Alt-Media: The Salvage Crew

2020,  Yudhanjaya Wijeratne -- Spotify audiobook

Much of this blog is me bemoaning how something was "just OK" or "meh" or "just terrible". And then, when I really enjoy something, I find it hard to say why. But this one, this one deserves me writing something about it, because I fucking loved it so much, so much so, I have added the printed hardcover to my "gifting wishlist", because when she asks me, "What do you want for your birthday?" I so often just shrug, "Nothing. I don't want any thing." This. I want this thing.

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.

Alt-Media: Mickey7

2022, Edward Ashton -- audiobook

Lo and behold, I actually listened to a 9 hour audio book over the last few weeks, during commutes and while running errands. I have literally never listened to one before, not completely because of bias (admittedly, I do think proper "reading" and "listening" are two separate methods of absorbing the "written" word) but due an assumption of costs. Then I noticed that Spotify does more than audio-drama podcasts, and has a good number of books to listen to, I gave it a go. And, having enjoyed the movie and being curious about the original book, I thought, "Why not."

First thing up, and no it's not "the book is better" -- oh, it is, but the first thing I need to get off my chest is that the reader of an audiobook should not do the voices. For one, leave it to the reader to put his own voice on the characters speaking. And secondly, a man doing a "girl voice" just sounds terrible, unless you are going for comedic effect, and at worst it ends up telling us about your latent misogyny. If an author is not able to impart upon you an accent or vocal characterization from the actual words used, then a reader should assume everyone has the same flat accent.

Mickey 7 is not the movie, and nor should it have been -- sorry, that's an inverse statement; the movie was not the book. But, of course, it is the core from which the movie came. Mickey Barnes is an expendable, forced to join a colony ship after making the wrong bet on his best friend / greatest enemy's sports game. Berto is an athletic, capable, confident and extremely arrogant man who has Mickey always in his shadow. Berto comes out of sports retirement to play one last game before he joins the colony ship on its way to Niflheim. He wants to leave his name in legendary status on their colony of Midgard, but Mickey, who secretly despises his friend's good fortune, doesn't think Berto stands a chance at winning. He bets large. He loses, and the money he now owes means he only has one chance -- get off Midgard. Mickey knows there is no possibility of  finding a "real" job on the ship, because he doesn't really have any skills, so he signs up as Expendable, a crew member whose job it is to die on behalf of the colony. Each time he dies, he will be vat grown again, and his last memory backup downloaded into the new body. 

Its an expensive concept, and each new body requires a lot of resources. Its also a very very sociably unacceptable concept, and most people think the idea is insane. And there is a religious (not cult, accepted religion!) organization that is actually entirely against the idea. Its all because the creation of the technology started with a genius sociopath dropping himself, and his tech, on a planet where he began to kill off the local populace, to provide raw source material for duplicates of himself. When the rest of the colonial Union learned of what had happened, they responded by destroying the planet and banning the process except in the most controlled environments.

The crux of the rules is that "multiples" cannot exist -- only one iteration of a person at a time. They only create a new Mickey if the old one dies. But Berto is lazy and risk averse, so when he sees Mickey stumble into a deep crevasse on Niflheim, he assumes the man must be dead. Mickey's girlfriend Nasha knows he survives the fall, but Mickey assures her he cannot get out of the hole, so he will "pop his seals" and die. Except he doesn't. He is "rescued" by the local lifeform called "creepers", giant millipede like bugs. Well, until this one rescues Mickey, they were all assumed to be arm length and non-intelligent. Buuuut because that leaves "Mickey 7" alive when he shouldn't be, Mickey doesn't disclose this detail about the creepers until much later.

Much of the middle act of the book, if you can liken books to having acts, is Mickey7 and Mickey8 dealing with their situation. Unlike the movie, there is not a vast personality difference, but both of the men believe they deserve to exist and they know they have to hide their existence. There is a lot of focus on how hungry they both end up being, because food is rationed and the colony leader Commander Marshall, who is not the pompous ex-politician of the movie, just your usual gruff, angry military style man who is a member of the anti-Expendable religion, but also knows he requires one on the mission, has it in for Mickey and doesn't need much of an excuse to punish the man.

There is also a lot of world building / exposition, as Mickey fills in the details around colonization since "the Diaspora" had to abandon Earth. Most colonies fail. And all colonies are very very VERY far from each other; even with their close to unlimited engine reserves and extreme speed of space travel, it takes years, if not decades to reach other possibly habitable worlds. "Possibly" is a key point, as they only have the long range sensor data, and that doesn't always mean much. Many colonies arrive only to die off or be killed off by local life forms or the environment. Some die on the way or are lost. Colonization seemingly means death, but they keep on doing it. The book does not comment on the why.

The book does eventually reveal both Mickeys and the existence of the creepers being more than bugs, but it doesn't delve into them much. Mickey7 knows they are sentient, and when Marshall sends him/them out to destroy them he turns the tables. Not in any grand gesture like the movie, but simply telling him that Mickey8's bomb is in their possession and now the two sentient species on the planet have a stand-off relationship. Oh, and its the creepers who figure out the communication / translation bit, not Marshall's technologists. 

Overall, for my first audiobook, I enjoyed myself. I feel the experience is parallel to (proper) reading, and I doubt I will ever be able to pull the two closer together as the "same" experience. It took years for my brain to eliminate the bias between digital books and physical books, even though I embraced the simplicity and convenience of digital books, I just absolutely love the tangible nature of a nice hardcover. For me, the audiobook pulls me further from the author's words because it has someone else's voice attached dominantly to it. That makes it an entirely different experience, more akin to adaptations than the source. But time will tell whether my brain will also rewire for this.

Of note, I am using Spotify, and only fond out during my second audiobook that while the subscription provides the audiobooks for "free" its limited to 15 hours a billing period. Most audiobooks start at 10 hours. Yeah, fuck you spotify.