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.

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.

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. 

Worlds within, worlds beneath

Four seasons in one day

Lying in the depths of your imagination
Worlds above and worlds below
The sun shines on the black clouds hanging over the domain

– Crowded House (Lyrics Tim Finn & Neil Finn)

In writing, much of my attention is turned to the craft and creation of fictional worlds. This is not simply a matter of science fiction or fantasy; every fiction instantiates and implies a rich collection of assumptions, designs, guesses, and diegetic facts that form the imagined world: the shadow of the text illuminated by the reader’s imagination.

Fictional worlds, their potential and danger, haunt two quite different recent works: M. John Harrison’s startling and unsettling The Sunken Land Begins to Rise Again and Susanna Clarke’s lucid and compelling Piranasi. Each one considers, in quite different ways, the temptations and traps of the many worlds harbored in the imagination.

One knows, by now, what to expect of M. John Harrison. His technique is extraordinary; his worlds are indistinct, oblique, out of reach. The Sunken Land Begins to Rise Again is set in England, but it is the profoundly alienated and drifting nation of the Brexit era. Beneath the surface lies the deep history of the land: geology, geography, the sediment of millennia of human occupation and industry, marked in the spiritual and material landscape. But the characters are detached from this, often both physically and emotionally isolated, in a post-industrial economy focused on gigs and temporary lodgings. One senses the movement to reconnect with the sunken lands, inherent in the fictional interest in the themes of spiritual renewal and transformation expressed in the sentimental Victorian tract The Water Babies. But the fixation on a lost sense of "English-ness" also evokes the toxic isolationism of Brexit. 

Harrison's technique focuses on exact, evocative description paired with inexact, oblique narrative. His work is often described as unsettling, and it is the way his precise, writerly skill with detail and landscape positions itself across an incomplete story that unsettles one’s sense of narrative and coherent action. Harrison’s characters, likewise, are drawn to the unspoken network of aspiration and conspiracy that informs the story but refuses to cohere.

Clarke's Piranesi is no less painstaking, but the narrative that begins as a mystery eventually becomes clear, as the protagonist's fractured memory is reconstructed, if not restored. Yet the fictional world, the structure inspired by the work of the historical Piranesi, in particular the astonishing Carceri d'invenzione or Imaginary Prisons series of prints, is the primary setting of the novel. The "World" of Piranesi — it is a proper noun, a character — is an archetypal labyrinth, a fictional construct, and a prison. The fantasy that begins as a dream of transcendence, an experiment in magic, becomes a trap, an exercise in manipulation and cruelty. What first appears as a consistent, even beautiful exercise in baroque classicism also has corrosive effects on the mind and memory. And although compassion and rescue are possible, it is only from outside the fictional world that we begin to understand its dangers as well as its potential.

There is a measure of peace and resolution at the end of Piranesi that The Sunken Land Begins to Rise Again does not offer, but both works shape themselves around the potential and dangers of the other world, the imaginary, and the dangerous journey between the real and unreal, and what we may discover, recover and lose in the transition.

The Book of the New Sun – Gene Wolfe

Where to begin with even preliminary notes on Gene Wolfe's dizzying, monumental sequence The Book of the New Sun? The death of Gene Wolfe earlier this year prompted me to return to the sequence starting with The Shadow of the Torturer to give the whole series its second (and in some volumes third) reading, but the whole remains a staggering and sometimes frustrating work, frequently brilliant and occasionally baffling.

At one point in The Sword of the Lictor, the narrator-torturer Severian climbs down a mountain cliff that is composed not only of natural materials but human-made elements, strata of artificial structures, metals, made objects: "the buildings and mechanisms of humanity," layered in geological sediment. As Tolkien created a sense of the mythic past of Middle-Earth by building ages of imaginary history, Wolfe creates a sense of an ancient world illuminated by a dying sun by generating these accumulated layers of future history. But this history is also so vast that it is mostly unknowable, at once so compressed and remote that there is little to be gleaned from it. This scene is something of a touchstone for my reading of the whole work.

You might say that Severian's eidetic memory, able to record a mass of episodic detail but rarely able to draw back far enough to show the implications of what he witnesses, enacts this kind of layering. Severian is often described as an unreliable narrator, despite the precision of his recall. In fact, the text itself is like this, layering allusions, metaphors, stories, histories, and forms of meaning. One of Wolfe's most effective conceits is to conceal high technologies behind antiquarian terminology by way of "translation", such that energy weapons are described as lances, grounded spacecraft as citadels, and often the apparent significance of an item conceals and transcends its material nature, as the Claw of the Conciliator, the healing relic of the messiah, is eventually whittled down from jewel to claw, and eventually shown to be a thorn from a wild rosebush.

