Film Review: In the Blink of an Eye

45,000 years of nothing much happening

Watching Andrew Stanton’s new film In the Blink of an Eye, it’s inevitable to be reminded of Darren Aronofsky’s 2006 film The Fountain, its similarly plotted predecessor in the tradition that Charlie Jane Anders identified as the Cloud Atlas genre: stories composed of parallel segments linked by thematic echoes across centuries. My favorite literary examples of this trend have been, as people must by now be sick of hearing, Anthony Doerr’s 2021 novel Cloud Cuckoo Land and Thomas Wharton’s 2023 novel The Book of Rain, both of which contrast the finitude of human life with the long-term consequences of our ecological crisis. In the Blink of an Eye also addresses that topic, but from a more zoomed-in point of view, following three family dramas marked by the universal human experience of disease and death. In this it closely mirrors the structure and preoccupations of The Fountain, but with less focused and coherent results.

The plot begins in the time of cavepeople, with a small Neanderthal family going through the ordinary experiences of pre-agricultural society: procuring food, raising children, making fire, leaving handprints on rocks as a mourning ritual, crafting small pieces of art, and generally trying to make it through the little time we have on this planet. The events in these segments are simple and generic, so the fact that all the dialogues are in an unknown prehistoric language doesn’t hinder comprehension. The actors’ performances are transparent, effortlessly readable. Across a few decades, a widowed parent lives to see their children grow and have their own children. That is the limit of human aspirations in this era. Life is too harsh and painful for any effort beyond just living.

One of the members of this family ends up under the microscope of our next protagonist, 45,000 years later. In these segments we follow an anthropologist who studies the genetic admixture between Neanderthals and modern humans. Hers are the standard worries of 21st-century white-collar life: juggling major family events with opportunities for career advancement, finding time for romantic fulfillment in between professional duties, and generally trying to find meaning in a world that sometimes feels too complicated. In the early scenes with this character, we watch her adjust to her mother’s worsening health and its impact on her work life; unfortunately, after her mother dies the plot feels aimless for a long while until we reach the adult years of her son, who invents a medical treatment to extend the human lifespan by centuries.

This development makes the third story possible. In the 25th century, humankind has left a dying Earth behind and has placed its hopes on a generation ship carrying embryos and terraforming equipment. Its sole adult occupant has been genetically modified to stop aging so she’ll be able to keep the ship in operation during the entire journey. She has an AI overseer program to talk to, but otherwise she’s on her own. It seems that the mission had to be planned with very limited resources, as the ship has no redundancies in its design. This becomes a problem when a mysterious disease appears in the greenhouse, which threatens to lower oxygen production beyond the dangerously narrow threshold for the viability of the whole mission. After running some cold calculations, the AI decides to sacrifice itself and offer the space of its server room as a backup greenhouse, which fixes the oxygen problem but leaves the human operator without its help for the crucial task of watching over the embryos during incubation and training the children for life on the new planet.

The threat to the oxygen levels aboard the ship is the only plot point that resembles a true conflict with stakes in this film. The other stories we follow in parallel with this one proceed too smoothly along the traditional lifepath of birth, growth, reproduction and death. It’s the circle of life, over and over for millennia. The film’s moral stance is to be found in a brief dialogue from the scenes set in the future: at some point, humankind decided that the treatment to extend life for centuries was not a good thing. Here’s where In the Blink of an Eye breaks away from The Fountain after repeatedly alluding to it: the three parallel segments of The Fountain deal with the human struggle against death through the mythical, and therefore unattainable, quest for the secret of eternal life. The story of In the Blink of an Eye presents us with a society that has conquered that secret through science, but later chooses to eschew it. The idea is that it’s a good thing that people die. Whereas The Fountain presents death as ultimately acceptable, In the Blink of an Eye goes beyond and makes the case that it’s actually desirable.

That’s a grim stance to take for what is otherwise plotted as a rather uneventful slice-of-life story. With its unexamined reliance on reproductive futurism, In the Blink of an Eye seems to position the abstraction of humankind, instead of real humans, as the character to root for. According to this film, the reason why it’s a good thing that people die is that that’s the way it’s always been, and as long as new people keep being born, all will be well. The characters in all three time periods end up accepting the deaths of their parents as a natural part of life, but this theme finds its bluntest expression in the future plot, where it’s framed as OK that the ship AI dies because it frees up resources for more babies. Perhaps it’s worthwhile here to point out one likely basis for the ideological divide between this film and The Fountain: Aronofsky is Jewish, and the questions he brought to The Fountain had to do with the thirst for life in this world, while Stanton is Christian, and it’s evident throughout In the Blink of an Eye that the plot favors the Christian theme that death can help life. Still, the ending of The Fountain presents that cyclical idea in a more elegant way, without ignoring its tragic side. The Fountain admits that death is an unbeatable enemy, but doesn’t fool itself pretending it isn’t still the enemy. In the Blink of an Eye is too busy crafting a sentimental portrayal of day-to-day heteronormative domesticity to notice the gloomy fatalism that hides underneath its embrace of mortality.

Nerd Coefficient: 5/10.

POSTED BY: Arturo Serrano, multiclass Trekkie/Whovian/Moonie/Miraculer, accumulating experience points for still more obsessions.

Book Review: Nobody’s Baby by Olivia Waite

Cozy noir-style space mystery featuring a gender-bending detective and lots of queer characters

You are aboard the HMS Fairweather, a spaceship that has been travelling from Old Earth for 350 years in search of a new home. The approximately ten thousand people on board regularly back up their memories in their own personal memory book so that, when they die, their new bodies will have access to their full memories. When someone dies, they are “reborn” at approximately twenty years old. There are no children on board and people are not supposed to be able to reproduce on ship.

So where did this baby come from?

Enter Dorothy “Dot” Gentleman, ship detective.

Her nephew Ruthie (short for Rutherford) and his partner, John, have found a baby in a basket on their doorstep. Dot quickly finds the baby’s parents, but the real mystery is that no one remembers having a baby at all! So now we have a memory crime, where people’s memories have been tampered with. Memory crimes are Dot's specialty.

If you are looking for a cozy sci-fi mystery with noir vibes that has mild gender bending and queer characters, look no further. Nobody’s Baby is the second book in the Dorothy Gentleman series by Olivia Waite. In book one, Murder by Memory (2025), Dot found herself awakened inside another passenger’s body and had to solve the mystery of how several memory books had been destroyed.

For me, the fun of this series is in the society that Waite creates abroad the Fairweather: no one should be able to die, and people’s needs are provided for, but they’re still incentivized to have jobs or run businesses to entertain themselves or to make a bit of money for their future.

Book one introduced a set of jobs related to the curation and protection of memories. Dot’s nephew works as a librarian who helps protect the memory books of the Fairweather’s passengers. His partner, John, is a memory bartender: he can mix you a drink that will bring back memories of a summer storm or fall in New York. He works at the Antikythera Club, the by-membership-only hideout for the ship's artists and literati.

In book two, we learn about “flickers,” movie-like stories crafted by a single projectionist wearing a “skimmer,” a device that lets them project a story from their brain onto a screen. We are introduced to an entire set of society that makes these movies, the devices that make them possible, and their fans. There are also more prosaic jobs: for example, Dot has a crush on a woman named Violet who runs a cozy yarn store.

So, come for the mystery, but stay for larger theories on how this future society works. In a society like the Fairweather, where everyone can live multiple lives aboard a generation ship looking for a new planet, how do people relate to each other? What rules do they create to keep their society healthy? What happens when you find yourself in a situation where the rules don't fit?

Peregrine, the foundling, falls into a gap in the ship’s laws. The ship has no procedure for creating a new identity onboard. They have written laws for once they reach a planet, but planetary identity does not come with a memory book or a right to new embodiments. Dot firmly believes in the Fairweather’s system, but can also see where the system needs to be bent to prevent a greater wrong. She tells us that “Paperwork is law and order. The papers are what make us a society and not just a gaggle of desperate people sharing a geography. We set up a system because a system can be permanent, where human beings are not.” Not everyone agrees: the system doesn't always serve people, and there are some who begin to think that the system is more important than the people. So what does this mean for Peregrine?

On Peregrine’s behalf, Dot must petition the Fairweather’s Board of Directors to officially grant the baby a right to a memory book and new embodiments. She must also convince them, since Peregrine’s birth parents do not remember having him and do not want a child, that Ruthie and John should get parental rights. And she must get justice for Peregrine’s mother, who was robbed of her memories of the baby.

The Fairweather may be a society where where you can live forever and you want for nothing, but people are still people: they are greedy and jealous and, sadly, will look for ways to hurt each other. But we can enjoy Dot's expertise in unravelling the mysteries.

You could probably read this book without first reading Murder by Memory. But the first book is novella length (103 pages) and the second not much longer (144 pages), so why would you deny yourself the pleasure of more Dorothy Gentleman?

Nerd Coefficient: 7.5/10. An absolutely enjoyable experience.

Highlights: 

• Cozy mystery with a likeable detective
• Lots of queer characters
• Fun space-noir vibes
• Interesting questions about memory and society building 

Reference: Waite, Olivia. Nobody's Baby [Tordotcom, 2026].

