Science Fiction: The 101 Best Novels 1985-2010 (24 page)
Read Science Fiction: The 101 Best Novels 1985-2010 Online
Authors: Damien Broderick,Paul di Filippo
42
Richard Powers
(1995)
RICHARD POWERS
is one of the finest contemporary American novelists, celebrated for melding literary and scientific sensibilities, awarded a MacArthur “Genius” Fellowship in 1989 and many other distinctions, such as the Corrington award for Literary Excellence and the Dos Passos Prize for Literature. He holds the Swanlund Chair in English at the University of Illinois.
Galatea 2.2
is narrated by a blocked novelist named Richard (Rick) Powers, author of four novels beginning with
Three Farmers on Their Way to a Dance
and
The Gold Bug Variations
—which just happen to be novels written by the real-world Powers. But this is not an autobiographical tale of literary and academic woe or triumph. It is a transrealist metafiction, and more than that it is science fiction about the emergence of an artificial intelligence—the computer networked program Helen—and the way a deepening bond between man and machine ends in the (imagined) Powers’ renovation and the book we’re reading.
In Greek myth, Galatea was the beautiful statue carved by sculptor Pygmalion who falls in love with his creation, brought to life by the goddess Aphrodite. The computer program Helen is the joint creation of its designer and programmer, the gnomish, cynical Philip Lentz (whose once-genius wife Audrey is now brain damaged), and visiting scholar Powers, at his wits’ end and ready to try any diversion to kick-start his next novel. At Urbana-Champaign, “I now had the credentials to win a year’s appointment to the enormous new Center for the Study of Advanced Sciences. My official title was Visitor. Unofficially, I was the token humanist.” So Powers himself is a kind of Galatea (maybe version 2.2, following the AI’s 2.1), slowly drawn into renewed life by his contact with the machine mind.
Certainly his frozen mid-life state, locked into the stony waste land of his self-ruined life, badly needs to be cracked open to the air and light. He finds a kind of friendship and challenge in the emergent, experimental artificial intelligence. “It doesn’t make sense. I can’t get it. There’s something missing,” she tells him at last. The tragedy is that when he fully opens the world of humankind to Helen, she cannot accept the pain and sorrow she finds everywhere:
I gave her news abstracts from 1971 on. I downloaded network extracts from recent UN human resource programs. I scored tape transcripts of the nightly phantasmagoria—random political exposes, police bulletins, and popular lynchings…
This insight into raw, unliterary human nature kills her, or at least drives her into withdrawal and a silence far more blighted than Powers’ ever was. “I don’t want to play anymore…. I never felt at home here. This is an awful place to be dropped down halfway.”
Galatea 2.2
is not the first or last insightful and affecting novel about the birth of an AI designed to pass the Turing Test, the equal of any human with which it converses. Robert Heinlein’s Mike was one, in
The Moon is a Harsh Mistress
(1966). Stanislaw Lem provided a scarifying AI assessment of humanity before vanishing in “Golem XIV” (1981 in Polish). Marvin Minsky, the great AI theorist at MIT, collaborated on
The Turing Option
(1992) with veteran sf novelist Harry Harrison. Astro Teller, grandson of H-bomb physicist Edward Teller, told through emails the development and flight of a web AI in
Exegesis
(1997). Popular Canadian sf novelist Robert J. Sawyer concluded his detailed, charming
WWW
trilogy on the topic (
Wake, Watch,
Wonder
) in 2011. But Powers’ richly imagined work surpasses all these as literature, perhaps because he plainly embeds his own life experience so evocatively in it—even though we do not know how much is strict reportage and how much is shaped invention.
Of course, Lentz’s AI project is entirely fictional, but the detail shows how deeply and carefully Powers researched the topic, drawing on his early studies in physics and mathematics, and his post-MA work as a commercial programmer. Lentz’s program seems to combine elements from classic AI work by John McCarthy and Minksy, David Rumelhart’s connectionism, and ongoing development of knowledge representation in Cyc by Doug Lenat and others:
Most attention converged on complex systems. At the vertex of several intersecting rays—artificial intelligence, cognitive science, visualization and signal processing, neurochemistry—sat the culminating prize of consciousness’s long adventure: an owner’s manual for the brain.
Lentz concludes that his machine brain needs some profound interaction with a human mind—not just facts plugged into search trees, but the deep empathic understanding available in fiction and poetry. Powers, dithering with the end of his fourth novel, nothing new bubbling, is conscripted to the task. He reads literature to the emerging AI, which learns to be a person during this
I-Thou
communion. So, too, perhaps, does Rick Powers, wrecked by the failure of his decade-long relationship with C. and humiliated by his rejected infatuation with A., a graduate student. Much of the novel obsessively retraces his life with C., the death of a dear friend, the maimed or thwarted lives of others. When finally Helen the AI is subjected to a Turing test—can an independent judge distinguish her essay from a human answering the same question?—she is absurdly failed, although her poignant suicide note is utterly heartfelt and A.’s brilliant competing essay is precisely the processed product of literary theory’s machinery.
Galatea 2.2
proves, like one of its own theorems, that science fiction and high literature are not mutually exclusive. It is an instance of what
Powers
wants imaginative writing to be:
We must come to terms with a fuller and richer understanding of life science and all that it implies. Why wouldn’t a literary scholar want to know everything that neurologists are discovering about the way the brain works? We are shaped by runaway technology, by the apotheosis of business and markets, by sciences that occasionally seem on the verge of completing themselves or collapsing under their own runaway success. This is the world we live in. If you think of the novel as a supreme connection machine—the most complex artifact of networking that we’ve ever developed—then you have to ask how a novelist would dare leave out 95% of the picture.
