The AI is not your friend

There are many types of the AI in fiction: enigmatic Wintermute, the ironical Culture Minds, Asimov's rule-bound robots, but as chance would have it, Philip K Dick's intuition of how such machines would work has landed closest to practice, so far.

In Martian Time-Slip, the teaching robots at the school are automata, in the format of Historical Persons, but represent a single, central AI. Dick couldn't anticipate the technology, but his concept of how the devices work, accessing vast quantities of recorded tapes, switching subtly to respond to input, means that they closely resemble chat-bot agents, drawing on a trained Large Language Model, the current state-of-art of Artificial Intelligence (AI).

But PKD was always probing the gap between the simulation and the subject, the fake and the real. For the latent schizophrenic technician-protagonist the school threatens/triggers an episode, because the 'bots, machines masked as people are both living and inorganic, present and absent, exposing the gap between perception and actuality that the schizophrenic dreads. The teaching robots recycle recordings; they appear present and responsive, but they are only subtle machines, replaying texts based on predetermined reactions to stimuli.

The limited conclusion is that the teaching robots are machines, artifacts, not people or friends, no matter how convincing—and being convincing is part of the reason they are so disturbing. But the bigger question, the deeper problem with the AI is that the model is an archive, a tape, a recording, that selectively repeats our own language back to us with convincing coherence. There is no organic creativity in this process, only reiteration and hence entropy, repetition, gubbish, gubble, gubble, gubble

There's no absolute answer to the problem, except that the work is always to center human creativity, to rigorously trace the slippery line between the real and the fake.

Cooger and Dark's Guide to Writing

"Omit needless words," said Strunk, and a great deal of writing advice hinges on this dictum. This has led to even starker imperatives: never tag speech with a verb other than "said"; eliminate adjectives; prefer simpler words.

But if Strunk's advice was the touchstone for 20th Century writing and every creative writing workshop thereafter, Ray Bradbury never heard that dark whistle-warning sounding over the plains. Consider, for example, the merry-go-round rush, the hall-of-mirrors sentences of Something Wicked This Way Comes:

The surface slit itself further in a wide ripping smile across the entire surface of the gigantic pear, as the blind Witch gabbled, moaned, blistered her lips, shrieked in protest, and Will hung fast, hands gripped to whicker, kicking legs, as the balloon wailed, whiffled, guzzled, mourned its own swift gaseous death, as dungeon air raved out, as dragon breath gushed forth and the bag, thus driven, retreated up.

How many needless words, redundancies, not to mention opaque constructions, metaphors, contradictions?

Reason for the need, however, and the case is clear. Bradbury's cavalcade prose, his carnivalesque expression, his mirror-house language, is the dark carnival, the show, the temptation, and the action that resides within it: the urge to engage, be thrilled, and the fear, the wish to escape. If it subverts the rules, well, doesn't the big show subvert the real, and that's where the terror and the lure of it lie?

Misters Cooger and Dark understand the fear, the temptation of the rules the #writingcommunity and workshops and classes lay down: omit needless words! follow the rules for good writing, and find an agent, impress a publisher, or follow the lonely path of the unpublished.

Consider another rule that sometimes boils up, the proscription from Elmore Leonard: Never use a verb other than “said” to carry dialogue.

Fine. J.K. Rowling abuses dialogue tags to an excessive degree, but compare:

• "I love you," she said.
• "I love you," she whispered.

And ask which verb means more, which has more imaginative potential, given the right scene and context?

No one wants stark prose, boring prose, bland styles, or we all end up writing for the Web, flat and technically correct. The writing challenge is not to excise the needless, but to find the needful in every word and sentence. What does it serve: atmosphere, character, action, plot? 

When the characters in Something Wicked This Way Comes realize there is no perfection in life, as there is no perfection in craft, that's when they find liberation, compassion, joy even. That's not a good reason to stop trying, but a pretty good rule for all rules.

Edwin Drood and the Magician's Hand

 Dickens knew that you would know exactly who killed Edwin Drood, and that doesn't matter, because the magician has already told you you're about to witness a trick, but you can't look away from the hand anyway, even as the other hand steals your watch and conceals the ace.

So forget that The Mystery of Edwin Drood isn't finished—deep down, you know what happens anyway—and remember that Dickens isn't there to found the long line of detective puzzles games, meant to snap together in an instant only when the reading is done, because Drood has already drawn you into a maze of illusions, and the reversal is that the thing you thought you had to figure out is not the mystery before you.

