Joan Slonczewski, Brain Plague
Sep. 2nd, 2007 09:13 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
elfsIt's not often that I re-read a book that, while I enjoyed it, I had a struggle doing so. However, several of Joan Slonczewski's fans, one of whom I trust quite a bit, encouraged me to re-read her book Brain Plague.
The basic plot is straightforward: a middle-tier artist who has moved to her interstellar empire's capital world to be part of the art scene is accepted for an "experimental" medical procedure that, she is told, will boost her intellectual capabilities. While this is going on, a "brain plague" is moving through the population at large, a blood-borne disease that turns people into zombies who either die or mysteriously disappear. Our heroine discovers that what she is getting is, in fact, a colony of millions of sentient beings who live at speeds hundreds of times faster than she does, and their 'boost' is in fact her leeching off of their creative efforts. They don't mind, though: they can only live within a human host and she, in effect, becomes their "god," and all they do is for her well-being. The plague, it turns out, is made up of corrupt colonies of these beings who take control of their hosts pleasure centers, addicting their hosts and sending them on an involuntary religious quest to find "the Eternal Light."
From here, much personal and political hijinks
There are several problems with Brain Plague, not the least of which is the fact that Slonczewski's culture, as it is depicted, should have disappeared up the Singularity centuries ago. It's depicted as a benevolent Empire of some sort, a capitalist structure that's allowed to flourish as long as it pays its taxes. Medical technology apparently allows for the most Banksian of body modifications, but the best tech only extends human life by two centuries. They have nanotechnology in abundance-- their buildings are grown, not built, for example-- but our heroine lives near a slum and, upon getting rich off of her colony's efforts, volunteers one night a week in a soup kitchen. The wealthy suffer from problems that any capitalist worth his salt would have solved with the technology at hand-- and made a bundle doing so
The distinctions in Brain Plague are artificial : there are uplifted apes, ordinary humans, enhanced humans, hivers of a sort, sentient robots, and super-sentient AIs "who think such deep thoughts that they never deign to use human speech." And never shall the twain intertwine, apparently. Although one human and one sentient robot are depicted as "married," as are one human and one uplifted ape, any shades of grey between the two are viciously suppressed by authorial fiat in order to create inter-identity-group conflicts and politics. The characters in Brain Plague never learned Vinge's Law: "The last thing we will have to do as a species is make a machine smarter than we are." Slonczewski's characters are morally suspect: there's no particular reason that the rich need their doors and windows to be independently sentient beings, and her depiction of serving robots "kept just below the complexity at which they might 'wake up'" struck a false tone in the face of current AI research.
Almost everyone in the book is bisexual. The only strictly heterosexual character-- a character given to Liberace-esque self-aggrandizement-- is pelted in every scene he is mentioned with the epithet "medieval." He's also conveniently dead and therefore can't defend himself; his story is told in news reports and flashbacks. To add insult to injury, it turns out he was incompetent as well. The more I think about it, the more annoyed I become with it: the "war of the sexes" can be reduced to the "wrestling match of the sexes: play hard, play fair, nobody hurt" without making gender irrelevant or trivial, but Slonczewski chose instead a convention as artificial and as unrealistic as the New Soviet Man Thesis.
Slonczewski's story is supposed to be "of the far future" but, if it is, then the future was depressingly static for a long, long time. The book opens with a Future That Is Like The Present, Only Moreso. By the end of the book, interesting possibilities suggest themselves, but only suggest. Slonczewski is a very competent writer: her scenes flow, her plot works from her first principles, her characterizations are strong. But I found some of the lesser themes in her work bizarre if not downright irrational.
I was hoping, upon re-reading, to discover that I had read the story incorrectly. I had not. Instead, I found the story even more bizarre. The characters flit from starsystem to starsystem in starships as casually as you and I take a subway. Sentient AIs have a scatological problem: mentioning "waste heat" is even more offensive to them than any epithet human beings use among themselves. Despite the enormous variance among the AI characters, they're all trying to found a city on a planet for AIs only just to show the protein machines that they can. There is no investment scheme targeting poor villagers living on the backward from which heroine Chrys comes, exploring the economic value of an entire planet that it's quite cheap to exploit, no capitalist at work trying to make the universe more productive. The economy, the social structure, the moral milieu, everything about this universe exists only by authorial fiat.
There is a class of writer that does not understand how the world came to be the way it is. She looks around and see class divisions and economic segmentation and doesn't understand why those institutions exist-- and then she extrapolates, badly, from the existing to an analogous SFnal setting. Slonczewski has done that with Brain Plague, but in the process she has given her class segments and economic segments (or their progenitors) capabilities that should destroy and re-arrange the distinctions with which she's trying to analogize.
Slonczewski remains a great writer of characters and their relationships (except when she doesn't; she does a poor job of communication Chrys's social life, using it primarily as an excuse to drive her into the grubbier bars), but she introduces ideas willy-nilly into her story without really grasping the consequences of her actions.
