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Mar. 31st, 2024 10:16 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
skygiantsI have formed a vague & probably untenable ambition of reading all the Nebula nominees this year, the first of which I managed to get round to (that I hadn't read already) was The Terraformers.
This book is a sort of multigenerational saga on a planet that's being gradually prepared for habitation by humans [and others]; the first section takes place while the planet is still a protected zone inhabited only by terraforming staff, the second section focuses on urban planning during the very early stages of settlement, and the third section focuses on corporate land grabs and gentrification on the now heavily settled planet.
Conceptually this is a very cool premise, I really enjoy science fiction that explore cultural shifts over the long term and the book is dealing with a number of ideas that I find extremely interesting! I am really glad to have read it, I think it's an ambitious project, I am always glad to read books that give me things to think about and argue with and this book certainly gave me a lot to think about and argue with, as everyone who has had the pleasure of communicating with me in the past three days now knows in excruciating detail because I have not been able to shut up about it.
This book is really really profoundly concerned with personhood and who gets it. Wonderful; I too am concerned with this question.
We are in a far future space in which all reproduction is conducted by 3-D printing various sapient creatures to design. Do not worry about the casually eugenicist implications of this concept. Or, I mean, do worry about it -- the author is very worried about it, because the bad corporate entities are unethically 3-D printing unintelligent people to do service instead of printing everyone out as properly intelligent, and by people I mean 'moose' -- our first major plot point in this regard involves a romance between a pair of sentient moose, one of whom has been printed out with a lower intelligent rating than the other, to great concern for all.
The moose text [with their brains]. They sound exactly like human beings when they do so. The less-intelligent moose's human partner is deeply concerned that the smarter moose is just using her friend for sex. I explained this togenarti, who said "....does she know about rutting behavior?" We neither know nor care about rutting behavior. Once we give creatures human level sapience there is no difference between a texting human and a texting human in a moose suit.
Okay, so the basic argument being made here is "if we can 3-D print everything with human-type sentience, then we have a moral obligation to do so." This results in a number of wild and frankly extremely funny plot elements like:
- intelligent dogs learn about the history of domestication, get extremely angry about it, and leave in a huff to perform their own science on another continent
- intelligent moose from evil corporate town visits egalitarian paradise, asks for barn to stay in, and is met with politely appalled reactions: why a barn? why not an apartment like everyone else??
- intelligent cat gets cannot pay rent on apartment, stays with friends for a while, but then starts feeling self-conscious about freeloading
(genarti, upon having these plot points to explained to her: has this author ever met a dog?? has this author ever met a cat??? is this a PETA tract????)
Eventually it's revealed that the less-intelligent moose is not in fact less intelligent in any way except for the fact that there is an artificial inhibitor in his brain that prevents him from using words of more than one syllable, which gets fixed by the end of the section!
the book, posing a question: hey, do we have a moral obligation to imagine different kinds of intelligence and treat beings with lesser intelligence by our standards or different ways of experiencing the world with respect and dignity?
the book, answering it: no! we have a moral obligation to make sure everyone can talk exactly like a human! problem solved!!!
At some point in the second section, the protagonists stumble upon a community that is working to give intelligence to earthworms, but have run into a problem where the earthworms won't talk to them.
"Ah," I thought, "we are complicating this at last! We've given intelligence to earthworms but they aren't interested in communicating like humans, and why should they be!"
but no, this is just a software bug and once they fix it the earthworms also start acting exactly like humans in earthworm suits.
(this does set up a very funny sequence in the third section where the protagonists go to a game jam and the earthworms are working on a video game for earthworms that's a bee simulator. 'earthworms make a bee simulator' is a great gag! if I wasn't so irritated already at the book's whole attitude towards animal intelligence I would be so charmed by this!)
When explaining why they felt compelled to give intelligence to earthworms, the scientist on the project says, "We were working with them on soil sustainability and infrastructure maintenance for the colony. It didn't seem right that we couldn't talk to them."
Later in this same section, the protagonists (one human and one intelligent cyborg cow) come across a (free-range) dairy farm populated by normal non-augmented cows and are shocked, horrified, appalled, made physically ill by the concept. And like -- sure, the point is that in this world where everyone is people, they are reacting like we would if we found a farm full of human women with cow-level intelligence being milked on the regular. Now, cows do experience the world in a different way than humans. All animals in fact experience the world in different ways than humans, and there is a lot of interesting science writing exploring our best understanding of those experiences. But not in this book! where everyone should experience the world exactly like humans do and if not we are doing something wrong!
This section takes care to point out that there are animals with animal-level intelligence wandering the terraformed planet -- but that's different, because they're part of a natural ecosystem. The point seems to be that humans cannot interact with other creatures ethically unless they can talk like us to express consent like us. We're not part of the ecosystem, I guess. We're exempt. By virtue of controlling the 3-D printers and being able to make everyone that we interact with specifically to design is this a bit eugenicist DO NOT WORRY ABOUT IT!!!!!
This section, by the way, is primarily composed of figuring out how to design a public transit system for the planet. Someone comes up with the idea of making trains that can fly and are intelligent! What a brilliant idea! Everyone in our consensus-based idyllic model community of free citizens on the planet is so stoked about this!
