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fishsupremeI've recently read a small pile of Charles Stross books (the four existing books in the Merchant Princes series, plus Saturn's Children) and thought I'd write up some reviews and observations. Though I talk very little about the main plot thread of either book, it is the nature of a Stross novel that to talk about its setting and world and themes necessarily gives away much of the plot and what's most interesting about the book, so if you plan on reading them, you should probably not read this. (In short: I really liked them all, but then, I usually do with Stross, and Saturn's Children is much more than it at first appears.)
The Merchant Princes (starting with The Family Trade) is a series about Miriam Beckstien, a Boston tech journalist who discovers that she is descended from a Clan that can walk between worlds. With a strange pattern inscribed in a locket, she can move between parallel Earths, which have diverged at various points in history. Her ancestors are powerful merchant nobility in an alternate Earth where Norse settlers set up kingdoms in North America, and Europe lies under the barbarian dominion of the Great Khan. Her relatives maintain their weath via secret trade with the United States -- specifically, they rapidly move small, expensive or secret items for the people of their world (via world-walking here and just FedEx-ing them cross-country) while moving contraband -- mainly drugs -- for people in our world (since moving them through their medieval society is very slow but also safe -- there's no DEA or FBI there.) A worldwalker can only move between worlds with what they can carry, and they always come through at the same spot in the alternate world.
What I most like about the story is the protagonist -- it's rare to find a story like this where, upon discovering that she essentially has magical powers, the protagonist is smart about it. She doesn't think she's crazy -- she runs experiments, and tries to figure out how it works. She has other people verify it, and she tries to figure out what to do with it. She also discovers that being a medieval princess isn't exactly a Disney fantasy -- women are not expected to do things and think for themselves in a medieval society. And what's more, world-walking is hereditary, and the Clan's power is directly proportional to how many world-walkers there are -- so like all women, she's expected to marry (arranged, of course) and have children -- preferably a lot of them. A modern American does not have an easy time fitting in in this world, but Miriam tries to build a power base from which she can be free. Of course, a lot goes wrong with those plans, and that's where the book gets its plot -- that and Miriam's discovery that there is at least one other Earth, aside from the two the Clan is aware of, and if there's a third, there might be even more...
The other thing I find fascinating about this series is the illustration of a development trap, like the oil-rich Middle East monarchies. The Clan in the medieval world is extremely rich -- they live in castles, dress in noble finery, and are surrounded by gold and jewels. But as one of the nobles points out, that's all there is. The wealth is all on the surface -- the people live as subsistence farmers in abject poverty. There are no banks, no infrastructure, no capital markets. The nobility can import themselves luxury goods, but can't import enough to develop the nation and raise its standard of living -- and are too afraid of upsetting the status quo to do so even if they could. How do you bring a society out of the Dark Ages using only what you can carry?
Overall, though, the Merchant Princes is an interesting adventure story, somewhat reminiscent of the Amber series by Roger Zelazny. I've enjoyed reading all of them and am looking forward to the next one.
Saturn's Children seems at first somewhat of an odd departure for Stross. The book is described as space opera -- the sort of melodramatic, fantastic sci-fi of Buck Rogers and Star Wars -- when Stross's usual is hard SF full of transhumanism and nanotechnology. And the premise is faintly ridiculous -- the protagonist, Freya, is a robot concubine, designed and built as a sex slave for men. The only problemis that they're all dead. The human race died out some 200 years previous, leaving only other robots to inhabit the solar system, so Freya finds herself obsolete. What's a free-willed robot to do when she can't do what she's built for?
However, in what is on the surface an adventure story about an obsolete sex robot, Stross manages to work in a lot of things I was not really expecting to think about. (Amusingly, I guessed the main plot of the book before even the title page, based entirely on what I've just said above coupled with the fact that the first page of the book is Isaac Asimov's three laws of robotics. The characters aren't just robots, they're those kind of robots. However, as the actual plot was pretty much beside the point when it came to what I liked about the book, this doesn't bother me.) The first surprise is the undercurrent of terrible sadness in the first few chapters -- Freya is not a happy person. Unlike most of us, she knows her purpose, inherently; she knows exactly why she exists, and what would make her happy, and she can never have it. Being a sex slave may not sound like much of an aspiration, but she can be nothing other than what she is -- she's been programmed with desires and reflexes and automatic responses that she can't change. She makes wistful references to her Dead Love -- the man she would have been destined to bond with and serve, but who she'll never know because the last of his kind died 139 years before she was activated. 90% of her kind are gone... and though their programming makes suicide difficult, it's clear that she has little will to live, and this is probably what claimed her siblings.
