I just finished reading C J Cherryh’s novella WAVE WITHOUT A SHORE (one of the three texts in the collection ALTERNATE REALITIES, available on the Kindle for $9.99). WAVE WITHOUT A SHORE is a brilliant work of science fiction. It takes place on a planet where powerful men (more often men than women) believe that they create their own reality and impose it on anybody “weaker” than themselves. They simply deny the existence of what is not within their will, learning to not even notice the existence of others who are excluded from their social arrangements (such others include both human beings who have been shamed and demoted or expelled from society, and to non-human intelligent beings). (This reminds me a bit of the way in which, in China Mieville’s THE CITY AND THE CITY, the people of the two cities have learned to ignore their mutual co-existence, each person unseeing the people of the other city).

The protagonist of WAVE WITHOUT A SHORE, Herrin, is a sculptor who is fatuously confident of his own superiority and genius; the only person he recognizes as perhaps an equal is his frenemy, Waden Jenks, the dictator ruling human society on the planet. Herrin makes a huge statue of and monument to Jenks; this project is a clash of the two men’s will-to-power, since Herrin is both glorifying Jenks and solidifying his tyrannical rule; and yet at the same time Herrin is asserting his own superiority over Jenks, since the implication of the piece is that Jenks needs Herrin’s artistic genius in order to claim supreme status. It is a prototypical example of how society is grounded in the Hegelian master-slave dialectic, or perhaps of Nietzsche’s vulgarization of this dialectic in his vision of hierarchies generated by conflicts of clashing wills-to-power.

Once the statue and monument are finished, Jenks understands that he has been both elevated and consigned to his place. In order to reinforce his dominance, he has his goons beat up Herrin and especially break all the bones in Herrin’s hands, so that the artist will never be able to sculpt again. There is a lot in the novella about how Herrin’s mastery is concentrated, not just in his ability to see and imagine, but above all in his manual dexterity in shaping clay and stone to his will. (This reminds me of the scene in Tarkovsky’s movie Andrei Roublev, where an aristocrat has artisans blinded so that they will never be able to construct a house more beautiful for the one that they made for him).

I won’t discuss the later twists of the narrative, except to say that Cherryh plays out the consequences of the collapse of Herrin’s worldview, and his being forced to understand that others exist — both human beings and aliens. Reality is capacious and contradictory; it contains many forces, and nobody can think to dominate and control them all. The way I have expressed it, this seems like an obvious point to make; but in asserting it, Cherryh undermines and deconstructs the pernicious myths that are central to our cultural imaginary, and that have been asserted not only by the most obvious creators and mythmakers (like Ayn Rand and Leni Riefenstahl), but much more widely in the literary and cinematic fictions that we consume and swear by.

Adrian Tchaikovsky is one of the most accomplished science fiction writers of the past two decades. He is also remarkably prolific, having published well over thirty hefty novels, together with many shorter works, in the years since 2008. Tchaikovsky also has a great range. He seems reluctant to repeat himself, and has instead explored a wide variety of subgenres in science fiction and fantasy: everything from novels of uplifted animal intelligence (the Children trilogy), to the dying-Earth subgenre (Cage of Souls), to metaphysical space opera (the Final Architecture trilogy), to alternative visions of evolution (The Doors of Eden), to science fantasy with a dollop of horror (Walking to Aldebaran).

Tchaikovsky’s latest novel, Service Model, might be characterized as robot cyberfiction. It recounts the story of a robot’s picaresque adventures in a ruined, posthuman world. “Charles”, as the robot is initially called, initially serves as a valet to a rich man, and is programmed to anticipate his every wish, and to pamper him to a degree far exceeding what even the richest actual human beings today are able to get their servants to do. Charles is content in his position, even though his idle, wealthy employer is clearly a degenerate scumbag (I am using this phrase, which does not appear in the actual text of the novel, in the precise sense in which it is defined by the Urban DIctionary: “a person whose behaviour and attitude holds back the progress of the human race while eroding social solidarity”).

Only one day, without realizing it, Charles slashes his master’s throat while in process of shaving him. With no master left to serve, Clarles has to leave. In addition, since the name “Charles” was only imposed as a feature of his initial position, once that position is gone, so is the name. For the rest of the novel, and following a suggestion from somebody else, the robot calls himself Uncharles instead. (I am only using he/him pronouns here because of the initial name “Charles”; the robot shows no particularly gendered characteristics one way or the other).