One (1) character -- the POV character's love interest -- raises a concern about the idea of creating a sentient species to fill a public infrastructure problem. What if we make trains specifically to be trains and they don't want to be trains?
Not only is this roundly shouted down -- the trains can be anything they want, but it's normal that creatures created to be good at a thing will want to do the thing, so probably many of the trains will enjoy being trains and others can be scientists or ballerinas if they want to! and obviously we will not compel the trains in any way, they will be their own self-governing union! no problems ever with maintaining infrastructure in consensus-based model community! -- but the POV character immediately starts ghosting the love interest, "repulsed" by the fact that he would even raise concerns about such an obviously cool and ethical solution to the problem, until the love interest makes a sincere and profound apology for his poor behavior.
I'm so mad about this in particular because conceptually I love sentient trains. I was all ready to adore the sentient trains. I cannot believe this book ruined sentient trains for me by forcing me to ask questions and then answering them with "if everyone acts ethically it will be fine, do not worry about it, and if you worry about it you're Bad and Wrong."
And the thing is, like -- a lot of this book is profoundly silly, intentionally so, viz. earthworms making a bee simulator. None of this would make me that angry if it wasn't so clear that it is also intending to be a Big Ideas book, "a feat of revolutionary imagination" (Publisher's Weekly), "a primer for how to embrace solutions to the challenges we all face" (Scientific American), etc. etc. etc. This is a didactic book. Even the bits that are silly are didactic. More than anything else, it really profoundly reminded me of the work of Sheri Tepper -- another author with a delightfully creative imagination who had a lot of Big Progressive Ideas, a real determination to explore Solutions to our Current Problems through Science Fiction, and an unfortunate tendency to accidentally slide from ecofeminism towards ecofascism with a little bit of eugenics thrown into the mix for flavor.
I am in no doubt that the author of this book and I agree in most of our political and cultural opinions. I too am concerned about the climate and the bad actions of corporations, I too would love to imagine a queer and trans-inclusive future, I too feel bad about eating animals! But I do think any progressive science fiction author runs in danger of falling into the trap of believing that they have hit the endpoint of human thought and moral behavior; that they can easily and without friction inscribe that onto a far future world and society in which all good and sympathetic characters are representing good behavior as we understand it here, now, in 2024. To me, this is both boring and annoying, EVEN WHEN it doesn't result in a take I disagree with as profoundly as "it's unethical to interact in any way with any living creature that can't communicate with you in complex sentences in your own language (! !! !!!)"
I have not listened to the author's podcast but my understanding is that it is called Our Opinions Are Correct. From reading this book, that is exactly what I would expect.
This book is a sort of multigenerational saga on a planet that's being gradually prepared for habitation by humans [and others]; the first section takes place while the planet is still a protected zone inhabited only by terraforming staff, the second section focuses on urban planning during the very early stages of settlement, and the third section focuses on corporate land grabs and gentrification on the now heavily settled planet.
Conceptually this is a very cool premise, I really enjoy science fiction that explore cultural shifts over the long term and the book is dealing with a number of ideas that I find extremely interesting! I am really glad to have read it, I think it's an ambitious project, I am always glad to read books that give me things to think about and argue with and this book certainly gave me a lot to think about and argue with, as everyone who has had the pleasure of communicating with me in the past three days now knows in excruciating detail because I have not been able to shut up about it.
This book is really really profoundly concerned with personhood and who gets it. Wonderful; I too am concerned with this question.
We are in a far future space in which all reproduction is conducted by 3-D printing various sapient creatures to design. Do not worry about the casually eugenicist implications of this concept. Or, I mean, do worry about it -- the author is very worried about it, because the bad corporate entities are unethically 3-D printing unintelligent people to do service instead of printing everyone out as properly intelligent, and by people I mean 'moose' -- our first major plot point in this regard involves a romance between a pair of sentient moose, one of whom has been printed out with a lower intelligent rating than the other, to great concern for all.
The moose text [with their brains]. They sound exactly like human beings when they do so. The less-intelligent moose's human partner is deeply concerned that the smarter moose is just using her friend for sex. I explained this to
genarti, who said "....does she know about rutting behavior?" We neither know nor care about rutting behavior. Once we give creatures human level sapience there is no difference between a texting human and a texting human in a moose suit. Okay, so the basic argument being made here is "if we can 3-D print everything with human-type sentience, then we have a moral obligation to do so." This results in a number of wild and frankly extremely funny plot elements like:
- intelligent dogs learn about the history of domestication, get extremely angry about it, and leave in a huff to perform their own science on another continent
- intelligent moose from evil corporate town visits egalitarian paradise, asks for barn to stay in, and is met with politely appalled reactions: why a barn? why not an apartment like everyone else??
- intelligent cat gets cannot pay rent on apartment, stays with friends for a while, but then starts feeling self-conscious about freeloading
(
genarti, upon having these plot points to explained to her: has this author ever met a dog?? has this author ever met a cat??? is this a PETA tract????) Eventually it's revealed that the less-intelligent moose is not in fact less intelligent in any way except for the fact that there is an artificial inhibitor in his brain that prevents him from using words of more than one syllable, which gets fixed by the end of the section!
the book, posing a question: hey, do we have a moral obligation to imagine different kinds of intelligence and treat beings with lesser intelligence by our standards or different ways of experiencing the world with respect and dignity?
the book, answering it: no! we have a moral obligation to make sure everyone can talk exactly like a human! problem solved!!!
