Me and the AIs thinking about thinking
On\e of the really nice things about BlueSky is that I got to find so many new writers, especially bloggers. The thing that I find that really attracts me to different writers is humaneness, a sense of ethics that highlights the importance of every single human being on the planet, a sense that does not make exceptions based on political convenience (they are rarer than you think!). One such writer that has brought me no end of intellectual stimulation is M. L. Clark, whose blog Better Worlds Theory I subscribe to. Clark has written a science fiction novel that will be the subject of our review today: Children of Doro, published in May 2023.
The planet Doro is unique by virtue of its governing structure: it is run by an artificial intelligence that is a gestalt of copies of the personalities of its residents, of various species. This is not an attempt to lecture on ideal systems of government, such as Plato’s Republic or Thomas More’s Utopia, for Clark is not so naive to think that simply outsourcing our problems to a machine would solve the human condition. No, this book is a lot of things (clocking in at 475 pages, it would have to be), among them an investigation into what sentience even is, what life even is, what intelligence even is. This is a book that is not afraid to get abstract, in a way that is traditional in the genre.
This is most obvious in Clark’s choice of narrator: an artificial intelligence (no, not the one that governs the planet, but that one is important too), which ends up being both a blessing and a curse for the reader, but maybe a curse that works. The narrator on several occasions talks about how fundamentally different its thought process is from organic life, and how incomprehensible it finds us. The end result was something that I, as an autistic person, found at parts to be very relatable as I feel that I often do not understand the neurotypicals around me particularly well. At its best, it is a form of Brecht’s distancing effect, thrusting you out of the story to consider why things are the way they are. Clark goes even farther than Brecht did with it, as Brecht was concerned with society (being a committed socialist), while Clark is concerned with the basics of thought and of consciousness.
Unfortunately, this does not always work. There are times when the AI can be so detailed in its observations you can lose track of what is being observed. The AI narrator is not the only problem; many of Clark’s characters are incredibly verbose, and very few of them speak in a way that real human beings do. The effect, at its densest, is like the more impenetrably written Victorian or Edwardian novels that induce the 21st-century reader to glaze over, as it can be so hard to figure out what the actual point being made is. There are parts of the plot, more towards the beginning than the end, where there are so many tangents that you can’t tell what characters are actually discussing, and that can pull you out of the story. Clark cites Fyodor Dostoyevsky’s The Brothers Karamazov as a major influence on this book; maybe this is a borrowing from Dostoyevsky, but not having read that book of his, I found it a bit of a thicket. Fortunately, the plot starts moving faster at about the 2/3 mark, and by that point the paragraphs have a more readable length, and the story is overall more engaging. As such, that last third was my favorite part of the book, where the characters get to be themselves more and avatars of raw ideas less, or perhaps are given a chance to turn their ideas into reality as shocking events upend life on Doro.
I really like what Clark did with the worldbuilding. Every major character is shown to be simultaneously, and contradictorily, both fully formed individuals and deeply products of their environments. This is most interestingly done for an alien whose species is hatched from eggs, and in litters of eggs at that; this character’s first real shock is the fact that one of the eggs is diseased and ultimately does not hatch a sibling. The AI narrator is sufficiently detached to reveal things, but sufficiently close to make them feel like characters.
There are also quite long passages that explain the worldbuilding in a more history-book-like way (although still narrated in-universe by the AI). I for one thought that they were very interesting and made Doro feel more like a real society, one with its contradictions and inefficiencies and a history to showcase that. The narrator talks about a previous AI that had governed Doro, but was ultimately removed from its position over its choice to effectively advise the residents of the planet in the way that King Solomon dealt with the two mothers in the Book of Kings. It’s an elegant solution, one with mechanistic efficiency—and it is something actual living beings could not bring themselves to accept. It was something that felt very real to me, to Clark’s credit.
Children of Doro is not a perfect book. Frankly, had it been pared down to somewhere between 300 and 350 pages, it would have been a far more readable book. But in a more positive sense, this book feels like the best of ‘Golden Age’ science fiction, which for all its paleness and maleness was certainly capable of delivering satisfyingly high-concept romps through assemblages of interesting ideas. Clark succeeds in doing that fantastically (and being ideas-focused is no bad thing—Cixin Liu is another contemporary writer that does it well). I can see what I liked in the blog in this novel. It is, for all its verbosity, a book that is philosophically curious and deeply moral, both things I deeply admire. I shall conclude this review with the words that Clark uses to conclude every blog post; they are wise words, moral words, for our troubled and miserable times:
Be well, be kind, and seek justice where you can.
POSTED BY: Alex Wallace, alternate history buff who reads more than is healthy.