This mirroring (mirrors can also transcend space and time in the New Sun) can be both dazzling and perplexing. For instance, after two or three readings I'm still at a loss as to describe precisely how the far future messiah boot-straps himself into temporal existence, or precisely how and where and for what function he comes by the Claw. It's suggested by the end of the sequence that Severian is destined to travel in the corridors of time, and thereby somehow guide his own apotheosis, but where Severian intrudes in his own story, or his precise relationship with menacing, distant figures such as the abyssal giants, is not apparent after this reading any more, I expect, than the next.

The dying earth genre, from The Night Land to Viriconium, is by implication an elegy, located at the point of entropy where the fictional world is ossified and decayed. The Book of the New Sun certainly partakes of this moment and its dizzying perspectives. But perhaps Wolfe's most profound piece of misdirection is that his work ends not on the edge of dissolution but of renewal. This theme, the movement from executioner to broader moral consciousness to redemption, is one Dickens deployed and I've used myself, most clearly in the figure of Gabriel Carver. There is always a tendency, from Tolkien to Wolfe, to chase after deliberate allegories, in this case between Catholicism and the cult of the Increate and the New Sun, but for me it is Severian's meandering journey, sometimes impressive, sometimes perplexing, in the labyrinths of the far future that hold the greatest satisfaction and interest.

The Magician's Land - Lev Grossman

The Magician's Land, the last volume of a series we can now say forms The Magicians trilogy, does several admirable things. It brings the series to a satisfying close, not always possible in a loose serial narrative, and addresses the primary question left dangling at the end of the first book: what is magic for? And it does so with a brisk, well-written narrative that avoids the bloat and long-windedness that the genre has become prone to.

The Magician's Land has some faults too. These are minor faults, to be sure, but they make the reading experience an uneven one. The first is an over-large cast of focal characters, and a structure that flips between characters at will, which forces Quentin, the protagonist of the trilogy, towards the background at odd moments, even though the story of his growing maturity and quest for restitution is the focus of the novel. Plum, a young magician snatched by misadventure from the magical college of Brakebills, holds significant portions of the narrative, but there's no real reason for her to do so, except to act as a foil for Quentin. There's also a tendency for characters to speak with the mock-ironic tone of college students even in moments of genuine tenderness or emotion, which is rather at odds with the growing maturity of the central characters, he signature development of this final volume. Nevertheless, Grossman has a magician's gift for combining action, contemporary references, and moments of true fantasy and wonder, and his invented world of Fillory has gathered true weight and strangeness (and a touch of sadness) as the series continues.

These, however, are small matters. Although Grossman is at pains to point out that the grand fantasy quest (even the quest for self-knowledge) is more often than not incomplete or ambivalent, his characters both destroy and remake a world. And in this we finally touch on the answer to the challenge of the first novel. Magic is not neat, predictable, merely technical, or even necessarily useful. But it is creative, and in creation and dislocation the magician, like the novelist, brings new possibilities into the mundane world.

Noted in passing: The Devil in the Marshalsea

A recent debut historical thriller, The Devil in the Marshalsea, by Antonia Hodgson, explores familiar terrain to The Raven's Seal.

Indeed, the promotional copy evokes some of the Dickensian themes that drive The Raven's Seal:

The Marshalsea Gaol is a world of its own, with simple rules: Those with family or friends who can lend them a little money may survive in relative comfort. Those with none will starve in squalor and disease.

I hope to have a chance to read it soon, but perhaps readers who have enjoyed The Raven's Seal and enjoy this will return the favour and bring The Raven's Seal to the attention of Hodgson's readership, as the pre-modern prison mystery seems set to gain more followers.

The Night Land - William Hope Hodgson

The Night Land (1912), William Hope Hodgson's science fantasy of a decaying Earth darkened by the death of the Sun in a vastly remote future, should be regarded as unreadable. The pseudo-archaic language lumbers along, the plot is simple and largely descriptive, there is virtually no dialog, the characters are thin, there is an unpleasant thread of misogyny in the character relationships, and the whole mass is excessively long and repetitive.

But The Night Land is, after a fashion, a masterpiece.

The Night Land is less a narrative than a prose-poem, a setting, a mood, an evocation of entropy and dread in a world so old that human progress is over, the Sun is dead and only the end of all things, inevitable but hugely delayed, remains. Humanity has retreated to one last Redoubt, and can only wait for extinction. The world is desolate, ruled by threatening monsters, but their nature is utterly alien. Whatever the hero of the text can gain, it will be ultimately eclipsed by the destruction and failure of everything else. Hence, in a real sense, progress, narrative advancement, is futile. The book is really about a setting, a world of alien things and impending destruction, which can be barely named, let alone described.

Hence, the archaic language is an evocation of distance, of the alienating effect of so much time. The vague names of creatures – Watchers, Silent Ones – suggest their menace and unknowability. The routine story is really the only action that is possible when all human beings can do is rescue the remaining fragments and wall them up against the gathering darkness. Hodgson's fantasy edges closer to the logic and stasis of a dream. The Night Land is about creating an impression, a sense of dread, of the night closing in and a flicker of human resistance.

