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. 

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.

Consider Phlebas — Iain M. Banks

 I can still recall buying Consider Phlebas on a rainy winter’s afternoon in Christchurch in the very early 90s and reading it entirely in the space of a couple of days. No slight thing, given its comparative length at 467 pages. I was a student at the time, which makes dedicated, compulsive reading feasible. Consider Phlebas was then the first of what became Banks’s sequence of Culture novels, but to my mind it remains one of the most compelling and challenging novels in the sequence, a masterpiece in the sense of being the first and necessary proof of the author’s skill. Over the years, I’ve seen other reviewers relegate Consider Phlebas to the status of an earlier, less accomplished work — the first but not the best, as fantasy literature.com has it — but this seems to me to fundamentally misunderstand its impact and importance.

If you’re inclined to read CP as part of a series, it does offer some challenges, the first of which would be a roughly two-part structure, in which the first part is relatively disjointed, almost picaresque, a sequence of accidents and violent incidents as the protagonist Bora Horza Gobuchel weaves his way towards the location of his main mission. Each of these incidents, from a disastrous raid on a remote temple to a crashing megaship to a gruesome encounter with an apocalyptic cult and its grotesque, cannibalistic leader works exceedingly well as a set-piece. In terms of narrative they are superb and compelling, a combination of action, suspense, and vivid detail. But beyond setting the scene for the novel’s broader conflict between the imperialist, religiously conservative Idirans and the liberal, pan-humanistic but no less expansionist Culture, what do these incidents achieve?

To my reading, the arbitrary violence and random danger are quite the point. War, of course, is chaotic and often absurd. But more than this, Banks’s galaxy of cultures and species, despite its high technology and tiers of civilization, is no utopia. Rather, we observe through the context of Horza’s encounters the persistent strands of hedonism and fanaticism, and the fear of disorder that motivates both the Culture and the Idirans. Horza is fond of accusing the Culture of trying to suppress the “messiness” that is organic life, but the first half of CP illustrates just how violent and precarious that messiness can be.

This would still be simply scene-setting if it were not for its connection to the second significant challenge of CP. Horza, our primary point-of-view character and protagonist is aligned against the Culture and sides with the religious zealotry of the Idirans for his own reasons. From the beginning Horza, a Changer, one of a species of biological weapons designed to infiltrate and impersonate other humanoid species, has been engaged in a struggle for identity. This might seem natural for the doppelgänger, always marginal, always forced to mediate between multiple identities merely to survive. As Banks makes clear, this is the challenge for all intelligent life. Who are we? asks Fal ‘Ngeestra, Culture Referer, whose intuition matches the intelligence of the Minds: Information being passed on... Life is a faster force, reordering, finding new niches, starting to shape; intelligence — consciousness — an order quicker, another new plane. The Idirans, at the apex of their ferocious evolutionary ascent, are driven to assert a fixed identity lodged in their genetics. Even the refugee Mind, quest object, fears the corruption of its information/identity as it shelters in its hiding place.

Understand this about CP, that the framing Culture-Idiran War is really a struggle for identity that consumes and shapes Horza’s path, and you begin to see how compelling and emotionally demanding the ending really is. 

Consider Phlebas...

Who are we? Who do we identify with: the Culture, the Idirans, Horza the Changer, his doomed crew? 

Oh you who look to windward...

Enquire of the Internet what "Look to windward" means and you're likely to find multiple, circular references to CP and the Culture series. But if you treat it as the fragment of poetry it is, to look to windward from a sailing ship suggest looking into the wind, either along the course you have passed, as the wind blows you, or to look out for any object bearing towards you with the wind behind it. The metaphor, then, is an admonishment to consider where you have come from, and the threat that is not before you but follows in your wake. 

Eventually, Horza fails, defeated by the irreconcilable tensions between the fanaticism of the Idirans he has committed to and the technical superiority and perhaps moral superiority of the Culture. Indeed, it is the Culture, and it's "clever" anticipation of all eventualities that prevails. But in his last moments he grasps for and retains that fragmentary expression of identity, a name, a coherent, tragic self. For Fal and the Culture Minds—those who look to windward and prevail—there is a certain validation in this rescue, just as the outcome of the Culture-Idiran War is inevitable. But buried in this moment is another realization, as we learn that the rescued Mind later assumed the name of Bora Harza Gobuchel, the reason for which is a "long story"— indeed, the long story we have in hand.