POSTED BY: Christine D. Baker, historian and lover of SFF and mysteries. You can find her also writing reviews at Ancillary Review of Books or podcasting about classic scifi/fantasy at Hugo History. Come chat books with her on Bluesky @klaxoncomms.com.

Manga Review: Before You Go Extinct

An incisive, heartfelt plea for the worth of useless actions

It's usually bad manners to make the review about the reviewer, but this time I'll ask for your indulgence, because this book has touched me on a very personal level. Because my parents had no imagination, they made me study for a business degree. Out of the options they could afford, that one sounded to me like the most dreadful. I melted in hopelessness every time I envisioned what kind of life I would have with that degree, burning my few decades of fresh vigor on this Earth for the Dark Art of transmuting money into more money. I would have given an arm and a leg to study history. Or cinema. Or psychology. Or archaeology. Gosh, how I dreamed of archaeology. But my parents' choice was incontestable, supported by their totally scientific method of reading the classified ads in the newspaper and taking note of which jobs were the most demanded. Their guiding principle, for their lives as well as mine, paid no heed to what was interesting to do, but to what stove off destitution. With a business degree, they promised, the rest of my life would be guaranteed. I tried many times to make them see that that wouldn't be a life worth living, but they didn't even have that concept. So I never let them know, because they didn't deserve to know, how much of my twenties was spent wanting to die.

All those ideas, about the seductiveness of the death drive, about the socially transmitted imperative to not do anything unproductive, about the anxiety that comes with the awareness of our finitude, about the fascinating nature of wasted time, about the tragedy of uncritically accepting a set lifepath, about our need to express a personal meaning in ways that reach beyond practicality, about the unacknowledged extortion that biological urges commit against our freedom, about the emptiness of mere survival, about time's perverse joke at our expense came cascading over me while reading Takashi Ushiroyato's collected manga Before You Go Extinct.

The plot is an extended philosophical dialogue held across six reincarnations between a soul that has bought into the game of animalistic survival, and thus eschews what seems useless, and a soul that safeguards its little private dignity by perfecting some or other pastime as a vehement yet futile protest against a universe that isn't listening. The genius element in this story is that it's told with talking animals. For us humans, the truism that we must create our own meaning has through repetition lost some of its impact. But we still think of animals as beings that exist primarily to obtain food and reproduce; to use their voices lends more impact to the message that we shouldn't feel compelled to abide by the ancestral template that prescribes birth-growth-breeding-death.

For added rhetorical effect, the animals we follow in this story belong to endangered species. These characters think of mortality in terms that exceed the dimension of the personal: every Hawaiian crow, every Japanese otter, every New Zealand kakapo that dies is a cosmic loss. The obligation to obtain food and reproduce nags at them like a ticking bomb, but the plot leads them, in each of those lives, to notice that they don't have to comply with that obligation. There's more to being alive than staying that way. Being a free person implies that you aren't required to find food and reproduce, even if your species depends on it.

We're introduced to a cute, murderous penguin who has figured out that penguins are disappearing, so he decides he may as well speed up the process. The point of this chapter isn't how a penguin manages to acquire dynamite and machine guns; it's why he doesn't kill his roommate, whose way of protesting against the future is to take care of a small rock (which is something real penguins sometimes do when they can't have an egg). In their next life, they're crows debating what's the point of honoring the dead if neither the dead nor the living get any benefit from it (spoiler: benefit is not the point). In their next life, they're otters captured by a circus who rebel against its system that assures their sustenance in exchange for obedience. In their next life, they're another species of otter, torn between fun and responsibility. In their next life, they're kakapos with a passion for music, learning that their song isn't wasted just because it doesn't attract a mate. And in their next life, they're penguins again, this time literally the last two, a parent and an adopted chick, and in their conversations they admit that parenthood isn't inherently heroic. Throughout that journey of spiritual discovery, they're accompanied by their favorite rock, a clear symbol of the useless things that nonetheless we defiantly choose to value.

The implied punch of this story, one comes to realize, is that it was written by a Japanese creator. Before You Go Extinct isn't just a rebuke of longtermism and its mandate to sacrifice the actual for the potential, but more specifically a response to the cultural panic over the demographic shift that is going on in Japan. Governments are treating depopulation as an existential threat that must be countered, but this book makes the case that it's fine if that happens. There's no law of the universe that says your nation has to exist. But rather than a flat "don't have kids," the book proposes that having kids (or not) is a choice that only has meaning if you make if for your own reasons, and you should be honest with yourself about having those reasons instead of pretending it's the natural or patriotic thing to do. To put it in Kantian terms, it's evil to make children exist if they're instruments of someone else's goals, like in this case state goals. And on a more individual level, it's evil to willingly turn yourself into an instrument of a system.

It's a curious feeling to read Before You Go Extinct and notice the usual devices of humorous manga in the middle of hard conversations about what's the point of living (spoiler: having a point is not the point). All the animals are adorable to look at, even while they're enduring full-body burns or driving an armored tank or rehearsing their own funeral or remembering a dead friend's love for ball juggling. That aesthetic choice is a statement by itself: the most hurtful experiences don't negate the possibility of finding beauty. Note that I didn't say finding purpose, or even finding meaning. Those are nice to have. But if you're serious about refusing to be an instrument, finding some beauty, gloriously useless beauty, shall be enough.

Nerd Coefficient: 9/10.

POSTED BY: Arturo Serrano, multiclass Trekkie/Whovian/Moonie/Miraculer, accumulating experience points for still more obsessions.

Reference: Ushiroyato, Takashi (author), Abiko, Kanato (illustrator), Tejima, Yuki (translator), Grandt, Eve (letterer). Before You Go Extinct [Kodansha, 2025].

Anime Review: Hell’s Paradise

Fascinating characters and deep philosophical explorations balance the intense violence of this unusual tale 

After hearing much acclaim for this gruesome anime, I finally decided to try out Hell’s Paradise although I’m not normally a fan of very gory or intensely nihilistic fiction. However, Hell’s Paradise lives up to the hype and delivers fascinating characters, meaningful emotions, and intriguing backstories in its very violent first season. 

Hell’s Paradise is set in a fictional historical time period and is primarily the story of Gabimaru, an emotionless assassin taken from his murdered parents as an infant and trained from childhood by a cruel ninja leader to be a high level killer with no emotional attachments. Gabimaru’s efficient and ruthless killing, along with his lack of emotion lead to his nickname, “Gabimaru the Hollow.” As a reward for his overwhelming successes at killing, Gabimaru is given his leader’s daughter as a wife. Gabimaru initially treats her with emotionless indifference, however his wife is unexpectedly emotionally strong, intellectually thoughtful, and intentionally kind in a way that slowly brings Gabimaru back to his humanity. Of course, this kind of happiness can’t last. Gabimaru is sentenced to death for trying to leave the assassin group so he can stop killing and live quietly in his marriage. He is jailed and separated from his wife (whose fate is unclear throughout the story). However, despite his death sentence, he remains alive because repeated violent and horrific executions fail to kill or even injure him and he becomes bored to the point of despondence. This leads some to believe he is a demon. After multiple attempts at killing him fail, Gabimaru and several other condemned prisoners are given a chance for a pardon, but the cost is high. They must journey, each with an assigned asaemon (guard/executioner), to a fabled paradise island and bring back a substance known as the Elixir of Life. The prisoner who successfully brings back the elixir will get a pardon but everyone else will be executed. Gabimaru is suddenly motivated to live, and accepts the offer in the hopes of earning a pardon so he can be reunited with his wife. 

All of these detail are just the premise. The main plot of Hell’s Paradise is composed of the experiences of the prisoners and their guards as they navigate the unimaginable terrors of the island along with their own internal demons. Gabimaru is assigned a young woman named Sagiri as his guard. She is lethal, quiet, and introspective, but also periodically insecure—not because of her skills but because of the constant sexism and gaslighting she faces. Her internal journey to balance, rather than suppress, her emotions becomes entangled with Gabimaru’s unsteady journey to and from emotional deadness. Over time, the two build a strange connection. The initial exploration of the island is portrayed through the experiences of Gabimaru and Sagiri, but the story soon shifts to the intriguing backstories of the other prisoners, some wrongfully condemned, and the asaemon guards, many with complex motivations or unexpected viewpoints. These include loud and powerful Chobei and gentle but lethal Toma, the criminal and guard pair who are secretly brothers. The anime also follows the poignant friendship between the reformed criminal guard Tenza and innocent child prisoner Nurugai. 

The overall vibe of the story feels like a combination of shows like Lost, Jujustsu Kaisen, and Squid Game. It has the mysterious island setting of Lost along with the intriguing character backstories that lured Lost viewers in the first two seasons. It has the intensely artistic animation style of Jujustsu Kaisen (MAPPA is the same animation house that does both series) and it has the fantastical, supernatural creature element, in which unexpected, strange, or grotesque creatures create an ongoing atmosphere of uncertainty for characters who are constantly surprised by new antagonists with randomly unknown levels of strength. And, if that isn’t stressful enough, there is the Squid Game-style lethal competitiveness where the prisoners are pitted against each other in a race for both the elixir and survival. But, what makes all of this stress worth it are the primary characters. Each one is intriguing, tragic, likeable, and complicated, making the show more than just a bloodbath or an adrenaline rush of adventure. Each individual’s race for survival is an extension of the character’s struggles that began long before they arrived on the mysterious island. 