Most of the book narrates Uncharles’ search for another source of employment; and secondarily in order to find out why he murdered his employer, since he cannot discover any reasons to have done so. He sees himself as a mechanism, having tasks to perform, but without anything of the order of needs, desires, and emotions, such as human beings might feel. Uncharles seeks a new job, not for monetary reasons — he has no physical needs as long as he can be recharged from sunlight — but because he still feels a strong impulse to do the sort of work for which he was initially programmed: to be the enthusiastic helper of a living human being. The problem is that the world has been largely destroyed. Pretty much everything has been reduced to debris. The wasteland is heavily populated with robots set adrift, much as Uncharles himself is. Human beings have almost gone extinct; for the most part, the only surviving ones are relegated to hellish situations of continual pain and punishment.

For most of the volume, Uncharles passes through a series of situations that are unattractive for him, and evidently satirical from the point of view of the author and of us as readers. Thinking the murder of his employer results from some sort of mechanical defect, Uncharles goes to a robot repair center that is entirely dysfunctional (which is evidently for the best since its only form of “repair” for broken robots is to terminate them and scavenge their physical remains for spare parts). Uncharles then goes to a sort of farm or factory where the few surviving human beings are compelled endlessly to re-enact their supposed pre-robotic folkways (consisting in straightened living situations, hellish commutes, and meaningless and unending factory labor, though they do not actually produce anything). Then there is a library where all human knowledge is transcribed into 1s and 0s and then erased, with the original sources (books, movies, etc.) also being physically destroyed. After that, there’s an enormous junkyard where robot armies continually battle one another for no discernible reason. And so on. These scenarios are referenced to famous modernist authors, such as Kafka (the bureaucracy of the repair facilities), Orwell (the ceaseless surveillance of the people forced to reenact the most oppressive circumstances of their past lives), and Borges (the library) — though this is a joke only for the readers, as it is something the robots themselves remain unaware of.

Uncharles is accompanied on his voyages by another figure known as The Wonk (who turns out to be a human woman in robot disguise — I don’t feel like I am giving away a spoiler here, because the reader realizes that this in the case, long before Uncharles is officially informed of it). She plays Sancho Panza to Uncharles’ Don Quixote, with her comments continually undermining his delusions about his tasks and about the structure of society. She also keeps noting to Uncharles that, in contrast to his original programming, he has developed something like free will. This is an observation that he continually denies, but that readers in the long run judge to be true.

The question of human freedom or flexibility versus robot programming and external determination is also continually raised in the novel’s own language. A close third-person narration is continually describing Uncharles’ reactions to various things by comparing them to human emotional responses, while at the same time disavowing these comparisons by saying things like: Uncharles was acting very much like a person getting angry, though of course as a robot he didn’t feel anger or any other emotions. The novel gets a considerable degree of this power from this sly use of rhetoric, as well as from the evidently satirical and exaggerated characterizations of all the predicaments within which Uncharles finds himself.

In short, Service Model is a brilliant novel, equal in power to many of Tchaikovsky’s other works, but unique among those works in its particular strategies and angles of approach. Its ultimate impact is to blur the distinction between internally-generated and externally-imposed actions and responses, as between what philosophers call dispositions and what common sense refers to as feelings. And therefore it also erodes (even as it overtly affirms) differences between natural and artificial intelligence. This is both the source of the considerable pleasure I took in reading the novel, and the sign of its being a deep philosophical thought-experiment and argument in its own right.

Michael Bérubé is one of our best social and cultural critics. He has written important books on cultural studies, disability studies, and the politics of the “culture wars” in academia and beyond. Bérubé’s new book, The Ex-Human, is about science fiction. Bérubé offers thoughtful close readings of a number of classic science fiction texts: Ursula Le Guin’s The Left Hand of Darkness, Cixin Liu’s The Three-Body Problem, Margaret Atwood’s Oryx and Crake, Philip K. Dick’s Do Androids Dream of Electric Sleep? (with some reference to its film adaptation as Blade Runner), Arthur C. Clarke’s 2001 (with some reference to its better-known film adaptation by Stanley Kubrick), and Octavia Butler’s Parable series and Lilith’s Brood series.