At some point in the second section, the protagonists stumble upon a community that is working to give intelligence to earthworms, but have run into a problem where the earthworms won't talk to them.
"Ah," I thought, "we are complicating this at last! We've given intelligence to earthworms but they aren't interested in communicating like humans, and why should they be!"
but no, this is just a software bug and once they fix it the earthworms also start acting exactly like humans in earthworm suits.
(this does set up a very funny sequence in the third section where the protagonists go to a game jam and the earthworms are working on a video game for earthworms that's a bee simulator. 'earthworms make a bee simulator' is a great gag! if I wasn't so irritated already at the book's whole attitude towards animal intelligence I would be so charmed by this!)
When explaining why they felt compelled to give intelligence to earthworms, the scientist on the project says, "We were working with them on soil sustainability and infrastructure maintenance for the colony. It didn't seem right that we couldn't talk to them."
Later in this same section, the protagonists (one human and one intelligent cyborg cow) come across a (free-range) dairy farm populated by normal non-augmented cows and are shocked, horrified, appalled, made physically ill by the concept. And like -- sure, the point is that in this world where everyone is people, they are reacting like we would if we found a farm full of human women with cow-level intelligence being milked on the regular. Now, cows do experience the world in a different way than humans. All animals in fact experience the world in different ways than humans, and there is a lot of interesting science writing exploring our best understanding of those experiences. But not in this book! where everyone should experience the world exactly like humans do and if not we are doing something wrong!
This section takes care to point out that there are animals with animal-level intelligence wandering the terraformed planet -- but that's different, because they're part of a natural ecosystem. The point seems to be that humans cannot interact with other creatures ethically unless they can talk like us to express consent like us. We're not part of the ecosystem, I guess. We're exempt. By virtue of controlling the 3-D printers and being able to make everyone that we interact with specifically to design is this a bit eugenicist DO NOT WORRY ABOUT IT!!!!!
This section, by the way, is primarily composed of figuring out how to design a public transit system for the planet. Someone comes up with the idea of making trains that can fly and are intelligent! What a brilliant idea! Everyone in our consensus-based idyllic model community of free citizens on the planet is so stoked about this!
One (1) character -- the POV character's love interest -- raises a concern about the idea of creating a sentient species to fill a public infrastructure problem. What if we make trains specifically to be trains and they don't want to be trains?
Not only is this roundly shouted down -- the trains can be anything they want, but it's normal that creatures created to be good at a thing will want to do the thing, so probably many of the trains will enjoy being trains and others can be scientists or ballerinas if they want to! and obviously we will not compel the trains in any way, they will be their own self-governing union! no problems ever with maintaining infrastructure in consensus-based model community! -- but the POV character immediately starts ghosting the love interest, "repulsed" by the fact that he would even raise concerns about such an obviously cool and ethical solution to the problem, until the love interest makes a sincere and profound apology for his poor behavior.
I'm so mad about this in particular because conceptually I love sentient trains. I was all ready to adore the sentient trains. I cannot believe this book ruined sentient trains for me by forcing me to ask questions and then answering them with "if everyone acts ethically it will be fine, do not worry about it, and if you worry about it you're Bad and Wrong."
And the thing is, like -- a lot of this book is profoundly silly, intentionally so, viz. earthworms making a bee simulator. None of this would make me that angry if it wasn't so clear that it is also intending to be a Big Ideas book, "a feat of revolutionary imagination" (Publisher's Weekly), "a primer for how to embrace solutions to the challenges we all face" (Scientific American), etc. etc. etc. This is a didactic book. Even the bits that are silly are didactic. More than anything else, it really profoundly reminded me of the work of Sheri Tepper -- another author with a delightfully creative imagination who had a lot of Big Progressive Ideas, a real determination to explore Solutions to our Current Problems through Science Fiction, and an unfortunate tendency to accidentally slide from ecofeminism towards ecofascism with a little bit of eugenics thrown into the mix for flavor.
I am in no doubt that the author of this book and I agree in most of our political and cultural opinions. I too am concerned about the climate and the bad actions of corporations, I too would love to imagine a queer and trans-inclusive future, I too feel bad about eating animals! But I do think any progressive science fiction author runs in danger of falling into the trap of believing that they have hit the endpoint of human thought and moral behavior; that they can easily and without friction inscribe that onto a far future world and society in which all good and sympathetic characters are representing good behavior as we understand it here, now, in 2024. To me, this is both boring and annoying, EVEN WHEN it doesn't result in a take I disagree with as profoundly as "it's unethical to interact in any way with any living creature that can't communicate with you in complex sentences in your own language (! !! !!!)"
I have not listened to the author's podcast but my understanding is that it is called Our Opinions Are Correct. From reading this book, that is exactly what I would expect.
no subject
Date: 2024-03-31 04:05 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2024-03-31 07:33 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2024-03-31 10:38 pm (UTC)Going to be real, it's much easier to imagine a moose having a somewhat parallel life to a human. At least a moose is a mammal.