This, and the scope and boldness of the author's vision of a dying universe, is what makes The Night Land unique.

Beginning in 2013

Few things are as creatively daunting as starting a new writing project, particularly a novel. I'm one of those writers who always begin at the beginning with writing, even while the end is a distant, vague shape on the horizon. Nothing is as revised, edited, read and reread in anything I write as the first chapter of a novel.

But I ask myself this morning: why start to write if your topic is not daunting? Why undertake the work if it will not test all your skills as a writer?

This, and a personal loss, will explain why my posts have been scanty since the start of the year. The Raven's Seal is holding up well with reviews and recognition. Astute readers will guess from my Goodreads reading profile the starting point of my new work, but the endpoint is still remote.

Update - The Raven's Seal

My novel, The Raven's Seal, an historical mystery with a Dickensian edge, has been contracted for publication by Top Five Books, an independent publisher of quality mysteries and classics. Details to follow, after the manuscript is delivered.

The Master of Ballantrae - on the toss of a coin

Since the plot hinges on the toss of a coin, the entire novel is a matter of opposites: Jacobite and loyalist, older and younger brother, wanderer and steward, lover and husband, charm and restraint, selfishness and duty. And at the centre of it is a struggle over who merits their place as the hero of the novel: the feckless, charming, amoral and ambitious Master, or his stolid, honourable, introverted and subtly dull younger brother, who through the toss of a coin suffers one side of an extraordinary inversion, becomes the laird, husband and father, while the bold, talented heir becomes a wondering adventurer. Stevenson seems almost as fascinated by testing, or reframing, the very nature of a hero in an adventure plot.

But, the economy of detail, the absolute precision of characterisation through action, is almost perfect. Perhaps only a novel based on chance can be this finely, exactly, constructed and controlled.

The Magicians, Lev Grossman

The Magicians succeeds because Grossman tells a compelling story with psychological depth and great pace and verve, but it seems to me that it is based on two conceits that could have stood independently as novels in their own right, and somwhere between these two strands it leaves a central concern of the novel unresolved.
In the first place, The Magicians is plainly a Harry Potter for adults, replacing the magical boarding school with the magical college, and hence teenage angst with early-adulthood self-realization. Of course the young magicians are also college students, but here they get drunk, sleep with each other for the wrong (and right) reasons, suffer identity crises, ennui, career doubts, and generally fumble their way towards adulthood. Grossman captures their competitiveness and anxiety nicely, recasting apprentice magicians as essentially the top-tier of ivy-league students on competitive scholarships. The risk here (as it is in Harry Potter) is that the magical education systematizes and hence literalizes magic, turning it from an art to a craft, from a technique to a technology. Fortunately, Grossman mitigates this by revealing that there are depths beyond depths in the magic his students explore.
In itself, this advanced Harry Potter, the dealings of a hidden class of magicians in upstate New York would be intriguing, but here Grossman avoids engaging in this by introducing a second, though not unrelated strand.
This conceit is one of adult entry into a child’s world of wonder, specifically a faux-Narnia named Fillory. Here, adults with adult concerns attempt to discover and remain in a world of essentially childish magic and wish-fulfillment. The corollary to this, of course, is that one must be careful what one wishes for.
My main dissatisfaction with The Magicians is that when Grossman moves his characters from the subtle conflicts and perplexities of upstate New York into the childishly fantastical world of Fillory, he fails to answer the question that arises so compellingly for the graduate magicians: what is magic for? In mounting the quest into Fillory, he demonstrates that magic and fantasy of themselves cannot bring happiness any more than money or success, and that the regression into the child’s fantasy world can have destructive outcomes. Where magic comes from can remain a mystery, but how to use magic, and how to use it for the good, remain unanswered, and by the end Grossman seems to waver awkwardly between the possibility of renouncing magic altogether and the open-ended conjuring of higher, stranger planes of fantasy, a little like a Dungeon Master seeking even wilder adventures for his already over-powered players.

I'm working on - The Raven's Seal

The Raven's Seal is the novel I've been working on since late 2004. In fact, the first few lines were written in the winter quiet of Uris Library, at Cornell University.
What is The Raven's Seal? It's an historical mystery, but it's a mystery in the Dickensian sense, in that the characters find themselves thrown into the centre of a mystery that they must navigate and survive as much as investigate.
It's set in the late-eighteenth century city of Airenchester (my own invention, in the tradition of Cloisterham), and in particular, in the precincts and surrounds of the Bellstrom Gaol, where the protagonist, Thaddeus Grainger, is falsely imprisoned for the murder of his rival.
For me as a writer, the device of the mystery, with more than a nod to the Victorian novel of urban mysteries, gives The Raven's Seal a more open, flexible form, encompassing the prison narrative and the novel of society. The mystery (I hope) is an experience, an entertainment, not simply an exercise in detection and deduction.