Some thought on Sci-Fi I like and Peter Watts.

Sci-fi is my favourite genre. Why? I think a few reasons:

• good sci-fi touches on the human condition, morality and reality
• good sci-fi explores ideas about the world. Characters/events are mostly a mechanism for that exploration. That makes it uniquely information dense compared to, say, fantasy which is mostly narrative stories about individuals.
• good sci-fi imagines genuinely different people’s, ideas and worlds. This is valuable because it puts into stark contrast what the beliefs of your own society and time and place are. It’s this contrast which can make you aware for the first time that certain things you assume about the world could be wrong.

One of my favourite examples of this is a book called “The Mote in God’s Eye”. It’s not particularly well written. The stories and characters are mid at best. It’s not even meant to be a horror book. Still, it was one of the most frightening books I read and more lovecraftian than lovecraft. The premise is simple. In the far future there’s a neo-feudal star empire of humans with space ships and laser swords and not much else. There’s star in a nebula. It’s uninhabited and unreachable by FTL drive most of the time. Something that seems like a strong laser signal comes from the star. A human ship is sent to explore it during a rare open window. What they find is a race of sentient creatures they name “moties”. At first the moties seem primitive. Then the humans discover evidence of layers upon layers of civilization. They come to the realization that the moties have existed far longer than humanity has. As a result, they’ve also evolved far longer. They’re not stuck in the dreamtime, where contraceptives + higher econ growth mean that individuals no longer live at the malthusian frontier. Rather, they spent enough time there for evolution to ruthlessly select for motes who didn’t just desire sex, but desired children specifically. As a consequence they live in a constant life or death struggle to survive, eat and procreate. Alliances exist but are usually limited by degree of blood relation. All games are ultimately zero sum as every large group of moties expands until they hit the limits of their environment and then erupt in war. Civilization slowly advances until they hit nuclear weapons, they then destroy themselves before repeating they cycle. Every generation a few “Crazy Eddies” come along who castrate themselves and try to do something beyond optimise for children, but those are few and far between. For individual moties, even ones smarter than humans, their evolutionary drives are much stronger than ours. They’re conscious, but have much less scope for choice. Imagine a human heroin addict who will sell their own children for another hit because that single drive has drowned out almost every other drive a normal human has. Now imagine a whole species like that. Moloch in the flesh.

Peter wats has written a fair bit. A few of his stories/worlds:

• The Freeze-Frame revolution: how do you coordinate an uprising when you’re only awake one day out of a million and under constant, total surveillance.
• The rifters trilogy: Psychologically broken people sent to the bottom of the ocean to work on a geo-thermal energy plant. Organs replaced/modified. They slowly change. The world is on the edge of singularity. The rifters slowly realize something is off.
• Firefall: First contact. A near future earth with p-zombie soldiers, near strong AI, a collapsing climate and war. A ship hastily constructed sent out to meet a large object entering the edge of the solar system. Are all intelligences conscious?

All his books are interesting and I think that’s because they all do a few things well:

• Genuinely try to imagine alien/non-human minds. Whether it’s the intelligence at the edge of the solar system in Firefall or the brain-cheeses (neural-net AI’s) in rifters, when he has non-human minds they are genuinely non human. They don’t have objectives anywhere like ours. Their capabilities are likewise drastically different. Sometimes far beyond humans. Other times just orthogonal. Drastically better in some respects, drastically worse in others. (The aliens in firefall are an especially good example of this, and example which raises genuinely profound questions about consciousness and identity, but spoileys so won’t go into it).
• All his worlds have the feeling of being on the cusp of singularity. We see them through the eyes of characters and over a short period of time. Still, even then we notice that the pace of change seems frightening. Read in between the lines and they all seem like worlds where humans, both individually and as a collective, are on the verge of loosing control or may have already lost it without realizing. Just as humanity farmed for 10k years until the industrial revolution suddenly shifted farming from 90+% of working age adults to under 10%, so we get to see a society on a similar cusp and get to feel how powerless humans feel in response to changes driven by inevitable advances in tech and game theoretic equlibria which mean every actor has an incentive to keep climbing the tech tree regardless of where it leads.
• His characters are different and strange and broken. Usually that’s not a plus for me. But for him it is because they broken here is used less to generate meaningless interpersonal conflict and more to examine underlying patterns and unconscious behaviors that underlie a lot of human interaction but only become explicit in the pathological cases.
• He doesn’t seem to care about coming across as serious. His books freely fly through an imagined worlds and explore ideas. I think the best example of this is Vampires in firefall. How do vampires exist in a fairly hard sci-fi book? Simple. They’re predatory homonids which ate humans in the ancestral past. They died out during the ice age or after the transition to agriculture. We revived them from frozen samples in the mid 22nd century. They’re more intelligent than humans, basically autistic in the same way as orangutans due to their solitary nature through their evolutionary history, but can emulate and fit in to human conversation/social interaction despite actually not feeling/understanding many of the sound they’re making when they talk. Oh yeah, and vampires being afraid of crosses? They have a specific kind of epilepsy triggered by right-angles. Nature doesn’t have right angles so no selection against it.