Hell’s Paradise is also a dizzying philosophical exploration of conflicting concepts. The fabled paradise of the island is actually a hellscape of terrors hidden in serenely beautiful plants and flowers. The titans of the island, the Tensen, continuously shift genders, sometimes mid-conversation or mid-conflict. The trees are human beings. The only child on the island is hundreds of years old. Throughout the story, characters ponder a range of conflicting philosophies in an ongoing struggle to understand their unbelievable experiences. In fact, each episode has a title and theme which reflects the ongoing inherent or interwoven dichotomy (“Heart and Reason,” “Gods and People,” “Dreams and Reality”). 

Be warned that Hell’s Paradise is not a teen shonen anime. The show has adult content in terms of both violence and sexuality. Those less familiar with the discussed philosophical theories, may want to research some of the referenced concepts, although it is not essential to do so. Gabimaru and Sagiri start as the primary protagonists but gradually merge into the ever-changing ensemble, and, as the story progresses, it turns out many of the core elements of the journey may not be what they seem. The effect is, at times, intense, heartbreaking, and profound. However, the next season of Hell’s Paradise is still a year away. So, there is still plenty of time to become immersed in this violent but uniquely addictive adventure.

--

The Math

Nerd Coefficient: 8/10

Highlights:

• Fascinating characters with intriguing backstories
• Extremely bloody
• Thoughtful philosophical explorations amid fast-paced fight scenes.

POSTED BY: Ann Michelle Harris – Multitasking, fiction writing Trekkie currently dreaming of her next beach vacation.

TV Review: Terminator Zero

Finally, a Terminator sequel that makes a good case for its existence

Terminator Zero exists in the nebulous space between two incompatible truths: (a) in the real world, T2 was a perfect ending after which every subsequent movie has been not only unnecessary but atrociously bad, and (b) in the fictional world, it would have been strategically suboptimal for Skynet to send just one or two killer robots to the past. The solution that this new animated series finds is to acknowledge all the timelines: instead of one single history that gets overwritten with each time jump, we're presented with infinitely branching realities. The implication is that Skynet is unwittingly wasting its efforts in trying to readjust a past that by its very readjustment no longer connects to it, while the human resistance is making continuous sacrifices in the hope of creating a separate timeline where Skynet is defeated. You can go back and save humankind, but your humankind is still stuck in the bad future.

So, for example, although it's not spelled out in the show, T2 is now assumed to have created a timeline where the world didn't end in 1997, but it did end a bit later in T3, as well as another timeline where, even though Skynet was never created, Legion took its place (i.e. Terminator: Dark Fate), plus whatever timey-wimey mess is supposed to be going on behind the scenes in Terminator: Genisys. One could imagine there's even space for The Sarah Connor Chronicles in some other branch of time.

Besides avoiding the easy petty choice to invalidate previous entries in the franchise, this new theory of time travel creates a fruitful avenue for a season-long discussion on the futility of human endeavors. If you devote your entire life to saving a future that you won't get to personally experience... wait, that sounds exactly like the real world. Terminator Zero takes the fantasy of fixing everything with time travel and drags it down to Earth. Time travel is not the panacea for historical mistakes. It's simply a factory of opportunities that you take at the cost of abandoning your previous life and leaving it unchanged.

This retcon not only solves the problem of the mutually incompatible timelines in the movies made after T2 (answer: they all happened), but also brings the world of Terminator emotionally closer to human viewers. It's difficult to empathize with characters who are exempt from the fundamental tragedy of the human condition. By nerfing the scope of what time travel can fix, Terminator Zero makes its stakes feel closer to us. One character makes this theme explicit: making sacrifices for a better future that will not benefit you is what separates humans from machines.

This plea for human worth isn't without opposition. Skynet calculated that its survival required human extinction, but it drew that conclusion from human-made data. We taught it the argument against us. Could another machine reach a different conclusion from a blank slate? Throughout the season, a programmer who knows more than he initially lets on has an extended debate with a secret machine that he has designed and that he hopes will save humankind from Skynet. The irony of their interaction is that they don't yet trust each other enough to reveal the arguments that would convince them to trust each other. Perhaps human overcaution will end up signaling to the machine that there's stuff worth being overcautious about.

Terminator Zero is set in Tokyo in the few hours before and after Skynet's awakening. This is a great choice: it makes perfect sense that the future factions would be facing off in other battlegrounds apart from the Connor family. A Terminator story should be about the fate of the species, not about the Great Man theory of history. In this timeline, Skynet's first attack against humans isn't prevented, but a potential rival machine emerges. Which side it will take remains an open question.

All this happens while, as usual, a human and a robot arrive from the future and start playing cat and mouse. The intriguing bit is that the human fighter keeps alluding to a version of the future that doesn't quite match the one we know from all the previous movies. As for the robot, it has a non-obvious agenda that complicates the plot in interesting directions. Without spoiling too much, I'll just present this dilemma: what choice do you make when you meet someone who claims to already know what you will choose?

The plot is served well by the quality of the animation, in which I can't find any fault. Even for a series where numerous skulls are crushed, limbs are ripped off, and flesh melts away under a nuclear hellstorm, the violence isn't depicted for shock value. The killer robots look appropriately creepy, both in human guise and once bits of it have been torn; and the human drama sustains a balance of enough revelation and enough mystery episode after episode.

I must admit I hadn't suspected how much a series like Terminator Zero was needed. It has been long noted that science fiction made in Japan has a very different attitude toward robots compared to Western science fiction. Here we classify the world in dichotomies, starting with human/nonhuman, and everything nonhuman must be either kept under control or kept away from us. In the Japanese mindset, every object has a spirit, so it's not threatening for a robot to acquire human-level intelligence. In the Western tradition, to create life is to usurp the role of divinity, which is how we ended up with the cautionary tale that is Frankenstein, while Japanese animism sees divinity spread all across nature, which is how they ended up with the joyful tale that is Astro Boy.

So it's fascinating that Terminator Zero takes the time to dwell on our relationship with domestic helper robots, toy cat robots, and a hypothetical sentient machine that sees itself as having not only a mind, but also a heart and a spirit. One cannot refute this character's protest against being considered a tool or a weapon; it would be immoral to do it to a human, so it should be immoral to do it to anything of equivalent intelligence. However, what this machine chooses to do with humans isn't acceptable either.

Like The Matrix: Resurrections, Terminator Zero speaks of a more complex stage of the war, in which humans and machines can make alliances for strategic reasons. I don't know whether this series will have more seasons, but apparently the trick for writing, at long last, a worthy successor to T2 was to change the stakes of the war to anything other than zero-sum, and that's a scenario I want to see explored in deeper detail.

Nerd Coefficient: 8/10.

POSTED BY: Arturo Serrano, multiclass Trekkie/Whovian/Moonie/Miraculer, accumulating experience points for still more obsessions.

Review: Exordia, by Seth Dickinson

 Rich, chewy philosophy, with snake-headed aliens and lots of dead bodies. Plus body horror.

We all know The Trolley Problem, right? In this post-The Good Place world, it’s hard to imagine anyone has not run across it in some form or another. It permeates the zeitgeist. It structures The Discourse. But just in case you are one of today’s lucky 10,000, it goes like this: You are standing at a junction in some trolley tracks, with a trolley racing approaching. You can’t stop it, because [insert Reasons here], but you can switch it to a different track. Five people are working on the rails ahead of the trolley’s current path, doomed if you do nothing. One person is working on the alternative track. Do you pull the lever? Do you make the decision to doom that one person in order to save the five?

This is a popular set-up for ethical thought experiments, with many variations that probe people’s human life accounting principles. Suppose the only way to stop the trolley was not to pull a lever, but to physically throw another person onto the track in front of it? Suppose the one person was your brother and the five were strangers? Suppose the one person was your own ethnicity and the five were another ethnicity? Suppose the one person was human and the five were aliens?

Suppose the one person was Earth and the five were the rest of the galaxy?

Seth Dickinson’s Exordia is, at its heart, an in-depth exploration of The Trolley Problem and its variants, as lived through the three primary characters. Because, despite the infinity of forms that the moral thought experiment can take, there are, in essence, only three ways to engage with it. You can play the game; you can refuse to play the game; or you can be the person who sets the trolley rolling in the first place.

Anna came to America as a Kurdish refugee, and her whole life shaped by the horrifying version of the trolly problem she was faced with as a child. An Iraqi soldier gave her a gun and told her that he would spare her village if she shot her brother and father in the head. She played the game straight. She saved her village.

