User Profile

Like #TedChiang's ‘Seventy Two Letters’, Babel is set in a fantastical alternative history of England during the Industrial Revolution. In Kuang's universe, the revolutionary tech is yínfúlù, silver talismans engraved with a word in one language and it's translation in another. When a bilingual utters the words, the subtle differences between their meanings are released by the silver, working magic on the physical world. “The power of the bar lies in words. More specifically, the stuff of language the words are incapable of expressing - the stuff that gets lost when we move between one language and another. The silver catches what's lost and manifests it into being.” Like in #UrsulaLeGuin's Earthsea, words have magical power, but also like Earthsea, the magic is taught to adepts in cloistered academies, in Kuang's case the Royal Institute of Translation. Translators are not only key to great leaps in productivity for British Industry, but also at the nexus of Britain's project for empire and colonisation. The empire's next target is China, and the novel opens with a boy, the only survivor of Asiatic Cholera in his Canton household, is rescued and cured with silver-work by a mysterious Englishman, Professor Lovell. The professor spirits the boy off to London, forcing him to choose an English name (Robin) and abandon his native Cantonese in favour of the more ‘useful’ Mandarin tongue. Like #PhilipPullman's The Golden Compass, the hero is a youth of ambiguous parentage, growing up in an Oxford college, mentored by a distant, dismissive father figure. He's brought up studying Latin and Greek, and afforded a ‘opportunity’ to enter the Royal Institute of Translation, with a small cohort of foreign-born multilinguals. Like the Le Guin's academy, the he finally finds recognition and love amongst his peers, and a long lost sense of belonging, a salve for his lifelong alienation. Robin loves student life, but glossing over the underlying racism of Britain in general and Oxford in particular, and ignoring the growing realisation that silver-work is a tool for oppression in the colonies and a weapon of imperial expansion, become increasingly unsustainable. He realises the ‘opportunity’ is slavery wrapped in a false promise. The novel's civilised beginnings are misleading. The tension, violence, and stakes rise inexorably amongst revelations about his origins, shadowy resistance groups, betrayal, excruciating torture, and sudden death. Ostensibly about English colonial hegemony in centuries past, the novel has a lot to say about Silicon Valley's global imperial projects of similar magnitude, digital and linguistic sovereignty violated by today's magic: machine learning in general, and natural language processing in particular. Kuang's 'Babel' is action packed, and also bristling with etymological curiosities and translation theory. I loved it not only because of its germane themes and because I'm a nerd linguist, but also because it was a great, heartrending adventure, with a great deal of resonance not only presumably for colonised people and immigrants everywhere, but anyone who's spent time bathed in alienation or crises of identity.

Walkaway by @pluralistic@mamot.fr has been described as a utopian novel in a sea of dystopian alternatives, although I'd say it's actually both utopian and dystopian. It takes place in the 'middle distance' of the future; cars are still a thing, and they have wheels that roll on the ground, space travel isn't really a thing yet - humankind is essentially still bound to the Earth. But number of current-day issues have reached their logical culmination; from mundane technology (drones everywhere, 'interface surfaces' stuck to things instead of touch-screen smartphones, 3D printer 'fabs' are ubiquitous, capable of printing machines, clothing, and food) to the Big Issues of our time: Social inequality is extreme, with the overwhelming majority of the populous trapped in a struggling middle-class of insecure wage slaves, ruled by a tiny over-class of 'zottas', the hyper-rich owners of everything, from real estate, through business and roboticized industry, to intellectual property - Thomas Picketty's "Capital in the 21st Century" taken at its word. In addition, climate change has raised sea levels, flooding major cities, and pollution has rendered others unlivably toxic - great swathes of civilisation lie abandoned and in ruins.