God, the mobility questions about this society alone are absolutely wild. Will the trains have enough seats and standing areas for all the sentient animals, golden compass style? Do you build tiny moving dirt trucks with misters for your earthworms when they want to travel independently? If we're going full human parallel, do the worms go to the hospital to give birth? Do the trains go to the hospital to give birth? *absolute head in hands*
no subject
Date: 2024-03-31 10:56 pm (UTC)Now thinking of the legal status of unicorns in the Commonweal...
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Date: 2024-03-31 11:10 pm (UTC)(p.s. I put the fanart in your original recommendations post if you haven't seen it, since I wasn't sure where else to put it.)
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Date: 2024-04-03 01:38 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2024-04-03 09:32 pm (UTC)Nobody, however, gives birth, because everybody is 3-D printed!
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Date: 2024-04-05 01:22 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2024-04-03 09:30 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2024-03-31 04:17 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2024-03-31 07:30 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2024-04-03 05:28 am (UTC)Okay, so. In the first four pages or so:
Our heroine, Destry, is an ecological ranger of some sort in a boreal forest on a planet in the wilderness part of terraforming. She has a sentient moose partner whom she rides. She also has some kind of modification? cybernetics? something tbd? that allows her to directly interface with the soil bacteria, fungi, roots, etc, to get direct info about her environment and the health of organisms within it, whereas most of her colleagues have to look at sensors to get that. So far, so good!
There is someone on an unauthorized campsite here! Burning a campfire!! (What is the wildfire ecosystem and management system here? We don't know! Destry's concern is phrased not as fire safety, but as trespassing and "uncontrolled carbon emissions." Irritation #1. I don't mind a terraforming planet ranger being upset about a trespasser in an area no one is authorized to be in, or about setting a fire that may not be in accord with policy, but the tone of it and stated reasons for it irked me. It felt like it really was about "eww, look at this horrible ignorant man we're about to clap back at" rather than a matter of policy and stewardship, even if it's framed in terms of Destry being a professional steward of this forest.) Not only that, but he's killed and is cooking a rabbit! HORROR REVULSION DISGUST. Not because of any suggestion that the rabbit is sentient, but just on general principles of killing and eating animal flesh being abhorrent.
(I figured that attitude was likely here, but it annoyed me. This is ironic in some ways, because a) I'm like 95% vegetarian and b) I recently read a very mediocre Anne McCaffrey book in which all the POV characters were likewise horrified by the very idea of eating meat. But that book was from 1976, and Anne McCaffrey had POV characters hunting, eating livestock, etc, in other books, so I know in that case it was a deliberate culture-building choice, and am very curious about the intended audience's reaction. In this case, in 2024, it felt like it was the acknowledged Non-Problematic Attitude™. Possibly that's unfair; possibly the cultural and/or personal roots of this are delved into later. But off the cuff, it felt like a very 2024 urban progressive vegetarian attitude rather than the attitude of someone with a built-in neurological connection to a boreal forest's ecosystem and its food web.)
Irritation #2, which is unfair in a way because I wouldn't've known this without spoilers from Becca: Destry also has a conversation with her moose friend Whistle. Whistle is the one who has a brain thing limiting him to single-syllable words. But he says the word Destry! Even if they're speaking a language where Whistle is one syllable, Destry isn't! Maybe personal names are an exception to this brain limiter but it reminded me that that plot point exists and annoys me.
Anyway. Destry goes to challenge the guy! He gives her lip and is generally resistant! She pushes back! She fails to make any real arguments beyond "because I said so." (Now, she is in a position of authority here, so I get the because-I-said-so factor, but when you've got somebody refusing to recognize your authority, just repeating yourself louder is not going to do anything to change that. This could be a character point -- maybe she's not good at asserting herself, maybe authority doesn't sit easily on her shoulders -- but there's a narrative attitude of "mic drop! and then everybody [who isn't problematic] clapped" surrounding her statements that was irritation #3.)
The guy, by the way, is a remote-controlled person -- someone who's loaned? sold? his body for use by somebody up in orbit for livestreaming a Pleistocene-level experience. It's the unknown person up in orbit who's actually talking through him, as Destry recognizes quickly and as his statements soon confirm. We don't know anything about the guy whose actual body this is or what he thinks about any of this, except that he was willing to be a livestreaming puppet for whatever reason.
And we're not going to! Because when saying "because I said so" three or four times doesn't get him gone, Destry SHOOTS THE GUY IN THE HEAD.
Irritation #4. Killing a rabbit to eat is a horrific ethical violation, but killing a guy after 30 seconds of conversation with the other person puppeting him is totally fine! Well, Destry regrets it in that it'll get her in trouble if she doesn't successfully cover her tracks (which she immediately starts to do), but there are no ethical qualms about this, apparently? "DO THEY EVER COMPLICATE THIS OR ADDRESS THIS CONTRADICTION???" I asked Becca. "lol no of course not," Becca said.
...And that's when I put the book down and went to go read something that angered me less for a while. I do want to read more of this book, if only so I can booklog about it, but clearly I'm gonna have to brace myself and be in the right mood to get through any of it.
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Date: 2024-04-03 05:43 am (UTC)I have just noped out of a book I've never read.