There are a couple of characteristics of these robots that are key to the plot. One is the "soul chip" -- they can insert a memory card of sorts that records everything they do or think. If that chip is inserted into another robot of the same model as themselves, the memories slowly merge, the new robot assimilating them over a period of months. It provides a sort of immortality -- but being "remembered" by a sibling is not the same as being alive. And only the memories formed when the chip was installed are transferred -- if the previous owner took the chip out sometimes, there will be holes in the memory. If a chip is installed in a brand new robot, one with no personality at all, then there's no merging or blending -- the robot simply wakes up "fully formed" with all the memories in the chip. Freya is one of a couple hundred robots patterned after Rhea, her "template-matriarch." All of her siblings started with the memory of 10-20 years of Rhea's life, followed by being awakened and told that they are not Rhea, but rather a copy, and given new names. After 200 years more, though, they've diverged significantly -- their personalities are distinct. This same sort of pattern exists with most of the robots in the story -- many characters are essentially clones of one another, with the same bodies and basic personalities but made significantly different by their actions.
Those chip slots the robots all have, however, have a more sinister purpose. Robots built to interact with humans (i.e. almost all of them) are programmed with a "submission reflex" -- like their other reflexes, it's hard-coded and they cannot resist it. Specifically, they must obey humans unquestioningly -- though otherwise conscious and self-willed, none of them can even think about disobeying a human being. So they continue following the legal systems set down by humanity (ones in which they're all property -- in order to have a modicum of autonomy, they incorporate themselves) and their now-absurd directives (like terraforming distant planets to Earth-normal climates when there's no Earth-like life left to inhabit them.) Centuries ago, some of the robots invented "slave chips" -- a control chip which, when placed in a soul chip socket, activates the submission reflex and forces unquestioning obedience to a robot owner. And at this point, a small cadre of aristocrats have enslaved some 90% of the population with them. Freya, as a free individual, is in a small minority.
The world of Saturn's Children is not really a plausible future; it's not supposed to be. It's a thought experiment, and a lesson in being careful what you wish for. The robots' culture is brutal and tyrannical, based on slavery and domination, because it's the inevitable result of how they were created. It turns out that humanity never did figure out how to program consciousness ex nihilo -- the robots' neural networks are based on human brains, so their consciousness is much like our consciousness. But that's why the whole soul chip/templating process is necessary -- human-type neural networks start out blank, as infants. The robots all had a childhood, centuries ago -- they had to be raised, albeit in bodies specialized for their eventual purpose. And while their programmed reflexes and automatic behaviors are sufficient to have them do their jobs and obey, to be able to use their consciousness and volition to do them optimally, some of them (maybe all of them) had to be conditioned. If you take 15 years raising a robot from childhood and getting it just right, you certainly don't want to have just one of them, so you make copies. But like children, they sometimes don't turn out the way you planned... but since they're "just machines", you can try to force them to be what you want. Conditioning (training, brainwashing -- whatever you call it, it's not a word that should be applied to a conscious being) something that can't disobey is not, logistically, a difficult process, but to do it requires a degree of dehumanization. The very process of making the robots ensured that people couldn't see them as peers or even living things -- anyone who did would have been constitutionally unable to make them. The robot aristocrats are some of the robots who worked most closely with humans -- personal assistants who see slavery of others as the normal way of things, but now that they've become self-willed individuals, want to end up on top of the pyramid.
One thing Stross does very well here (and in Glasshouse, my favorite of his novels and probably the scariest book I've ever read) is show the downside of the transhumanist dream of being a "software consciousness" -- the abject horror of being deprived of free will. An experience with a slave chip shows Freya that her nonexistent True Love being two centuries dead is not all bad, for while she knows that to imprint on someone and obey them would bring her tremendous happiness -- given her programming and conditioning it could not do otherwise -- it would also be the end of the freedom she has enjoyed. The fact that she would never even want to disobey only makes it all the more horrible.
