ENGL 334 Science Fiction

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All Systems Red, by Martha Wells

Novel Background

  • Another Tor.com novella
  • Won Both Hugo and Nebula in 2018
  • Martha Wells is the first A&M alum to win either for fiction
  • Additional Hugo and Nebula winners w/ Aggie connections
    • Gene Wolfe also won Hugo & Nebula Awards
      • But didn’t graduate
    • Brad W. Foster
      • Hugo for best fan art 8 times
  • Texas A&M has a long connection to the history of SF
  • The Science Fiction & Fantasy Collection in Cushing Library is the largest collection of rare SF material in the world
    • Contains, amongst other things, all of George R.R. Martin’s drafts of the Game of Thrones novels (and a bunch of prop swords from the film)
    • The Cushing collection started as the Corp of Cadets SF lending library, that a cadet kept in his dorm room and handed off over the years. Eventually, someone realized that a lot of the material was rare and it was donated to the library.
  • AggieCon is the largest student-run science fiction convention in the world

Themes

  • Netflix/TV
    • 9 (“I could have … terrible failure”)
    • 50 (“Yes, instructions … should go along”)
    • 79 (“On the entertainment feed, this is what they call an ‘oh shit’ moment.”)
    • 80 (“No, it’s definitely hacked … more reason to trust it”)
    • 82 (“I think that’s what happened … wouldn’t happen again”)
    • 109 (“Everyone was … from here”)
    • 116-7 (“What was I supposed .. without the other”)
    • 141-2 (“I went to finish … PreservationAux”)
  • Cyborg – Murder Bot is a cyborg: a cybernetic organism, part human; part machine
    • 11 (“She was unconscious … out of the crater”)
    • 15 (“Hubsystem … wasn’t hacked”)
    • 16 (“Arada pulled … staring at me”)
    • 34 (“That’s another reason … unless they had to”)
    • 35 (“Confession time … I don’t care”)
    • 71 (“Then my organic parts … They’d put me on the table?”)
  • Corporate
    • 13 (“I didn’t want to put … on the grass”)
    • 25-6 (“I don’t care much … do about it”)
    • 82 (“I didn’t want to explain … wouldn’t happen again”)
    • 90-1 (“Even if the company … furniture”)
  • Awkward
    • 14 (“Humans and augmented humans … dragged Volescu inside.”)
  • Anxiety
    • 19 (“Then someone knocked … I watch”)
    • 20 (“So, I’m awkward … no one wants to see them”)
    • 21 (“On the feed … unnecessary interactions”)
    • 33 (“They all looked … giant hostiles”)
    • 40 (“The conversation … talk to humans”)
    • 55 (“I slid out of the seat … didn’t notice”)
  • Heroism
    • 66 (“Maybe these clients … smart thing to do”)
    • 73 (“She ignored me … entertainment feed”)
  • Seeing Himself
    • 77 (“A diagnostic … at some point”)
    • 85 (“I was still watching through … from this room?”)
  • Human
    • 83 (“It calls itself Murder Bot … we’d notice”)
    • 143 (“I had never … It smelled good, too”)
    • 145 (“My clients … normal clothes”)
    • 145-6 (“If people … when you get home”)
    • 147 (“I didn’t know … to want”)
    • 148 (“You’d be my guardian … than owner”)
  • Aliens
    • 135 (“Bharadwaj … what GrayCris wanted.”)

Conclusions

The philosopher Jean-Francois Lyotard said that artificial intelligence will only be truly intelligent when it has the ability to suffer. I think that’s key to understanding this novella. What interests me about it is how much Murder Bot resembles us: he’d rather be watching Netflix; he’d rather not do the thing.

This resemblance makes me think that Wells has intensified the cyberpunk aesthetic (corporate future, indifference to the wonder of space travel, etc.) in a way that signals how normalized this aesthetic has become. The important innovation Wells specifically offers, as well, is in making the more-human-than-human AI (Murder Bot, here) not evil, as we saw with Wintermute in Gibson, but is instead extremely normal.

Again, however, Wells connects to the longer and older tradition of using robots to map the limits of the human, something that becomes specific in the end of the novel, as the notes above indicate. I also think there’s a lot to think about in the context of this novel with regards to how Murder Bot figures out how to be human from watching television.

Finally, I think the novel, as we enter an age with Siri and other “smart” home technologies, asks the question: what debt do we owe to our smart machines?