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Date: 2024-04-03 05:57 am (UTC)To be scrupulously fair, it's possible that they do delve into it some more later, and Becca forgot on account of all the everything else happening in this book. I can't say for sure that the narrative attitude is that it's totally fine. But that's how it felt at this point in the book, at least, and not in the way of a story that's deliberately delving into a fundamentally different value system on that front. So it was rant #4 for these pages even on the off chance that that event proves to get more nuance later.
no subject
Date: 2024-04-03 09:35 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2024-04-03 09:39 pm (UTC)Ah: the human equivalent of vat meat, where as long as it isn't sentient, of course it is acceptable to eat.
no subject
Date: 2024-04-06 03:48 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2024-04-03 05:57 am (UTC)Irritation #4. Killing a rabbit to eat is a horrific ethical violation, but killing a guy after 30 seconds of conversation with the other person puppeting him is totally fine! Well, Destry regrets it in that it'll get her in trouble if she doesn't successfully cover her tracks (which she immediately starts to do), but there are no ethical qualms about this, apparently? "DO THEY EVER COMPLICATE THIS OR ADDRESS THIS CONTRADICTION???" I asked Becca. "lol no of course not," Becca said.
... WHAT.
This is where I keep wondering if
no subject
Date: 2024-04-03 09:37 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2024-04-05 08:41 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2024-04-06 04:04 am (UTC)Upon rereading I thiiiiink Becca is probably right, but also, the book is really not very clear about whether the "remote" was ever a person with their own mind or potential to have such, and I do think that this is an important point to be clear on, especially in a book that's loudly billing itself as interested in expanding the category of who counts as a person with a voice to be listened to.
no subject
Date: 2024-04-03 07:25 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2024-04-06 04:38 am (UTC)Now, okay. Becca has pointed out that the person may in fact have never actually been a person with a mind of their own, but may just be a sort of fabricated empty vessel for ambulatory livestreaming purposes. If so, I still have questions, including "are we SURE there's no personhood in there?" but I would be willing to accept that Destry doesn't. But the book really unclear on this subject, and I think it's one it's important to be clear about, actually! Especially in a book that's billing itself as concerned with ethical behavior and crafting a more just future and expanding the definition of who counts as a person!
Anyway, yes, she says it's not a debate and he has to get off the land, he says "no can do" and makes a comment about how moose jerky would be tasty, and she shoots him between the eyes and tells herself that okay, killing is supposed to be a last resort for a ranger, but he was threatening WHISTLE [her moose friend] so obviously she simply had no choice!
...The ethical underpinnings of this particular set of choices and justifications may yet be examined, I guess, but have not so far, by the end of the chapter. (I read on a bit more tonight.) She's just been concerned with dealing with the carbon load and thinking to herself that ha! he thought this was a Pleistocene environment! even though it's OBVIOUSLY mostly Devonian! because there are synapsids with sail backs wandering around?? even though there are ALSO angiosperm trees including conifers, and ravens, and hares and squirrels and foxes, not to mention the sapient moose, and honestly this is the first mention we've had of anything that wouldn't fit right into Earth's Pleistocene and we don't see any gorgonopsids or whatever onscreen, at least so far. So I'm also waiting to see if the Devonian synapsids ever come up again or if they only existed for the space of a gotcha. We'll see! Or we won't, depending on how much of this I make it through!
no subject
Date: 2024-04-07 03:00 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2024-04-03 09:34 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2024-04-03 11:28 pm (UTC)WHAT??
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Date: 2024-04-06 04:45 am (UTC)On the other hand: I really feel that if this is the case, and if we are to see this as (at least in Destry's eyes) the moral equivalent of unplugging somebody's PS3 while they're actively playing it, that ought to be made explicit very promptly, especially since otherwise her mental justification for it is "well I had no choice, I'm stuck dealing with his mess either way and his comment about eating moose jerky was OBVIOUSLY a real and present threat to my moose friend" which, as a justification for shooting somebody in the head for giving you lip instead of respecting your authority, has some unfortunate echoes, shall we say.
no subject
Date: 2024-04-06 09:45 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2024-04-04 03:56 am (UTC)I will just join in the general chorus of WHAT the actual WHAT
Irritation #4. Killing a rabbit to eat is a horrific ethical violation, but killing a guy after 30 seconds of conversation with the other person puppeting him is totally fine! Well, Destry regrets it in that it'll get her in trouble if she doesn't successfully cover her tracks (which she immediately starts to do), but there are no ethical qualms about this, apparently? "DO THEY EVER COMPLICATE THIS OR ADDRESS THIS CONTRADICTION???" I asked Becca. "lol no of course not," Becca said.
These are definitely some ethical choices which were made!
no subject
Date: 2024-04-06 04:50 am (UTC)It's possible that the guy isn't actually a person who chose to sell/loan his body, but is in fact an empty vessel created just to be an ambulatory livestreaming tool. That's not what I got on the first read, but Becca suggested it and I went back and looked, and it is a plausible reading.
