Zendegi by Greg Egan

book

It’s a curious coincidence that this book opens with a problem I’ve been wrestling with for some time. Being one of the dinosaurs, I’m still hoarding my collection of singles and LPs accumulated over the early years. I copied the 78s to tape many moons ago but I worry about how long the tapes will remain playable. Like Martin Seymour in Zendegi by Greg Egan (Night Shade Books, 2010), I dream of digitising all the recordings but find myself lacking the will. My wife has little interest and will not shed many tears if the original recordings are put on to the funeral pyre when my body is finally sent on its way. She’s not a Hindu and, therefore, would not consider sati (or suthi) an appropriate way of celebrating my death. But relieving herself of the option of replaying some of the hits from the 1950s might give her peace in her remaining years.

Anyway, Martin discovers that, unless you carefully check the sound levels on all the records to be transferred to the computer, it’s very easy to end up with wave shaping, i.e. distorted sound. Being something of a perfectionist, that would mean I could not listen to any of the affected tracks. Because he’s pressed for time, Martin makes the discovery after he has disposed of the originals. This loss makes him sad. But, in a more serious way, it also foreshadows the problems explored in this book. It all starts with the efforts of Nasim Golestani to map the part of a finch’s brain that decides what song to sing. She eventually creates a computer model that replicates bird song. It’s not clear how successful this is because it’s a bit difficult to ask real finches what they think of the tone and melody produced by the computerised version. The rest of the book then moves up to artificial intelligence experiments on replicating human abilities. Not unnaturally, there are some rich people who think it would be just dandy to have themselves uploaded and so achieve immortality.

Greg Egan keeps this real in his consistent rejection of the notion it would be possible to make a recording of anyone’s brain waves and so reproduce the human being. The best his scientists can manage is the replication of physical skills in avatars. Zendegi is a gaming platform and the owners make a lot of money out of people wanting to play football and other sports alongside or against their favourite players. Even inducing natural language abilities is fraught with difficulty because, like the bird song, computers have no understanding of how and why each individual note is significant. So avatars can be given access to comprehensive vocabularies but, even with multiple brain scans taken over months, there’s no consistency in the avatar’s performance as the target human. There’s no reasonable prospect of being able to “clone” a human personality by digitising his or her brain waves.

This is not to say that avatars could not undertake routine tasks and so displace the need for human labour. For example, it might be possible to build systems sophisticated enough to replace call centre staff or to perform other tasks not relying on face-to-face contact with real people. In a sense, this is simply extending the displacement of the thousands of administrative and secretarial staff in the management of any business. With software able to take dictation from bosses who refuse to learn how to type, there’s no longer a need for shorthand and typing skills sitting expensively in another office, nor for the clerks who file all the paper copies of correspondence generated, nor for the filing cabinets thereby closing down industrial production and terminating further jobs. All forms of automation seriously limit the need for human workers. Machines are cheaper and, once they have learned the jobs, make fewer mistakes. So, in all this continuing debate about the extent to which real world societies should allow the development of automated systems, Greg Egan is asking and answering some relevant questions.

However, I find it strange he should place most of the action in a near-future Iran. Although it’s certainly relevant to consider whether, in any sense, machines might capture souls, the political backstory to this novel simply gives us a thriller scenario and does not significantly advance the science fiction element. I’m not convinced the Islamic reaction to the phenomenon of avatars in a gaming environment is constructive in advancing the plot. The reaction of the Christians to the Zendegi project and another US-based attempt to create a massive AI capable of running human government is somewhat predictable and not given much space for development. Indeed, the whole tenor of the book is less science fictional than I expected. The first third is more or less a straight thriller about journalism, and the latter two-thirds is the increasingly sentimental story of Martin and his son. Although the two parts of the book do tie together in the relationship between Martin and Omar — initially a neighbour who gets involved in helping Martin get the news — Martin is somewhat self-absorbed as a person and fails to understand the significance of the relationship. He sees surface reality and is not particularly good in assessing the person underneath. As an early incident shows, you can dress up a man in women’s clothing but this does not convert the man into a woman. Gender identity is based on the whole package of the personality, the physical behaviour and the context. Similarly, you can capture features of human behaviour in avatars on Zandegi, but this does not make them human.

So Zendegi is a sentimental journey through life made by a two slightly inadequate people. Neither Martin nor Nasim are particularly successful as humans although they do manage to get things done. They work on a project together and it fails. I think that sums it all up really. The book is good in part but unsatisfying because it fails to really engage with the social and political implications of the work being done. We see it but there’s not enough meaningful discussion of it. The real questions are whether something approximating human is better than nothing and, if what you create is a kind of Frankenstein monster, would it be moral and legal to kill it by wiping it from the server?