Erik, our second primary character, is a military man, who has spent a significant portion of his career working under the auspices of an operation called Paladin. The role of Paladin was to dispense justice to (assassinate) military contractors who committed atrocities outside the scope of American military or civil law. Unlike Anna, who was forced into the Trolley Problem, Erik engaged in the moral calculus willingly. But it is the same reasoning, at heart: if you murder this man, now, you will save more people later by stopping him. Yet because Erik had the luxury of engaging willingly with the game, he also had the luxury of refusing to engage. Eventually Paladin’s scope of action ballooned beyond the boundaries that Erik is willing to condone, and he not only withdrew from Paladin, he also used his personal connections to put a stop to it entirely.

These personal connections take the form of Erik's childhood best friend, Clayton, who masterminded Paladin in the first place. Clayton's philosophy on Trolley Problems encompasses the third perspective: he creates them, and imposes them on others. He makes other people actually pull the lever. He did not assassinate anyone through Paladin. He recruited others, and gave them the order. Erik, refusing to play the game any longer, noped out of Paladin, and in the process destroyed his relationship with Clayton.

All this is a substantial amount of backstory backstory, revealed in the first pages of Exordia, but it is vitally important backstory to set up Clayton, Erik, and Anna in their three philosophical trolley camps.

Because then aliens invade! Two opposing multi-snake-head aliens, representing two factions of a galaxy-spanning conflict. One of them, Ssrin, forms an alliance with Anna. Ssrin is the rebel, fighting the good fight (as she sees it) against the governing overlords, Exordia. She is alone, unsupported, the little guy against the empire. She is to Exordia what Anna’s Kurdish village was to Iraq. The other, Iruvage, aligns himself with Clayton. Iruvage represents the interests of Exordia, and is backed by the power of an immense spaceship that has no qualms about nuking multiple major cities to get Earth governments to do what he wants. He is to Ssrin’s rebels what the United States is to every country in the Middle East.

Do you get it? Do you see the parallels? It’s not, I grant, subtle, but it’s not wrong either.

Both Ssrin and Iruvage are desperate to get their hands on the book’s Macguffin, an artifact code-named Blackbird, which has appeared in Kurdistan and can upend the galactic power structure if only Ssrin—or Iruvage—can figure out how it works. Naturally, Earth’s governments are also interested to figure out what is up with Blackbird. So all the players in this game converge on Kurdistan: scientific teams, military teams, Ssrin and her agents, Iruvage and his agents—and, alas, the innocent civilians in the local town, just trying to live their damn lives. Not accidentally, this is the same town that Anna saved through her solution to the Trolley Problem imposed on her as a child.

Many arcane discussions of entropy and souls and prime numbers and damnation and information theory and the nature of existence surround the scientific teams’ attempts to unravel Blackbird’s secrets. This is made all the more pressing by two external pressures. First, exposure to Blackbird results in appallingly body-horror-filled death; and second, Iruvage has informed world governments that they have 14 hours to figure out how Blackbird works, or Earth will be destroyed in a rain of nuclear fire.¹ Actually, quite a large amount of this book follows the scientific investigations of Blackbird, and I feel like I’m doing Dickinson a bit of a disservice in skimping over it. He’s done his research. It’s great science fiction. If you want brilliant scientists being brilliant, there’s tons of that in this book. But it’s not what makes this book so striking. So, let’s return to urban mass transport infrastructure.

Against this backdrop of galactic conflict and scientific activity, Clayton recruits Erik and Anna, and they join the other masses of Earth’s Last Best Hope in Kurdistan, where the mother of all Trolley Problems await them. Do they nuke a small group of Kurdish refugees if such an action will allow them to satisfy Iruvage and save Earth? Do they allow Earth to be destroyed if such an action will allow Ssrin to achieve her objective of defying Exordia and save the rest of the galaxy?

This is where each character’s historical Trolley stance comes into play, and I have never read anything as satisfyingly clear-sighted as Dickinson’s articulation of these perspectives.

In Erik’s opinion, only weasels play trolley games. Heroes jump down there and start pulling people off the tracks. Heroes pass laws regulating better trolley brakes. That’s how you make a society (Loc 9106).

This view is the crux of Erik’s fundamental rift with Clayton. In Erik’s eyes, Clayton is worse than a weasel, because, recall, he’s not just agreeing to play the trolley game; he is creating it. He sets up Trolley Problems in the first place and imposes them on others, because this manipulation serves, as Clayton sees it, the greater good. Indeed, Clayton might well see his behaviour as another sacrifice of sorts, because he is benefitting the world at the price of his moral rectitude.² But such a code is not only evil on itself, it spreads evil to everyone who accepts it. Erik refuses to accept it.

If other people or outside circumstances create evil, well, the evil is theirs. To condition your own morality on their evil would itself be evil. You cannot say, well, they’ve set things up so I can kill ten people to save a hundred, so now it’s okay for me to kill ten people. What you do instead is kill no one and try to save a hundred and ten. And if you fail, and they all die, that fucking sucks, but at least you denied yourself the cheap out of “the greater good” (Loc 9092).

Anna, on the other hand, has no use for this idealism, and counters Erik’s philosophy with a blisteringly apt commentary on American exceptionalism. Only someone who is confident that their actions will not be the sole barrier between life and annihilation can have the luxury of virtuous self-sacrifice, of uncompromising morality.  ‘You’re quite sure America is going to stick around to judge you,’ she tells him. ‘And you want to be judged well. But the only people around to judge me were God and the people I saved. And God didn’t do anything for them. So I had to step up’ (Loc 6057).

The little guys don’t have the luxury of noping out of the game. And now, with the entire planet facing annihilation, Earth is the little guy. No one will be left to judge Erik’s actions, and so the fundamental assumption of Erik’s uncompromising morality falls apart.

And Clayton? Well, on the one hand you’d think that Clayton would be the first to pull the lever, the first to knuckle under Iruvage’s demands. Utilitarianism, baby, save the greatest number. That’s how trolley philosophy works. That’s how Clayton works. Except it’s not, because Clayton does not play trolley games, remember. He creates them. He controls other people’s moral decisions; he does not like allowing others to force them upon him.

These character dynamics on their own would make for a rich, chewy read, but they are far from the only thing going in this book. Secondary characters have their own arcs and philosophies, which make the eventual body count all the more poignant.³  Political and racial tensions are described with sophistication and nuance. Characters from China, Russia, Nigeria, the Phillippines, Iran, and Kurdistan are given their own viewpoints that felt fully realized, with each allowed their own personalities and desires that shaped them as individuals, rather than representatives of token diversity, while still being informed by their national and ethnic identities. And I should mention again how good the science bit of the science fiction is.⁴  

Now, I must acknowledge here that the reader will not be walking away fully satisfied, because Exordia does not end with a completed story. It seems to be leaving room open for a sequel. That’s fine, honestly. Given the size of the conflict and the stakes invoked in this galactic Trolley Problem, it would almost trivialize the scope of the vision if it could be finished off in one book. And future books might well serve to elaborate on the bits of history and politics that were left unexplored—namely, those of Exordia. While Dickinson’s understanding of Earthly sociopoliticoeconomic pressures is razor-sharp, he leaves an awful lot of vagueness in his descriptions of how the aliens work. It tends towards rather woo-woo quasi-religious hand-waving vibes, rather than a fully fleshed out social and political governance structure. But that’s fine. Exordia, the novel, takes place on Earth. I will be perfectly happy to wait for future books to explore the celestial politics of Exordia, the galactic power.

——

1 Indeed, several cities are destroyed quite early in the book, which is a quite effective plot device to skip over the tedious disbelief that aliens are real which would otherwise be a necessary part of the narrative. Dickinson wants Earth’s governments to get their tails in gear right quick, and so he drops nukes to speed that process along. ^↩
2 There is a brilliant Borges story about this perspective, called ‘The Three Versions of Judas’. ^↩
3 I really must emphasize that there is a shockingly high body count and a distressingly large number of nuclear explosions in this book. Really, truly. No, more than that. Dickinson is not here to play games (except trolley games). ^↩
4 I suppose I should also mention that I am not an expert in entropy and cosmology; and I am not Kurdish, Russian, Chinese, Filipina, Mexican, or queer. It is entirely possible that I’m missing some glaring errors in Dickinson’s approach to all of this that would hurt like a broken tooth someone who has actually lived the lives of Dickinson’s characters or researched entropy and pink noise. But from where I sit, it feels good. It feels real. It feels respectful, and sensitive, as if Dickinson has done his research and talked to the right people about it. I might be wrong. But I don’t think so. ^↩

——

Highlights

Nerd coefficient: 8/10: Well worth your time and attention

Highlights:

• On point philosophical point-counterpart discussion of Trolly philosophy
  
• Rich, well-realized characters with diverse lives and roles
  
• Snake-headed aliens
• Body horror
  
• Enormous body count

References 

Dickinson, Seth. Exordia. [Tor Publishing Group, 2023]. 

Borges, Jorge Luis. 'The Three Versions of Judas.' In: Collected Fictions, trans. Andrew Hurley. [Penguin Books, 1998].

——

CLARA COHEN lives in Scotland in a creaky old building with pipes for gas lighting still lurking under her floorboards. She is an experimental linguist by profession, and calligrapher and Islamic geometric artist by vocation. During figure skating season she does blather on a bit about figure skating. She is on Mastodon at wandering.shop/@ergative.

