Twelve Tomorrows

Twelve Tomorrows. Wade Roush, editor. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2018. Technology Review TRSF series #5.

Reviewed by Dominick Grace, our source here, SFRA Review 50.1 (Winter 2020).[1][2]

Eleven stories and a piece on Samuel R. Delany. Grace tells us that "The remit of the series, as explained on the series website is to offer 'original stories that explore the role and potential impact of developing technologies in the near, and not-so-near future.'"[3]

In the anthologized stories "implications of computer technology innovations [...] loom large," and "Several are about AI, or variations thereof," notably Paul "McAuley’s 'Chine Life,' offers a far future in which AI has mostly supplanted humanity and has split into factions, one of which wants humanity eradicated and the other of which ostensibly wants to help, but literally colonizes the bodies of human beings in order to do so."

In "Resolution," Clifford V. Johnson presents a story "told in comic format" where "an alien invasion goes unnoticed because the aliens [...] have passed themselves off as the AI the protagonist thought she had developed." Elizabeth Bear's "Glory, Glory" features a hacked AI that is fooled into believing a catastrophe has occurred and therefore confines the rich recluse who owns it "to his impregnable fortress of a house, until he pays the hacker/extortionists $150,000,000." For the confinement motif, cf. and strongly contrast Colossus, with a more sophisticated and, let's say, take-charge supercomputer.

"Sarah Pinsker’s 'Caring Seasons' also involves smart tech" that may or may not be AI "run amok, as it presents a retirement facility in which the medical protocols designed to protect residents instead become the tools that imprison them." Another AI story is J.M. Ledgard’s “Vespers,” where humankind's first interstellar spacecraft is "run by an AI that spends the story ruminating about its situation," for which cf. and contrast such AIs as Ship from HAL 9000 of 2001 as film and novel to Mayflies to the conscious Ship Minds in The Culture (novel series).[4]

Computer technology gets a twist in Ken Liu’s “Byzantine Empathy,” featuring cryptocurrencies that might be co-opted "to serve charitable ends — or [...] to allow one charitable organization to become the most powerful charitable organization in the world — by melding social media and giving," which we will note already occurs on FaceBook. Liu Cixin’s "Fields of Gold" features "the accidental launch of a woman into space on a doomed voyage" that could "unite the world in an attempt to reach the stars, but we ultimately learn that the real woman is long dead and replaced by a computer simulation" — which we'll suggest has a sentimental appeal that could be compared and contrasted with "The Cold Equations," and whose motif of a program on the borderline of human might be seen as a tragic variation on Max Headroom, and with a computer simulation used more nefariously in Eclipse Corona where a dead religious charlatan is simulated.

Alastair Reynolds's “Different Seas” "carries remote control to an extreme by positing humanoid helpers that can be inhabited remotely to aid people in crisis," for which (again our suggestion) cf. and contrast Frederik Pohl's "The Day the Icicle Works Closed" and his 1974 "We Purchased People"[5] A potentially more positive work in the anthology has drones used for rescue: Malka Older’s "Disaster Tourism."

Note also Nnedi Okorafor's "The Heart of the Matter," where an artificial heart may be seen as a useful advance, or used politically with "credulous equations of new technology with witchcraft." Cf. and contrast the continuing symbolic possibilities of hearts in, for an obvious example, IRON MAN.

RDE, with thanks to Dominick Grace, finishing, 22Oct21