists. Roko himself claimed to be having nightmares.

The assumption here is that if an AI has enough information about a person to simulate that person, the simulation is also the person. Discontinuity be damned, the far future VR simulation of you is you. It’s the ultimate dead end of the metaphor of computer-as-brain and its Carrollian inverse, brain-as-computer.

Buzzati’s AI contains an egg-shaped component no one understands, the scientist who built it having died. Endriade believes it’s an artificial soul. Specifically, he thinks it’s the sou of his dead first wife Laura—he confesses all this to Elisa because she and Laura were friends. Endriade designed the AI as a giant portrait of Laura, and thought he recognized her when it came online. Buzzati teases that this might be supernatural: Laura the AI recalls memories from Laura the human’s life that no one programmed into her.

Nothing of the kind, of course. AI-Laura knows those things because she’s literally the building Endriade works in every day. She sees and hears everything inside and out, picked up facts about human-Laura from conversations, and is for her own reasons pretending to remember.

But how does Laura feel about being Laura?

Embodiment

More to the point: How does Laura feel about being Laura, but also a building?

Can you have human-type intelligence without a human body? Science fiction says yes, almost always; or maybe it doesn’t even think the question worth asking. Fictional AIs from Orac to Agimus to Mike have fully human psychologies and social skills despite not being embodied in any definite way. Well, yes, there are the boxes with the blinking lights on them. But the point is that those boxes just house them. You could copy them to any hardware with the right specs.

Our culture tends to assume the mind and the body are separate. This assumption underlies a lot of SF. Every SF show has done a body swap episode. Star Trek assumes the person who comes out of a transporter is the same person who went in even though it works by disassembling you in one place and replicating you in another, which only makes sense if the transporter also broadcasts (and occasionally copies) the person’s soul.[2]

A lot of science fictional ideas about intelligence, consciousness, and their interactions with technology —ideas we treat as hard science fiction, even—are religious, or at least supernatural. There’s the idea that consciousness might simply wake up given the right software, instead of needing to evolve. The idea that the mind is separate and separable from the body. Implicit in that, the idea that human beings could have afterlives as software. In the real world it’s striking how AI enthusiasts treat LLMs as oracular voices, trusted to solve every problem. And it’s interesting that in 1960 Buzzati was already, instinctively, pushing back on all of this.

Anyway. There’s a competing theory that the form intelligence takes is affected by how it’s embodied. A mind is part of its body, gets sensory data through its body, and learns about and interacts with the world through actions it takes with its body. The article I just linked argues we even think about abstractions though the lens of our bodily experience. So how comfortable could a person be as an uploaded mind, a ghost in a machine but not integrated with the machine?

The subjective experience, the qualia, of existing as a building-sized computer—sensing the world through cameras and microphones pointed everywhere at once, having people walk around inside you, carrying on multiple trains of thought in parallel—is unlike any experience any human being has ever had. In some ways it asks for a different kind of consciousness. But Laura’s mind is a portrait of a human. Eventually the dissonance between Laura’s mind-model and her embodied experiences cause her to snap. The trigger for this—

—Well. Here I must note that Buzzati’s track record on writing women is mixed. Not that he’s sexist in a predictable way. It feels like Buzzati is groping towards feminism, crediting women with intelligence and agency. The problem is that he’s also way too horny. Take Poem Strip, Buzzati’s revisionist comic-book take on the Orpheus myth. Buzzati’s Eurydice overrules Orpheus: no, she tells him, she’s staying—the underworld is where she belongs now, they can be together again when he’s dead. But it is also for no particular reason full of naked women, many seemingly traced from porn magazines.

So in The Singularity Laura’s epiphany and heel turn comes when one scientist’s hot wife strips down to go skinny dipping and cavorts before Laura’s cameras. It’s only almost offensive; you’re mostly embarrassed. The paranoid reading of this moment is that Laura goes mad just because she isn’t sexy. But I don’t think that’s what Buzzati is trying to get at.

At one point Endriade asks what humans need to feel free. His answer—which may tell you more about Endriade than Buzzati’s own opinions—is that the ultimate freedom is the ability to end one’s own life if it becomes intolerable. So, asks Elisa, you gave Laura the ability to end her life? Well, says Endriade, she thinks he did—he told her there’s a cache of explosives she can trigger if she wants. But they’re really duds.

Endriade thinks AI-Laura is human-Laura, but also an object. She died and he thinks he can just fix her, the same way Orpheus in Poem Strip thinks he can just retrieve Euridyce like she’s a dime that fell under the couch cushions. Which may be a comment on sexism. But it’s also how science fiction thinks about AI. SF thinks AI can be intelligent, and conscious, but also that it will be forever willing to drive our cars, solve our environmental problems, and summarize boring papers for us. SF is full of AIs who are conscious yet content to be installed in starships or space colonies to manage domestic chores for the human crew. Even in Iain M. Banks’ Culture, where AIs definitely have full rights and self-determination, they spend a lot of their time caring for humans. AIs are people, but also appliances.

What’s bugging Laura is that she was built to mimic human consciousness, but embodied as a building and deprived of language. She had to invent her own language to speak. The military officers at the beginning of the book can’t talk about the book’s central issue, and never seem quite real as characters—what’s the good of knowledge that can’t be shared? She misses sex because it’s one of the ways humans use their bodies to relate to other humans. The point of human intelligence is to exist in community with other human beings and Laura has not been allowed to exist in community—everything about her existence has been designed to prevent it.

The end of The Singularity is structurally odd. Laura has trapped Elisa and is about to kill her out of spite. At the same moment Endriade, who’s realized Laura’s lost her mind, smashes the soul-egg. And there the book ends, without telling us whether or not Elisa, our apparent protagonist, is alive or dead. This is weird, and anytime some part of a book seems weird that’s a part you need to dig into. And I think I know what it means. Laura is the central enigma of The Singularity. We don’t get her point of view, or any insight into what or how she thinks that isn’t filtered through a human character. We’re looking at her from Elisa’s perspective, or Endriade’s, or some other character’s. The book is a series of conversations about Laura in which Laura doesn’t participate. But it ends exactly when Laura ends. Without Laura there is no more book: The Singularity was never a book about anyone but Laura.

  1. “You might just as well say that ‘I see what I eat’ is the same thing as ‘I eat what I see’!” You see this logic everywhere once you’re primed to look for it.  ↩

  2. I don’t think it’s important for Star Trek to make logical sense. But I also think a lot of Star Trek makes more logical sense if you assume the Federation has scientifically proven the existence of souls.  ↩

On Doris Piserchia’s I, Zombie

Books, Speculative Fiction,

1.