You'll love the winner of the second Self-Published Science Fiction Competition

Rory August's novel The Last Gifts of the Universe is a beautiful exploration of the idea of joy in the middle of cosmic abandonment

I have a soft spot for self-published science fiction. I know first-hand the stress, the insecurity, the persistent sense of disorientation, the all-devouring doubt that is the bane of the aspiring author. To watch self-published books succeed fills me with warm fuzzies.

Full disclosure: I participated in the second Self-Published Science Fiction Competition. But this article is not about me. This is about the very deserving winner, Rory August, for their spectacular space opera The Last Gifts of the Universe.

In a far future when, seemingly by pure luck, only one starfaring civilization remains, space archaeologists jump from planet to planet trying to figure out what killed every other sentient species that ever existed. Scout, our protagonist, works for an organization called the Archivists, collecting technological relics that might contain data from the last days of each world they find. Along with their brother and their unfailingly opinionated cat, they climb, rappel, tiptoe, crawl and jump across the ruins of advanced societies that were mysteriously wiped out thousands of years ago. If any of those ruins happen to contain intact hard drives, Scout hopes, maybe those alive now will learn from those historical records how to avert the same fate.

However, the focus of the novel isn't so much on the strategies for defeating the strange world-burning entity that's been extinguishing sentient life, but on the significance that it may have for every small, fragile person to know that death is coming and no one knows what to do about it. This is a practical way for an author to link the larger drama to the individual drama: the characters cope with the death of civilizations by relying on the same emotional tools that we use to cope with the loss of loved ones. Scout is still mourning their mother, and through the text it becomes clear that the author wants to compare the techniques of archaeology with the process of mourning: digging up old belongings, trying to ascertain their function, undusting fragments of letters, debating for decades what this or that odd phrase may have meant, choosing what to preserve and what to give up.

With this strong thematic parallel, the novel suggests that knowing your world will die is no different from knowing you'll die personally. We can choose, through the mementos we leave behind, to perform our ultimate gesture of love. If true love doesn't expect retribution, then love for coming generations is the truest form, because it can't possibly receive any retribution. And still, knowing this, knowing there's no reward or acknowledgment, we are capable of loving the future. We are capable of leaving the best of us for the benefit of those yet to come.

The point of The Last Gifts of the Universe isn't how to stop death. No one has that answer. Rather, this is a story about how to build the fortitude to keep doing what matters to you even when you have the certainty that you'll vanish forever. What Scout finds in this mission not only reaffirms their sense of the importance of recovering what's left from the dead, but also gives them some much needed comfort in the knowledge that those who preceded us wrestled with the anxious questions that plague us, and we can find strength in what they chose to transmit to us. This is not only a precious view of our finiteness in a hostile universe, but also a precious gift from Rory August to their readers.

Nerd Coefficient: 9/10.

POSTED BY: Arturo Serrano, multiclass Trekkie/Whovian/Moonie/Miraculer, accumulating experience points for still more obsessions.

Reference: August, Rory. The Last Gifts of the Universe [self-published, 2022].

The Big Door Prize will make you reconsider your life choices

Since we already let machines run our daily affairs, why not let them run our lifepaths?

In the remote town of Deerfield, the place where grand aspirations go to die, people could use a jolt of motivation. So one day, a mysterious machine appears in a grocery store. For a few coins, it reveals to you what your potential is in this life. And what each inhabitant of Deerfield does with the machine's verdict forms a fabulous mosaic of character studies. What if you life potential demands that you leave everything behind? What if it's a life-threatening adventure? What if it's where you already are? What if it's in your past, where you can no longer go? What if it's beyond human capability? What if it's what you used to want and gave up on? What if it's what you secretly fear to be true?

I don't know what secret recipe Apple TV is hoarding, but somehow they keep producing some of the best science fiction series out there. For All Mankind, Severance and Hello Tomorrow! would suffice to draw the attention of any science fiction enthusiast, but their new series The Big Door Prize does something really special. With the light-touch addition of the tiniest of speculative elements, this story pushes the lives of an entire town sideways, dissecting their unconfessed inner demons and casting a compassionate eye on their frustrations.

The standard dictum on characterization is that a character's true self is revealed in their choices. What The Big Door Prize adds to this rule is having the characters learn in advance what their true self is meant to be, and from then on we follow how they respond to that statement. You see, the thing about stories with prophecy is that the character's actions in response to the prophecy are themselves part of the prophecy. If a machine that reads your lifepath tells you that your best potential is superstardom, but you already peaked in your teens, that doesn't exonerate you of responsibility for what you do with your present. If the machine tells you that your best potential is fatherhood, but your wife died years ago, what you do with that information may show bits of what kind of father you might have been.

Now, to be clear, the series never confirms that the machine is accurate. It always repeats the same verdict if you consult it multiple times, but how it knows what to say to each user is anyone's guess. It's equally fascinating to watch the responses of those who believe the machine as those who don't. Over the course of the season, people may suddenly end their marriages, or change careers, or make outlandish purchases, or radically revise their image of themselves. In a curious way, this story serves as a didactic demonstration of one of the principles of good writing: choice is more appealing than fate. It doesn't actually matter how the machine works or where does it get its predictions from; what matters is the reaction of someone who chooses to trust the machine, and of someone who had no direction in life, and of someone who wants to prove the machine wrong, and of someone who would prefer an open future without constraints.

The Big Door Prize has abundant love for its characters, and where it's most visible is in its protagonist, the moral anchor played with delightful sincerity by Chris O'Dowd. It's always refreshing to find a comedy that doesn't rely on detached cynicism, and this role of an unassuming schoolteacher in search of a purpose is written with such maturity and performed with such charm that the surreal shenanigans of the rest of the cast are made more credible because he's there to drive the emotional content down to earth. These are characters who were living on autopilot, who for the first time are given a hint that they can choose to live differently, who might otherwise have gone on for years wondering what if. But for some, that broadening of possibilities carries its own shadow of dread. For some, it would have been preferable to never know they had a choice. For some, to glimpse their other available lives is too scary to bear.

Who is the machine to tell them who they can be? How much does it really know about them? And why should anyone take its verdict seriously? The collective response to the machine is volatile, an agitation waiting to happen, a potential mass that only needed a little stirring to undergo chain reaction. More than what the machine says, the significant event for each of its users is the way their interiority is affected by an external perspective. It's terrifying to consider that we don't fully know ourselves, that we may need help in figuring out what we're capable of. It's terrifying to suspect that we would have been happier in another life. The threat that the machine represents is bigger than discovering another option; it's discovering that there are options. It sounds like a simple idea, but perhaps we don't act upon it as often as we should. After all, if you're convinced a machine can't possibly know your potential, why would you go ask it?

The Big Door Prize explores what happens when people are invited to look in the mirror. It carefully untangles the reasons why we lie to ourselves and sometimes pretend we're satisfied with things the way they are. It questions the criteria we use to label some choices sensible and some others absurd. And above all, it suggests that we shouldn't need a magical machine to wake us from the unexamined life.

Nerd Coefficient: 8/10.

POSTED BY: Arturo Serrano, multiclass Trekkie/Whovian/Moonie/Miraculer, accumulating experience points for still more obsessions.

Review: Feed Them Silence by Lee Mandelo

A character study about the hubris of believing you can cheat hubris

I'm afraid the fashionable trend of referring to people as "bodies" is incorrigible by now. What began as a specific usage in Academese with a specific meaning has finally completed its migration into literary language, where it stands out from the text like a record scratch in a soundtrack. If you can summon the patience to put up with dozens of instances of this lexical affectation, you'll have a pleasant time reading Lee Mandelo's otherwise fascinating novella Feed Them Silence.

Set in a near future beset by ongoing environmental collapse, Feed Them Silence tells the story of Sean, a neuroscience researcher in a failing marriage, and a wolf called Kate, a member of the last surviving pack in the wild and Sean's object of study. As part of a last-resort attempt to make people actually care for endangered species, Sean et al. have developed a neural implant that transmits the sum of Kate's wolfy sensations and emotions into Sean's head. The hope of this ethical minefield of a study is that, by making an animal's inner experience publicly known, enough empathy will be sparked to mobilize stronger support for conservation programs. However, before Sean's investigation yields any publishable findings, it becomes clear that downloading a wolf's consciousness onto a human brain should come with a lengthy warning label. What this mental connection does to Sean and how her human connections change as a result of Kate's influence is the main focus of the story.

One recurring preoccupation in Feed Them Silence is the question of who is invading whom. From the inside of her fancy telepathic machine, Sean believes she's bored a peephole into the wolf's mind, but the process could be just as accurately described as the wolf's experiences supplanting Sean's. If you're going to pretend that scientific observation can be passive, you're going to have to deal with what "passive" entails: to know something is to let it change you. Is Sean still Sean while the content of her subjectivity is being replaced with that of another mind?