Perhaps no one is what they seem: the genteel choir-master is an opium addict, but that's just the first card. The confident young gentleman-protagonist is a victim, gone with all his flaws. The childish, pretty girl is sensible and compassionate. The staid boarding school mistress is a social butterfly. The dusty lawyer is a closet romantic (of course he was in love with Rosa's mother). The exotic orphans, brother and sister, will swap roles and identities. They're all masters of disguise, except the one person who really is in disguise, right Dick Datchery?

And Cloisterham, the staid, quiet, dusty cathedral town? Well, most of that dust is from monuments and corpses. Seen through Durdles' eyes, Cloisterham is a sepulcher, concealing death as much as the cathedral elevates solid English Christianity. And remote? Perhaps, but the toxic traces of empire are everywhere—tea, china, spices, exotic preserves, opium itself are products of imperial trade. The predictable, conventional racism that Jasper leverages to land suspicion on Neville Landless is itself just a thin cover, a pretext, to deflect from how deeply every part of of old England, the nostalgic version that Cloisterham would seem to celebrate, is compromised and transformed by (and complicit in) Victoria's sprawling empire, from Sri Lanka to Egypt.

Dickens never made it back to London and never finished the manuscript, but every time you go back to it, you're struck by how the structure of the murder is already there; it's the world itself that's a labyrinth of images, every character a mystery.

Technical metaphors -- A Scanner Darkly

Sometimes, the locus of meaning in science fiction isn't in the "world-building", the broad setting and social and idealogical conditions, but in the specific technologies applied, which can appear almost incidental. 

Consider Philip K Dick's A Scanner Darkly. It's about addiction, of course, and also dissociation and paranoia, but in the glimmer of the scanner we also trace the scramble suit. The scramble suit reads at first like an interesting gadget, a narrative convenience. It encloses the wearer, flashing a blurred sequence of faces and features at high frequency, scrambling the identity of the wearer, making them anonymous, unidentifiable. Convenient, because the identity of the undercover officer is perfectly concealed, even from other police.

But I'm reminded of something I thought of reading this essay, "Philip K. Dick and the Fake Humans", because in the scramble suit you're a fake person because you're concealed, digitized, anonymized, like any number of pseudo-persons who might be online right now generating posts and tweets and instas and reels, pushing copy-and-paste opinions and misinformation that may or may not come from a "real" person or support a real, human agenda. And so, as the cop in the scramble suit can look at the junkie in the scanner and start to forget that they're the same person because they're pretending to be different people all the time, we're not wholly authentic individuals any more; not caught between the real and the fake but increasingly uncertain and paralyzed by not being able to tell the difference.

A Scanner Darkly is much concerned with this dissociation and its corollary, paranoia, and the incoherent patterns of thought that accompany it, but it doesn't spend any time considering the reasons for addiction, only the technical consequences. Substance D, the fictional drug with an unknown source, breaks down the connection between the hemispheres of the brain, bifurcating the individual mind, and so throughout the book we have these mirror-pairs trapped in the darkened scanner: cops and dealers, straights and junkies.

If there's a hint for the reason for Substance D, it lies in the gap between our technological, mediated, scrambled selves and a longing for connection and authenticity we can no longer achieve.

The long journey: Tad William's Memory, Sorrow, and Thorn

When I posted on the doorstopper fantasy over two years ago, the book I had before me was Tad Williams's The Dragonbone Chair, the first book of Memory, Sorrow, and Thorn. Now, I've just finished To Green Angel Tower, the last book of the trilogy. The reading experience says something about the fantasy series, as a genre and a form, and also how reading is itself an undertaking that changes over time.

For the sake of accuracy, I've read plenty of other books since starting MST, and part of the pleasure of a long series is setting each volume aside, then beginning again, reprising the synopsis, leaving and then returning to the fictional world, observing the changes in characters, speculating on the long threads of plot that are held over. But as MST progresses, the pace slackens, and reading TGAT in particular was a plodding business, sometimes only a few pages a night. When I was younger, I was bolder about skimming long books, but as a consequence my recollection of first reading TGAT was somewhat sketchy and incomplete. This time, I took the time—but the time, as it were, also took something out of me. There was more to learn reading at a measured pace, but it was also obvious how much of the text was filler, spacing, incidents that replicated previous incidents, not to mention the sheer spatial requirement of journeying out and back across the map of Osten Ard.