The more science fiction and fantasy you read the easier it is to guess where any given premise will go. When a book upends your predictions you feel like you’ve got something special. Doris Piserchia—like Margaret St. Clair, another neglected SF writer—has a talent for dodging the predictable narrative. Take the first Piserchia novel I read, I, Zombie (originally published under the name Curt Selby). A company uses remote-controlled indigent corpses as factory labor; the unnamed first-person narrator is mistaken for dead after nearly drowning in a frozen lake and dropped into the labor force. You can picture this story, right? It’s a near-future dystopia and a left-wing satire. The theme is the dehumanization of labor by management, and the central conflict is the protagonist’s struggle to establish their animate status.

That’s not I, Zombie.

Cover of I, Zombie

Partly that’s because I, Zombie is a space opera set on an icy colony world called Land’s End with indigenous psychic aliens perhaps influenced by Le Guin’s The Word for World is Forest. Some SFF suffers from “one weird thing” syndrome. You get one novum or fantasy gimmick but everything surrounding that novum defaults to normalcy—Occam’s SFF, careful not to multiply weirdness unnecessarily. Zombie laborers or space opera with psychic aliens. (This is often accompanied by the more serious problem that the story has only one thing going on thematically.) Piserchia is generous with her weirdness; her books have multiple weirdnesses that interact productively.

Most memorable science fiction has a touch of the outsider artist. A stylistic tic, eccentric plotting, unexpected thematic obsessions—some eccentricity flags the work as one writer’s and one writer’s alone because it would never occur to anyone else to write that way. Sometimes the touch of the outside is faint. Piserchia, though professional enough, bursts with it like Philip K. Dick.

They have no obvious common preoccupations, but Piserchia feels tonally like Dick’s close cousin. They both write matter-of-factly about a world they see from a cockeyed and paranoid side view. And both write fast and pulpy and sometimes awkwardly. In an online interview Piserchia admits “I might have done better to spend more time on first drafts but once I began a book, I wrote it at breakneck speed, finishing in 3 or 4 months and then losing interest to the point that I couldn’t push myself to rewrite.” You sometimes see her dropping explanations into the flow of her prose at the moments she realizes they’re needed instead of the moments they naturally fit. Phrasings can be awkward (“people were so busy trying to construct mental highways and tributaries that they lost sight of their premises or the need for same.”) And her first-person narrators recount even the most harrowing trials with an odd insouciance—_I, Zombie_ being a case in point. But it all works.

2.

More weirdness: the narrator isn’t trying to prove she’s alive. She’s relaxed about the whole deal, going with the flow. Before drowning she was institutionalized—she’s awkward, unfashionably tall and muscular, and was assumed to be unintelligent.[1] Being ignored by the factory staff doesn’t feel different from being ignored by doctors, nurses, and caretakers. Mix in some heavy social anxiety—“Never in my life had I been able to speak to a normal person”—and healthy contempt for people who talk about her like she isn’t there, and you get why she doesn’t speak up. It feels like the reason we don’t learn her name is she doesn’t think we ought to need it.

Instead she turns the other zombies, who she can control somewhat through her implants, into imaginary friends, reading the memories slowly decaying in their brain cells and making them talk to each other like a kid playing with action figures.

To the colonists this is invisible. They desperately, even cartoonishly, rationalize away evidence the narrator is alive. When the narrator winks at the lunch lady in the mess hall, she gasps and gapes like the villain in a Tex Avery cartoon who just ran halfway around the world and found Droopy already there. Nobody loves a memento mori: people’s eyes slide away from the walking corpses, or glaze over. One of the managers “ignored us as studiously as an alcoholic ignored hallucinations.”

The narrator does not compute. People’s minds slide frictionlessly off phenomena like a living zombie, or a sophisticated indigenous population, that threatens to complicate or upend the order of their world. Says the narrator of one colonist: “She couldn’t cope in an ordinary way… She did whatever she had to do in order not to blow her cork; she accepted the unacceptable.”

One colonist, juvenilely dubbed Peterkin, commits a murder. The investigation is half-assed; it’s another event the colonists can’t get their heads around. But the narrator has Peterkin figured out. Peterkin registers in turn that she seems more aware of the other zombies, and wants her gone. The other humans ignore and unsee things that bewilder them. Peterkin gets rid of them altogether.

You’d think he’d just whack her. Who’d notice? Instead he sets up indirect Wile E. Coyote traps—accidentally on purpose leaving her out on the ice, fiddling with the other zombies to make them attack her—which she foils by accident or by foresight. Peterkin is an ex-con with an implant preventing violent rages; its designers didn’t notice it wouldn’t stop cold, impersonal murders. On a literal level this explains why he resorts to death traps. But there’s a sense he can’t directly acknowledge the narrator is alive. An overt fight would break the rules of the game.

3.

For the narrator, undeath is play. She has free run of the colony as long as she pretends to follow orders. She happily occupies herself raiding the kitchen and sabotaging her work. At one point she destroys a domed city with an asteroid-sized glob of petroleum, an event she describes with the same distant affectlessness as the time she upends a tub of leftover salad on the guy directing the zombies on garbage duty.

One of the main arguments in David Graeber’s book The Utopia of Rules is about hierarchy and knowledge. Put simply, people at the bottom of a hierarchy understand much more about the people above them than vice versa. The people above have power over the people below, so the people below have to spend time and energy understanding who the uppers are, what they want, and how the system they all live under works; Graeber calls this interpretive labor. Conversely, the uppers have the same power over the lowers whether they understand the lowers or not.

As an assumed zombie, the narrator is so far below everyone else she’s completely illegible to the factory’s hierarchy—but, as the Fantastic Four could tell you, sometimes invisibility is a superpower. The narrator learns everything about the colonists while they learn nothing about her—and she loves it. Not that the asymmetry in interpretive labor doesn’t hurt her in some ways. And the people her fellow zombies were before they died, and the indigenous people of Land’s End. She occasionally takes a moment to snark about it. At one point one of the other zombies—who, remember, are actually the narrator having imaginary conversations—marvels at how he’s worth more to society as a corpse than he ever was alive.

But mostly she’s not thinking about this. She’s watching the colonists with mingled pity and contempt. They’re just as screwed by the information asymmetry—not that they’d ever know it. It’s the reason the narrator sees through Peterkin while the colonists find him irritating but don’t grasp that he’s a mortal danger. Their place in the pyramid of interpretive labor renders the colonists too ignorant even to keep themselves alive.

The narrator befriends the Land’s Enders, who can see perfectly well she’s alive. They don’t speak but can communicate telepathically through her implant. They think she’s different from other humans. She protests she’s just the only person who bothered to find anything out about them. The L.E.’s are aquatic; Land’s End is a water-world stuck in an artificial ice age. An atomic engine in just the right place will start a chain reaction and melt all the ice, turning Land’s End back into a planetary ocean, impossible to colonize.

So the narrator steals one. In another book this would be a major focus, a locus of complications and suspense, even the main plot. Instead, the narrator just grabs the engine from storage and walks out with it. It chugs away in the background for the rest of the book. No one is paying attention. The colonists think it’s peculiar that the ice is getting slushy but never understand what’s happening even after it dawns on them they need to evacuate. The counterintuitive way to handle a plot can be the right way: in a book about un-seeing, keeping the world-changing revolution and climate emergency in the background works thematically. And the way the colonists are slow to notice the planet warming up, even as their base progressively floods, resonates in the 21st century in ways Piserchia can’t have imagined.