On the other hand, I feel like if you're going to make a plot point like this, you need to be explicitly clear about that, actually! Otherwise readers might think that your protagonist just shot a guy in the head for crimes that under my society's morality, at least, he did not personally commit! And anyway the "crime" was just trespassing and, uh, "threatening" her moose friend by mentioning moose jerky with a sneer. (In a contest between one random dude sitting by a campfire and a moose at close range, I would not bet on the dude, even without an armed park ranger friend on the moose's side. I do not think this was a credible threat, is what I'm saying, and so the justification has some pretty unsavory echoes to me.)
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Date: 2024-04-04 03:59 am (UTC)I have also read Dinosaur Planet and agree that it was mediocre. My favorite part of it was actually the vegetarian worldbuilding - I thought it was a clever bit of "this culture is different from ours."
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Date: 2024-04-06 05:02 am (UTC)But I do think that if you're going to do a plot point like this, you really should make that explicitly clear! Readers can have their own questions and doubts, but at least you'll have demonstrated that your POV character is viewing this as more like unplugging somebody's PS3 than shooting a guy in the head for the horrible crime of trespassing, giving her lip, and making the world's vaguest possible threat to her friend the moose (who is A MOOSE, not exactly the most defenseless of creatures), a disproportionate punishment which has deeply unpleasant real-world parallels the narration never touches on in the slightest.
And yes, I agree about the vegetarian worldbuilding of Dinosaur Planet! It was an intriguing level of constant commitment to a major cultural difference. (I need to write that book, but basically, I found it mediocre but an interesting bit of a time capsule, and also I read enough mediocre McCaffrey sci fi in my youth that it had a certain nostalgia value.)
Anyway, the Dinosaur Planet comparison was more apt than I realized, because I read a bit further in The Terraformers and was informed that actually, this boreal forest is a mishmash of Earth eras, with sail-backed synapsids from the Devonian wandering around! (Only referred to as "synapsids" so far, which makes talking about it slightly tricky in that technically speaking a boreal forest still has plenty of synapsids in it, but Newitz clearly doesn't mean modern mammals.) ...But it's also a boreal forest full of coniferous trees and other angiosperms, and also foxes and squirrels and ravens and hares. I have no idea how this even works, and more pressingly WHY this is the case. I resent being put in a position of not being delighted by an anachronistic mishmash of species, but I'm utterly bewildered as to what the in-universe purpose of the mishmash is, given that literally everything we've seen onscreen is a perfectly coherent modern-ish species mix. We'll see what else I learn if I manage to read on, I guess!
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Date: 2024-04-06 12:14 pm (UTC)ETA: never mind, read up thread, slightly less horrified now but also wut
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Date: 2024-03-31 08:58 pm (UTC)+1 share the rant.
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Date: 2024-04-03 05:29 am (UTC)no subject
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Date: 2024-04-03 06:43 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2024-03-31 04:18 pm (UTC)the book, answering it: no! we have a moral obligation to make sure everyone can talk exactly like a human! problem solved!!!
*sighs*
I wonder if the author is aware that there are humans with intellectual disabilities existing right now, and some of them do not have especially complex language use, and some of them do not use language at all.
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Date: 2024-03-31 05:02 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2024-03-31 05:07 pm (UTC)YES! THIS! EXACTLY!
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Date: 2024-03-31 07:17 pm (UTC)Eventually it's revealed that the less-intelligent moose is not in fact less intelligent in any way except for the fact that there is an artificial inhibitor in his brain that prevents him from using words of more than one syllable, which gets fixed by the end of the section!
also very much reminded me of all the ~inspiring~ narratives where everyone thought this physically disabled person was intellectually disabled as well, but then it turned out they were secretly a genius who just couldn't communicate it!
Because we can respect and treat someone as an equal as long as they have at least normal intelligence on the inside; if they'd actually been intellectually disabled, then warehousing them and forgetting about them would be fine, I guess.
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Date: 2024-04-01 06:53 pm (UTC)Like--really? That's where you rest intelligence? Under syllable length?
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Date: 2024-04-02 07:36 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2024-04-02 05:58 pm (UTC)The only reason we tend to assume this is a thing in English is because of the class-associated Romanicization of our loan words over historical time! That's an arbitrary historical development!
like I am just befuddled over here.
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Date: 2024-04-02 06:29 pm (UTC)because the bad corporate entities are unethically 3-D printing unintelligent people to do service instead of printing everyone out as properly intelligent
Also why is this trope ("we will make stupid/slow people so they can be the perfect servants/slaves!") even a thing. Where does this idea come from that intellectually-disabled people are naturally compliant and subservient and happy obedient child-like slaves come from.
Because it's clearly not from anyone who's ever met people with intellectual disabilities, who are as autonomous and rebellious as anyone else (and in many cases especially so because being surrounded by people trying to control you will often tend to make people push back hard, in whatever ways they can).
Maybe it's supposed to be obviously wrong, but the evil corporate entities should have found that one out immediately.
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Date: 2024-04-03 04:38 am (UTC)Neither has the author apparently spent much time around small children and toddlers, who are certainly not particularly biddable or pliant either despite still developing their cognitive faculties. Obviously adult intellectually disabled people are quite different from small children in that they are adults with the time to learn and percolate and develop skills and, you know, be adults—the best definition of what general intelligence is that I have seen is essentially processing speed and capacity, which does not comment on what is being processed—but the point re: pliancy remains.