Bérubé’s discussions of all these texts are subtle and insightful. But close reading in its own right is not the point of the book. Bérubé includes autobiographical personal reflections, and discusses writing the book in the wake of the COVID-19 pandemic, which deeply changed the dynamics of his own personal and family life, together with everyone else’s. Above all, though, the book is concerned with how science fiction allows us to entertain non-human perspectives upon human life and existence, and specifically to imagine the end of humanity — or rather (and better) its transformation in radical ways that exceed our capacity for imaginative projection and continued empathy.

I am inclined to share Bérubé’s pessimism about human futures. Immanuel Kant said that, regardless of its mistakes, excesses, and bad human rights record, the French Revolution was inspiring and positive because it demonstrated the sheer fact that human beings were capable of rebelling against injustice and envisioning something better. But today we find ourselves facing a sort of inverse of this situation. Regardless of whether Donald Trump gets elected to a second term or not, his widespread support by millions of American voters is frightening and horrific because it demonstrates the sheer fact that human beings are so enthusiastically vicious, bigoted, and sadistic that they are more than willing to embrace a worsening of their own lives, as long as this guarantees that other people will be treated even worse than they are, and that they will retain the privilege of enjoying the spectacle of other people’s suffering, like Christians in Heaven who gain surplus gratification from observing the torments of sinners in Hell. Though Bérubé doesn’t express himself precisely in these terms, he is definitely saying something similar. He cites, for instance, Octavia Butler’s insight that human beings are both highly intelligent and inveterately hierarchical, an extremely deadly combination.

Bérubé chooses the works he discusses precisely because they all share something of this ferociously negative vision, even though many readers/viewers seem to have gone out of their way to avoid acknowledging this. He defines his perspective by identifying it with that of Ye Weinjie, the character in The Three-Body Problem who deliberately contacts the Trisolarians (the aliens who inhabit the Alpha Centauri three-star system), thus encouraging them to invade Earth. Having suffered through the Chinese Cultural Revolution, and subsequent tyrannical and environmentally destructive actions of the Chinese government, Ye Weinjie concludes — mistakenly but not unjustifiably — that an alien invasion might well be the one thing that “can somehow save us from ourselves.” Bérubé is careful to distinguish this position from the more overtly radical one (also dramatized in the novel, and expressed in theoretical terms by such anti-natalists as David Benatar) that straightforwardly seeks the self-annihilation of Homo sapiens altogether.

For Bérubé, then, the greatest virtue of science fiction is its ability to articulate perspectives “in which we have become able to see ourselves and our sorry fate from the vantage point of something other than the human.” Rather than using such common terms as posthuman or transhuman, Bérubé describes his perspective as ex-human. To me, this suggests the scenario of tending one’s resignation from, and retiring from, the human race, although Bérubé does not quite describe it in these terms. In any case, the term ex-human avoids the self-congratulatory visions of exceeding and transcending the human that we find in Nietzsche, say, or more to the point in recent Silicon Valley TESCREALists (TESCREAL = “transhumanism, extropianism, singularitarianism, cosmism, rationalism, effective altruism, and longtermism”). [You can find out more about TESCREALism here]. For Bérubé, the ex-human “is distinctive in that it is framed by the possibility of human extinction and driven by a desire to imagine that, somehow, another species is possible.” Becoming otherwise is desirable, and may well be a better alternative than remaining conventionally “human”; but it should not be seen as a conquest, a triumph, or a heroic accomplishment.

The novels and films discussed by Bérubé all express this desire in various ways, albeit often tentatively. The bioengineering of a less malevolent successor species to Homo sapiens is most explicitly envisioned in Oryx and Crake. Much more mildly, Ursula Le Guin’s vision of a society that is not governed by gender in The Left Hand of Darkness proposes a modification of “human nature” that is not flawless, but evidently more desirable than not. Though Do Androids Dream of Electric Sleep? is explicitly premised upon the supposition that human beings are able to feel empathy, whereas androids are not, it is not only set in the aftermath of a human-made catastrophe (nuclear war), and questions its human-supremacist premise in many other ways as well. 2001 also contrasts banalized human characters with the supercomputer HAL, who is arguably the most empathetic character in both the novel and the movie. 2001, like Androids and Blade Runner, suggest that transcending, or at least reforming, what we understand as “the human” is urgently necessary, and indeed perhaps inevitable.