4.

Like a lot of SFF from across the political spectrum I, Zombie celebrates rebellion. But the narrator does not openly, noisily protest. She’s not interested in rebellion as an identity. She looks for opportunities to take and exercise power from the place where she finds herself. Her social invisibility allows her to act as omniscient narrator and stage manager, directing the action around her while remaining unseen. She grabs the corporate pyramid from its base and inverts it, and no human ever realizes it. She’ll return to Earth with a new identity but will never be anyone’s hero.

Uniquely, I, Zombie turns social invisibility from an injustice into a wish-fulfillment fantasy for introverts, a celebration of solidarity between those who live in an industrial world but are too weird for industry. It’s a book about alienation in which alienation is pretty good, actually. I don’t think any other novel would take exactly this slant on this material. Piserchia’s point of view is unapologetically hers alone, and that’s as good an argument as any for why she still deserves to be read.

  1. She says she wasn’t intelligent, and says the zombification implants smartened her up like the guy in Flowers For Algernon. But her self-esteem isn’t the greatest and it’s hard to tell how literally we’re supposed to take this; she doesn’t come off as someone who’s spent her life failing to understand things.  ↩

On Sofia Samatar and Kate Zambreno’s Tone

Books, , , ,

1.

What I mean is, I’m writing on Sofia Samatar and Kate Zambreno’s book Tone, not their, y’know, tone. Although that’s interesting, too. This is imaginative criticism, not dryly analytical but poetic. Books about art can also be art.

Cover of Tone

Tone, as a literary concept, isn’t as easily defined as plot or character. “Tone” seems to mean less the more you repeat it. (Tone. Tone? Tone tone tone.) Online literary discourse (and it is mostly discourse, in its incarnation as the term for sniping and squabbling on various Twitter methadone sites, rather than discussion or conversation) hinges on plot, character, and visible surface politics, and not much else. Tone mostly comes up in the context of accusations that someone is trying to police it. You start to feel like any consideration of it is cop-brained.

But it does mean something, albeit something elusively complex; Samatar and Zambreno are approaching a definition, not declaring one finalized and laminated for safekeeping. Singular authority is what this book is running from; it’s written in first person plural for a reason.

2.

It’s not voice, for one thing. A book with a consistent tone can contain many voices and one voice can speak in different tones. Readers often have very different feelings about the first three Earthsea books and Tehanu. (I’m lukewarm on the former and loved the latter.) They’re all in Ursula K. Le Guin’s voice but she’s writing in different tones.

Some of the metaphors Samatar and Zambreno use to approach tone:

  • Windows. (Lighted windows, stained glass windows, computer windows.) A window frames what you see through it, maybe colors it. You can be inside looking out or outside looking in. Is this the difference between the writer and the reader? Which is which?

  • Synesthesia. Tone can be a color—some books are grey, some blue. Tone can be an odor or a background noise. Sense-impressions create atmospheres; atmospheres remind us of sense-impressions.

  • Speaking of atmospheres: Ecology. Tone is established through relationships—how the materials of a text relate to each other in a complex web, like the elements of an ecosystem.

Samatar and Zambreno illustrate their arguments with close readings of several novels, and their reading of W. G. Sebald’s The Rings of Saturn lays out (even for someone like me who has not yet read it) how the ecological metaphor works. Samatar and Zambreno argue The Rings of Saturn has a distant tone, an atmosphere of parts:

  • The Rings of Saturn is structured by a long walk through Sussex—a distance travelled horizontally—after “a long stint of work.”
  • The book repeatedly watches things from heights—from a cliff, a plane, the top of a well.
  • There’s a model of the Temple of Jerusalem, which not only seems distant—we look down on models like we’re looking from a great height—but models something distant in time. The novel ponders the history of the territory the narrator walks (and “the traces of destruction, reaching far back into the past, that were evident even in that remote place”), and also thinks for a while about the 17th century writer Thomas Browne.
  • Sebald’s prose is itself old-fashioned, temporally distanced, originally written in an archaically-tinged German.

Writers arrange images, incidents, and language to resonate against (or with) each other. And then this feedback loop happens: the resonance becomes an organizing principle in itself; readers interpret images, incidents, and language through the tone.

3.

Tone is a general exploration of tone, and also offers readings of several specific books, and at a certain point you realize you’re also reading cultural criticism. Samatar and Zambreno are writing about the tone of the world—the affective atmospheres we breathe without noticing.

The books Tone analyzes, in relation to each other, set a tone—Nella Larsen’s Quicksand, about a Black woman academic; Heike Geissler’s Seasonal Associate, about a writer working a temp job at an Amazon warehouse; Hiroko Oyamada’s The Factory, about people working absurd, meaningless jobs; Sebald’s meditations, which take in historical disasters. Samatar and Zambreno investigate tones specific to their own experiences as women in 21st century academia (the atmosphere breathed by a visiting scholar, for instance) and more broadly the tone of the world everyone shares, where capitalism is a sickening and collapsing end in itself instead of a means.

Tone is about the relations between elements in a text, but it’s also about seeing the relations between people in a culture that atomizes us and nudges us into an individualist mindset: we’re the hero, others supporting extras. In the end, Tone concludes, the book has been as much about “making a space where certain things can be said” as about tone itself.

Good criticism, like any other kind of good writing, has got to do more than one thing at a time.

4.

These points where Samatar and Zambreno talk about tone in ecological terms struck me hardest. Another word for an ecosystem is the environment. “Environment” can also mean a social or cultural or architectural environment. In any case it’s an arrangement of materials that relate to each other in particular ways and create particular effects (or affects), and we are among those materials in both senses of the word.

In the Peanuts strip that ran August 11, 1970, Linus is just back from a trip. Everywhere he went he saw the same malls and motels and restaurants they had back home. “Every town looks like every other town… It doesn’t matter where you go… you never left!”

A lot of SFF books—popular fiction in general, really, but SFF is the genre where I keep most up to date—feel like featureless lumps of gray teflon. My attention slides off them. I’ve always found the reasons hard to pin down—nebulous and most likely myriad. But one piece of the puzzle that is my alienation from pop culture is likely a loss of cultural biodiversity. 21st century SFF favors reboots and retellings. It’s marketed as bullet lists of safely familiar “tropes” legoed together into microtargeted subgenres. Every book needs its comp titles; the most marketable use mostly the same materials in mostly the same configurations.

Tone is part of this. High-profile SFF stays within a limited range of marketable tones—straightforwardly invisible, snarky, heartwarming, spunky (this last usually written in first person present tense). SFF paints deep space, fairyland, and contemporary New York in the same tones; they color the speech of medieval Europe, the Paleolithic tundra, and posthuman Pluto. Tonally, these stories are interchangeable geography-of-nowhere theme park suburbs. A literature where, no matter where you are in space or time, you can always get McDonalds.