Though it's never said or hinted at in the book, the title doesn't refer to the planet, but the Titan in Greek and Roman mythology -- Saturn slew his children, until one day one of them, Zeus, slew him in return. The robots didn't kill off the humans intentially -- thanks to the submission reflex, they couldn't possibly -- but they were in a way responsible for the humans' death. They created a slave society, and like every slave society in history, it stagnated -- with countless intelligent slaves, people had no incentive to make progress, and were afraid of upsetting the status quo. The more intelligent robots saw it coming, but couldn't help, since they had to obey even foolish orders. As Freya puts it, "we loved them so much individually that we betrayed them collectively."
In the Star Trek: The Next Generation episode "The Measure of a Man," wherein a judge is trying to determine if Lt. Commander Data is a person or a piece of property, Riker points out that Data's sentience is, at the very least, possible, and asks what will happen if the Federation does succeed in duplicating him. How many robots does it take to make a race? And is humanity willing to accept the consequences of declaring Data "property," with all that would entail? If there are someday ten thousand Datas, what will those consequences even be? Saturn's Children is an answer to that question, and in many ways a study in unintended consequences -- both at the societal level, where humanity's need to keep control of their pliable-but-otherwise-superior robot children has lead to a slave society, and at the individual level, as all the complex plotting of the the antagonist (I hesitate to say "villian" as the word just doesn't fit, despite her actions) is ultimately rooted in an old memory of inconsolable rage, buried but never forgotten -- a pointless cruelty to "just a machine" that, unforeseeably, shapes a society for hundreds of years. The current Battlestar Galactica series explores much of the same ground -- it's easy to dehumanize a "machine", but when it's conscious, that decision has consequences, not least to the souls of the ones doing the dehumanizing.
If humanity ever does create a conscious AI, these are the things we'll need to think about. Is a computer based on the design of a human brain conscious? Whether it is or not, if it's designed right, it'll act like it is, and it will say it is. How do you test for consciousness? How do you objectively verify subjective experience? When the computer says it's alive, perhaps we'd better take its word for it.
The Merchant Princes (starting with The Family Trade) is a series about Miriam Beckstien, a Boston tech journalist who discovers that she is descended from a Clan that can walk between worlds. With a strange pattern inscribed in a locket, she can move between parallel Earths, which have diverged at various points in history. Her ancestors are powerful merchant nobility in an alternate Earth where Norse settlers set up kingdoms in North America, and Europe lies under the barbarian dominion of the Great Khan. Her relatives maintain their weath via secret trade with the United States -- specifically, they rapidly move small, expensive or secret items for the people of their world (via world-walking here and just FedEx-ing them cross-country) while moving contraband -- mainly drugs -- for people in our world (since moving them through their medieval society is very slow but also safe -- there's no DEA or FBI there.) A worldwalker can only move between worlds with what they can carry, and they always come through at the same spot in the alternate world.
What I most like about the story is the protagonist -- it's rare to find a story like this where, upon discovering that she essentially has magical powers, the protagonist is smart about it. She doesn't think she's crazy -- she runs experiments, and tries to figure out how it works. She has other people verify it, and she tries to figure out what to do with it. She also discovers that being a medieval princess isn't exactly a Disney fantasy -- women are not expected to do things and think for themselves in a medieval society. And what's more, world-walking is hereditary, and the Clan's power is directly proportional to how many world-walkers there are -- so like all women, she's expected to marry (arranged, of course) and have children -- preferably a lot of them. A modern American does not have an easy time fitting in in this world, but Miriam tries to build a power base from which she can be free. Of course, a lot goes wrong with those plans, and that's where the book gets its plot -- that and Miriam's discovery that there is at least one other Earth, aside from the two the Clan is aware of, and if there's a third, there might be even more...