In fact, in my experience it's if anything easier to convince individuals with more processing speed to behave and act as you'd like them to: you can basically fast talk them into dropping inputs and convincing themselves that doing what you want is actually in their best interest, whether or not it actually is. Or you can entrap them emotionally, at which point they will generally spend their considerable cognitive powers justifying why it actually makes total sense to do what you'd like them to.
Not that I've ever seen any of that play out in real life or anything. Sometimes staving off the meltdown to get through a stressful situation means keeping yourself in that situation much longer than you need to be.
Anyway, it's such an indication of a level of self centered complacency about cognition, variation, and diversity to find in a writer who is theoretically interested in what personhood is and means! Folks else where in discussion keep invoking animal rights positions and language to explain it, and I think that's exactly right: animal rights (vs animal welfare) ideology encourages people to explore personhood by projecting themselves into the position of an alien experience and imagining how they would feel if transplanted immediately into that social position. Animals are viewed as humans in furry suits without the ability to speak, not fundamentally experiencing different priorities, opinions, and sensory experiences than humans do.
I really do think that this emphasis on "intelligence" as language, and specifically language as easily parsed and unpacked by the speaker, is a key to the fundamental mindset. It's also the thing that lets people be tricked by processes that simulate language without actual cognition, like ChatGPT. It's just so heartbreaking watching someone concerned enough about about defining personhood and variation in cognitive experiences to write a whole speculative scifi novel probing the boundaries of the concepts... while being totally trapped within the paradigm of a world populated by tiny versions of ourselves, devoid of tools to use to actually connect to and understand the alien.
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Date: 2024-04-01 01:13 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2024-04-01 01:39 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2024-04-01 06:50 pm (UTC)Sort of want to introduce the author to Nagel's wretched bat essay and see whether any sparks fly. Or maybe, if I was feeling especially mean, to release the extremely treacherous and eugenicist history of the study of intelligence and its many critiques into their sphere of knowledge and see how that interacts with the scrupulosity. Yeesh.
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Date: 2024-04-03 09:44 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2024-03-31 04:23 pm (UTC)Okay, I failed out of one of this author's other books because I was not getting really grabbed by it and one of the robots was like "what if I regender myself to make myself sexier to this human? What a cool use of autonomy!" (author is trans, so maybe the one not getting it is I? But I super did not get it.)
But hahah wow. NOT how I would explore animal uplift. This seems less like animal uplift and more like... consciousness colonization?
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Date: 2024-03-31 04:25 pm (UTC)no subject
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Date: 2024-04-03 10:26 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2024-03-31 04:25 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2024-04-03 09:47 pm (UTC)(....if you have a link to the other DW pan, I'd love to see it. >.>)
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Date: 2024-04-04 12:17 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2024-03-31 04:31 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2024-04-03 09:49 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2024-03-31 04:36 pm (UTC)I have read that Piers Anthony story and am now going to try to forget it again.
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Date: 2024-03-31 06:44 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2024-03-31 08:16 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2024-03-31 08:46 pm (UTC)The Anthony story was also exactly where I went when I hit that line and now I'm trying to get back.
(I was once at a party where Anthonology was used as the basis of a drinking game. Everybody within earshot lost.)
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Date: 2024-03-31 10:57 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2024-03-31 10:59 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2024-04-03 09:50 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2024-03-31 04:57 pm (UTC)Minister, I would like to raise some concerns about this policy. Many of them are about slavery, and things rail infrastructure lawyers are not typically equipped for but luckily we are recruited on our soundness in public law I guess so hello.
(I have picked this book up a couple of times and put it down for the pedestrian prose and now can't believe the reasons I've missed out on for putting it down!)
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Date: 2024-04-03 09:52 pm (UTC)(THE PEDESTRIAN PROSE REALLY IS THE LEAST OF ITS SINS)
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Date: 2024-03-31 05:10 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2024-04-03 09:54 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2024-03-31 05:14 pm (UTC)but it's normal that creatures created to be good at a thing will want to do the thing
Hello Aristotle...
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Date: 2024-04-03 09:55 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2024-03-31 05:32 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2024-03-31 07:34 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2024-03-31 09:31 pm (UTC)I'm not planning to read the book, but if I did it would be to find out if it works to interpret the whole train thing as being about putting pressure on the train conductors' union.
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Date: 2024-03-31 09:37 pm (UTC)no subject
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Date: 2024-04-03 10:29 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2024-04-03 01:41 am (UTC)There is so much that could be done with this angle and the whole concept of gender and embodiment, but it sure doesn't sound like this book did it.
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Date: 2024-04-03 09:29 pm (UTC)Who let Anne McCaffrey into this conversation.
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Date: 2024-04-03 09:57 pm (UTC)no subject
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Date: 2024-04-02 11:15 am (UTC)I think there's an implicit commentary on the way people who care about justice can spend a ton of energy on one aspect of their community while taking for granted more structural aspects of inequality. In general it didn't feel to me like a book that expected the reader to agree with all of the characters' moral stances, it felt like a book that expected the reader to compare the characters' stances to their own and then have an impassioned discussion!