Deep in the Command System on a Planet of the Dead, a desolate war monument to the mass destruction of an intelligent species with its own weapons, Horza and the hidden Mind both come to recognize the fragility and contingency of consciousness. For Horza, it is a single, all-too-late point of identification with the Culture: "Horza realized that his own obsessive drive never to make a mistake, always to think of everything, was not so unlike the fetishistic urge which he so despised in the Culture: that need to make everything fair and equal, to take the chance out of life."

Last century, when I first read CP, I was inclined to assign Banks’s other motto, the sardonic quote from the Koran, as a reference to the Idirans. But now, I can see another irony at play: the moral calculus of the Culture may indeed be that contained carnage is preferable to idolatry, to religious fixation on absolute ideas. What makes CP so compelling is the nuance of this theme set against the brilliance of the explosive action narrative Banks deploys to deliver it. Eventually we will choose to side with the Culture, and later novels, more contained, mannered even, will focus more and more on the implications of the Culture’s own use of weapons as it expands and consolidates its version of interventionist utilitarianism. But the emotional sub-current is equally relevant: what are the costs, who are we, really, to decide? Consider Phlebas...

Who was once handsome and tall as you.

What happened in the end

Pandemic reading has led me to two quite different authors and two quite different formation of one of the crucial challenges of writing in the long form: the stakes and satisfaction of an ending. 

We take it for granted, of course, that novels end. If they simple finished, terminated arbitrarily, we would recognize immediately that we possess a fragment, not a whole. And even fragments, like The Mystery of Edwin Drood, suggest their own missing structure. If we were to come across half of a broken boat, we will still see in the broken beams and keel the shape of the whole.

Here, then, is a study in contrasts.

M. John Harrison's Empty Space is the last volume in the loosely federated Kefahuchi Tract series, but it rigorously resists any disclosure that could be taken as a resolution to the complex of unsettling questions of character and causality that the sequence raises. There's a remark about a control room instrument: "Everything was processed to look 'real', arriving preassembled as a narrative from selected points of view," which taken in reverse suggests Harrison's method. From separate, selected points of view, narrative is disassembled, the structural illusion of reality is unravelled to reveal the contradictions, incoherencies, and dissonance of a future poised on the shockwave between the unfathomable physics of chaos and quantum indeterminacy and the unbearable nostalgia of submerged human identities.

But, also on my e-reading device is the first volume of the Penguin series of Georges Simenon's Inspector Maigret novels—French detective fiction from the 30s, almost as far from contemporary science fiction as you could get. And, of course, what happens at the end of any Maigret is that the crime is solved, the guilty are discovered, the selected points of view, clues, plot points, are assembled into the narrative of the crime and its solution.

And yet—I'm not sure anymore whether Empty Space can be called an "open" ending and Pietr the Latvian, for instance, a "closed" one. Because however the inspector exposes the material logic of the crime, the human problem, Maigret's point of entry into the solution, with all its paradoxes and contradictions, remains. And isn't that the point of Harrison's radical uncertainties and unresolved threads, and inchoate nostalgia, that the human problem persists, a struggle to assert a sense of reality and identity against the shimmering chaos of an unknowable universe?

Whether SF or police procedural, perhaps the distinction lies in what is settled and unsettled, the points that are decided and undecided. In this sense, Harrison's project is to disrupt the confident teleology of technological progress, where Maigret's detective can close the case but leave open, and subtly unstated, the implications of character and the ironies of morality, guilt and deviation. In any case, what happened in the end counts, but we are left with something beyond the ending that haunts our reading still.

Ubik - Philip K. Dick

One of the most compelling scenes in Philip K. Dick's Ubik is a struggle simply to walk upstairs, to find a place of rest: a fight against inertia, fatigue, the pure malice of entropy. Reading this scene during the pandemic, after seeing harrowing accounts of the fever and weakness that COVID-19 inflicts, the scene gains a terrible resonance.