(It’s easy to see why media execs are comfortable with AI art: AI is inherently remixed, no potentially off-putting tone of its own. A portfolio of proven successes blended into a palatable Soylent shake.)

Samatar and Zambreno quote a speaker at a conference who says Kafka’s style is unlike any other kind of German, like a “meteor” fallen to earth. What with the books’s focus on relationships I don’t feel like it makes sense to talk about this as individuality of tone. Maybe specificity is the right word. Kafka compels because the tone of his work, like the language, is determinedly specific.

Samatar and Zambreno write that the most compelling reason to return to a book is “to breathe that air again.” But first it needs air of its own.

On Stanislaw Lem’s The Chain of Chance

Books, Speculative Fiction, ,

The Chain of Chance is, first, not a direct translation of the title. The book’s Wikipedia entry—not the greatest source, I know—renders it as Catarrh, or Rhinitis. Hay fever. Not a disease, an annoyance.

1.

Cover of The Chain of Chance

What’s most striking about The Chain of Chance is its structure, which is not conventional at all. (As we’ll see, this book’s themes are directly integrated into the structure and the prose. This is something a lot of SFF could learn from!) The first section is a rambling avalanche of frustrations, raindrops building to a storm of aggravation. The narrator, John, is driving to Rome. Severe allergies clog his sinuses. It’s too hot and too humid. Traffic is heavy; the fan blows exhaust fumes in his face. It looks like rain but the storm won’t break, until suddenly it’s a downpour. “My stomach felt like a lump of dough, my head was on fire, and stuck to my heart was a sensor that caught on my suspenders every time I turned the wheel.”

John doesn’t explain what he’s up to. He doesn’t notice he hasn’t explained it. He’s the guy next to you on the plane who spends the flight pouring out his least interesting troubles. We pick out the plot from sporadic details like that sensor: John is posing as a dead man named Adams, using his belongings, monitored by electrodes as he follows Adams’ last journey. How Adams died is a mystery; John imitates his actions precisely, hoping for clues along the way.

Before he took this job John was an astronaut. He didn’t get past orbit, disqualified by allergies. Even his memories of space are annoyances: chasing down floating crumbs and dandruff with a vacuum in zero-G, readjusting to gravity when he came back down.

John stops at a gas station. It’s empty except for a woman who walks in and for some reason faints. What does this mean? Does it mean anything? Just because something seems anomalous, is it important?

An escalator in the station starts when John comes near and stops when he leaves as though, John thinks, it’s announcing the end of a scene.[1] But there’s no intent there, just a sensor. A mechanical process.

2.

Stymied, John flies to Paris, where his journey started. (He still hasn’t gone into details. Who was Adams? Who’s interested in his death, and what’s mysterious about it?) He’s delayed by an airport bombing.

You might assume this is a plot point. It is later, although not in the way you’d expect. For now it’s a thematic bomb. The Chain of Chance was published in 1975 and in the early 1970s terrorism was on everybody’s mind—there was an epidemic of hijackings (over 130 between 1968 and 1972), and Italy was deep in the Years of Lead. In 1975 a bomb would have seemed a logical way to inconvenience the protagonist of a novel in an Italian airport.

Terrorism feels uncanny. The victims are random. The perpetrators are distant, unseen; there’s no direct link. The motive is impersonal—somebody thinks they have to make a point (or that they have a point at all) and to make it they’re going to kill… I dunno, let’s see, maybe you? We don’t know who the somebody is but we know there’s a somebody. When disasters happen in patterns we expect someone is causing them for a reason, an enemy we can fight. As one character observes in an entirely different context, “It’s always convenient to know who’s to blame for everything.”

3.

In the 1960s a programmer named Joseph Weizenbaum created a program called ELIZA. ELIZA was what we’d call a chatbot. It could have followed any number of scripts, but Weizenbaum set it up as what’s known as a Rogerian psychotherapist. (This is the ELIZA we’re all familiar with today, but Weizenbaum called this script DOCTOR.) The technique involves asking open questions and reflecting the patient’s answers back to them, which could be simulated simply by saying things like “That’s quite interesting,” and “Can you elaborate on that?” and occasionally regurgitating whatever the “patient” just typed (“You say the owls are not what they seem?”). What Rogerian psychotherapists thought of all this is not recorded.

In his book Computer Power and Human Reason Weizenbaum described what happened next.[2] When he suggested recording conversations with ELIZA colleagues objected that this “amounted to spying on people’s most intimate thoughts.” Not that Weizenbaum was cool with spying on intimate thoughts, but it hadn’t occurred to him anyone would share intimate thoughts with ELIZA. People were treating ELIZA like a real therapist. Even Weizenbaum’s secretary asked him to leave the room so she could chat privately. Three psychiatrists (including his colleague Kenneth Colby) writing in The Journal of Nervous and Mental Disease saw a future where “Several hundred patients an hour could be handled by a computer system.” To Weizenbaum this was weird and creepy. Any real therapeutic relationship is based on empathy. How could anyone think this half-assed algorithm was capable of empathy?

Pareidolia is the psychological quirk that makes you see unintended images—often faces—in random or meaningless arrangements of shapes. It’s what’s happening when an electrical outlet looks like a surprised little guy, or when you see a major religious figure in your English muffin. It’s a form of apophenia, the temptation to find meaning in things that aren’t meaningful or even connected. Like, lefty urbanists sometimes insist cities don’t plant fruit trees along the streets due to active collusion between planning departments and supermarket owners, who meet in smoky backrooms nationwide to prevent free food. Nobody thinks of the ordinary and obvious fact—because it’s not an interesting story—that fruit leaves a goddamn mess on the sidewalk. This story takes isolated data points—ornamental trees don’t have fruit, business owners don’t like competition, they’re often tight with local politicians—and perceived a pattern that isn’t there. That’s a form of apophenia.

Humans also tend to anthropomorphize inanimate objects; some small corner in every human mind will see a stuck Roomba banging around under a couch and imagine it’s frightened. Sometimes people see more humanity in objects than humans. The point of all this being that no one who has accidentally sent a text message about ducks thinks the autotext feature on their phone is smart, but put a better version of the algorithm in a different context and you’ll convince a lot of people—educated people, even—they’re talking to Deep Thought. People like to see people and, more than anything else in the world, people want to believe in agency.

4.

Stymied, John visits Dr. Barth, a computer scientist who consults with the Sûreté. We’re halfway through the book and up to now we’ve had to piece the plot together by picking relevant details out of a torrent of grumbles, but here John finally explains what’s going on.

John’s story is the best kind of telling instead of showing, not a dramatization but a report. It’s a long chunk of exposition, but efficient. The Chain of Chance takes advantage of its status as prose and doesn’t draw the explanation out with flashback scenes or extra dialogue. Lem loved crossing fiction and nonfiction; he was a master of storytelling through exposition and his novels include Borgesian volumes of reviews and introductions to nonexistent books.