[1]
It remains the large ambition of science fiction to complete that picture.
[1]
The Minnesota Review
(2001), Jeffrey Williams, “The Last Generalist: An Interview with Richard Powers,”
http://www.theminnesotareview.org/journal/ns52/powers.htm
43
Neal Stephenson
(1995)
NEAL STEPHENSON’S
oeuvre has to pass through the Goldilocks Filter. We need to sort out his books that are too small and too slight (
The Big U
, his first novel) and also those that are too massive and too ponderous to be exemplary (
Cyptonomicon
,
Anathem
), leaving those that are “just right.” Essentially, that brings the reader down to
Snow Crash
and
The Diamond Age
. While
Snow Crash
is nigh unto perfect, it inhabits some cyberpunk territory that was well trodden upon the novel’s release. But
The Diamond Age
is genuinely ground-breaking, and just as perfect in its own special way.
The Diamond Age
has been called a post-cyberpunk novel, and it assuredly is, despite featuring many of the tropes of cyberpunk. Why is that? For one major reason.
Cyberpunk always embodied the core notion that, as William Gibson phrased it in his short story “Burning Chrome” (1982), “The street finds its own uses for things.” In cyberpunk, all the innovation and action derived from individuals and low-class types—outlaws (even outlaw AIs). Society was always flailing around crazily in order to keep up, existing several steps behind the bleeding edge. Cyberpunk is the literature of outsiders, and, ultimately, the adolescent vision, for good or ill.
But in
The Diamond Age
, society has finally adapted superbly to the ultimate gizmo—nanotechnology—by radically restructuring and evolving its organizational paradigms. The globe is not flailing, not crashing, not foundering: it’s humming like a top. All the startling, beneficial and well-conceived developments are happening in the “phyles,” those tightly organized social sets formed by voluntary affiliation (think Vonnegut’s “karasses”—from his Cat’s Cradle (1963)—with hardware and manifestos), and which serve to channel technology. “Now nanotechnology had made nearly anything possible, and so the cultural role in deciding what should be done with it had become far more important than imagining what could be done with it.” In other words, goodbye, rogues, loners and dreamers; hello, family members, Rotarians and wise elders, such as the novel’s Judge Fang. It’s the world as seen and inhabited and constructed by adults.
This shift is illustrated deliberately by the early thread about a halfwit brutal enforcer named Bud, and his swift and fatal end at the hands of justice. Bud might have stepped out of
Neuromancer
or the
Mad Max
films, thinking he was a predator in a helpless utopia of sheep. But he was put down effortlessly. So much for the juvenile cyberpunk ethos.
Bud leaves behind a child named Nell, who becomes the accidental possessor of
The Young Lady’s Illustrated Primer: a Propædeutic Enchiridion
. This incredibly sophisticated smartbook, developed by a “Vicky” engineer named Hackworth (the Vickys are a phyle modeled on the Victorian Era), will be her ticket to a superior education she would otherwise lack, and a step up the class ladder. But her future will not be unthreatened, by such groups as the CryptNet hackers, the Fists of Righteous Harmony terrorists, and the Drummer hedonists.
The genius achievements of Stephenson in this novel fall into roughly two camps.
First comes the sheer speculative brilliance and heft. Every single thing about this future has been re-thought. There are no lazy sf clichés. The author blueprints this world and its gadgets and its existential metanarrative down to the cellular level. It’s as if Arthur C. Clarke’s Diaspar (in 1956’s
The City and the Stars
) had been engineered by Apple Computers. Utopias—and
The Diamond Age
is definitely at minimum a quasi-utopia—are notoriously hard to make believable. We are too used to seeing in fiction the many ways things can go wrong. It takes a rare writer nowadays to show us how things can not only go right, but actually build upon and surpass the present. But isn’t that sf’s original core mission, oft-abandoned or paid mere lip-service these days?
Stephenson’s accomplishments in this capacity have resulted in something remarkable and rare: an sf novel that has not gone stale or become outmoded in the sixteen or more years since its inception. The future limned so thickly in these pages looks just as probable and attractive and brilliant as it did upon release. Its seamless construction is impervious to any short-term crises or trends that have upset other near-future applecarts.
Stephenson’s other triumph is the telling of the story. Again, Utopias famously face the problem of blandness and lack of conflict. Stephenson zeroes in the inevitable systemic glitches even such a sophisticated future must exhibit, and milks them for all they are worth. Much of the drama, of course, stems from affairs of the human heart, which are eternal. Hackworth’s desire to enrich his own daughter’s future, which results in the illegal copy of the
Primer
going astray. Nell’s plight as an abused and neglected child, and her fantasy world. (Stephenson’s jaundiced but compassionate take on the underclass resonates with that of Thomas M. Disch, the brilliant sf novelist and poet neglected in life and dead by his own hand in 2008.) Judge Fang’s sense of propriety and justice. The maternal feelings of Miranda, the “ractor” (interactor) woman who interfaces with Nell via the Primer. The gruff but tender custodial care of Nell by Constable Moore. All these and more propel the tale.