Memory Going Backwards

One of the most interesting questions in A Memory Called Empire is whether or not protagonist Mahit Dzmare will turn her back on her native Lsel Station. Will she embrace and adopt the colonial culture of the Teixcalaanli Empire?

(Image via Goodreads)

One of the elements that elevated Arkady Martine’s debut novel above many others is the depiction of Dzmare’s internal turmoil and the interplanetary politics that force the question.

This isn’t a simple decision for Dzmare; not only had she been fascinated with the colonial superpower in her formative years — she had fallen for Three Seagrass, an Imperial bureaucrat. This exploration of a cultural identity is a tender, heartbreaking, and moving series of decisions that reveal the integrity of Dzmare’s character, and perhaps Martine as an author.

For us, this was why Martine deserved the Hugo Award she received for A Memory Called Empire. But it is a source of confusion when assessing the sequel A Desolation Called Peace.

Martine is a fine writer who crafts characters you want to root for and we think readers who want to spend more time in the company of Dizmar, Seagrass, Yskandr Aghavn, and Nineteen Adze will enjoy the book thoroughly. This is a well-written, engaging space opera adventure novel.

The problem is that bringing these characters together again (and returning Mahit Dzmare to the centre of the action) requires no small degree of contrivance. Whether or not a reader finds this construction believable and satisfying will depend on how they understood the relationships in the preceding novel.

This sequel picks the action up just weeks after the end of the first book, with Mahit having returned to her home station to find that she is no longer welcome there. Meanwhile the Empire has become embroiled in a war against an unknowable and mysterious alien race. Three Seagrass strategizes to reunite with Dzmare and drag her into the front-lines of the intergalactic conflict.

Some readers might find the first 150 pages of A Desolation Called Peace serves to undo the resolution of the first book. For example, the will-they-won’t-they romance is restored to uncertainty as if the characters were in a sitcom that needed to return everything to the status quo at the end of every episode. When looking at A Desolation Called Peace through this lens, if feels as though the nuance and meaningfulness of the previous book has been diluted. The final decision that Mahit made at the end of A Memory Called Empire seemed retconned to be not so final. The heartbreaking ending of her romance with Three Seagrass is suddenly not so heartbreaking.

In the novel’s defense, some readers might find the sequel to be a deft examination of the nature of

Colonialism is toxic and has a corrosive effect on
human relationships such as the one between 
Mahit Dzmare and Three Seagrass. Even if there's
real affection, one cannot help but question the
dynamics of power and appropriation of culture.
(Image via History.com

freedom within the context of colonization. There continue to be strong themes about marginalization of non-mainstream cultures, the erasure of history, and the belittling of an individual’s background or past. When these themes come into conflict with the ideologies of the dominant class, the novel becomes far more interesting. This quote of Dzmare contemplating why she is angry with Three Seagrass makes this tension explicit: “She'd meant, When you understand that there's no room for me to say yes, even if I want to. She'd meant, You don't understand that there's no such thing as being free. Free to choose, or free otherwise.” Ultimately the empire doesn’t change and Dzmare’s story ends the only way it could. This left some readers wondering how the relationship with the empire and the new aliens will evolve.

It’s worth noting that some of the best parts of A Desolation Called Peace feature characters who were not present or not prominent in the previous novel: Fleet Captain Nine Hibiscus and Imperial heir Eight Antidote. In these sections, the world of the Teixcalaanli seems as fresh and vibrant as it did in the first novel. The ways in which Imperial power structures and monoculture are corrosive to even those who are in positions of privilege are explored with nuance, and it is shown how internecine factionalism can tear down even those who excel within the system.

But fundamentally, the events of the second book no longer seem to be Mahit Dizmare’s story; she’s written to be the main character, but the story is no longer her own. Rather it seems like a story that was taking place in one corner of the galaxy far from anywhere that an Ambassador from Lsel Station should be. The continued focus on Dzmare seemed incongruous.

In many ways, A Desolation Called Peace succeeds: It’s engaging, sweet, often interesting, and fun. But it also has trouble connecting with and growing from the original story.