The richest discussion in The Ex-Human is that in the final chapter, devoted to Octavia Butler. Here Bérubé discusses both the Parable diptych, and the Lilith’s Brood trilogy. The Parable books presciently envision a Trumpian America, and set against it a small-scale utopian community project. In the course of the novels, the protagonist Lauren Oya Olamina does succeed in setting up a worthwhile intentional community, but only after the most horrific and painful tribulations. And in any case, such a result is not scalable to humanity as a whole. This leads Butler to posit space travel and migration to other worlds as a more permanent solution to self-inflicted human suffering; but it is all too symptomatic that Butler was never able to write a third novel in the series that would convincingly envision such a movement. Here Bérubé cites Gerry Canavan’s exploration of Butler’s many abandoned manuscripts. (In fact, this impasse was already encountered in Butler’s early novel Survivor, which she ultimately disowned as a result).

Bérubé then turns to Butler’s earlier Lilith’s Brood series, consisting of Dawn, Adulthood Rites, and Imago. In these novels, Butler envisions an Earth devastated by nuclear war, survived only by a small number of humans who are rescued by an alien species with superior technologies, the Oankali. These aliens define themselves as gene traders; they seek to produce a genetic hybrid between themselves and humans. I won’t go into Bérubé’s reading of this trilogy in detail. I will only note that the biggest interpretive disagreement about the trilogy is over whether we should regard the Oankali as benevolent saviors, or whether we should regard them as manipulative and oppressive colonialists. There is good evidence for both approaches in the books. The Oankali insist, quite plausibly, that human beings are bound to destroy themselves (again; since the premise of the novels is that we have already done so once), unless they accept the deep species modifications that are being offered them. However, the Oankali clearly maintain a position of superiority vis-a-vis the surviving humans, lying to them, forcing them into actions against their will (up to and including what can only be understood as rape), and continually overriding human demands and desires, supposedly for the humans’ own good. Bérubé offers a remarkable synthesis of these two opposed readings; he agrees that the Oankali’s treatment of human beings is entirely, unacceptably nasty; but at the same time he suggests that (from Butler’s own perspective, which Bérubé endorses) such a forcible remaking of humanity into something *other* is preferable to human beings remaining as they are. The human condition as it actually is can only lead to horrors of nuclear holocaust, devastating epidemics, or the re-election of Donald Trump. I have to say — much as I do not want to — that Bérubé has a point.

Andrea Hairston, ARCHANGELS OF FUNK

I received an advance copy of Andrea Hairston’s Archangels of Funk, in return for giving an honest review. Here it is. The book will be published in two weeks or so.

Andrea Hairston’s new novel, Archangels of Funk (2024), is a science-fictional sequel to her two previous magical realism / alternative history novels, Redwood and Wildfire (2011) and Will Do Magic for Small Change (2016). The new novel’s heroine, Cinnamon Jones, is now a sixty-year-old woman; those previous novels were about, respectively, Cinnamon’s grandparents (a Black grandmother and a Seminole/Irish grandfather) who leave the deep South and come north to Chicago during the Great Migration of Black people in the first half of the twentieth century, and Cinnamon herself as a teenager in Pittsburgh in the 1980s.

This places Archangels of Funk as occurring in 2030 or so. This is only a few years beyond the actual present in which the book was published, and in which I am writing this note. But things have changed radically during those several years. We have gone through the Water Wars, which are not described in detail in the novel, but which evidently shook things up quite a bit. Large corporations and rich white people still own the world; but not everything is under their control. Cinnamon Jones is part of a thriving multiracial alternative community, including farming cooperatives and centered on the Ghost Mall, a former shopping center now refurbished as a collective gathering place and free kitchen, with lots of space for experimental collaborative projects. This community is hooked in to the global Internet, but it is largely a loose, local aggregation, autonomous from major centers of power and production, more or less self-sufficient in terms of food, and largely reliant on bicycles for transportation, instead of cars. This community is also relaxed and dispersed, resistant to the sort of centralization and totalization that one often finds in both utopian and dystopian visions.