For another review of a book by Greg Egan see The Clockwork Rocket.

The Clockwork Rocket by Greg Egan

book

The Clockwork Rocket by Greg Egan, Book 1 in the Orthogonal series (Night Shade Books, 2011), has proved to be an experiment too far for me. Over the years, I’ve read and, for the most part, enjoyed Greg Egan’s short stories. When I mentioned his name, however, there were always faintly worried expressions from those who know me. I never asked why. They might tell me I was looking even closer to death than usual. So I was left with an optimistic view that here was a hard-SF writer who actually produced accessible fiction, albeit only in the short form. For the record, I need to interject a small historical note. I gave up on physics rather more than fifty years ago. I found electricity experiments like the wheatstone bridge alarming — even rewiring a plug was challenging for me — and the suggestion I might apply anything more than basic addition and subtraction from the maths realm was enough to induce intellectual anaphylactic shock. Put simply, top-class boffins had only just invented the transistor when this old dog was trying to recreate Pepper’s Ghost, so the notion of anything actually amounting to cutting-edge physics was, and remains, completely alien to me.

At this point, it’s perhaps convenient to show the amount of background work Greg Egan has done to create this universe: Orthogonal Background Notes. It would be alright if it was written in Greek. I was good at Greek at school. But seeing the detailed work invested before actually sitting down to write the story is one of the most dispiriting things it has been my misfortune to encounter. My long-suffering friends were right. This type of book is not for me. Anyone who has to insert graphics into the text to explain what’s going on has lost the battle for my attention. If it can’t clearly be expressed in words anyone of ordinary intelligence can understand, nothing diagrammatic is going to help. By my standards, it’s not proper fiction.

So, here we have a strange bunch of aliens. I admit complete ignorance as to the nature their world. All I can say about it with any degree of certainty is that it does appear to go round a sun. As to the locals, they have a distinctive process of reproduction which depends on either the gynogenesis or parthenogenesis of the females. This leaves single dads with the responsibility of bring up the twins or quads. It’s very unusual for a solo or a triple to be produced. Needless to say, this has produced an extreme patriarchalism with women not only expected to be generally subservient, but “wives” treated as property and, as runaways, subject to forcible return to their “husbands” by enthusiastic male police officers. It’s all magnificently Victorian in the Regina v Jackson sense. This was a case in 1891 in which a husband kidnapped his wife who had refused to live with him and forcibly detained her in the “matrimonial home”. The Court of Queen’s Bench refused habeas corpus to free her, confirming a husband, “. . .had a right to the custody of his wife unless he uses it for some improper purpose. . .” This was the last time habeas corpus was refused as the Court of Appeal changed the law to assert a wife’s right to personal freedom. One small step towards equality.

Anyway, in this fictional society, our heroine, Yalda, is a solo born into a remote farming community. But she proves to have a big brain to go with the outsize body and is soon moving up through the academic ranks. On the way, she encounters the usual backbiting from jealous peers and intimidated lecturing staff. This is aggravated by her status as a female solo. To keep her from spontaneously producing two or four children and therefore ceasing to be a thorn in the sides on all those who would banish her from their equivalent of the ivory (red) towers, she takes a “contraceptive”. Thus fortified, she proceeds to identify a possible threat to her world. In fact, she has time to work out the science of it while lying in a jail cell for assaulting the son of someone politically powerful. Now there’s a literal and metaphorical division of labour required. A close friend divides leaving the question of who will assume responsibility for the children’s upbringing. And then there’s the need to convince the authorities it will be necessary to produce a “rocket” to take some people away from, and then back to, wherever it is they are. Somehow this will ensure life can continue. In the midst of what follows as our little band of doomsayers tries to rally public support, is some discussion of temporal causality which I more or less followed, but all this physics, particularly when it gets into what I take to be relativity, is just beyond me. We have the usual attempted sabotage as we come up to the launch and then the ethical problem of what to do with the misguided saboteur. All this is predictable as is the physical confusion when they encounter zero gravity. Growing food when the plants don’t know which way is up is a challenge.

So what this comes down to is that these people live in a place and face a threat I don’t understand. On the off chance they need to save themselves, they propose to send out a rocket. In causal terms, this may save the race by changing the future or not. I really don’t know. So if this sounds like your kind of book (with lots of explanatory charts and diagrams thrown in) you will be in your element with The Clockwork Rocket. But if, like me, you have the scientific ability of an amoeba and the attention span of a gnat, walk quietly on the other side.

Wonderfully atmospheric "rockets" from Cody Tilson

The full artwork for for jacket from Cody Tilson is spectacular.

For a review of another book by Greg Egan, see Zendegi.

A copy of this book was sent to me for review.