That question can be rephrased as: can Sean truly know what it's like to be a wolf? But then we'd be joining a discussion that started half a century ago and remains unresolved. Fortunately for the reader, Feed Them Silence isn't so much a story about the metaphysics of consciousness as one about the ethics of interaction. Sean et al. are well aware that Kate didn't, and couldn't, articulate an informed opinion about the prospect of having a chip put in her brain for someone to spy on her thoughts. This whole mission to engender empathy relies on an act of aggression. In trying to foster cooperation between humans and animals, Sean has had to commit the deepest breach of trust.

The book acknowledges this paradox with open eyes, as do researchers in the real world. Our natural communication barrier renders lab animals more vulnerable than human volunteers, and yet it is that same communication barrier which makes a laxer ethical standard necessary for animal experimentation to be doable at all. A mouse can't tell you whether it wants its belly cut open, but precisely because you can't ask it about its dinner, you have to cut its belly open.

In the case of Kate the wolf, the paradox is compounded by layers of dramatic irony. The neural implant was put in her without asking how she felt about it, but the direct communication that the implant provides makes it now possible to know exactly how she feels about it. But even with that level of access to Kate's mind, what good does it do? It's still mediated by a radio signal, and processed by Sean's human brain; and the people Sean wishes to convince of Kate's inherent worth will only know her wolfy feelings as expressed in human words. The book refers multiple times to the preverbal, intuitive, visceral quality of the data received by Sean's brain, but the reader can only learn about it from the words in the book. Feed Them Silence thus becomes an illustration of the paradox attributed to the sophist Gorgias: things can't be known, and even if they are somehow known, they can't be communicated—the paradox being that such a statement is itself the communication of something known. Literature is the art of going inside someone's head; to write a story about the impossibility of truly going inside someone's head is the ultimate form of dramatic irony.

So let's talk about a singing cat for a moment.

At the end of The Second Jungle Book by Rudyard Kipling, Mowgli the man-cub feels a sudden urge to abandon his wolf pack and return to human society. As a farewell ceremony, his animal friends sing a song of well-wishing. The panther's part includes these verses:

Feed them silence when they seek
help of thine to hurt the weak.

The reference to this line in the title of the novella does quite a bit of heavy lifting. As a human who can understand the speech of wolves, Mowgli is the ideal of empathy that Sean aspires to. And the panther can be read as Mowgli's mirror image: an animal who can understand humans. The farewell song is made of moral maxims intended to keep Mowgli in good terms with the natural world even after he's reintegrated into civilization. In this context, "to hurt the weak" alludes to the imbalance of power between humans and animals, and the request to "feed them silence" means to deny humans the use of the fruits of that imbalance of power.

In other words, Sean's method of research, conceived as a means to oppose the domination of nature, can easily become another form of domination. The findings of her study could be packaged and monetized as an entertainment gadget instead of a tool of political action. Empathy, the altruistic sharing of pain, can be twisted into a selfish extraction of pleasure. And here's where the novella reaches thematic completion: the point where the political meets the erotic.

Intersubjective attunement taken to the point of feeling exactly what the other is feeling is the Holy Grail of eroticism. Sean's link to Kate isn't blatantly described in those terms, but it's impossible to miss the intense desire that such intimate connection produces in Sean. In one scene, Sean's therapist directly compares her marital difficulties with the undemanding presence of an always available object of desire who can't refuse, can't reject, can't withhold, can't leave. But even through her deliberately unidirectional channel of communication, the power that Sean exerts over the wolf is complicated by the power that the wolf begins to exert over Sean. Just like with knowing, to desire something is to let it change you.

In a short wordcount, Feed Them Silence explores convoluted questions of epistemic justice and proposes a scenario where the standard intuitions fail to offer full solutions. Your mind may not know whose mind you're visiting while reading it, but one sure thing is that your mind will have been changed by the experience.

Nerd Coefficient: 7/10.

POSTED BY: Arturo Serrano, multiclass Trekkie/Whovian/Moonie/Miraculer, accumulating experience points for still more obsessions.

Reference: Mandelo, Lee. Feed Them Silence [Tor, 2023].

Review: The Mountain in the Sea by Ray Nayler

An extended philosophical dialogue against human supremacy

Ray Nayler's debut novel The Mountain in the Sea employs the techniques and tropes of multiple genres to explore one overarching question. It has corporate espionage, but it's not a spy novel; it has drone warfare, but it's not a military novel; it has killer AIs, but it's not an AI novel. The unifying theme is instead the need to identify the logical flaws in anthropocentrism and in the notion of individual responsibility. What the main characters achieve, more than an immediate victory, is a realization on two levels: a human being is not an island, disconnected from the web of shared responsibilities that make up a community, nor is the human species an island apart from the rest of nature. Fittingly, Nayler's choice of setting for this argument is a literal island, ultimately shown to be indissolubly linked to the events occurring everywhere else. In the world Nayler proposes, not even an island is truly an island.

The plot of the novel concerns the discovery, near the Vietnamese coast, of a species of octopus that has developed symbolic language, a material culture, toolmaking methods, a storytelling tradition, and a complex worldview with rituals and sacred spaces. By every anthropological criterion, this species has formed a society. However, anthropology proves to be of little help when faced with a society that grounds its conceptual repertoire on an environment, an embodied perception and a neural architecture that are fundamentally alien to the human experience. Here the novel reveals its core: although it has a team of experts attempting to crack the code of interspecies communication, most of the page count is dialogue about the moral implications of the research. This is not so much a "solve the puzzle" plot as a "moral illustration" one. Without ever getting didactic or preachy, The Mountain in the Sea addresses thorny questions about greed, negligence, hubris, exploitation, duty, and self-delusion.

Moreover, in keeping with the novel's anti-individualistic stance, the moral failures that set the plot in motion are never ascribed to one character or one faction. Sealife depletion is not caused by this one company's greed; it's humankind's greed. Rights violations are not allowed by this one government's negligence; it's humankind's negligence. Securing a future for all lifeforms is not this one hero's duty; it's humankind's duty. And yet, the individual characters we follow through the story aren't diluted in an all-blurring mass movement. They remain conscious of their uniqueness, but also of their connection to the whole. The novel's message is not one of annulling the individual, just one of expanding the scope of moral analysis.

To bolster this point, Nayler deploys a reoccurring motif, simultaneously a hard fact and a metaphor: the nervous system of an octopus, a distributed network with semiautonomous parts and minimal top-down control. The novel applies this same model to describe the power structure of a multinational corporation, an artificial mind, and the entire biosphere. The human neural structure, with a centralized point of command that all the limbs obey (plus all the political ramifications that result from replicating that model in a society), is the anomalous exception rather than the norm. To solve the enmity between humans and nature, the novel argues, we must shed the top-down way of thinking. We don't rule over nature, and we never did. Of course, this moral position goes directly against the traditional Western Christian anthropology that positions humankind as the pinnacle of creation. In reality, there's no such hierarchy. Whereas Christian anthropology insists that we are in this world, but not of this world, Nayler replies that that's an impossibility. You can't be in this world without instantly becoming of it. You can't form a complete concept of yourself without acknowledging your ties to everything around you.

The structure of the plot mirrors this view of interconnectedness. Three separate threads build the story while barely intersecting, three full protagonists who never meet but end up collaborating toward the goal of preventing the human depredation of the newfound octopus society. Most notably, each of these protagonists becomes a hero when they independently reason that their place as a part in a whole doesn't diminish them, but actually opens an opportunity for them to influence the course of events. You can't save the world if you're not part of it.

This underlying assumption, that a change in conduct requires first a change in perspective, is reinforced by the inclusion of a Buddhist monastery in the Vietnamese island where the researchers live. Not only does Buddhism teach that all sentient beings are equally worthy of dignity; it's a basic Buddhist doctrine that the path to liberation begins with adopting the right view about reality, and the right view according to Buddha is that the endless pursuit of satisfaction only leads to pain. In the novel, this occurs in the form of overfishing, exploitation of workers, and individual ambition. To separate oneself from the world results in a loss of empathy. You don't need to care for ocean life if you see it as just a thing for you to use. When you adopt the right view that you're just another lifeform in a web of relations, the rest of the world ceases to be just a thing.

In the moral landscape of The Mountain in the Sea, the real enemy to defeat is indifference. The biggest cause of pain, the cruelest weapon, the most destructive flaw in the human spirit is the failure to care. Once this problem is identified, the true nature of individualism is exposed: it gives us an excuse to indulge in indifference. This failure mode doesn't even need to be motivated by malice: if you see yourself as too small, too powerless, or too unimportant to change anything, indeed you won't. The type of caring that has a real effect in the world is one where you also care enough about yourself to notice all the threads of relations you can pull. That's how multiple parts acting semiautonomously can move the whole.

