J. E. Landau

I’ve been doing the Bradbury challenge, both versions, and as a part of that I’ve been reading a lot of sci-fi short stories. I picked up a copy of the anthology Year’s Best SF 17, which was published in 2012 and edited by David G. Hartwell and Kathryn Cramer.

The lineup includes some authors who I was already familiar with, like Ken Liu, Nnedi Okorafor, Neil Gaiman, and Yoon Ha Lee, and a lot more that I was not familiar with, and there were a lot of good stories. I think if I had to choose a single favorite, it would probably be Laika’s Ghost by Karl Schroeder or The Ki-Anna by Gwyneth Jones, which were both very nice, strange stories that I found emotionally engaging and also quite intellectually interesting. Overall, I’d recommend the collection.

But it’s also very interesting to think of the collection as a bit of a time capsule. After all, the stories were all written 15 years ago, and they reflect the ideas and zeitgeist of that time.

In particular, I think that The Best Science Fiction of the Year Three by Ken MacLeod, Dolly by Elizabeth Bear, Laika’s Ghost by Karl Schroeder, and The War Artist are all based in contexts that no longer quite make sense, and so they’re instructive when looking back at the way the people of the past looked forward. I’m also about to mercilessly spoil all of them, so consider this your warning.

To start with Year Three, it’s a story set after a vaguely-described mutualist revolution takes over in France, and a far-right revolution takes over in the US. An American science fiction editor is visiting a bunch of expatriate and exiled American science fiction writers, hoping to recruit them for an anthology, and the protagonist considers his offer.

At the end of the story, the French government demonstrates a flying saucer with an antigravity device, and the demonstration goes wrong, revealing the saucer to be a fake. But the protagonist notes that the demonstration required the ability to predict the weather perfectly months in advance, and it’s implied that he worked on this project himself. Then, he notes that the American editor was likely trying to recruit him into a guerilla movement against the revolution.

The story is an interesting little yarn, although I think it’s actually one of the weakest in the collection. Because of the two revolutions, which are clearly different but only described as “the Revolution”, it’s very difficult to tell what anyone means when they say anything, and after three reads I am still not absolutely confident that the US and French revolutions are separate, or if there was some global revolution instead. On the other hand, I think that this story displays a distinctly 2011 view of smartphones and the way that people interact with them.

First of all, the characters have smartphones, and they call them phones instead of “tablets” or “pocket computers” or something like that, and I think that this is a predictive win on MacLeod’s part. The first modern smartphone only came out in 2007, and it was a sea change that I don’t think everyone had caught up with in 2011. The relationship of the characters to their phones, however, is alien. Today, our smartphones are integrated with us, and instead of using them as tools our primary use for them is as an umbilical connecting us to the planetary overmind. All of our communications glocally flow through our phones, that is to say, we use our phones to communicate not just with people who are far away, but people who are immediately there, and the phone does not really exist for us so much as it is an invisible connection to the online things that really exist. This is why in dreams it is rare for people to use phones, and it is fairly common to carry out “psychic texting” where you use the interfaces of your phone without actually holding the phone in the dream.

To contrast, MacLeod’s story has the phone as a discrete object, which is only ever used by a tool. Characters “exchange phone numbers”, which is something that is almost completely obsolescent due to social media. The protagonist “put[s] on his earpiece and fire[s] up his phone” to place a call, instead of always having it waiting at his fingertips, barely on the edge of his consciousness. At one point, a character does a spectral analysis of the flying saucer to determine what it was made of, which is certainly possible today, but not a capability that I think hardly anyone has.

I think that in general, the story did a really good job of predicting that smartphones would kick off and that everyone would have one, but failed to guess how ephemeral and ubiquitous they would be, and more generally failed to predict the ways that software would become ephemeral, hidden, and ubiquitous. The protagonist’s rebel friend is described as working with “free software start-ups” to change the world. Today, these free software groups are a dying breed, and the techno-liberal future they promised, where everything would be libre if not gratis, is farther away than ever, and the story predicted that. But the exact way they would be made irrelevant, I think, with the closing-off of tech and the way that we are now constantly surrounded by thousands of black boxes, was not predicted.

The next story I’d like to talk about is Dolly by Elizabeth Bear, which is a story about a robot that killed its owner. The robot was a domestic servant robot, abused sexually by its owner, and which is eventually shown to be intelligent by the protagonist, who experiences an uncomfortable parallel with her own (less-advanced service robot).

The protagonist notes that while it is unambiguous that Dolly killed her owner, any human would be justified in doing so, and seeks to have Dolly found innocent on that basis.