The Future Refusing To Be Born

There will always be a place that our unevenly distributed future reaches last.

(Image via Goodreads)

In Neil Sharpson’s excellent debut novel When The Sparrow Falls, that place is The Caspian Republic: a country founded by expatriate American and Russian bioconservative activists, whose boundaries are roughly those of present-day Azerbaijan.

While the rest of the world has embraced an almost-singularitarian future of AI-guided mass prosperity, near immortality, and widespread expansive human rights, this Caspian Republic has hewed to a quasi-religious “Humanity First” doctrine and polices the use of technology.

The reader’s guide to this setting is Agent Nikolai South, an aging detective with StaSec, one of the country’s various rival agencies devoted to maintaining ideological purity, and punishing those who try to use illegal technologies.

In a police state where ambition is often met with tragedy, South’s proclivity for keeping his head down has kept him safe. But when the agency needs someone politically reliable, yet expendable, he gets swept up into a protection detail and investigations that have implications for the entire country.

Sharpson’s prose is sparse, clear, and engaging. He ably paints a picture of a deeply flawed society, and one that is the all-too-believable result of nostalgia-driven politics and identity-driven ideology. Because the Caspian Republic’s technology is pretty much limited to what was common in North America in the 1980s, readers will be reminded of late-era Cold War spy stories.

Welsh statesman 
Aneurin Bevan (1897-1960)
once described Fascism as
"The future refusing to be born."
(Image via Wikipedia)

But while the setting may seem familiar to readers over 40, many readers will engage with it viscerally because of quotable passages like “Nominally, the currency of the Caspian Republic is the moneta, but in truth the coin of the nation was fear. Whoever could inspire fear was rich, whoever lived in fear was poor.”

One of the highlights of the book is the way in which cultural mores come into conflict between the protagonist and influences from the world outside the boundaries of the Caspian Republic, and the questions that are interrogated. Who or what deserves to have legal rights? What limits should be placed on individual action for the good of the community? To what extent should we allow technology to dictate the future of the species and the planet?

There are coincidences scattered throughout the book that do strain credulity. It is suggested at one point that this may be due to an iteration of Roko's Basilisk — a thought experiment about a future artificial intelligence so advanced it can manipulate events in our present to ensure it comes into being — but for us this thread of the novel fell flat.

Author Neil Sharpson provides
interesting insight into his novel
on an episode of Androids and Assets.
(Image via Amazon)

Likewise, it was at times difficult to believe South’s emotional journey from apathetic true believer in the national cause, to someone who sees the country’s problems and is willing to sacrifice himself for the greater good. Not because this journey can’t happen, people can change beliefs, but because of the speed with which it happens in the novel. Over the course of two days, South becomes comfortable betraying all he has stood for his entire life.

While many reviewers have made comparisons between When The Sparrow Falls and Orwell’s 1984, we feel that those comparisons, while useful, are perhaps superficial. Although both authors begin by examining repressive government autocracies, Sharpson is far more hopeful and seems to suggest that all such regimes are unstable and will collapse under their own internal contradictions. We feel that When The Sparrow Falls is just as much in conversation with a lesser-known midcentury science fiction novel: the infamous Hugo winner They’d Rather Be Right, as it tackles similar questions of governance by algorithm.

Because the novel takes place almost entirely within the borders of the Caspian Republic, the AI-embracing rest of the world is largely ignored. The few glimpses of the mind-uploading, technocratic, utopian society are somewhat facile (though it has to be admitted that such scenes are difficult to write well). We were left with questions about whether the rest of the world is that much better than the Caspian Republic. If nothing can be done without approval of the Artificial Intelligences that guide humanity, in what way is it not a totalitarian state?

The strength of Sharpson’s prose, the fast-paced and engaging plot, and the extraordinarily interesting political dynamics of the setting make for one of the best debut novels of the year, despite some minor flaws.

The Humanity Of Machinehood

Several short works by S.B. Divya have been among our favourites in the past five years or so.