The other thing I find fascinating about this series is the illustration of a development trap, like the oil-rich Middle East monarchies. The Clan in the medieval world is extremely rich -- they live in castles, dress in noble finery, and are surrounded by gold and jewels. But as one of the nobles points out, that's all there is. The wealth is all on the surface -- the people live as subsistence farmers in abject poverty. There are no banks, no infrastructure, no capital markets. The nobility can import themselves luxury goods, but can't import enough to develop the nation and raise its standard of living -- and are too afraid of upsetting the status quo to do so even if they could. How do you bring a society out of the Dark Ages using only what you can carry?
Overall, though, the Merchant Princes is an interesting adventure story, somewhat reminiscent of the Amber series by Roger Zelazny. I've enjoyed reading all of them and am looking forward to the next one.
Saturn's Children seems at first somewhat of an odd departure for Stross. The book is described as space opera -- the sort of melodramatic, fantastic sci-fi of Buck Rogers and Star Wars -- when Stross's usual is hard SF full of transhumanism and nanotechnology. And the premise is faintly ridiculous -- the protagonist, Freya, is a robot concubine, designed and built as a sex slave for men. The only problemis that they're all dead. The human race died out some 200 years previous, leaving only other robots to inhabit the solar system, so Freya finds herself obsolete. What's a free-willed robot to do when she can't do what she's built for?
However, in what is on the surface an adventure story about an obsolete sex robot, Stross manages to work in a lot of things I was not really expecting to think about. (Amusingly, I guessed the main plot of the book before even the title page, based entirely on what I've just said above coupled with the fact that the first page of the book is Isaac Asimov's three laws of robotics. The characters aren't just robots, they're those kind of robots. However, as the actual plot was pretty much beside the point when it came to what I liked about the book, this doesn't bother me.) The first surprise is the undercurrent of terrible sadness in the first few chapters -- Freya is not a happy person. Unlike most of us, she knows her purpose, inherently; she knows exactly why she exists, and what would make her happy, and she can never have it. Being a sex slave may not sound like much of an aspiration, but she can be nothing other than what she is -- she's been programmed with desires and reflexes and automatic responses that she can't change. She makes wistful references to her Dead Love -- the man she would have been destined to bond with and serve, but who she'll never know because the last of his kind died 139 years before she was activated. 90% of her kind are gone... and though their programming makes suicide difficult, it's clear that she has little will to live, and this is probably what claimed her siblings.
There are a couple of characteristics of these robots that are key to the plot. One is the "soul chip" -- they can insert a memory card of sorts that records everything they do or think. If that chip is inserted into another robot of the same model as themselves, the memories slowly merge, the new robot assimilating them over a period of months. It provides a sort of immortality -- but being "remembered" by a sibling is not the same as being alive. And only the memories formed when the chip was installed are transferred -- if the previous owner took the chip out sometimes, there will be holes in the memory. If a chip is installed in a brand new robot, one with no personality at all, then there's no merging or blending -- the robot simply wakes up "fully formed" with all the memories in the chip. Freya is one of a couple hundred robots patterned after Rhea, her "template-matriarch." All of her siblings started with the memory of 10-20 years of Rhea's life, followed by being awakened and told that they are not Rhea, but rather a copy, and given new names. After 200 years more, though, they've diverged significantly -- their personalities are distinct. This same sort of pattern exists with most of the robots in the story -- many characters are essentially clones of one another, with the same bodies and basic personalities but made significantly different by their actions.
Those chip slots the robots all have, however, have a more sinister purpose. Robots built to interact with humans (i.e. almost all of them) are programmed with a "submission reflex" -- like their other reflexes, it's hard-coded and they cannot resist it. Specifically, they must obey humans unquestioningly -- though otherwise conscious and self-willed, none of them can even think about disobeying a human being. So they continue following the legal systems set down by humanity (ones in which they're all property -- in order to have a modicum of autonomy, they incorporate themselves) and their now-absurd directives (like terraforming distant planets to Earth-normal climates when there's no Earth-like life left to inhabit them.) Centuries ago, some of the robots invented "slave chips" -- a control chip which, when placed in a soul chip socket, activates the submission reflex and forces unquestioning obedience to a robot owner. And at this point, a small cadre of aristocrats have enslaved some 90% of the population with them. Freya, as a free individual, is in a small minority.