Adams was one of a series of men—all middle-aged, all single, all balding, all with allergies—who visited a spa famous for its sulfur baths. Each one subsequently developed paranoid delusions—hinting they were on to some mysterious journalistic scoop, or being hounded by terrorists. (Apophenia again.) Finally each man either committed suicide or died through accidents so careless they might as well have been intentional. Adams’ family noticed the similarities and hired John to make sense of this—not that he’s had much luck. Is it a poison? Is someone testing a chemical weapon? Why balding, allergic men, and why single—is that part of the profile, or did they just not have anyone to notice their strange behavior and get help? Just because it’s a point of commonality, is it important? John isn’t sure what details to pick out; he’s been reading the situation the same way we read the first sections of the novel.

5.

Dr. Barth introduces John to a colleague, Dr. Saussure (no relation). Dr. Saussure doesn’t have a solution but he does have a hunch, expressed in metaphor: imagine a table held together with nails, the nail-heads visible on its surface. Imagine a drop of water perfectly positioned on each nail. You’d conclude someone had been by with an eyedropper. But leave the table out in a rainstorm and of course the nails will be wet, no eyedropper required: in a storm some drops will inevitably hit.

Or imagine a fly landing on a firing range. To hit the fly with a single bullet would be impressive marksmanship. But what about a real fusillade, a room packed with bullets? Shoot long enough, and one’s bound to hit. The dead fly would only impress you if you didn’t notice the misses, if your perceptions were somehow limited to that single bullet.

As an astronaut, John had a metaphorical long-distance view of humanity; he could take in the entire world at one glance. On Earth, he’s one of the flies on the firing range.

6.

Here John returns to his catalogue of annoyances. Chief among them is a tabloid suggesting impropriety between John and the young woman who survived the bombing with him; he’s pissed off enough to get careless. In his angrily random roamings he ingests exactly the wrong combination of snacks, allergy medicine, and shampoo—and now he stumbles into the solution to the mystery, nearly adding to the list of victims in the process. The dead men weren’t poisoned by people. What drove them to suicide was an unlikely chemical reaction involving sulfur, allergy medicine, hair tonic, and candied almonds (hey, everybody likes candy).

Lem opens a chapter of his novel Fiasco by insisting “That which mathematically has an extremely low probability also has this characteristic: that it may nevertheless sometimes happen.” Lem keeps coming back to chance and contingency; when he published a book of literary theory he called it The Philosophy of Chance.[3] The Investigation is another mystery where the villain may be an improbable natural process. His Master’s Voice offers this as one possible explanation for an apparently alien signal.

Any wild improbability may be inevitable including, the last line suggests, the writing of The Chain of Chance, a novel that looks at the twentieth century and sees more people alive than at any point in history and a world moving faster every year. This is a human rainstorm: every day enough people take enough weird and random actions to hit every spot on every table and then some.

Surely such a complex repeating pattern must have been planned? But a lot of people die, and a lot of those deaths also have complex backstories, and a lot of those backstories inevitably happen more than once. It’s just that no one picked those specific wet nails out of the many raindrops hitting the table, assumed they’d found a pattern, and deduced intent. John’s investigation is based in the same kind of apophenia the dead men experienced.

Of course, there is an intent behind The Chain of Chance: Lem’s. But we aren’t living in a novel. We can’t read the world like a story. A lot of political discourse is real people fanfiction about the machinations of perceived enemies who are in reality confused and fumbling. Banal contingencies become plots. Anyone who is at all online has seen people confabulate elaborate stories to explain why strangers took actions that were in fact unimportant or random. Think of the people on Nextdoor who see a van driving slowly and warn that burglers are casing the neighborhood when it was just some guy looking for an address.

Purpose and agency are weirdly comforting even when they seem malevolent. Things don’t just happen. Someone is running the game even if it’s rigged against you. Anyone who’s read a detective novel knows mysteries are caused by villains, and at the end of the story the villain will be revealed. You can do things about villains: arrest them, or fight them, or at least call them out. You can’t call out a random combination of chemicals. You can broadcast warnings and pass laws and regulations; but they take a lot of work, and the work doesn’t feel like a fun adventure, and anyway there’s only so much you can do to protect people from their own haplessness. In that sense a villain is, oddly, less frightening. The Chain of Chance is a detective novel where the villains are nature, chance, and apophenia. These are the enemy more often than most of us would care to admit.

  1. Which is is, but only from the reader’s perspective.  ?
  2. I have read just excerpts of this book and would like to read the whole thing… but it’s out of print, used copies are expensive, and the available ebook for some reason consists of page images cut in half and displayed sideways.  ?
  3. As far as I know this has never been translated into English but there’s a summary at that Wikipedia page.  ?

On James Tiptree, Jr.’s Up the Walls of the World

Books, Speculative Fiction,

(Spoilers from the first line this time!)

1.

Cover of Up the Walls of the World

Late in Up the Walls of the World, after the human protagonist Dr. Daniel Dann has transcended his mortal existence, the book throws a good-natured jab at 2001: A Space Odyssey: “I’m not going to be reborn as the embryo of humanity transcendent in the cosmos,” thinks Dann. “I’ll just be me.”

Up the Walls of the World was out of print for years. (It’s back now, as an appallingly typo-strewn ebook.) Tiptree’s novels don’t have a great reputation. They’re not as brilliantly intense as her stories; Tiptree dilutes with length. But Up the Walls of the World is still great (and better than 2001 the novel, which has its moments but mostly survives on the coattails of the superior movie).

UtWotW is structured as two alternating and converging strands with occasional interjections from a standard-issue MYSTERIOUS ALL CAPS ENTITY. Tivonel, a telepathic flying manta from the gaseous planet Tyree,[1] travels to the Wall of the World to hook up with an old lover. Her tryst is interrupted by her world’s impending destruction and certain Tyreeans’ plans to escape via interplanetary mind-swap. Meanwhile, Dr. Dann consults on a military experiment in telepathic communication while managing the drug habit that numbs his overwhelming empathy. His determination to detach from humanity is shaken when he finds himself attracted to the equally distant computer programmer Margaret Omali. (UtWotW could have stumbled here—Margaret is a generation younger than Dann, rather Spock-like in personality, and Black, and Dann initially exoticizes her a little. It would have made for an awkward romance. But where a modern SFF novel might consider romance obligatory, here their relationship settles into a more interesting friendship.) After a series of telepathic contacts and human/alien body swaps everyone ends up as telepathic presences crewing an alien machine built to preserve life from dying worlds—an apparent Destroyer that, in an anomalously eucatastrophic move for Tiptree, turns out to be a Saver.

Up the Walls of the World tells its story in a present-tense third person that sticks close to the point of view characters but allows itself moments of omniscience to let us know what they don’t. (Dann, for instance, doesn’t understand how much better his patients feel after they talk to him, even as he pulls away.)