Image via Simon
& Schuster

“Contingency Plans for the Apocalypse,” “Loss of Signal,” and the Nebula-shortlisted novella “Runtime,” demonstrate that she is a writer who delivers interesting ideas wrapped in approachable and stylish prose. We therefore had high hopes for her debut novel Machinehood — and were not disappointed.

The novel is clever, brimming with engaging ideas, and provides important commentary on current political trends. Set a century down the line, Machinehood delves into the erosion of human rights, the perils of capital-driven pharmaceutical development, and the evolving understandings of privacy.

Machinehood centres on Welga, a security contractor who ends up investigating a series of terrorist attacks thought to be orchestrated by the world’s first truly sentient artificial intelligence. Although the story initially feels like an adventure novel, it’s soon apparent that the story centers on Welga’s quest to create stability, the precariousness of her work situation, and her sister-in-law’s medical investigation into seizures that Welga begins experiencing.

Divya uses these narrative threads to explore how capitalist-driven competition can lead to negative outcomes for society. In particular, the use of performance-enhancing drugs has been normalized in this future, leading to workers whose employment is contingent on their willingness to punish their bodies and nervous systems beyond their natural limits. While this is a bleak (and unfortunately believable) aspect to the world Divya has crafted, it is not entirely dystopian.

While the novel depicts various forms of body modification having detrimental effects, and the gig economy making working relationships more tenuous, other advances such as automatic kitchens, the ease of global travel, and medical printers have created higher standards of living in other ways. This is a nuanced future that avoids monocausal explanations for society’s changes.

Escape Pod co-host
S.B. Divya's engineering
background is evident.
Image via Analog

One of the recurring themes explored in the book — and one of the reasons it should be considered for the Prometheus Award — is the relationship between government services, the private sector, and do-it-yourself culture. As an example, those wanting to go to space do so through the participation of voluntary hobbyist rocket-ship clubs, while health care is allocated through a system of micro-auctions. Pharmaceuticals are often printed at home with some government oversight, but pill designs come from both giant corporations and from hobbyists. None of these details are delivered by way of polemic, but rather flow naturally within the story.

In such a setting, the most powerful actors seem to be religions, in part because of the unassailable sway they have over their followers. Without giving too much away, there are philosophical aspects to a religion of Neo-Budhism that provide incredible motivations to some of the religion’s adherents. Religion thus is shown to be a tool to navigate and instigate change.

One of the greatest strengths of the novel is that as it progresses, the conflict becomes less and less black-and-white. The antagonist is compelling in large part because it’s easy to see their side of the issues, even though their tactics aren’t acceptable. Has the terrorism perpetrated by the Machinehood improved the lives of humanity? Divya has the courage to leave that question unanswered.

Every few years, it starts to seem like science fiction is running out of ideas. Thankfully, authors like Divya remind us that the future has an almost infinite array of possibilities. Machinehood is the type of novel that gives us faith in science fiction as a genre.

Attack Surface: A Novel For Today

After the events of a weekend in which waves of violence overtook American streets, I find myself wishing that Cory Doctorow’s upcoming novel Attack Surface were already available.

It’s a novel that is perfectly suited to inform national dialogues about police violence, how

A photograph from today's Detroit
Free Press could have been pulled
straight out of Cory Doctorow's new book. 

technology can undermine or promote human freedom, and how members of the dominant culture can be allies in combating injustices committed against marginalized groups.

Picking up a decade after the events of Doctorow's Hugo-shortlisted novel Little Brother, this new book follows the career of Masha Maximow, the hacker/programmer who showed up briefly in previous stories.

As an anti-hero protagonist working for private security firms, Maximow's loyalties are split between the well-funded realpolitik employers that let her live in luxury, and the idealistic friends and allies she helps in secret. This makes for interesting internal character tensions, as well as opportunities for Doctorow to delve into the details of computer security and encryption.

One of Doctorow’s strengths as a writer is his ability to tackle complex real-world computer security issues with a depth of knowledge, while making the subject accessible to lay readers. He also makes it evident why the subject — and the nuances he's describing — are of immediate relevance to the plot.