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Date: 2024-04-03 10:04 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2024-03-31 06:18 pm (UTC)no subject
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Date: 2024-03-31 07:29 pm (UTC)LOLOLOLOL this review is the greatest.
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Date: 2024-03-31 07:35 pm (UTC)LOLOLOLOLOL.
This book really does sound very much like a lost Sheri S. Tepper novel.
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Date: 2024-04-04 03:44 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2024-03-31 07:36 pm (UTC)My personal issues started with the geography & biogeography, which make NO SENSE. Why would you design the Eel River like that? Where is the water supposed to come from?
Why are the most important companion species moose and beaver, boreal forest specialists? When we learned about what had happened with dogs, I also went, "No. That is not how dogs think." And that was before we got to *cats* feeling *guilty* about *freeloading*, which can only be meant for comedy.
I'm now going to read other people's comments, then come back.
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Date: 2024-04-04 03:47 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2024-03-31 08:54 pm (UTC)Aside from joining the consensus of twitchiness with what this solution seems to say about different kinds of human intelligence and communication, it seems a singularly joyless way to think about sharing a planet with different kinds of non-human intelligence and communication. The idea that humans aren't part of the natural ecosystem isn't Anthropocene reckoning, it's just inverting the Puritan wilderness. I am sorry this book did not supply you with a union of ballerina trains.
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Date: 2024-04-03 05:39 am (UTC)RIGHT. This isn't the only thing that gets me about this book (obviously), but it seems like such a wildly missed point that's fundamental to the premise (and also, admittedly, a general bugbear of mine so I'm primed to get mad about it).
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Date: 2024-04-03 09:37 pm (UTC)Obviously, solidarity.
I was intrigued by the excerpt from Newitz's The Future of Another Timeline (2019) reprinted in Adventures in Bodily Autonomy (2023), but I do not feel intrigued by the reports of this novel except as to how it happened.
(Your icon is on point.)
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Date: 2024-04-04 03:49 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2024-04-04 03:58 am (UTC)That is like the last thing I want from my science fiction!
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Date: 2024-03-31 11:06 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2024-04-04 03:50 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2024-04-07 06:59 am (UTC)spoilers for a >20 year old series
The hork bajir were genetically engineered by another race, the arn, to serve as gardeners and treetenders their whole lives to restore the horrendously damaged planet (post-civil war I believe? It's been too long since I reread). They were specifically engineered to be 'unintelligent' in the 90s sense of the word, to live peacefully among the trees without asking too many questions about the world around them. Created to serve the ends of the arn, they end up enslaved by yet another race that uses them as unwilling shock troops. Freeing them is a major plot point in the series and they become excellent allies to the MCs.Not to imply this is all handled perfectly because one of the plot. things. about the hork-bajir is that every so often one of them will be born extremely intelligent. These anomalous hork-bajir are called seers and have a place in their people's mythology, as being born during times of chaos and turmoil to help their fellow hork-bajir survive. So like, kind of sadly the most sympathetic horks in the series, who do the most moving and shaking wrt plot, are these seers (there is 1 main hork that speaks for her people and interfaces with the human MCs throughout the series, and 1 main hork in their backstory book. both are seers). The human MCs also firmly avoid trying to kill humans suborned by the main antagonists of their series, but even when they understand the position t he hork-bajir are in and are more sympathetic to them they never avoid killing horks the same way. That said I do feel like we get a sense of the personhood of hork bajir and at the end they're freed to live the life they want to live, there is pathos when even 'regular' as opposed to seer hork-bajir die, and overall... like, the way they are constantly enslaved or used at the whims of other species is seen as a crime perpetrated against the hork bajir! I also gotta say the fandom has done some work in doing them justice and explored the way the original series doesn't treat them well. It's a bummer to see a modern-day work doing, it sounds like, worse than a kids series from the 90s?
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Date: 2024-03-31 11:20 pm (UTC)SO WEIRD, SO CURSED, thank you for reading this book so none of us have to (and also for this extremely funny review)!
ETA: I showed this post and its comments to my sister, who is a huge fan of Sentient Train Musical Starlight Express, to which her reply was "this is so unbelievably topical to me that i feel like you just truman show'd my ass," SHE TOO HAS BEEN PONDERING THE SENTIENT TRAINS QUESTIONS and has similarly come to far more thoughtful conclusions, Annalee Newitz is simply not trying hard or weird enough,
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Date: 2024-04-04 03:50 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2024-03-31 11:28 pm (UTC)But yes the disability and animal rights implications are... oof. Thank you for this review so I can boggle from a safe distance!
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Date: 2024-04-04 03:51 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2024-03-31 11:48 pm (UTC)no subject
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Date: 2024-04-01 12:42 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2024-04-04 03:53 am (UTC)(I knew that there were three sections that covered different characters but that was pretty much it -- I truly thought I was in for some Kim Stanley Robinson-esque very hard sci-fi.)
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Date: 2024-04-01 01:10 am (UTC)Ironically, I am currently reading/listening to a FANTASTIC book on the evolution of animal intelligences, laid out with great sensitivity and imagination by Peter Godfrey-Smith -- Metazoa. I recommend it to you as a palate-cleanser!
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Date: 2024-04-04 03:54 am (UTC)no subject
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Date: 2024-04-07 02:57 am (UTC)