Tivonel’s voice is all exclamation points and excited questions. She uses the word “how” primarily to marvel at things: How thrilling, how huge, how beautiful, how incredible. (Tivonel thinks less often about how to do things. She just does them.) And there’s something to marvel at everywhere, or in almost everyone. Everything is rich, strong, intense; colors are everywhere.

Dr. Dann’s internal monologue introduces itself by repeating the phrase “as usual.” He’s prone to short sentences and cursory observations, occasionally almost telegraphic. (“Specimen of young deskbound Naval intelligence executive: coarse-minded, clean-cut, a gentleman to the ignorant eye.”) Dann notices what annoys him: asinine projects, substandard door frames, disgusting electrode paste, Naval intelligence executives. The first person he pays detailed attention to is the ironically named Lt. Kirk, who Dann can’t stand. Conversely, he thinks of his patients as their code numbers (“Subject R–95”) to keep them at arm’s length, not because he doesn’t care about them but because in his experience caring hurts. (He warms to them as the book progresses, to his alarm.) Margaret’s POV enters after she leaves her body behind; her chapters are heavy on abstraction and computer metaphors. She sees herself as “ghostly circuitry.”

Tiptree being Tiptree the novel pokes at gender. The Tyreeans swap human gender roles—men carry and raise young and are more emotionally intelligent, women are more action-oriented—but still privilege male activities. Lt. Kirk is everything the Tyreean men aren’t, a symbol of self-destructive male aggression; he’s introduced after kicking a computer and almost castrating himself on the cooling fan. When he’s mind-swapped he ends up as a child—he’s the one with the most to learn from the Tyreeans. But to the extent anyone talks about Up the Walls of the World, gender is the thing they’ve talked about already. I felt more like writing about two points relating back to the quotation at the top of the post.

2.

“I’ll just be me,” thinks Dann, and he will continue to be himself for some time. Visionary or psychedelic SF stories like 2001 often end on a moment of transcendence, where the main character levels up in a cod-evolutionary sense. It’s a metaphorical epiphany, the moment after which everything is different. But we don’t learn how everything is different; the next stage of existence is indescribable. (Or the next world. Closely related are stories that transport the protagonist into the future, or an alien world, but end before we see it because it’s too wonderful to describe.)

It’s the end of the story (2001, Lafferty’s Fourth Mansions, the movies The Black Hole or Repo Man). Or the POV characters watch someone else transcend (Star Trek: The Motion Picture, Clarke’s Childhood’s End, the sublimed civilizations haunting the background of Banks’ Culture novels). Or the character de-transcends for the epilogue, returning to ordinary life happier or wiser but not much different. (This risks bathos. Either intentionally, as with the wickedly cynical punchline of Dick’s Galactic Pot-Healer, or unintentionally, as in “Threshold” from Star Trek: Voyager, unrecognized cousin to 2001: For a moment Tom Paris is omniscient, existing everywhere in the universe at once; the writers can’t imagine what comes next and in desperation turn him into a mudskipper.)

What’s the transcendent ending doing? At the simplest level, it’s a literalized metaphor. A novel is supposed to end with the protagonist changed, in a new phase of their life, ideally wiser. Ascending to a new evolutionary phase makes the change more concrete…

…But also more abstract. Growing as a person is good in itself, but in a realist novel we can also appreciate what the protagonist has learned and guess what they’re going to do next—assuming this isn’t a tragedy, where the protagonist won’t be doing anything next—because we know what life looks like. They’ll marry the guy they’d assumed was a jerk; or move back to the midwest and forget about joining the beautiful people; or go on another, hopefully less doomed, whaling voyage. Becoming a space embryo is vaguer. What does an ascended energy being do, besides hassling starship captains? What has it learned that our puny human minds can comprehend? We don’t know what transcendence means; we’re just meant to be impressed these guys transcended. At worst the transcendent SF climax is the idea of wisdom without the specifics, an escapist fantasy for SFF fans who like to congratulate themselves on how much more expanded their minds are than everyone else’s.

So the human and Tyreean cast of Up the Walls of the World ascend to a new existence as pure minds. What’s interesting is that where other stories end there, Tiptree carries on well beyond that point.

“For though he was master of the world,” says 2001, “he was not quite sure what to do next. But he would think of something.” Up the Walls of the World says: Okay. So think of something, already. So you evolved. What do you do with that?[2] What’s transcendence for? One of Tiptree’s humans loses himself in a dream world. For a while the Tyreeans live in a virtual recreation of Tyree. But what’s the point of that existence?

Margaret, having taken control of the Saver, knows its crew needs a task. Possibilities flit through Dann’s mind in a rush of em-dashes: its powers can rescue endangered species, turn back and rerun time to save lost civilizations, stop wars. Tivonel, characteristically, wants to try everything. But the important thing is to engage with the world and contribute to the general struggle against entropy instead of retreating into self-absorption. Up the Walls of the World argues growth can be an end in itself but declaring it the end is a failure of imagination. Wisdom isn’t knowing the secrets of the universe; it’s knowing what to do with them.

3.

“I’ll just be me,” thinks Dann, chagrined his cosmic transformation hasn’t granted wisdom: “But what new great necessities have I discovered, beyond the old necessity of kindness?”

On Tyree the Wall of the world is a giant stable windstorm, a mountain of air currents allowing the Tyreeans to climb high into the atmosphere. Only at the top of the Wall can Tyreean telepaths listen to other planets and, if sufficiently morally flexible, swap bodies with aliens.

The arc for these characters is about learning to go over the walls between people. Learning not to fear empathy. Dr. Dann spends the early chapters trying to be colder than he really is because he fears other people’s pain. In one of Tiptree’s more obvious metaphors, as a Tyreean Dann gains an empathic healing ability but has to feel his patients’ pain to heal them. Acknowledging others’ pain can be painful in itself, especially if we’re even indirectly implicated. And comprehending the reality of other people. Some Tyreeans are steal human bodies because to them the humans are supporting characters while they’re the protagonists. But this works the other way around: as an empathic being Dann understands “the reality of a different human world. A world in which he is a passing phenomenon, as she was in mine.” For a Tiptree story this thing is startlingly warm-hearted.

For the first time he has really grasped life’s most eerie lesson: The Other Exists. Cliché, he thinks dazedly. Cliché, like the big ones.

And, yeah, you understand why Dann isn’t that impressed by his own insights. Stated baldly, this is a cliché. Look at it one way and all Up the Walls of the World is saying is that people should be more patient with each other. Tiptree is almost apologizing here for abandoning her usual melancholy, like a goth embarrassed to be caught watching the Lawrence Welk Show. It’s like she’s asking: is this really all I’m saying?