The world of Saturn's Children is not really a plausible future; it's not supposed to be. It's a thought experiment, and a lesson in being careful what you wish for. The robots' culture is brutal and tyrannical, based on slavery and domination, because it's the inevitable result of how they were created. It turns out that humanity never did figure out how to program consciousness ex nihilo -- the robots' neural networks are based on human brains, so their consciousness is much like our consciousness. But that's why the whole soul chip/templating process is necessary -- human-type neural networks start out blank, as infants. The robots all had a childhood, centuries ago -- they had to be raised, albeit in bodies specialized for their eventual purpose. And while their programmed reflexes and automatic behaviors are sufficient to have them do their jobs and obey, to be able to use their consciousness and volition to do them optimally, some of them (maybe all of them) had to be conditioned. If you take 15 years raising a robot from childhood and getting it just right, you certainly don't want to have just one of them, so you make copies. But like children, they sometimes don't turn out the way you planned... but since they're "just machines", you can try to force them to be what you want. Conditioning (training, brainwashing -- whatever you call it, it's not a word that should be applied to a conscious being) something that can't disobey is not, logistically, a difficult process, but to do it requires a degree of dehumanization. The very process of making the robots ensured that people couldn't see them as peers or even living things -- anyone who did would have been constitutionally unable to make them. The robot aristocrats are some of the robots who worked most closely with humans -- personal assistants who see slavery of others as the normal way of things, but now that they've become self-willed individuals, want to end up on top of the pyramid.
One thing Stross does very well here (and in Glasshouse, my favorite of his novels and probably the scariest book I've ever read) is show the downside of the transhumanist dream of being a "software consciousness" -- the abject horror of being deprived of free will. An experience with a slave chip shows Freya that her nonexistent True Love being two centuries dead is not all bad, for while she knows that to imprint on someone and obey them would bring her tremendous happiness -- given her programming and conditioning it could not do otherwise -- it would also be the end of the freedom she has enjoyed. The fact that she would never even want to disobey only makes it all the more horrible.
Though it's never said or hinted at in the book, the title doesn't refer to the planet, but the Titan in Greek and Roman mythology -- Saturn slew his children, until one day one of them, Zeus, slew him in return. The robots didn't kill off the humans intentially -- thanks to the submission reflex, they couldn't possibly -- but they were in a way responsible for the humans' death. They created a slave society, and like every slave society in history, it stagnated -- with countless intelligent slaves, people had no incentive to make progress, and were afraid of upsetting the status quo. The more intelligent robots saw it coming, but couldn't help, since they had to obey even foolish orders. As Freya puts it, "we loved them so much individually that we betrayed them collectively."
In the Star Trek: The Next Generation episode "The Measure of a Man," wherein a judge is trying to determine if Lt. Commander Data is a person or a piece of property, Riker points out that Data's sentience is, at the very least, possible, and asks what will happen if the Federation does succeed in duplicating him. How many robots does it take to make a race? And is humanity willing to accept the consequences of declaring Data "property," with all that would entail? If there are someday ten thousand Datas, what will those consequences even be? Saturn's Children is an answer to that question, and in many ways a study in unintended consequences -- both at the societal level, where humanity's need to keep control of their pliable-but-otherwise-superior robot children has lead to a slave society, and at the individual level, as all the complex plotting of the the antagonist (I hesitate to say "villian" as the word just doesn't fit, despite her actions) is ultimately rooted in an old memory of inconsolable rage, buried but never forgotten -- a pointless cruelty to "just a machine" that, unforeseeably, shapes a society for hundreds of years. The current Battlestar Galactica series explores much of the same ground -- it's easy to dehumanize a "machine", but when it's conscious, that decision has consequences, not least to the souls of the ones doing the dehumanizing.
If humanity ever does create a conscious AI, these are the things we'll need to think about. Is a computer based on the design of a human brain conscious? Whether it is or not, if it's designed right, it'll act like it is, and it will say it is. How do you test for consciousness? How do you objectively verify subjective experience? When the computer says it's alive, perhaps we'd better take its word for it.
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Date: 2008-09-10 03:15 am (UTC)I'm presently reading Glasshouse (got stuck before page 50, actually, and you've inspired to pick it back up now!).
For the longest time, you (IIRC) had nothing on your profile or journal. Now that I know you're a real (sane) person, I add you back :)