Where the book stumbles is when Maximow reconnects with her former antagonist and ally Marcus Yallow, who was the protagonist of Doctorow’s previous novels Little Brother and Homeland. Yallow’s wide-eyed techno-utopianism feels at-odds with the more pragmatic worldview that has informed Maximow’s life for the majority of the book. Maximow’s subsequent road to Damascus moment is unconvincing at best. This tonal confusion may in part be explained by the unusual placement of Attack Surface as a novel for adults that is a continuation of a story set by two YA novels.

Major portions of Attack Surface are spent in protest scenes that are nearly identical to those plastered

Attack Surface will be
released on October 18,
2020. It could not be
more timely today.
(Image via MacMillan)

across every news station in the U.S.A. right now, and Doctorow captures the hope, the fear, and the confusion of these types of events. Any reader who has participated in a protest that was targeted by the police will recognize that Doctorow is clearly writing from experience.

Some of the police tactics that Doctorow describes — including kettling, deliberate provocations, and cell phone jamming — have been on display over the past few days. The ways in which the protagonists of Attack Surface circumvent those tactics are not always as effective as Doctorow describes, but the novel still provides a good crash course in some forms of effective protest management.

Given the events of this past weekend, I wonder if Doctorow underestimated the willingness of American police officers to act with unmitigated violence, and if he overestimated the judicial system’s ability to hold those police officers accountable.

Despite the ways in which Doctorow depicts omnipresent surveillance, privatized military being turned against citizens, and corporate corrosion of democratic accountability, Attack Surface is at its heart a hopeful novel. This is a story in which protests work and in which individual actors are able to affect change for the better. I am not sure that I found that believable, but at this present moment many readers might need something hopeful.

Attack Surface is a vital and necessary contribution to the public discourse. Doctorow is extremely talented at diagnosing potential problems with new technologies being used to subvert human freedom, even when the resolution to the story he tells might ring hollow.

I wish it were available now, rather than being released in October. 

The Ebullient Imagination of Stealing Worlds

Optimistic and replete with ebullient imagination, Stealing Worlds is a compelling techno-thriller

Karl Schroeder's at his best
when proposing new ways to
organize political power.
(Image via Goodreads)

elevated by first-rate near-future world-building.

At one level, the plot is a fairly linear whodunnit; On the run from shadowy figures, protagonist Sura Neelin finds refuge in an augmented-reality game world that allows her to hide in plain sight. As she learns more about her new-found community, she investigates the circumstances around her father’s death.

But at another level, it is the story of revolutionary societal change. It is on this second level that the novel succeeds most fully.

Stealing Worlds is a highly political novel, not in a partisan sense, but because it offers thought experiments about how power structures can be organized. While the book depicts a global capitalist structure that continues to erode human freedom, Schroeder also envisions self-organizing communities that work in the interstices of the modern world. New technology and tools evolve to allow for the exploitation of idle and forgotten resources, to the benefit of those left behind or targeted maliciously by those in power.

The most interesting innovations in the novel, however, don’t come from the technology of augmented reality, but from cleverly imagined legal constructions. Schroeder’s idea of giving legal life to inanimate objects and abstract ideas is the most intriguing part of the story. To accomplish this, Artificial Intelligences (AI) are programmed to operate on behalf of eagles, forests, and other entities and to bargain with people to meet the needs of that legal entity. For example, an AI responsible for the legal personhood of a forest might negotiate the sale of lumber to pay for reclamation or protection. More complex ecosystems might comprise numerous, smaller AI actors that coordinate the survival of, for example, a boreal forest by ensuring the rivers are clean, the animals are not overhunted, and enough habitat remains to support life. Using markets to place value on natural resources isn’t a new idea but this agency provides the natural resources a mind-blowing role in the process.

Schroeder demands more than a passing level of technical knowledge. For example, basic levels of

A futurist by trade and
training, Schroeder brings
intellectual rigor to near-
future science fiction.
(Image via KarlSchroeder.com)

blockchain and cryptocurrency literacy help. While this may turn off some readers, it will make the work more engaging for others. Impressively, Schroeder doesn’t condescend, but builds and explores these concepts for a wide range of readers.