Archangels of Funk is narrated in close third person through the varying perspectives of Cinnamon herself, her close friend Indigo, her dogs Bruja and Spook (both of whom seem to be able to grasp spoken human desires and suggestions, and the latter of whom is cyber-enhanced), and even her three “circus-bots”. These sentient machines are camouflaged, when they are quiescent, as piles of junk; but when they awaken they take on robotic animal forms, and project vivid multimedia spectacles. They are also imprinted with the personalities of Cinnamon’s grandparents and great-aunt. The circus-bots preserve and transmit the wisdom of the ancestors, but they also plunge forward in time in order to generate exuberant new configurations of spectacle.

Hairston is less concerned with narrative than with exploring the textures of everyday life in the changed circumstances of the world that the book presents. The novel is set in just one locality, western Massachusetts, where Hairston herself actually lives; and it takes place over the span of just a few days. Cinnamon is mostly concerned with staging her yearly extravaganza, the Next World Festival. This is a “community carnival-jam”: a gigantic theatrical spectacle, highly participatory, played in an outdoor ampitheater, and filled with song and dance, as well as with seeemigly magical masks and costumes, together with splendiferous props and sets. Everything in the Festival both calls back to African American history and leap forward to envision social and personal transformations. A Mothership lands, recalling George Clinton and Parliament/Funkadelic. Careful planning serves for the proliferation of play, rather than for any more instrumental purpose.

Cinnamon is by no means anti-technology. But she is careful with her gadgets and inventions, because she is all too aware of how computational devices in the 21st century serve purposes of dissuasion and surveillance. Her house is configured as a Faraday cage, and she never carries or uses a cellphone. Her bots are always gather data, and anxious to give advice; but they are also booby-trapped to prevent corporate spies from seizing and reverse-engineering them. There is also considerable attention paid to physical safety. The surrounding woods are rife with robbers looking for a quick score, as well as with “nostalgia mlitias,” dudes roaming about in combat gear trying to bring back the old days of MAGA values. But their efforts are somewhat hampered, fortunately; though they seem to have lots of guns, they are mostly empty because bullets, bombs, and other munitions seem to be quite scarce.

Cinnamon and her friends are not just happy-go-lucky creators, however. They suffer from depression, relationship problems, bouts of fake nostalgia, and other all too real psychological symptoms. The ill effects of global warming are everpresent: “deny climate change all you want, but when that brushfire rolls up on your ass, you run or burn“. There are also kids whose parents are missing, visitors with murky and perhaps dangerous agendas, and so on. The novel is, at least in part, about how to negotiate such difficulties. It is psychologically incisive, even as it values lateral connections with others over the narcissism of deep interiority. Cinnamon is adamant that she is “too busy” to be “waiting for love,” but she remains open to chance encounters and unexpected opportunities. People always seem to be engaging in

Archangels of Funk has no deep, mythical narrative, no grand, overarching Story: this is precisely because everything in the book is composed of little stories, told and experienced, involving exchanges and transformations on multiple levels. There is no firm line between actuality and dream, or between technology and magic. Hairston’s prose style strikes me as unique, and it is ultimately what draws everything together. The writing is liquid and mercurial, stopping to capture unexpected details, passing between interior monologue and physical description, then turning and flowing away from what you thought was important, and drawing your attention somewhere else. When I finished reading Archangels of Funk the other night, I felt a bit confused because I was hoping for more. The final dialogue, between Cinammon, her bots, and some long-ago friends who have shown up long after she expected never to see them again, suggests a never-ending adventure. You may become tired of adventure and seek to rest for a while, but the energy will return, at least until you have passed (as all people and all things ultimately must). “You’re a dream the ancestors had” — which is true enough, except vice versa is true as well. “We’re in a sacred loop”; there is no goal except continuing to play and to circulate. “Nobody makes up their own mind,” because our minds like are bodies are continually in motion, continually intertwined with others. (Earlier, we had been told that “mind was always a community affair”). And: “here we are at the end of the world,” Cinnamon finally says, “thinking up what the next world will be.” And: “I am who we are together.”

(this is a revision of something I first posted on Facebook).

