“But you may have noticed that for a terrifying
murderbot I fuck up a lot.”
In “Artificial Condition - The
MurderBot Diaries 2” by Martha Wells
The very unfamiliarity of SF is one of its attractions for me. It slows down the reading and speeds up the
need to think, both within and across books (intertextuality). Familiarity,
similarity? Try reading these in a row, then come back and tell me you were on
familiar ground all the while and that your mind is still in the same shape:
"Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?", "Ubik";
"Version Control"; "The Gradual", "The
Dispossessed" and "The Paper Menagerie and Other Stories".
Setting a story in another place or another
time enables speculative fiction like the one Martha Wells attempts with her
MurderBot series to explore ideas that literary fiction might really struggle
with. I'm interested in divided societies … Irish … English … Dorset … Croatia
… Bosnia … Israelis and Palestinians … A literary novelist dealing with any of
those intractable, complex conflicts faces countless challenges and pitfalls,
but so does a SF writer when trying to deal with the estrangement of the world
created (if done right). Want to engage with complexity and nuance? Want to
encounter counter-intuitive thinking that forces you to think again and again?
Read and re-read Kafka. Can Xue. Javier Marías. Karl Ove Knausgård. (Spoiler
alert: some of the books these writers wrote are not realistic. Some of them
are SF. Some are fantasy. Some are science fiction. Some
are not. A fully rounded literary life means reading across the full spectrum
of fiction. Yes, a fully rounded literary life (indeed, a fully rounded life)
means reading across the full spectrum, i.e., not reading just within one
genre, i.e., not being one of those narrow-minded readers who prefers only to
read, for example, crime novels, SF, Literary, Thrillers, ....In many ways I
don't want to argue with anyone because I think I agree with a lot of what a
lot of people are saying when to argue for specific books. To argue that
"a genre" is inferior is nonsense -- yet this is what many people are
doing when they dismiss SF. I've never really understood what people actually
mean when they say "literary fiction". But there does seem to be a
category of fiction which gets reviewed on the "literary" pages while
other categories get relegated to the "genre" columns. This category
includes fairly limited mainstream novels about middle class life in the
tradition of the "realist" novel (itself a pretty limited form of the
prose novel) or novels in which someone is "using the tropes of
[genre]" or has "transcended the genre" (whatever that means).
Far more honest to admit that X is actually writing SF, or even to admit that
among this stuff called SF there is actually some fine writing. Most of the
time, it amounts to a war of definitions and false dichotomies. The mundane
literary establishment tends to marginalize SF. Yet, George Orwell's 1984, the
works of Margaret Atwood, Kurt Vonnegut, and Doris Lessing are just as much SF,
using the same tropes to advance the same thought experiments and commentary on
society as many other writers ghettoized into the SF genre today. (Frankly,
many of the "genre writers" do at least as good a job of tackling the
thorny issues as these more canonized writers, and write extremely well.) On
the other hand, there are certainly books written to be enjoyed and consumed,
without quite such a hefty intellectual burden. These have their place (in SF
and, frankly, in literary fiction) as well.
What Martha Wells attempts and succeeds this
time around is to question the proverbial questions: "Computers now lack
the processing speed but one day, why not? What do you think our compassion and
empathy is? And what do you mean by feel?" Is it just neurons firing and
picking up neurotransmitters? All we are doing is sensing the right
combinations of them. Is there so much difference between calling up range of
neurotransmitters and calling up a range of subroutines to achieve a similar
effect? One definition of compassion is 'pity inclining one to help or be
merciful'. What makes you think (even if they ever could muster such an emotive
response) that a murderbot SecUnit would be inclined towards 'mercy' or capable
of 'pity'? 'Empathy' involves the power of identifying oneself mentally with
(and so fully comprehending) a person or object of contemplation. Is 'empathy'
way beyond the realm of synthetic neurotransmitters, despite what the
transhumanists (and Musk et al would have you beLIEve? Empathy, however, is not
a socially programmed response to given stimuli, to which any number of
individuals are likely to react differently. The fact that the word
'neurotransmitters' has become applied to both to organic and to synthetic,
technological operations, does not mean that they are the same thing with
regard to their respective innate and substantive qualities. It can be said of
a relentless long-distance runner or rugby player that they have a 'good
engine', but this in no way equates them to the engine that propels a Bentley
Continental. Our synthetic neurotransmitters are 'programmed'; programmed to
perform certain operations within certain insuperable limits. The same does not
apply to the human being and its unparalleled operational capacity (the human
brain is capable of creating and programming synthetic neurotransmitters).
The hoity-toities will
arrive soon enough and the 'daydreaming evasion' is going to get dropped pretty quickly.
This is, of course, a charge only levelled by those who haven't really read any
SF, but do honestly know that the genre covers the entire spectrum from densely
literary to, yes, 'daydreaming evasion’. Of course, they're worried if they did
pick up some SF they might actually enjoy it, and they don't want to be
seen as the sort to enjoy SF books. Books are there to be slogged through, after
all. For what it's worth, I probably read more literary fiction than I do SF
these days, but it is literary fiction that's (usually) more than a decade old,
and which has survived because it's good enough. I never want to read another
literary novel about wealthy people in Lisbon, London or Paris having marital
difficulties - give me some star-gazing MurderBot SecUnits over navel-gazing jerks
any day.
Fred Pohl's "Man Plus" explored
similar themes, but Martha Wells does it much better.
SF = Speculative Fiction.