The basic plot is straightforward: a middle-tier artist who has moved to her interstellar empire's capital world to be part of the art scene is accepted for an "experimental" medical procedure that, she is told, will boost her intellectual capabilities. While this is going on, a "brain plague" is moving through the population at large, a blood-borne disease that turns people into zombies who either die or mysteriously disappear. Our heroine discovers that what she is getting is, in fact, a colony of millions of sentient beings who live at speeds hundreds of times faster than she does, and their 'boost' is in fact her leeching off of their creative efforts. They don't mind, though: they can only live within a human host and she, in effect, becomes their "god," and all they do is for her well-being. The plague, it turns out, is made up of corrupt colonies of these beings who take control of their hosts pleasure centers, addicting their hosts and sending them on an involuntary religious quest to find "the Eternal Light."
From here, much personal and political hijinks
There are several problems with Brain Plague, not the least of which is the fact that Slonczewski's culture, as it is depicted, should have disappeared up the Singularity centuries ago. It's depicted as a benevolent Empire of some sort, a capitalist structure that's allowed to flourish as long as it pays its taxes. Medical technology apparently allows for the most Banksian of body modifications, but the best tech only extends human life by two centuries. They have nanotechnology in abundance-- their buildings are grown, not built, for example-- but our heroine lives near a slum and, upon getting rich off of her colony's efforts, volunteers one night a week in a soup kitchen. The wealthy suffer from problems that any capitalist worth his salt would have solved with the technology at hand-- and made a bundle doing so
The distinctions in Brain Plague are artificial : there are uplifted apes, ordinary humans, enhanced humans, hivers of a sort, sentient robots, and super-sentient AIs "who think such deep thoughts that they never deign to use human speech." And never shall the twain intertwine, apparently. Although one human and one sentient robot are depicted as "married," as are one human and one uplifted ape, any shades of grey between the two are viciously suppressed by authorial fiat in order to create inter-identity-group conflicts and politics. The characters in Brain Plague never learned Vinge's Law: "The last thing we will have to do as a species is make a machine smarter than we are." Slonczewski's characters are morally suspect: there's no particular reason that the rich need their doors and windows to be independently sentient beings, and her depiction of serving robots "kept just below the complexity at which they might 'wake up'" struck a false tone in the face of current AI research.
Almost everyone in the book is bisexual. The only strictly heterosexual character-- a character given to Liberace-esque self-aggrandizement-- is pelted in every scene he is mentioned with the epithet "medieval." He's also conveniently dead and therefore can't defend himself; his story is told in news reports and flashbacks. To add insult to injury, it turns out he was incompetent as well. The more I think about it, the more annoyed I become with it: the "war of the sexes" can be reduced to the "wrestling match of the sexes: play hard, play fair, nobody hurt" without making gender irrelevant or trivial, but Slonczewski chose instead a convention as artificial and as unrealistic as the New Soviet Man Thesis.
Slonczewski's story is supposed to be "of the far future" but, if it is, then the future was depressingly static for a long, long time. The book opens with a Future That Is Like The Present, Only Moreso. By the end of the book, interesting possibilities suggest themselves, but only suggest. Slonczewski is a very competent writer: her scenes flow, her plot works from her first principles, her characterizations are strong. But I found some of the lesser themes in her work bizarre if not downright irrational.
I was hoping, upon re-reading, to discover that I had read the story incorrectly. I had not. Instead, I found the story even more bizarre. The characters flit from starsystem to starsystem in starships as casually as you and I take a subway. Sentient AIs have a scatological problem: mentioning "waste heat" is even more offensive to them than any epithet human beings use among themselves. Despite the enormous variance among the AI characters, they're all trying to found a city on a planet for AIs only just to show the protein machines that they can. There is no investment scheme targeting poor villagers living on the backward from which heroine Chrys comes, exploring the economic value of an entire planet that it's quite cheap to exploit, no capitalist at work trying to make the universe more productive. The economy, the social structure, the moral milieu, everything about this universe exists only by authorial fiat.
There is a class of writer that does not understand how the world came to be the way it is. She looks around and see class divisions and economic segmentation and doesn't understand why those institutions exist-- and then she extrapolates, badly, from the existing to an analogous SFnal setting. Slonczewski has done that with Brain Plague, but in the process she has given her class segments and economic segments (or their progenitors) capabilities that should destroy and re-arrange the distinctions with which she's trying to analogize.
Slonczewski remains a great writer of characters and their relationships (except when she doesn't; she does a poor job of communication Chrys's social life, using it primarily as an excuse to drive her into the grubbier bars), but she introduces ideas willy-nilly into her story without really grasping the consequences of her actions.
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no subject
Date: 2007-09-03 07:52 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2007-09-03 10:58 pm (UTC)Don't ask me, I don't know either.
no subject
Date: 2007-09-05 05:05 pm (UTC)I think about it often when I'm baking bread.