lightreads

The Terraformers

3/5. Sold as a novel, but really this is three connected novellas set on a planet over several centuries as it is terraformed, settled, corporatized, and gentrified.

I ought to have liked this more than I did. It’s occupying space I like – stories concerned with exploitation of resources and people, stories that creatively move beyond original flavor humanity, stories set over longer periods of time. But I was indifferent to this. There’s a quality to Newitz’s writing here – growing in their last few books – that is just not to my taste. Something a little self-consciously weird, maybe? Too much time talking about how everyone’s bodies are modified beyond our imagination, not enough time spent on the social consequences? Not quite right either. Some of it lands well – there’s a sex scene in this book between two people with very different parts and expectations and notions of gender, but meeting in a shared appreciation and interest in pleasure and togetherness, and that was lovely. But most of it fell flat for me.

Autonomous

3/5. In a near future dystopia, a rogue chemist retroengineers the latest miracle drug that is supposed to make you love your job, with disastrous results. Meanwhile, the commando/robot team hunting her down are also busy falling into a romantic relationship with each other.

This book is doing a lot of things, and pretty much all of them hate capitalism. But I’m going to focus on the hot human on robot action, because it’s the most interesting to me. Largely because I think a subset of the tumblr generation would really, really hate it. I’m talking about the sort of people who sincerely argue that a nineteen-year-old going after a seventeen-year-old is by definition a rapist (no really, this is an actual argument). Or that if a person has a glass of wine and then has sex, they’ve been categorically and unarguably raped. (I swear to God, I am not exaggerating these arguments). These are the people who think that any relationship where the parties don’t come to it on precisely equal footing in terms of power is coercive to the point of being immoral to tell stories about, let alone have. Which is a valuable thought experiment to engage in when one is learning to understand rape culture. And an actively counterproductive, not to mention toweringly stupid, framework to apply to, you know, the actual rape culture we actually live in and actually have to deal with and form actual relationships in the context of.

All of this is to say that the human/robot romance is told by the robot, who doesn’t get her “autonomy key” – control over her own programming – until she has already made a number of key decisions about her gender presentation, her sexuality, her interest in getting involved with her partner. And then she gets her key and can revisit those decisions without running some of the ‘masterlove’ subroutines programmed into her. This book is about that stuff – being a self when someone else can edit you, by programming or by drugs. And the tumblr people I’m talking about above would just not be able to cope with the complexity of that, as presented here. With the compromises people make in order to survive inside different kinds of coercion, and how coming out the other side is never as clean or triumphant or simple as people want it to be. Which I guess makes sense since those tumblr people aren’t able to cope with the complexity of actual life, as far as I can tell.

Anyway, this book is doing a lot – too much, actually – and I wish it had a different editor, maybe. But what it’s doing is interesting.