Read: March 2023
Loved it! It’s not a long book, and I generally like when there’s no unnecessary filling material in a book. When it doesn’t drag on. This one was almost too short, especially towards the end I was wondering how they will wrap everything up (and it did feel slightly rushed towards the end). But overall a great book. Very pleasant, quite dry writing, and a good example of “showing not telling”. For example when the characters use futuristic tech, like a kind of virtual mask that conceals your identity. Nothings over-explained.
The story is set in a slightly (?) dystopian, alternative world, where some of our current countries don’t exist, but instead are split into city states and autonomous trade zones. The different storylines unveil that the world is run by mega corporations and AI, but there are also glimpses into the day-to-day of “normal” people that just use the tech that exists and lead their own happy lives.
I particularly liked the storyline with the AI trawler. A mega ship staffed with slaves and mercenaries, steered by an AI mind whose only goal is to comb the oceans for sea protein. Previously, these ships were run by robots, but the corporation owning the ships found out maintaining and repairing robots was much more costly than kidnapping humans and forcing them to catch, gut and freeze the fish they catch. I found it fascinating how this creepy ship is described, with it’s plate-steel-protected wheelhouse and the AI mind lurking inside, continuously calculating fish stock prices, ocean currents and fish travel routes, and defending the ship from outside or inside forces with any means necessary. I guess it kind of falls into the sci-fi genre of “abandoned spaceship”, which I love.
The other story lines are also interesting - environmental protection, drone warfare, hacking, linguistics, alien minds, conscious AI.
Some quotes from the book
The great and terrible thing about humankind is simply this: we will always do what we are capable of.
Yes, guilt. It’s a revenge fantasy. We are so ashamed of what we have done as a species that we have made up a monster to destroy ourselves with. We aren’t afraid it will happen: We hope it will. We long for it. Someone needs to make us pay the price for what we have done. Someone needs to take this planet away from us before we destroy it once and for all. And if the robots don’t rise up, if our creations don’t come to life and take the power we have used so badly for so long away from us, who will? What we fear isn’t that AI will destroy us - we fear it won’t. We fear we will continue to degrade life on this planet until we destroy ourselves. And we will have no one to blame for what we have done but ourselves.
“I was a nautical engineer, before all of this. This” - He gestured around them, to the darkened, sweat-stinking barracks lurching in the storm. “This world didn’t exist. It was a story in the news. A story I clicked past without reading. Autotrawlers crewed by slave crews. Another world, a degraded shadow of our own. How was I to know there was a hole in the world that I could fall into, like falling through an open manhole? That I could fall right through that story in the news, and end up on the other side, on a planet I don’t even recognize? And become a person I don’t recognize.” “This was always there,” Eiko said, “underneath it all.”
Given time, even the stones will flow.