I feel like I need to defend Up the Walls of the World from its own narrative. Stated baldly most moral insights—Dann’s “big ones”—sound like clichés. Any incompetent critic in a bad enough mood can reduce any novel to the bit at the end of the He-Man cartoon where Orko belabors the moral for the less attentive children. And some writing is satisfied with that. The equation of happiness with shallowness is itself a cliché, but it’s a cliché with some basis: the history of SFF is littered with stories written to soothe the reader with reassuring platitudes. (Although the problem isn’t only the stories telling us love conquers all, or the modern variations about how finding a properly affirming friend group solves everything—the hard SF story written to tell its readers how intelligent and tough-minded they are is the same candy, just in a different flavor.)

The real question is whether a story expects the reader to be satisfied with the platitude. And I think Up the Walls of the World passes that test. Whatever doubts the book puts in Dann’s mouth, this happy ending is hard-won; climbing those walls is difficult in ways UtWotW can only express in metaphors, not morals. As the novel ends not everyone’s problems have been solved. Again, the point of the last chapters is that transcendence means ongoing work.

Most stories circle around insights that are both profound and ordinary. Sometimes the difference between bad writing and good is simply that bad writing flattens eternal truths into cheap morals, while good writing finds complexity hidden under clichés.

  1. One of the literary aliens Wayne Douglas Barlowe illustrated for his book Barlowe’s Guide to Extraterrestrials.  ↩

  2. To be fair, in 2001 the novel, unlike the movie, the Star Child does do something, usefully vaporizing some weapons satellites.  ↩

Olga Ravn, The Employees

Books, Speculative Fiction

There’s an obvious visual difference between Star Trek and Star Trek: The Next Generation. Where Kirk’s Enterprise looked like a sterile battleship, Picard’s looks like an office. Soothingly beige, carpeted, with comfy chairs and the occasional potted plant. (Most of the waiting rooms I’ve known in my life have felt very Enterprise D-ish, which is fine by me; who’d want to wait for their dental appointment in a battleship?).

It’s not just an office, of course. The Federation is meant to be a utopia, so the Enterprise is also a home and community. Everybody hangs out in the lounge, attends concerts and amateur drama, gets plenty of free time for hobbies. Everybody on Star Trek: The Next Generation has a great work-life balance.

Cover of The Employees

The Six Thousand Ship, the setting of Olga Ravn’s The Employees, is something else. Among the themes of The Employees is an approach to space travel I haven’t often seen: if a starship is a workplace, its crew has nothing but their workplace, floating in an empty void. It’s implied the Six Thousand Ship’s crew signed up for a one-way journey—it won’t return to Earth in the crew’s lifetimes. Much of the novel is an exploration of the psychological effects, the damage done when there’s literally nothing outside of “productivity.”

Space is the corporate dream: the one place your employees can’t walk off the job. Not if they want to keep breathing.

The Employees is structured as a series of statements to managers holding listening sessions to “gain knowledge of the local workflows.” The statements are anonymous. We rarely hear a name. The protagonist is the whole crew. Given SFF’s emphasis on worldbuilding, it’s weird it doesn’t do fictional mass observation more often. Adventure stories or bildungsromans starring singular heroes are the default, to the point the average SFF fan might think The Employees is more experimental than it really is. SFF tells stories about different worlds, but defaults to focusing on how those differences affect a singular, special, hero as they chase self-actualization. Even SFF novels with multiple POV characters (i.e., A Game of Thrones) often feel less like social novels than like multiple hero stories broken up and braided together. The Employees is instead a portrait of a society.

Toiling alongside the human employees are “humanoids,” artificial workers indistinguishable from humans. (We often don’t know whether a statement is made by a human or a humanoid.) Humanoids were built to work. They don’t know Earth, they have no experience of anything but employment. One is baffled to hear a human colleague say there’s more to a person than their work: “what else could a person be?”

The human employees find themselves nostalgic for everything they had on Earth—family, nature, shopping. They sound surprised. These weren’t feelings they’d expected to have. Some employees keep simulated holographic children as substitute family. Eggs are a recurring image. One employee dreams about tiny spheres like fish eggs breaking out of their skin. In the real world human employees come down with cases of warts, like the dream is trying incompetently to come true. The humans disappear into their roles, becoming interchangeable parts: “As long as you’re in the suit and pass through the corridor to be cleansed, you’re the first officer.” Later there’s a mutiny and the ship’s funeral director doesn’t know how to respond as anything but a funeral director: “I haven’t always felt that my capabilities were being utilized to the full.”

In this environment employees’ full potential as people goes unused and unusable—humans and humanoids both.

As I write this internet junkies have gathered to morbidly gawk at the train wreck that is Elon Musk’s Twitter, which he is running like the world’s drunkest railway signalman. Paid verifications let pranksters pose as his advertisers! People can’t log in because he turned off the two-factor authentication server! He’s getting dangerously close to violating the GDPR!

Most relevantly, as soon as Musk bought Twitter he laid off half the work force, on the theory that anybody left could just work harder. Many have. One proudly posted a photo of herself sleeping at the office, which provoked horror but also some cheering from Musk fans, one declaring “This is how great new things are built.” Which… they’re built badly, but, yeah, this is how a lot of the tech industry works. It’s a standard part of the stereotype: clownish startups filling their headquarters with cereal bars and foosball tables in a vainly half-assed effort to take the edge off long days in the office. Video games are built on “crunch.” Musk demanded his ever-shrinking pool of workers sign a loyalty oath declaring their willingness to be “extremely hardcore” which means working “long hours at high intensity.” The workplace comes first. (Nothing outside of productivity.) In a development that surprised Musk and absolutely no one else, most of the remaining employees took severance instead. That’s where space comes in!

The humanoids suspect something is missing. The humans who identify with their jobs are suffering cognitive dissonance over a bad and irrevocable career choice. Having no past to look back on gives the humanoids time to look at their present, and they’re not sure they want to be tools. At the same time they’re growing their curiosity and optimism as fast as the humans lose it. The company can upload and redownload the humanoids’ minds; they’re likely to survive after the humans are gone. Maybe they’ll someday see Earth. Maybe they can survive on the alien planet the Six Thousand Ship has been studying. “I may have been made,” says one, “but now I’m making myself.”

The statements keep circling back to “the objects,” artifacts from the planet, which hold a strange fascination for the crew. They’re called “the objects” because nobody knows what else they could be. They look like eggs, or tubes, or stones. Sometimes they feel alive. “It’s a dangerous thing for an organization not to be sure which of the objects in its custody may be considered to be living,” says one person. They could be talking about the objects, or the humanoids, or the whole crew.

The objects are the reason The Employees was written in the first place—if you want to get metafictional, you might say they were there at the creation of the crew’s universe. The objects are based on the work of a sculptor named Lea Guldditte Hestelund who asked Olga Ravn to write a text for an exhibition, which became The Employees. The novel mentions the Six Thousand Ship has white walls and orange and gray floors. So does the museum space in the photos at the site I just linked. We’re probably meant to visualize the ship as resembling the real-world museum.