At this intersection of technological advancement an eco-social catastrophe, three initial protagonists, Hubert, Seth, and Natalie decide to become "walkaways", joining a 'post scarcity' movement that rejects the premises of the materialistic, hierarchical, and clearly unsustainable "default" civilisation they find themselve in, and, rather than resisting or trying to change it, they simply 'walk away', leaving behind possessions, the very idea of ownership, money, work, and social status. The walkaways have no formal structure or organisation, are simply a collection of people living ideologically and literally outside civilisation. They occupy abandoned land and using 'fabbers', FAQs, and software, construct machines, buildings, and everything else they need, using 'feedstock' scavenged from the surroundings. Designs and systems are open-sourced and constantly improved on by whoever wants to work on them. Similarly work that needs doing on their pop-up settlements, from construction to food preparation, is picked up by whoever wants to do it, helped and highlighted by ubiquitous smart technology, all powered by wind and sun.

The trio wander and learn the walkaway terrain, make friends and lovers, with imminent disaster always looming - from internal philosophical conflicts and power struggles to increasingly lethal incursions from the "default" world, which sees the walkaways as more and more of an existential threat. They discover a community of scientists working on the ultimate act of walking away - the abandonment of biological dependency; developing the means to 'scan' the important parts of a person from their neurological structure, and 'sim' them on a digital substrate - i.e. upload minds into computers, making not only material but also temporal scarcity irrelevant. The walkaways want to eliminate death, and they want to open-source it so that everyone, not just the zotta overlords, can enjoy the benefits of disembodied immortality.

As so much good science fiction is, the novel is essentially a vehicle for Doctorow to explore philosophical ideas and take them to logical conclusions. Much of the dialogue is essentially 'Socratic'; two or more characters ostensibly 'arguing' about something, as a means for the author to explore a particular set of opposing philosophical positions. The topics are wide-ranging. 'Open-source' development and organisation feature large in the walkaway world; putative meritocracies are examined through a couple of different lenses: the zotta's, personified by Natalie's father, believe themselves to have floated to the top of society by their own genius, rather than their privilege, but also the walkaways themselves debate about their own social organisation, and whether work gets done more efficiently when 'merit' is rewarded by formal kudos or by the privilege of having exclusive right to particular work. In a nice twist, those with merit are labelled 'snowflakes', an epithet currently reserved for 'bleeding-heart liberals' by the 'right' in the real world, but used in Doctorow's world to apply to decidedly right-wing capitalists and others who feel their talents grant them divine rights not shared with commoners.

The 'mind-brain' problem (complete with oriental room), of course, is given an airing, along with some discussion of the possible socio-political consequences of widespread immortality. Interestingly, although mass abandonment of biology, and social control via fear becoming impossible, are projected as the outcome of mind-uploading, these scenarios don't actually play out in the novel, and the reasons aren't directly explicated.

However, rather than have the characters duke out all the issues raised, some of them are simply 'givens' in the walkaway universe; economic inequality, the militarised police state, anthropogenic environmental catastrophe. The injustices of these have terrible consequences in the story, but they're not 'solved' by it, and this is the dystopian facet of the work. Its utopia, on the other hand, is represented by ascent of the walkways, from an underground, marginal movement, through increasing persecution as their numbers and relevance swell, to finally (and possibly too sweetly) they become the 'default' themselves, by sheer force of numbers (and of course the efficiency, justice, and 'rightness' of their way of life).

Along the way, there are lots of opportunities to explore both neat and terrible technology, including realistic extrapolations from the state of the art, and actually real (if currently less ubiquitous) things, some interesting uses, and drawbacks to, #cryptography, changes of social norms around drugs, sexuality, gender, and race. And Doctorow gets to air many of his memes - individuals failing to recycle their way out of global warming; only those who tread water against all odds surviving shipwrecks, economists being to the 1% as court astrologers were to kings...

For me it was just the right mix of the familiar with some new ideas; allowing this reader to both feel like he knows some things, but also have some new thoughts too. I imagine it would be a vindicating romp for faraday-cage-wallet-toting, gait-altering, #cyanogenmod-installing, #cypherpunk githubbers everywhere.

The only thing wrong with it is that you can't put it down. Not even if it's 3am. This is why I can't read novels - they're the original Netflix binge-watching recipe for sleep deprivation.