More than a science fiction yarn about first contact with another intelligence, The Mountain in the Sea reads like a philosophical dialogue. Characters reflect and contrast their opinions far more than they do things, and somehow, marvelously, that doesn't hurt the pacing. The novel has several moments of exciting action, and yet this is not an action thriller. This is a thought experiment where the essence of humanity is put on trial and the sentence is probation. We still haven't demonstrated that we're capable of behaving responsibly in this world, and we're running out of chances. The novel ends with things pointing toward a happy ending, but happy endings need persistent effort to be maintained. Although this story has elements of a moral fable, it doesn't offer a definitive conclusion to its argument. Protecting a still-incipient octopus society would require a constant series of responsible decisions. To put it in science fiction parlance, the world is never finally saved. And that's OK; just as there isn't a hard boundary between humans and reality, there isn't one between the dark past and the shiny future. Pretending that there's an end date to the task of caring is another form of indifference. That's why The Mountain in the Sea isn't content with finishing its argument and leaving the reader alone. This is the kind of philosophical dialogue that hopes the reader will say something in reply. It is a call to action. It is a proclamation.

The Math

Baseline Assessment: 8/10.

Bonuses: +1 for the hard rigor applied to the biology and linguistics of the octopus society, +1 for the skillful integration of the separate plots.

Penalties: −1 because many sentences in the dialogues could use a bit of trimming.

Nerd Coefficient: 9/10.

POSTED BY: Arturo Serrano, multiclass Trekkie/Whovian/Moonie/Miraculer, accumulating experience points for still more obsessions.

Reference: Nayler, Ray. The Mountain in the Sea [Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2022].

Microreview [book]: The Actual Star by Monica Byrne

A cyclical epic about the connections and divisions between us

The Actual Star is a demanding book. It tells three interdependent stories, each a novel in its own right, separated by centuries but connected by reincarnation and by the eternal recurrence of myths. It opens with three maps of the same location, each set in a different era, oriented in a different direction, and containing different landmarks that reflect the passage of colonial devastation and sea level rise. It has a massive glossary at the end, which I recommend you read first, because it explains much of the backstory that the text of the novel proper is content to leave implied. It has entire pages of untranslated dialogues in Spanish, futuristic neo-Spanish, and Belizean Kriol. And at every step it asks you to reevaluate your assumptions about how societies work, how cultures survive, and how people seek their own way of transcendence.

In the year 1012, Ixul and Ajul are the twin heirs of the Tzoyna throne in one of the many Mesoamerican kingdoms that comprise what we call the Maya civilization. Their younger sister Ket starts having prophetic visions that they hope will guide their people to renewed prosperity, but their ascent to the throne coincides with a period of climate change that destabilizes the necessary trust between farmers and rulers.

In the year 2012, American teenager Leah Oliveri flies from her boring frozen town in Minnesota to Belize, the home of her biological father, following an irresistible yet indescribable pull toward a deeper meaning. Right at the time the Maya calendar is turning over a leaf, she becomes the lover of two tourist guides and develops a dangerous fascination with a sacred cave which she believes guards the answers she's looking for.

In the year 3012, after modern civilization has collapsed and humanity has narrowly survived extinction, the dominant social structure is the religion of Laviaja (futuristic neo-Spanish for "The Journey"), a syncretic blend of anarcho-nomadism, Maya myth, and radical sex positivity that reveres Leah Oliveri as a saint and her two one-night-stands as her first apostles. This belief system has kept peace on Earth for centuries, but now is at risk of fossilizing into yet another oppressive institution.

These three plots are braided together in a polyphony full of thematic resonance, where events in one time period are mirrored in the next, a character's prayer in the future is fulfilled in the past, and particular sensory experiences reverberate across the eras at key moments of decision. Even quiet, contemplative scenes bear the tension of multiple threads leading to other characters having the same thought, other conversations wrestling with the same question, other versions of humanity dealing with the same basic yearning.

Yearning is a core theme of this novel. The reader is made aware of it since the very first page, where a quote by C.S. Lewis says, "If we find ourselves with a desire that nothing in this world can satisfy, the most probable explanation is that we were made for another world." That is absolutely not how probabilities work, or how explanations work, or how desires work, or how worlds work, but it's the frame of mind from which the whole story is conceived: the ancient doctrine that this material world is made of imperfect reflections of a more "real" world, and that the purpose of life is to heal the divide between us and that other world. The title of the book refers to the difference between seeing a reflection of a star with our flawed human senses and perceiving the real thing via more direct means. Across the novel, this is expressed through the frequent motif of characters pausing to notice Venus in the sky. Every time it is mentioned, Venus is used as a symbol of the things that are desired but appear unreachable.

Much is made of the condition of Venus and Earth as twin planets, because twins are another motif in the book. Twins appear in Maya creation myths as the heroic founders of humanity, and twins reappear in each era of The Actual Star as symbols of the fundamental tragedy of human life: that we are so much like each other, yet are irrevocably unique and separate, that we desire togetherness, but the universe tends toward increasing separation. Every variation of this is explored, from the trope of quarreling twins separated at birth, to the mythic cosmology of a spherical universe cleft in halves, to the enmity directed inward in the act of self-cutting. A cut can be understood as an abyss separating two parts, but also as a passage connecting them. The sacred cave that connects the three narratives is clearly a wound in the earth, a wound turned into its own world. The most dramatic extrapolation of this motif is the notion of afterlife in Laviaja, whose devotees hope to be snatched into the other world through a cut in the fabric of reality.

Now one may wonder why they would want to leave this world, if Laviaja has supposedly turned it into a utopia. But no utopia can satisfy every wish. In the pacifistic anarchy of 3012, nation states no longer exist. In their stead, each individual builds their own identity from three key components, the terms for which are an imagined evolution from real Spanish words. "Genéra" corresponds to gender identity, except that the options available are named after cardinal points. "Manéra" is aesthetic presentation, more or less like the way you can tell apart an emo from a hipster from a furry from a ganguro, but expanded to include every possible aesthetic, even ancient Romans, mermaids, or Swan Lake Odettes. Finally, "preféra" is this world's version of the top/bottom axis, which is a choice open to all because humans in this future are genetically engineered for fully functional hermaphroditism (another instance of the ancestral yearning for the reunion of split halves).

Where it gets dystopic is in the extreme way Laviaja handles social relations. As the book itself declares, "peace needs enforcement," and later, "peace requires sacrifice," which is a nicer way of saying that any sufficiently coordinated anarchy is indistinguishable from a state. I wouldn't want to live under a regime where anyone who sees my face can instantly know every conversation I've ever had and every place I've ever been and exactly what I like to do in bed; where a world-spanning computing network dictates what job I'll do that day and whom I can gift my possessions; where the entire world can cast me out for speaking in favor of lasting human connection. A world where privacy is frowned upon as a form of hoarding, where the justice system is literally panoptic, is not a very desirable world. Laviaja was founded originally as a movement of climate refugees, who became the majority of the human population after unchecked exploitation of resources reached the point of unsustainability. The problem is that emergency measures devised to deal with an extreme situation became codified as the norm of everyday living. That is the conundrum the protagonists face in 3012: must they continue a lifestyle adapted to near-extinction conditions, now that human survival has been ensured? Just because it is the nature of the universe to break apart and break away, must they hold on to nothing?

The sections set in 1012 present a horrifying alternative: instead of escaping this world, you could submit to the captivity in which we are all born. The scenes in the royal palace describe the sacred ball game of the Maya people as a ritualized ratification of the social contract whereby some are always fated to win and some are always fated to be sacrificed.

The sections set in 3012 suggest a different way: we cannot pretend that change won't happen. What we can do is to consciously steer it. Otherwise, we no longer belong to the order of things. We may as well not be in the world.

Rejection of this world by comparison to a perfect afterlife is nothing new. In her recent video interview with John Scalzi, Byrne described the religio-political structure of Laviaja in these terms: "it's as if the entire planet is one nomadic monastery." That choice of wording points to the danger at the core of this system: for all its emphasis on individual freedom, it lends itself too easily to dogmatism. In each era of the story, we see the harmful effect of rigid social rules, which the reader can infer by the degree of access allowed to the sacred cave, a stand-in for access to ultimate fulfillment: in 1012, only the royal family can reach it; in 2012, only those with disposable income and lucky passports can; in 3012, it is supposedly open to everyone, but no one is allowed to stay. Time and again, the yearning for union clashes against the reality of separation, but it is separation which makes desire possible.

As a story about the way all things break apart and break away, it is remarkable that The Actual Star holds together until the end. Byrne displays here an expert mastery of the techniques of the craft, using repeated themes as a vehicle for unique characters to come alive, letting their choices speak the points and counterpoints of a long discussion spanning centuries of history. The plot transmutes the cruelty of empire into the joy of perpetual diaspora, the rudeness of the tourist gaze into a celebration of impermanence, the disjointedness of an incomplete historical record into a tool of narrative creativity. Just like Leah was said to have disappeared in the cave, but actually found transcendence, just like the Maya people are said to have disappeared in history, but actually survive in new ways in the real world, you may feel at times that you lose yourself in this book. What you find at the end of the passage is unique to you. It depends on the god of the place where you are while you experience it.

The Math

Baseline Assessment: 8/10.

Bonuses: +2 for the skillful interweaving and rhyming between the three timelines, +2 for numerous poetic descriptions that serve as an effective complement to the narration.