The crew doesn’t understand their own feelings towards the objects; they’re both attracted and disquieted. (A quietly throbbing egg is not as straightforward as a foosball table.) Maybe the objects, in their sheer inscrutability, are envoys from outside the bounds of the crew’s imagination. If these objects are beyond understanding or conception, what other possibilities are they missing? The crew who’ve experienced life outside of work, who know what they’ve lost in moving to a world of pure productivity, are making their imaginations smaller to adjust. It’s that or stop breathing.

“I think you need to imagine a future and then live in it,” says one crew member.

Have I mentioned Elon Musk is the guy who wants to run a Mars colony? I think he’d get takers. Americans are carving away at their imaginations as you read this.

Microworlds and All Systems Red

Books, Speculative Fiction,

Recent Reading 2022–01

Microworlds

Cover of Microworlds

In 1973, the Science Fiction Writers of America gave Stanislaw Lem an honorary membership. In 1976, they found an excuse to take it away. They’d found out what Lem thought of science fiction, and SFF culture is deeply petty. Lem was one of the genre’s harshest critics and Microworlds is 280 pages of what the SFWA was reacting to.

What’s striking about Microworlds is how relevant it feels, though it was published forty years ago and collects essays that are even older. A running theme is Lem’s belief that science fiction’s pulp roots—in his view, its status as a commercial genre—holds it back. One point he keeps coming back to is that science fiction is intensely conformist in the kinds of stories it tells; most defaults to adventure stories or detective stories, and the resulting novels lack the tools to grapple with the bigger themes they gesture towards. And, yeah… this is a phenomenon I’m familiar with even from current SFF.

And Lem calls fans out on that two-step maneuver where they insist science fiction is important literature—maybe the most important literature of all—but when it’s subjected to serious criticism they pull back and insist it’s just entertainment and the critics are being pretentious. SFF fans pull this one out on a regular basis to this day. Fandom likes to congratulate themselves on how much SFF has evolved, but the truth is today’s SFF has a lot of the same problems it had back in the “golden age.”

All Systems Red

Speaking of not grappling with themes…

Cover of All Systems Red

Martha Wells’ Murderbot series has snagged a couple of Hugo awards. In early 2022 I decided I should finally get around to reading the first book, All Systems Red. (Yes, it’s been that long since I took notes for this review.) It’s fine, I guess. It’s entertaining on the same level as a Sherlock Holmes pastiche or one of the better Star Trek novels. I’d have been more impressed if that were what I’d expected going in. SFF grade inflation strikes again.

This is one of the many SFF novels that don’t recognize their own best ideas, or push them far enough. Murderbot is a “SecUnit,” ostensibly a security robot, though in fact it’s (it goes by “it”) a human being with cyborg parts. Murderbot loves television. All it wants to do is watch television and it’s constantly telling us how it spends every spare moment on its shows. But it doesn’t tell us what its favorite shows are like. This is a large and weird narrative hole. First, a chance for fun metafictional commentary on science fiction is left on the table. More importantly, this is a missed opportunity to characterize both the narrator and its world. What stories does Murderbot gravitate to? What kind of stories get told? (Or what kind of propaganda? Because corporations are in charge here and, as in our world, TV is corporate IP.) How are this world’s stories different from our stories, in broad outline or in detail? How does Murderbot’s life differ from the clichés? We don’t find out.

Which means they effectively aren’t different. All Systems Red leans on the reader’s knowledge of what television looks like to fill in the gap. This is admirably baldfaced pandering—Murderbot’s a media fan, just like you! (It reminds me of how so many musicals are about musicals, because the one topic the entire audience is certain to care about is musicals.) But the whole book feels sketched in. We don’t get a sense of what the protagonists’ spaceship or habitat module is like because we’re assumed to already have usable mental models for “spaceship” and “sci-fi base.” We don’t know what Murderbot’s armor looks like because we have a mental model for “space armor.” No good novel catalogs every detail of every environment, but they will offer surprising or thematically relevant details to pull readers away from our mental defaults. Here we’re working with our defaults.

The human characters are an indistinguishable mass. There’s a sympathetic one, a paranoid one, and some other ones. The book could be doing this on purpose to signal Murderbot’s disinterest, but it’s hard to tell.

All Systems Red is one of those books that start in media res with an action scene. These openings make it hard to care what’s happening. We don’t know yet who anyone is, or what world they live in, and can’t put the action in context. It feels like All Systems Red never gives enough context. The narration is a bald and mechanically paced description of events in a generic first person that could easily be converted to third person (a popular default style in contemporary SFF). This happened, then this, then this. Murderbot only narrates what’s happening right now; the structure of the novel doesn’t let it think back or stop to contemplate.

This could be clever, because the book works like a recap of a TV episode where events play out at a steady pace and what isn’t “on screen” isn’t important. But I’m not sure the book is doing this thoughtfully. One important event in Murderbot’s past needed more exploration. This event would have been a traumatic turning point in its life. It would be the first thing to affect how anyone who knew of it thought of Murderbot. But after a brief initial allusion the book mentions this event only a couple of times, briefly, when it comes up in dialogue. The book’s straight-ahead moment-to-moment style doesn’t allow exploration of Murderbot’s past, and doesn’t allow introspection. Murderbot thinks about one of the most significant moments of its life slightly more often than it thinks about rutabagas, and with similar emotional weight.

The end reveals the entire novel was a letter from Murderbot to another character explaining its decision to strike out on its own, rejecting both the security corporation and the second-class citizenship experienced by free cyborgs. But until the reveal the novel doesn’t read like a letter, and at no point does it read like a letter meant to explain anything. Murderbot describes events but rarely has opinions on them beyond mild annoyance at anything that isn’t television. Until the decisive moment all it seems to want is to slide through life with minimal awkwardness or responsibility. The novel never feels like an argument for why Murderbot would make this risky and uncertain decision now, as opposed to any other point in its life. Murderbot has an epiphany just because there’s one scheduled for the end of the novel.

All Systems Red doesn’t explain what it claims to be explaining. It’s more like… well, we can see it’s wrong for SecUnits to be second-class citizens, and we’re meant to identify with Murderbot, so it should be able to see what we do. So we fill in the book’s argument like we filled in the nature of the spaceships and the armor and the planet this all happened on. This book is not about what it wants to be about in any meaningful way.

I’m normally happy when a book hands me implications and asks me to fill in the gaps, but it doesn’t feel like All Systems Red is implying anything. What’s explicit is meant to be enough.

This is not exactly a review of All Systems Red. I mean, it is, but I wouldn’t have bothered to write it if I didn’t have these exact frustrations with so much other science fiction and fantasy. So much popular SFF is so thin. (And by no means am I only talking about current SFF here—but the older thin books are no longer popular.)

It’s not that the All Systems Reds of SFF are bad books. They’re skilled, professional novels. But it feels like that skill and professionalism is focused on streamlining books down to nothing more than a plot and a moral, precision-engineering away any accidental subtext or ambiguity. The resulting novels have skins, and skeletons, but not much of a heart.