The story is a classic robot-kills-human story, and I think that it was very well written. The emotional core of the story is strong, and the serious subject matter is treated with appropriate gravity. I also appreciate that it doesn’t beat around the bush. A lot of more recent stories have had a whole lot of pointless wondering and denial, while in this story the two protagonists are reasonable people who think about it reasonably.

However, I think that like most stories about intelligent machines, it hasn’t aged very well. We live in an era where we have artificial intelligence systems which are very, very good at beating the Turing test. In a lot of ways, that’s sort of their primary “thing”. Now, most experts (the ones with degrees, not the ones who strode confidently out of the tech industry into the podcast circuit, probably with industry backing, too) agree that modern LLMs are not “conscious” or “sentient” in the way that we are, but when pressed, most don’t have great ways of identifying systems that are, and I suspect that in our future a case like Dolly’s would be far less sympathetic. This is another case where the future projected in the science fiction story is no longer possible, because society has changed in ways that the author did not predict, and a way in which our expectations for the future have changed.

Laika’s Ghost is perhaps more prescient. The story concerns a man who is working to prevent the secret of “metastable explosives” from being leaked, while also working to protect a man who discovered a mysterious Soviet pyramid on Mars. It’ a bizarre conspiracy thriller set in the former Soviet Union and also, more notably, in a world where nation-states are competing with supranational organizations like the UN.

The protagonist does some investigation in the metastable explosives, and finds himself tailed by members of the Soviet Union Online, a group that seeks to resurrect the USSR in digital form, and also encounters a local group trying to use old Soviet bunkers for ecological reconstruction work, while hiding his protectee, called “the last astronaut” from the FBI in a world where Kessler Syndrome has cut off access to space. At the end of the story, it all comes together, and it’s revealed that the pyramid on Mars was actually a Soviet Mars colony, made of concrete and launched with a nuclear thunderwell (https://nuclearweaponarchive.org/Usa/Tests/Plumbob.html). It’s revealed that the environmentalists are associated with the Soviet Union Online, which then launches another thunderwell to Mars, to live in the colony there, using the advanced metastable explosives, and the astronaut decides to come with them, because his own future in space has been denied by Kessler Syndrome.

Laika’s Ghost is, in itself, a story about lost futures, but it describes a lost future in itself, I think. The story is weirdly prescient about the idea of digital nations, something which has been done at varying degrees of seriousness and which is closely connected with blog regular Balaji Srinivasan’s Network State concept, but the idea that it would take the form it does in this story, as a legitimately powerful alternative to states, is laughable. Similarly, the idea of non-state actors like the United Nations being powerful enough to shelter people from governments without the support of another nation is no longer plausible.

Still, I would strongly recommend Laika’s Ghost. It really struck a chord with me, especially since I am currently living in a world of canceled futures.

It is also very similar to The War Artist, which I have less to say about, but which is set in a world where many countries have experienced economic collapses due to cyberattacks which were then followed by US-led international military intervention that sets up a new economic regime, likely as a form of colonialism (and the characters in the story believe that the US is, itself, behind the cyberattacks). To me, this story is very similar to Laika’ s Ghost, but I think that it is actually about a future that was no longer plausible even when it was written in 2011. The idea of the US-NATO bloc as a single hyperpower crushing the entire world was set firmly in the End of History era, which was over long before it was written.

Looking at these stories, I think that the through-line is that they failed to predict how traditional systems of control would reassert themselves. In Year Three, the new, revolutionary governments (representing the old order) are being seriously fought by open-source. In Dolly, the robot’s personhood can be established unambiguously, instead of being something muddled by corporate PR. In Laika’s Ghost, UN organizations and online nation are able to contend with traditional nations, instead of beings tools or ignored. And in The War Artist, a single nation is slowly but surely crushing all others, while today we live in a multipolar world.

The philosopher Mark Fisher wrote about hauntology, which is the idea that we are “haunted” by futures that were predicted, but never came to past, and I think that the study of any old science fiction is a study in hauntology, because science fiction is about predicting the future, and it I impossible to predict the future perfectly accurately, so every time we write science fiction we are preparing future ghosts.

In my opinion, this anthology shows a great expectation of political change, which went unfulfilled. While the world has changed, the political systems that rule it are essential the same as the ones that came before. Nobody was able to build things outside the system and overwhelm it. Large companies continue to control the way that we think about technology. State organizations continue to be the most powerful forces on the global scale. And so, Year’s Best SF 17 is a collection of ghosts.