I just finished reading John Cowper Powys’ PORIUS (1951, though the full text wasn’t available until 2007). It is a long novel — 450,000 words or so — and an absorbingly relentless one. Powys (1872-1963) was a contemporary of the great modernist writers, and his work represents an alternative form of modernism, and for me a quite inspiring one. PORIUS takes place over a week in October 499 AD; the eponymous character is the heir to a small princedom somewhere in Wales. He encounters, in addition to various relatives, rivals, and friends and/or lovers, such mythical Welsh figures as King Arthur and especially Myrddin Wyllt (who we know as Merlin). The novel occupies a strange place where naturalism, myth, and pantheist nature worship seem identical. We get modernist stream of consciousness of the various characters, except that the consciousness in question is entirely embroiled with and taken up by the natural world. We go seamlessly between the description of a gleam of sunlight on a mushroom, or for that matter a pile of dung visited by numerous flies, and the alienated self-consciousness of one or another character. The background is that of a society in flux. There is a Saxon invasion, that is reported to us but that we do not see directly. There are also ongoing factional disputes between the various ethnicities inhabiting pre-Anglo-Saxon Wales. Most of the groups are Celtic, more or less. The indigenous “forest people” seem to be Celtic, but Powys also suggests that they were originally from Morocco and Iberia. The Brythons, the ruling class to which Porius belongs, are also Celts; but they have intermarried with Romans from the former occupation, and picked up a lot of Roman customs. There are also the Gwyddylaid (Scots), and the Ffichtiaid (Picts).

The fractures are religious as well as ethnic. Christianity is in process of conquering Britain and exterminating all its rivals, but it hasn’t entirely gotten there yet. The priests, official representatives of the Roman Church, are loathsome bigots. But they have a lot of competition, both from milder more-or-less Christians, and from pagans of various sorts. The two extreme ideologies on display are mirror images of one another: militant Christianity on the one hand, and the extreme nihilism and hatred of life of Medrawd (known to us better in Arthurian tales as Mordred) on the other. In between, we encounter Mithraism, pagan nature worship, and the kinder gentler form of Christianity associated with Pelagius (he denied original sin, and is thereby regarded by the Church of the time, and ever since, as a heretic). Porius himself is not firmly committed to any religious faction. Instead, he is largely embroiled in the questions of political power, disputed among the many groups and tendencies, and in his marriage to his first cousin Morfydd, a move designed to solidify the dynasty. Morfydd in turn is in love with another man, Rhun, who is another first cousin to both Porius and herself. Despite flashes of jealousy, the three cousins work things out well enough. The drama of the book is largely metaphysical, and the emotions of the characters get subsumed within that.

The overall plot of the book is also somewhat picaresque. Though Porius is the most central character, the book also shifts focus numerous times and goes into the mentalities of a lot of the other characters. Porius is also diverted into other actions and adventures. Most interestingly, he has sex with a giantess (the last of a nearly extinct race of giants who inhabited the land before even the indigenous forest people arrived), and at the very end he rescues Myrddin Wyllt from his imprisonment by his lover Nineue (which is the last we see of Merlin in Arthurian legend). Powys not only gives Merlin a subsequent afterlife, but he also expresses considerable appreciation and admiration for his sorceress/destroyer, rather than treating her as a straight-out villainess as the traditional accounts do.

In the massive course of the novel, all of these odd happenings and strange contestations get subsumed within what might be called Powys’ post-Romantic nature worship. But that term is not quite right, since nature is not a single entity for Powys, but a vital multiplicity. It is composed of, or decomposed into, multiple instances: one particular tree, one particular mushroom, the special glint of sunlight behind cloud as it affects a small clearing in the middle of the forest, and so on.

Powys is a singular writer, and a marvelous one. I read another novel of his every two or three years, or so. Fortunately he wrote a lot, so I am in no danger of running out. PORIUS is so overwhelming that I would not recommend it as the first text of Powys to read, if you have never encountered him before. Though frankly, I am not sure which text is the best beginning place.

In any case, I will conclude with a few samples of Powys’ prose. These are just passages that stopped me cold when I was reading the novel, and that are relatively graspable without knowing the context, or the details of the plot.

