Book Reviews #6 The Singularity Project (Busby) / #7 Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? (P. Dick)

[kangeiko]

The Singularity Project
by F. M. Busby

*

Mitch Banning is a science journalist, writing up the crazy inventions of crackpots and tinkerers. He gets wind of a new project that involves an old school enemy and a conman who may or may not be on the straight and narrow. The invention is - put simply - a transporter device, beaming things back and forth. Mitch smells a con and sets out to figure out what's going on.

This book is a bit of a disappointment after the sharp, tight writing of the Hulzein / Kerguelen saga. It aims at a cross between noir and sci-fi, and unfortunately achieves neither. A big part of that is the large amount of detail about the technological advances that help and/or hinder the protagonist's quest. One large focus, for instance, is the problem of communication on the go: Mitch is in his shiny lovely car, on the way to a secret place (tm), and he is in contact with a terrible, crazy noir-esque villain by the monicker 'The Hornet', and he can't communicate with his back-up... because he's in a car. They end up jury-rigging some walkie-talkies, but 'cellphones' are deemed too expensive. Other, similar issues: computers and circuitry with tons of wires (Mitch deals with It security as well) but no mention of remote access; difficulties in verifying identities; strangely 80s attitudes to transgender persons -

Basically, the book was exceedingly grounded in 80s technology and a vision of the future that included matter transporters straight out of Star Trek, but the practicalities of communication and social relations remained static. This made it age exceedingly badly, as it is difficult to take the characters' problems seriously when the setting is supposed to be 'the future' and yet mobile phones still seem miraculous. It doesn't help, of course, that matter transporters actually exist (albeit still only really capable of transporting homogenous molecules at most - but that lets plastics get through...) and so the big fuss over their implications seems a little bit simplistic. Having commercialised the technology, it is difficult to conceive of using it to transport people to the moon... because, well, we wouldn't move people. Understanding the huge amounts of power it requires to even transport a small plastic figurine makes using it for mass transport of machinery etc unlikely. Essentially, the book is lopsided in its understanding of the science involved, mainly because it was written when the science did not yet exist. This is, however, still a serious weakness. It detracts from what would otherwise be a serviceable noir murder mystery, complete with femme fatale (who just happens to be transgender)... but, again, the science lets the plot down. What magic pills would 'Veronica' have had to ingest to grow an impressive bust in just a few days? Moreover, what magic pills would make said bust disappear more or less overnight?

Buzz attempts a great many things with this book, and it is a shame that they don't work. However, even at my most charitable I cannot deny it.



*

Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep
By Philip K. Dick
 
And then you have noir and sci-fi the way it's supposed to be done. Perhaps it is because the environmental theme is still a serious contender in the many dystopic visions of our future: take away the planet, it's greenness and animals, and you are left with the cold, sterile future of DADoES and the Mars trilogy and any other number of sci-fi books. Androids is a classic, of course, and with good reason. It fixates on several themes that are now more relevant than ever: human empathy, the environment, and AI.

1. Human Empathy
The empathy boxes and Mercer are genius creations. We already have scratch & sniff products, surround sound/experience TV - hell, even daytime television seems deliberately set out to make you cry for no apparent reason. We medicate ourselves when we are depressed, and medicate ourselves when we are too happy, and generally aim at a level, unemotional calmness that usually indicates you're a little numb inside. The empathy boxes scared the living daylights out of me, because the technology is almost there to create them - you can already transmit sounds, images and even smells; some even claim to be able to transmit mental impressions. How far away is the transmission of emotion (or, at the very least, a regulation of it through a small box with a variety of mood regulators inside)? And how addictive would such a device be, given today's values?

2. The Environment
The emphasis on live animals is fascinating. Deckard tests the andy's responses to the destruction of animals to see if they are human or not, and it is the disregard for life that is the deciding factor. How many of us would pass such a test, if it were administered to us today? Very few, I would suspect. I argued about compassion fatigue in various other posts, so I'm not going to rehash it here, but merely stress the point that excessive images of suffering and horror simply deadens the human empathetic response. Show us enough death and carnage and, sooner or later, we stop caring. To make us care for the environment, then - to care about the life of a spider - would require a long, long time without seeing such a being. To care about other life would require a long, long time without seeing life suffer - or life at all, really. It is easy to care about a goat if goats are rare and precious commodities. It is less easy when money or houses are the rare and precious commodities you are trying to accummulate.

3. AI
For the longest time, I wondered if Deckard was an andy. I suspected not, because of his despair. Having observed the andies in the book, they struck me as being capable of emotion, but generally immune to the more crippling ones. They managed passion and fear and rage, for instance - adrenaline emotions - but had trouble with empathic hurt and despair and faith. In short, they were humanity mark 1 - where baseness rules their responses. Fight or f**k or feed. It is only later that the other emotions - not relating to the body, but to the mind - develop. The child cries not because it is hungry or tired, but because it feels abandoned and wants to be held. So, when Ray and Rachel start displaying these other emotions - in conjunction with their coldness in some other matters - it is a cognitive shock. You cannot slot them into a neat hole, because they are displaying things like emotional attachment and hurt at an emotional rejection. At the same time, though, they are capable of displaying a shocking disregard for life: torturing the spider; killing the goat.

Except... well. How is that different from what we understand as 'human'?

Overview -
Overall, I greatly enjoyed this, and it made me think on quite a few topics. I am interested in seeing the movie now, although I understand it to be very different indeed.