The slower read gives us more time to reflect on the themes as well as the action—and though Williams is a fine writer of action, there is too much of it. First time round, MST can be read as a classic bildungsroman, tracing the journey of its younger characters from late childhood through to adulthood, and indeed challenging some of the conventions, since sex as well as romance arise, as well as the usual responsibilities and the adult need to confront and overcome grief and anger. But the other theme that becomes evident, woven into and reprised throughout the long journey outwards and back to the beginning, the Green Angel Tower overlooking the very castle that Simon and Miriamele set out from, is the theme of recurrence and nostalgia, of the longing for and critical loss of the past.

[mild spoilers to follow]

This, of course, has informed fantasy fiction since the Old English elegy, and is defines the distinct mood of the elvish exodus from Middle-earth. Williams centers MST on the cycle of invasion and dispossession, and the deep and exceptional resonance of this theme is that while Simon and his companions strive to correct a world that is severely and devastatingly out of balance, trapped in a supernatural winter, restoring the elder world of Sithi domination, before the violent arrival of the human conquerers, is the mission of the tragic and evil Storm King. To some degree, they are both on the same quest, but from very different points. 

This recognition makes Simon's choice at the very moment the Storm King's return is near complete an act of maturity and compassion. Choosing to perhaps to fear but not to hate, he seems to rob Ineluki of the last quantum of rage and spite he needs to complete his ritual. But outside the moment, this is also problematic. For if we accept that the Sithi are in a real sense the indigenous peoples of Osten Ard, brutally displaced, then admitting that fear of the other is only a first step towards justice and reconciliation.

MST gains great traction and interest in playing with many of the tropes of earlier fantasies, particularly The Lord of the Rings. But where the wisdom of Frodo Baggins lies not simply in his destruction of the ring but his pity and compassion—a weapon that the fallen Saruman acknowledges is formidable indeed—Simon here seems to gain the power to acknowledge fear and even look past hatred, but not to overcome it. 

Perhaps this is a necessary change, a more realistic balancing of the fears and compromises, as well as insight and regret, that the hero accumulates, and the cost of the return of the king. But one can't but feel that the moment is not quite satisfying, after so much effort is expended reaching it. Perhaps this is even the trap of the doorstopper, which always suggests more text, more sequels, another novel just in development.

On the other hand, investment in the characters and their world, the very sense of challenge and effort, would be lesser if it were not for their weight and detail of the trilogy. The danger for the doorstopper is that the nostalgia for the world, the desire to deepen immersion and multiply characters into sprawling stories, eventually became its own end. The problem with Game of Thrones is that the player can no longer see the end. But I do believe there are ways back into the form, that the formal structure of the trilogy and can nourish engagement, but also find ways to shift expectations, compress, adapt. The wonderment of fantasy is that the world is whole but also deep, and somewhere always remains beyond reach.

Use case scenarios: Look to Windward — Iain M Banks

Look to Windward is a mid-sequence novel for Iain M Banks’s Culture series, but also, in its fashion, a retrospective and a conclusion. It has all the usual Culture novel tropes (by now): an elusive unreliable narrator parked somewhere in the narrative frame, an structure of flashbacks and piecemeal reveals, a self-reflective concern with unpicking the nature and character of the Culture, and a good many characters who are either drones, non-humans, or Minds.

But despite the title—for the most telling line in the novel finally confirms that "look to windward" is an exhortation to scan the horizon of possibility for oncoming threats—the novel is almost entirely about looking back, and inwards, not forward. Framed by the observation from a Culture orbital of the light from two supernova events, acts of grandiose destruction from the Idiran-Culture war, the novel is primarily looking back in time: to the war that framed Consider Phlebas, and to the later conflicts and failed interventions that propel the Chelgrian protagonist to a monstrous act of revenge. In between lie some lengthy set-pieces and impressive landscape tourism about the orbital, mainly concerned with sketching out the lifestyle and unpacking the utopian society of the Culture in peace-time, but these are interspersed with darker accounts of warfare, personal loss, and the unfolding of a conspiracy to mass murder. 