At other times, Ubik might seems  prescient for its distillation of routine capitalism into endless payment for trivial services, such as the coin-operated doors and coffee-makers, presaging the economy of micro-transactions and in-app payments. But this, like the plot that sets emergent “psi” powers against their natural, effect limiting counterparts or “anti-psi” operations is simply part of the scaffolding, the incidental background for a more profound and deliberate consideration of how worlds are made and unmade, and what happens when our physical, moral, and even temporal realities begin to unravel. 

It’s striking that the forces of entropy are yoked to malice and cruelty in Ubik, just at a time now when reactionary politics in the US are also heedlessly erasing or countermanding progressive reforms in an attempt to wind the clock back to an era of “greatness” that never applied. In contrast, the cure-all “Ubik” seems to come from a humanizing impulse to heal and restore, an almost spiritual impulse to resist the death urge: “watching, wise, physical ghosts from the full-life.”

And yet, as in most of Dick’s work, for every action there is a reaction, for every reality a counter-reality, and the tension between life and half-life is never wholly decided. Perhaps this is why Ubik is both fascinating and unsettling — we’ll never quite know where our world stands; the only valid choice is what we’ll fight for, what we need to resist.

Ready Player One - Ernest Cline

My water-damaged, crumpled copy of Ernest Cline's geek friendly science-fiction adventure Ready Player One certainly now looks like a vacation read, and as an entertaining ride that ultimately offers few challenges to the reader, a vacation read is probably the best summary of its qualities. In this case, appearance and reality coincide.

Which is not to say that the premise, an extended dive through a global virtual-reality game that has come to stand in for the Internet in search of a departed billionaire's fortune is not both intriguing and well-executed. The execution of the plot is pitch-perfect, and the near-future dystopia, in which the energy crisis and global warming have driven human beings into the refuge of a virtual world, is intriguing. But the game ultimately proves more compelling than the characters' fictional reality, and so as speculative fiction, Ready Player One falls short.

The quest for the Easter Egg buried in the vast, shared virtual-reality world of OASIS, which grants access to the entire game as well as its creator's legacy, is as much a tour of Geek culture as the story itself. No movie title or song goes by without its due, reverent, acknowledgement. The products of Eighties geek culture, from arcade games to D&D to Monty Python to John Hughes' movies, all get their moment on screen, but there's no lightness of touch or satire in Cline's relentless referencing. This means that, firstly, the culture is predominantly the dominant culture of US media and games, but that Cline also conveniently leaps over cyberpunk, over Willam Gibson (Neuromancer, 1984) over Philip K. Dick, over the all the science fiction and culture of the 80s and beyond that has taken the same ideas about reality and virtual reality, the real and the fake, but questioned them with much more rigor and effect.

The effect of this is that as speculative fiction, Ready Player One falls enticingly short. The real world of the novel, including stacks of mobile homes that make for compelling cover art on my water-damaged edition, with its collapsing energy economy, galloping inequality, and corporate slavery, is intriguing, but Cline never attacks these themes head on, and the ramifications of the tension between material realities and virtual realities are handled more predictably than analytically. Although Wade's online best friend does turn out to be black, female, and gay, rather than a white gamer bro, this is no surprise, and Wade's love interest remains "the girl", minor blemishes aside. Wade and his friends fight and hack a murderous corporate entity to win the prize, but the fact is the prize is.... control over an even more ubiquitous corporate entity.

The end of the novel makes a gesture towards rejecting the virtual reality that Wade has always used as an escape from a collapsing world, but this is only possible because Wade and his friends have mastered the Geekosphere and escaped from virtual reality to the even more tenuous reality of the ultra-rich. They may choose to save the world at this stage, but never ask what world, exactly, is worth rescuing. Other works in the same vein, such as Charles Yu's sardonic "Hero Absorbs Major Damage" (of which I hope to say much more) bring a sharper critical eye to bear in less space.

Which is not to diminish the fun of this airplane read, but only to observe that Ready Player One would be stronger, and more memorable, if its contemporary cyber-nostalgia was tempered with more of the spirit of cyberpunk.