The novel has a clear separation between worldbuilding and adventure. Sura’s path weaves between investigating her father’s death and learning about the hidden world of augmented reality. While reading the thriller portions of the novel, we were left wanting more of the intellectual story and the sharp critique of our world. When delving into the world building, we occasionally forgot entirely about the narrative because we got lost in Schroeder’s irrepressible imagination.

Often, when reviewers focus their praise on a book’s worldbuilding, it is a sign that the book might have significant flaws in other areas. In the case of Stealing Worlds, it is an indication that the novel is possibly the crowning achievement of one of science fiction’s most accomplished — and optimistic — futurists.

The fact that Schroeder proposes a believable and positive vision of the future puts this among our favourite novels of 2019.

Company Town — The best 2016 SF novel not on the Hugo shortlist

The 2017 best novel shortlist was filled with worthwhile nominees representing diverse strains of

Our favourite SF novel
of 2016 did not get
a Hugo nomination.
(Image via Amazon.ca)

modern science fiction. From populist space adventures with hidden depths like A Closed And Common Orbit to ambitious and challenging far-future tales like Too Like The Lightning. 

It is interesting to note that the slate did not include much in the way of near-future works or grounded hard science fiction. And that’s a bit of a shame because 2016 saw the publication of one of the finest such works in recent memory. 

Madeline Ashby’s book Company Town may have escaped Hugo nomination because of its Canadian provenance, and primarily Canadian distribution. But it is a well-thought-out, nuanced thriller that should have appeal to a much wider audience. 

Set in a city built on a series of converted oil rigs off the coast of Newfoundland, Company Town is the story of Go Jung-hwa (AKA Hwa), a Korean-Canadian security worker and bodyguard who becomes caught up in a web of corporate intrigue when she is hired to protect the scion of a powerful business family. 

But that capsule plot summary does not do the author’s breadth of imagination justice. The city of New Arcadia is a character in and of itself, whose social strata, economy, citizens and culture are integral to the story. It has personality based on history and memory without leaning on nationalism or pride. 

This history of New Arcadia and the personal histories of its denizens never arrive in awkward infodumps, but are baked into the story in a natural and subtle ways. This is deft worldbuilding; enough detail to be relevant to the reader without distracting from the narrative or plot. 

As has been observed often, when the future arrives, it is unevenly distributed. In Company Town,

Given the size and growth of offshore oil rigs, its not
inconceivable that one day, they will be the size of cities.
(Image via The Motley Fool.com) 

Ashby introduces us to a world in which low-level genetic and technological augmentation has become normalized — but is class-based. We learn that some implants are cheaper and flawed, that others can be hacked.

For reasons of class and income, Hwa remains one of the few baseline humans around, having not even been cured of a serious neurological condition she was born with. 

As the book begins, Hwa is employed by the (completely legal) United Sex Workers of Canada, providing protective services to the union members. Although she quits that job fairly early in the story, her relationship to the union, and to the union members she protected provide both an anchor for her character, and a view into life in New Arcadia. This was written with evident knowledge of organized labour. 

After New Arcadia is bought out by a major corporation, Hwa goes to work for the CEO’s family. The various class strata that Hwa interacts with, and the characters that inhabit this world are well thought out, and believable. This is a book where we cared about what happened to just about everyone, and wondered what the future held for their city. 

Although this is not a cyberpunk work, Company Town is clearly part of the same intellectual tradition as Neuromancer and Snow Crash. The focus on inequality, the street-level perspectives, the body augments, and the class struggles all point to the earlier works’ influences. This is post-cyberpunk at its finest. 

No book is without its flaws, and in the case of Company Town those flaws are most evident in the conclusion. In the last 70 pages, there is an odd tonal shift and an unnecessary romantic subplot. The book seems to get less grounded and more fantastical. But even these issues are overshadowed by strong writing, engaging characters and inspired conceptual work.

If Company Town had been nominated for the Hugo Award, it would have been at the top of most of our ballots. As Canadians, we are left wondering why this book didn’t have stronger uptake. Although it failed to secure a nomination, this is a book that we suspect will have enduring value, and will be remembered as an exemplar of Canadian science fiction.