2020, Yudhanjaya Wijeratne -- Spotify audiobook
Yudhanjaya Wijeratne is a Sri Lankan author who is able to write a story that not only gives me all the right hits I want right now in scifi, but also exposes me to ways of thinking that are outside my normal Western mindset -- I mean, the main character is a fucking non-religious Buddhist poet, for crikey's sake! And he also is able to tap into the nostalgic referential part of my brain, that I dislike / love so much. As in, he gives me plenty of references to things that are not in your "I want this to be referencing this thing because ...." but more fun little snickering asides. For example, someone names the geographical area of the planet they are exploring "Stardew Valley" without ever even hinting as to why, but you know that someone outside the experience of every actual character in the book was snickering when they named it that. I like the way this man thinks, as an author.
The book also covers three scifi topics I am digging right now: AI and the idea of machine intelligence (not to be confused with the current use of the term, i.e. shitty LLMs), that space travel and the populating of other planets could take looooong amounts of time (centuries) and corporate controlled futures.
More than a century ago, the colony ship Damn Right I Ate the Apple crashed onto a planet designated Urmagon Beta, or as I heard it, given it was an audiobook, OMG Beta ! A governmental body has hired corporate entity PCS, or Planetary Crusades Society, to recover what they can from the colony ship. Even after a century, there will be much in the way of valuable parts lying around, including just raw materials. But PCS won't invest a lot into the trip, given they might just lose the recovery crew as well, so they just send four: three bargain basement humans paying off debts and wrought with personal issues, and an AI called Amber Rose 348. They are a "cheaper" version of AI, in that they are a human consciousness transferred to machine at the end of the person's life. That means the AI comes with some human response, something truly artificial intelligence cannot recreate (intuition, spontaneous creativity, etc.) but with all the upgraded value of a bigger brain machine. They are also working off a debt, and hoping this job will pay enough release them from their contract.
They land with the basic tools of survival: a fabricator which can turn any raw material into useful goods, a lander buggy and some bots, which Amber Rose can control wholesale. The idea is that everything they need can just be recovered from the environment, including materials for shelter and food. PCS did not want to invest more than it hoped to recover, so their gear is not really current state. Neither is Amber Rose for that matter.
The humans are assholes. Milo, an engineer and a major prick, Simon, geologist and deferential sort who grew up in a VR simulation, and Anna, not her real name, assigned as medic. They don't get along, which frustrates Amber Rose, who generally sees itself as The Boss (or "OC"), to no end. Through a lot of negotiating, emotional support and downright yelling OC gets them to do the basic things like setup a base camp, gather raw materials, and not shoot every other living thing they bump into on the planet.
Three living things they do need to shoot -- the giant megasloth creature, weird bug wolf creatures and Mercers -- cyborg mercenaries who were probably also sent there to recover the colony shift, for another corporate entity. But the Mercers landed a while ago and .... something has happened to them, something has ... infected them.
The plot is rather contained: survival, recovery, conflict. The interaction, between humans and otherwise, constantly shifts between contentious and pragmatic and while I usually don't like stories where everyone (except OC) is an asshole, everyone here is sympathetic... well, maybe not Milo, but in the end he does redeem himself. The antagonist turns out not to be the Mercers but something that has been on the planet for much much MUCH longer than human incursions -- an AI entity, something vast and representing an unknown and probably brain achingly ancient alien society. Humans are bugs, and OC is just above that designation. But eventually they come to an understanding.
The audiobook was read by Nathan Fillion, an actor I already defer to considering his body of work, but his easy voice lends itself well to the voice of OC, and as the narrator. The author's voice is also easy, digestible and speckled with pop culture references, not always my own, but relatable. OC is constantly spouting off Buddhist inspired poetry, and going on about Good Karma and Bad Karma. They are obviously once-human but also so very very not-human. Its one of my favourite representations of Artificial Intelligence in quite some time.
If there was anything I didn't like about the book, it was the ending, where OC and crew (well, who is left alive) and their story shifts to the emergence of this planetary sized AI entity and it making use of OC as an ambassador to the rest of the human dominated galaxy. The story shifts from small scale to vast impact too quickly for me, and is summed up too quickly, mainly by way of an epilogue.
I really need to read/listen to more of his stuff, but will focus on his print text for now, as he is a writer with a fascination for current AI / LLM models, and actually used them to write OC's poetry. I am curious to see how an author with such mentality lays out his printed books.
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