• Powys writes of the Welsh bard Taliesin’s poetry “whose peculiarity was that it was not only absolutely ‘a-sexual,’ or devoid of sex, but devoid of all the emotions connected with religion and piety where sex enters.” This poetry displays an “absolute immunity to all the human emotions where sex plays a dominant part, as it does in love, in hate, in race, in religion, and in almost all forms of cruelty; and the curious thrill of pleasure, as of a new exciting sensation that his poetry produced, showed what a mass of subjects is left when sex is cut out.” Taliesin’s poetry expresses “a quivering, vibrating, yet infinitely quiescent moment of real Time, a moment of Time so satisfying that it surpassed all the pleasures of sex, while it reduced to something unnatural, distorted, and perverted, every scruple of chastity.”
• “Could you see the shadow of a thing and its reflection at the same time?”
• Powys describing the fall of leaves: “the huge dark dumb mysterious process, reeking with sepulchre-sweet rot and fetid with lust-satisfying decay, of the enormous vegetable dissolution, out of which, autumn by recurrent autumn, the organic life of the earth is renewed.”
• “The girl bent down as she crossed this little stream and stared steadily into one of these constantly growing bubbles; and this arbitrarily chosen eye of the whole inorganic world stared back at her—the eye of matter itself responding in subconscious or perhaps superconscious indifference to the eye in a human skull!”
• “And yet there hung about the whole project something dreamlike and unsubstantial, not so much unreal as subreal, like a decision under water, or in the soft persistent falling of snow upon snow!”
• “Active brutality rather than erotic cruelty was the worst thing into which the surging urge of the invisible force which swept him forward drove Gunhorst.”
• “… though it might be impossible for the human brain to imagine such things it was still within the bounds of possibility that the ultimate reality was neither One nor Many, nor even a mysterious mingling of them both, however much helped out, so a few riverbed gurglings seemed to interject, by the Holy Trinity, but was something completely and absolutely different.”

Annalee Newitz’s new far future novel The Terraformers is about worldbuilding in a more literal sense than is usually the case in science fiction. Newitz gives us a vivid setting, or imagined world, in the planet Sask-E, where all the action takes place. But the novel, as the title indicates, is literally about transforming an alien, lifeless planet into a world in which human beings and other earthly life forms can thrive. This is a wonky book (of the type formerly known as “hard science fiction”) because of how it goes into the technology of altering a planet, so that it has suitable oxygen levels, and a self-sustaining environment or food web; and then, at a later stage, how cities can be built, lived in, and flourish economically. There’s a lot more detail than I ever thought I would want to know about transportation planning, for instance, and the differences between public and private systems. But — in contrast to most (if not all) of the hard science fiction of half a century ago — The Terraformers insists on the social, political, and economic dimensions of technological development. Technologies are not autonomous forces; they always depend upon issues of power and control. Who plans them, and who pays for them in the first place? Who uses them? Who maintains them? Who (if anyone) draws a profit from them? And are they privately owned, and marketed as a scarce resource? Or are they available as a common good? These questions are ceotral to the novel; they do not just come up after a technology is instituted, but influence technological growth and invention in the first place. Such issues seem obvious and commonsensical to me, but it is surprising how often they are ignored, both by technological determinists on the one hand, and by people who underestimate the radicality of technological change on the other. Newitz writes excitingly of (extrapolated, futural) inventions, but she insists on alway placing these developments in a social, political, and economic matrix.

The novel starts by presupposing several big utopian changes from life as we know it and experience it today. The first, and most important, of these is called the Great Bargain; it is a backstory that explains how Earth itself was saved from ecological catastrophe. The Great Bargain was “a way to open communication with other lifeforms in order to manage the land more democratically.” As a result of the Great Bargain, mammals, birds, and other animals become able to think at human levels, and to communicate through spoken or written language. Beings like moose and cats and naked mole rats, and eventually even earthworms, who do not have human-style vocal organs, are nonetheless able to communicate with one another and with human beings via something like wireless, telepathic text messages. The novel presents this as an ethical and political development above all: lands and environments can only be managed for the common good if all the stakeholders are able to enunciate their needs and desires, and participate in decision making. The result is a society in which a large variety of sentient beings, including humans and other sorts of hominids, mammals and birds and other sorts of animals, and AIs and robots of the most varied sorts, are all considered people, and all exist (at least in principle) on an equal basis.