Unlike Consider Phlebas, with its quest plot and visceral narrative momentum, or even The Player of Games with its unfolding victories, Look to Windward frequently reverts to losses, failures, even regret, as if these are the counter-cases and exceptions to the use of weapons, the points where the Culture misses or fails and the moral cost falls due.

Dedicated to the Gulf War Veterans (a war, by the way, that demonstrated the terrifying potential of advanced weapons and technologies against an ill-equipped, out-dated, and poorly led conscript army), Look to Windward could well serve as a study in post-traumatic stress disorder, the price of efficient slaughter for both the winners and the losers. But in the case of Major Quilan, the survivor of a brutal civil war that was precipitated by the meddling of the Culture, it's also a study in the grooming of terrorists, the subtle and dreadful conversion of trauma into nihilism, and nihilism into vengeance.

One of Horza's critiques of the Culture in Consider Phlebas was that the Culture was too safe, too tidy, that without risk the life it nurtured was ultimately without meaning either, and indeed, parts of Look to Windward suggests that for the majority of the Culture all risks have become trivial, illusionary even—evidence of the reification of spiritual value in an utterly materialist society. However, as the final threat is contained, there's a sense that some losses are irrevocable, that some war damages can't be mitigated. At its most thoughtful, and moving, Look to Windward redeems its relatively static passages to bear witness to this fact. 

Culture games: The Player of Games, Use of Weapons — Iain M Banks

 In the last post I argued that Consider Phlebas is mainly concerned with the question of identity, perhaps appropriately for the first major novel that developed into a significant series. In some quarters, ask about the "Culture novels" and you'll be directed to the safer entry-points, the established bases: The Player of Games and Use of Weapons.

Of course both of these books still betray Banks's concern with questions of identity and unreliable narrators  — who plays the bigger, more dangerous game; who is Zakalwe, really; who wields the weapon, and who is the weapon? — and one could well say that these questions are often at the center of Banks's considerable narrative craft. But I think as Banks's understanding of the Culture as protagonist and utopia developed, the other conflict, the clash between the logic of intervention and personal autonomy, also became more pressing.

In PoG the Empire of Azad, perhaps like the Idirans, is authoritarian, regressive, oppressive, elaborately sexist (since Banks gives it three biological sexes to manage). If there is a weakness in the presentation of the empire, it is almost cartoonishly corrupt, an easy stereotype. The nuance is that the empire has also created, and is structured by, Azad, which is elaborate, beautiful, endlessly complex, almost like literature. Naturally, Gurgeh comes to win at Azad, and because the game embodies the empire, he defeats the imperial system itself, initiating its collapse. But Gurgeh only wins because he eventually, in his revulsion at the empire's brutality, plays in the vernacular of the Culture, through soft power, subversion, the finely measured application of force. 

So, at this point, Gurgeh is effectively de-protagonized. Rather than the subject of his own narrative, he is another playing-piece in the long game of the Culture. The Minds, the drones, are the actual players and, we learn, manipulated Gurgeh into play in the first place. Gurgeh is their knife-missile, their perfectly deployed and selected instrument. Hence, for Gurgeh, his victory in the game of Azad is deeply ambivalent, and at the end of the story we find him not triumphant but in tears, perhaps because he understands that his own game has also collapsed, that the real player of games will always be the Culture itself.

The question comes to a fine point in Use of Weapons. Instrumental reasoning is a fine thing if only the objective counts, but the doctrine of utility reduces all individuals to the status of objects, tools, weapons, or game-pieces in the pursuit of the Culture's broader aims. UoW is a complicated read because of its dual strands of flashback and forward narrative, as if narrative technique were also one of the weapons the author wields for maximum effect. The flashbacks, though episodic, are always clearer and more engaging than the present narrative, in which the narrative stakes seem less clear and compelling, as the politics of the Cluster are less meaningful than the odyssey of the younger Zakalwe.

The coincidence of these streams is what shows us that Zakalwe, like Gurgeh, is merely a weapon, talented and useful, but only fully realized when deployed by the Culture. In fact, the text suggests that whenever Zakalwe attempts to break free of the Culture, to act on his own terms, his attempt is a failure. The tragedy of UoW is that at no point can Zakalwe redeem himself from his brutal history or escape his identity. He is the weapon rather than the wielder, and the poet knows that weapons find their full reality only in the moment of destruction.