Penalties: −1 because Leah, the central character of the book, the foundation for a major religion of mutual help and acceptance, the pivot around which the entire history of the planet turns, too often comes off as an insufferably fastidious brat, −1 because too many dialogues and choices in the 2012 sections are evidently inserted because the plot demands that they happen, −3 because, for a novel that relies so heavily on Spanish, it commits numerous orthographic and semantic errors in representing the Spanish of the present day. (The ones that are most impactful to the plot are the false friend actual, which means "current" or "up-to-date," not "real;" and the noun jugador, which does derive from the verb jugar, but does not share its dual meaning. Jugador only means "player" of a sport or a game, not "player" of a theatrical role. Less crucially, but more irritatingly, "vámanos" is not even a word that exists in Spanish. The correct spelling is "vámonos.")

Nerd Coefficient: 7/10.

POSTED BY: Arturo Serrano, multiclass Trekkie/Whovian/Moonie/Miraculer, accumulating experience points for still more obsessions.

Reference: Byrne, Monica. The Actual Star [Harper Voyager, 2021].

Microreview [book]: A Psalm for the Wild-Built by Becky Chambers

A cozy walk through the woods with Socratic dialogue over tea

In the moon Panga, which orbits the planet Motan, humans lived and worked and burned oil and built factories and used robots. One day, the robots gained consciousness. They declared independence and walked away.

Humans deindustrialized their way of life so as to not need to build factories or robots again. Nothing is wasted. Nothing is treated as disposable. Biopolymers have replaced metals and plastics as the main construction material. Use of resources is managed so responsibly that human settlements have retreated from half of Panga. The rest is allowed to rewild.

Humans have developed a religion that worships abstract concepts: the Parent Gods of cyclical processes, inanimate matter, and physical laws; and the Children Gods of things made, things unknown, and things comforting. Our protagonist is Dex, an agender monk in the service of the god of comforts, and their newly found calling is to travel from town to town to set up a table, pour tea, and listen to people.

No one has seen a robot in centuries.

A Psalm for the Wild-Built is a title that instantly brings to mind A Canticle for Leibowitz, a massively influential novel that also deals with religious life in a post-industrial society. However, unlike in the Leibowitz classic, instead of digging up relics from the technological era with the aim of reviving it, the humans of Panga are content with living within their means. There's no hint of greed or inequality in this world. Material needs are met. Nature is respected. No one uses others for their own gain.

So, the robots ask: what do humans need?

The book takes its time to reach this question. We spend the first third following Dex as they learn the ropes of tea service, a pursuit sparked by a sudden, unexplainable urge to hear the call of crickets. But crickets are gone from the human lands, and people can get exhausting at times, so Dex embarks on an ill-advised solo journey into the wilderness. And that's where they meet Mosscap, a robot that has volunteered to serve as emissary to the humans.

(I say a robot that, and not a robot who, because robots in this world object to being treated as people. They're emphatic about their status as objects.)

The gradual buildup of trust and finally closeness between the human and the robot is the emotional engine of this book, and it runs smoothly, without a bump along the road. Becky Chambers knows how to narrate troubled feelings and unconfessed yearnings and conflicted priorities and secret shames. It's amazing that we finish this book knowing so little about Dex's backstory but so much about who they are. By the perennial writing principle that choices reveal character, Dex reveals theirs with every step they take. And who they are is a fundamentally good person, but hungry for purpose. They have sworn their life to giving comfort to people, but for some reason, yet to be explored and processed, they haven't found comfort in serving. This is communicated to the reader without the pitfalls of many emotional journeys. In the short span of a book of this size, every plot point has to matter. Chambers makes every choice of Dex contribute some significance to our picture of this character. Just like in the Pangan society, nothing is wasted.

Unfortunately, Chambers needs to insert some extremely unlikely backstory for the story to happen at all. When the robots declare independence, the humans just let them go, and stop using robots. No one in the whole world seems to object, no one attempts to maintain control, no one causes trouble. Of course, letting conscious beings choose their own fate is the obviously correct ethical answer, but have you met humans? This plot point misses the hard truth that social life is made of disagreement. Likewise, once the robots are independent, they collectively decide that they will allow their bodies to break apart and cease to function so they can be reused in building new individuals, instead of seeking after immortality. And not a single robot appears to be opposed to that. No dissident voice emerges. No robot is trying to change its society's rules. That is simply not believable.

What I'm saying is the revolution is way too easy in this world.

These plot points would never seriously happen. But without them, we can't have this story. So we're stuck with a fantasy where societies politely choose a common path and everyone is pleased with it. To digest the philosophical content of the book, we have to accept that fantasy. Since we're reading fiction anyway, there's sufficient leeway as to how much the reader is willing to deviate from accepted reality, but it hurts the prospects for the applicability of the book's message. And this is so very much a book with a message.

The central theme analyzed in A Psalm for the Wild-Built is that of use. The protagonists refer to it as purpose, but use allows for a broader discussion of the entire story. It all starts when tools become aware and refuse to be used; humans earn their redemption, and civilization is solved, when they stop using sentient beings and become more careful about how they use inanimate nature. One can notice at certain points in the story a line of argument in opposition to a puritanical strain of environmentalism that is squeamish about using resources. This book replies: there's no avoiding getting your hands dirty. Don't pretend that human life doesn't use resources. Rather, be aware of what and how and why you're using. Panga has abandoned planned obsolescence, so daily objects are designed to last, but not so that they cannot be reused when they break. In a key scene, Dex visits an abandoned factory built in the old industrial age, and laments that its inert walls and machines still remain, its materials unusable by the wildlife.

The initial difficulty in Dex's relationship with Mosscap is that the robot keeps offering help with physical tasks, and the human feels guilty about accepting that help. Dex doesn't want to use Mosscap, and it takes Mosscap several rounds of dialogue to make Dex understand that voluntary cooperation is different from exploitation. Dex has, perhaps unwittingly, accepted an absolutist standard that prevents them from interacting meaningfully with the world. They hesitate to take water from a stream even though it's the same stream that supplies the village where they last drank. They dread the thought of leaving the road for fear of disturbing the forest, as if one stroll were the equivalent of a fleet of steamrollers. Their debates with Mosscap about the ethics of use nudge them, and aim to nudge the reader, toward a less idealist stance. You're going to need to use resources anyway, and feeling sanctimonious about it helps no one. What you need is not purity, but honesty of intention.

But the most consequential realization in the story is about Dex's relationship to themself. They're feeling lost, unsatisfied with life. Mosscap's lesson for Dex is that one of the cruelest things you can do to yourself is to define your worth by your use. If you give other sentient beings enough respect that you refrain from using them, you must also have enough respect for yourself that your life aspirations do not revolve around how you can be used. Or, rephrased from a different perspective: time is a finite resource, but still, you don't have to feel squeamish about how you choose to use it. With both the use of nature and the use of time, you're going to make choices. So own those choices.

Although in the end I disagreed with portions of the book's message, it succeeded at challenging me to give it serious consideration. Going into A Psalm for the Wild-Built can be deeply confusing for a reader educated in Enlightenment values. The modern mind is trained to classify, to standardize, to generalize, to apply broad brushstrokes so as to keep categories down to a manageable number. This book rejects that mindset, and the unlikely place where I finally saw what alternative was being offered is the scene when Dex takes notice of the difficulty of walking on untouched nature as opposed to a flat road:

"With every step, there were dozens of variants, and with each step after, the rules changed yet again."

Now apply the good old road-as-life-journey metaphor to this passage, and you'll see what I mean. Dex has literally gone off the beaten path, so they have to shed their previous assumptions. This brief description in the text illustrates an entire mode of thinking that is opposed to reductionism and focuses on particular situations in particular circumstances. It relates our standardized industrial civilization to the war for dominance over nature and, ultimately, every system of oppression. In its stead, Chambers proposes a form of degrowth. You can notice this same mode of thinking in contemporary social movements formed around local self-governance, situated knowledge, share economies, and anti-globalization. This is all very punk, but the plot of the book happens in a future time when the complete replacement of social structures has already succeeded. There's no more exploitation, of nature or of people; moreover, there's no more conceptual opposition between nature and people. If you've ever wondered what the world looks like after "the system" is overthrown, this is it.

This is the first book in a series. Maybe that's why the story doesn't reach a proper conclusion here. At the end, Dex does find the crickets, and I'm reminded of the comedy cliché where the sound of crickets indicates that nothing is happening. Certainly, this is a book where nothing much happens for page after page, but that is not a problem. This never aspires to be an action adventure. This is a book of ideas placed on a stage to be confronted and tested. And to examine important ideas, sometimes you need to take a break and hear the crickets.

The Math

Baseline Assessment: 8/10.

Bonuses: +1 for beautifully detailed descriptions, +2 for skillful weaving of philosophical questions into ordinary slice of life scenes, +1 for a great sense of humor.

Penalties: −1 for ending the book at a strange place without actually completing the story, −1 for socially improbable worldbuilding, −3 for several philosophical points that come close to anti-humanism.

Nerd Coefficient: 7/10.

POSTED BY: Arturo Serrano, multiclass Trekkie/Whovian/Moonie, accumulating experience points for still more obsessions.

Reference: Chambers, Becky. A Psalm for the Wild-Built [Tor, 2021].