Several other technologies exist in order to back up the Great Bargain. People (of all species) no longer reproduce sexually. Instead, they are “decanted” from genetic blueprints with the help of something like 3D printers or matter synthesizers. People of whatever species are “born” with fully developed adult bodies, although they still need a certain amount of guidance or education before they can be fully functioning and autonomous. Every new entity — human, animal, or robot — therefore has one or several “parents”, those these need not be organically related to the new individuals under their initial care. In addition, sentient entities have greatly extended lifespans compared to what actually exists today. Human beings live for hundreds of years, and in some cases well over a thousand. (This is actually one aspect of the book that I found a bit disturbing. I have worked as an academic for nearly forty years; I look forward to retiring in the next several years. The idea of working for an obnoxious boss continually for seven hundred years straight, as some of the characters in this novel do, is deeply upsetting).

When sexuality is freed from the chains of reproduction, it can flourish in all sorts of new and different forms. Newitz wrote about robot sexuality in her 2017 novel Autonomous, and she writes about it more here. Also, when human and other beings are “decanted,” their bodies can be constructed in different ways, not reducible to traditional gender binaries. Some of the human characters in The Terraformers use “he” or “she” pronouns, but a number of them also use “they”. There actually is not very much explicit sexual description in the novel, but one humanoid character (not Homo sapiens, but a different genetically engineered human lineage) is described as hermaphroditic, with genetalia containing both stamens and pistils (as with flowers).

The Great Bargain has also solved environmental problems. Human and animal entities get their energy by consuming vegetal matter, and robots and AIs run on solar batteries. In either case, a planet’s sun is the ultimate source of energy, much more directly than is the case on Earth today (nearly all of our our energy comes ultimately from the Sun, but harmfully mediated in the forms of meat and fossll fuels). In Newtiz’s future world, there is only clean energy. There is also a technology called “gravity assist,” which allows both animals and robots to fly. I really enjoyed the flying moose (who save the day at one point in the narrative), as well as the sentient flying trains for mass transfortation.

It has become a cliché (but one that remains true for all that) that it is easier to imagine the end of the world than the end of capitalism. Although the technologies that I have described so far make a world of abundance rather than scarcity possible, it still takes a huge investment, including a huge amount of labor, to terraform a planet in the first place. And so the future society imagined in The Terraformers is still a capitalist one, despite all the broad bottom-up and more or less egalitarian social structures that the new technologies have made possible. One galactic-scale corporation initiates the terraforming of Sask-E, and another one comes in as a major landlord, building cities and tyrannically ruling large populations. Nothing would happen on Sask-E without the initiative of these corporations, but they are also the major impediments to human, animal, and robot flourishing throughout the novel. The protagonists of The Terraformers continually need to battle these corporations, which is something that they cannot do as individuals, but only as parts of communities, or as parts of something like what is often called ‘civil society’ (though this phrase is not used in the novel). There is no vision of total revolution here, but only one of continual struggle, of maneuverings to leverage the needs and wants of large numbers of people against the power of the corporations. Or to put it differently: the corporations have lasers from space that can wreak destruction, but the people on the ground (and in some cases, living in cities under the ground) are sufficiently numerous, and their organizations sufficiently robust, that the corporations have to negotiate and/or back down and/or be outmaneuvered in legal and procedural terms. (These three outcomes are what happens in the three main sections of the novel).

I have mostly described the presuppositions of the novel, rather than the characters and the overall narrative. This is because, in the grand science fictional tradition, the former really guides (and even determines) the latter. The novel is divided into three sections, hundreds of years apart (in order to convey the vast time scales involved in terraforming). The narration is in the third person, but the protagonists of the three parts are respectivly: 1) a Homo sapiens employed by one of the large corporations but whose basic loyalty is to the enivronmental action group of which he is a part; 2) a Homo archaea whose ancesters were supposed to have died after initiating terraforming, but who survived instead by living underground, inside a volcano; 3) a sentient flying train. All three central characters are quite empathetic; and all of them have to make alliances with others in order to accomplish anything.

In sum, I loved The Terraformers. It combines utopian speculation with a continued realistic sense of the impediments that movements towards liberation will still have to deal with. It’s knowledgably political, while at the same time it maintains a science-fictonal commitment to, well, scientific experiment and discovery rather than the magical transmutations of desire that are more explored in fantasy. (I like certain varieties of fantasy well enough, but my heart is still with science fiction, so Newitz’s focus was especially welcome).