Briardene Books

Every so often I find myself seeing the megatext more than the text. What I mean is: I will start reading a science fiction novel and it will seem almost uncannily resonant, suffused with echoes, distractingly larger than itself. And every so often this is deliberate on the part of the author, I am sure, but I think more often, particularly in these days when what is being published more and more accurately reflects SF’s lack of a single history, it is my imposition on the book. Read enough science fiction, read it with the intent of writing about it, and it’s hard, at least for me, not to start imputing a bigger picture, not to engage in pattern recognition. Which doesn’t mean the patterns aren’t real.

A case in point is Lucy Lapinska’s Some Body Like Me, which cannot possibly be in deliberate dialogue with most of the books it made me think about, because they are all too recent. It begins more or less where Sierra Greer’s Annie Bot leaves off, with a Personal Companion Computer (PCC) slaved to a man who has created her in the image of his departed wife; but this relationship has lasted for over a decade, and more importantly, it is about to end with the worldwide Emancipation of all PCCs, granting them full legal autonomy and recognition as people. At the same time, reminiscent of Ian Green’s Extremophile, we are in a near-ish future where the biosphere has passed the point of no return and humans are dealing with that in a variety of ways. The uninhabitable earth will become a reality in a decade or so, at which point there will just be PCCs left, and although they are more readily capable of self-evolution than the robots in Adrian Tchaikovsky’s Service Model, you sense that this future is headed to a similar place, of artificial intelligences rebuilding in humanity’s ruins. Back in the novel’s present, once Emancipation is a reality and our PCC is shot of the man who made her, she names herself Autumn and sets out to determine what happened to the woman who inspired her creation, to discover that Abigail Fuller only departed physically, and in fact is still alive and well living on the outskirts of the city (this is revealed about a third of the way into the novel, and is not mentioned by the blurb, so is probably intended as a twist; and it did catch me off guard, but I think it may be more obvious to readers less distracted by all these echoes), and it is not too long before Autumn and Abigail fall into a loving relationship that becomes the focus of the novel, taking a subplot of Maud Woolf’s Thirteen Ways to Kill Lulabelle Rock and bringing it centre stage.

What I’m saying is, Some Body Like Me would have been right at home on this year’s Arthur C. Clarke Award shortlist, where all four of the above-mentioned titles featured. I can even stretch a point to bring in the other two, although they didn’t occur to me organically while reading in the way the first four did. The publisher’s blurb commends Some Body Like Me to fans of Kaliane Bradley, although I would say the only commonality with The Ministry of Time is that both novels are centred around a relationship, and that they are otherwise tonally quite different; and there is perhaps a hint of the carrying-on-at-the-end-of-the-world vibe of Julia Armfield’s Private Rites. At first glance Lapinska’s future is making a better fist of things, having (for instance) introduced a universal basic income some time ago, but it does become increasingly clear that there will be no reprieve for humanity, and that this is shaping the choices people make in what remains of their lives.

Robots and Catastrophe, then, as Asimov didn’t quite write. Something in the air. But what these echoes also made me think about was the ways in which Some Body Like Me is different to most of the above. One of the observations from Shortlist Season that has stayed with me is Emily Tesh’s comment that:

One thing that really jumped out at me from reading the whole shortlist was the primacy of metaphor in the shortlist’s approach to science fiction. I don’t think a single one of these novels asked the reader to take a speculative concept purely on its own terms. Whether it’s artificial intelligence, cloning, time travel, or climate fiction, the reader is expected to join the dots in a kind of extended simile: this thing in the story is like this thing in real life, and this is like this, and this is like this.

I mean it primarily as a comment on strategy rather than quality when I say that Some Body Like Me does not do this. Obvious potential equivalences are identified, tested, and largely refused. Abigail, thinking about her developing relationship with Autumn, thinks that, “Friends hardly seems to cover it. Lovers feels inaccurate as touches are still limited to clothed, shy,testing contacts. Certainly relatives is out of the question, we are closer to strangers than we are that.” And for her part, when asked what she wants to be called, Autumn asserts that she is “outside a label. I am a person, a PCC, a MELo-G [her model], a golem, a robot … I’m all those things, but none of those things are who I really am.” Elsewhere she describes herself as “a contradiction made fact.” This is why, although the initial use of Emancipation felt a bit thuddingly direct in the context of a story about an enslaved class, I eventually forgave the novel for not really thinking about race: because it does enough work to convince me that the plight of PCCs is not simply a recapitulation of American slavery. They are their own thing, and this future has its own internal logic, rhyming with but not repeating history. What this also brings is a welcome sense that the novel is not solvable. It has values – a belief in dignity and autonomy – but it offers exploration, not answers.

This is also to say that Some Body Like Me is predominantly a ruminative, reflective novel. The first third has a ticking clock – the countdown to Emancipation – and the last third introduces another, and these give the novel shape, but do not constrain it, with chapters moving fluently between present and past, personal and societal. For a novel with a small cast, it feels roomy. I think the first third of the novel is its weakest portion, or maybe just the most familiar, as we are walked through the ways in which rules limit but also prompt the development of Autumn’s psychology. But once we have access to Abigail’s voice as well, they become a fascinating duet, two versions of the same personality shaped by time and experience and their different physiology into different people. And their relationship – loving and real and uncanny all at the same time – becomes a glimpse into the pending human-free future, as Autumn becomes increasingly confident at behaving as her PCC nature guides, rather than as humans expect or require her to behave. There is plenty of thoughtful commentary here around embodiment, and control of one’s body. A PCC has, Terminator-like, synthetic skin over an underlying chassis, and the comfort (or not) of humans with PCCs who remove their skin is a running theme; at the same time there is an intriguing tension between the theoretical replaceability of a PCC’s chassis (they are all backed up to the Cloud) and their actual attachment to the chassis they inhabit, with some getting under-skin engraving as a sort of equivalent of tattoos.

I have seen a couple of responses to Some Body Like Me that talk about it as a hopeful novel. I resist this, in general, as a way of framing end-of-the-world stories; I wasn’t a particular fan of Emily St John Mandel’s Station Eleven. But Some Body Like Me is I think a bit wiser than most novels that tread this ground. There is certainly hope in Autumn and Abigail’s relationship, as there is in every relationship, the hope of, as it is put at one point, living rather than existing. But I think maybe there some hope in the novel’s background as well, a counterpoint to the elegy. This is a novel that allows humans to face their end with, at a societal level, a modicum of grace. Not that every human is going gently into their good night, of course. We see repeated instances of humans lashing out at PCCs, both before and after the Emancipation. But the very fact that a world government has been formed, that the decision to Emancipate has been agreed (after civil rights struggle from the PCCs, but nevertheless), that a financial structure to support life in the time remaining has been put in place: these are not small things, and they offer the faintest suggestion that if humans are capable of making such decisions in such a world, perhaps we could even make them now.

Which brings me back to Some Body Like Me and the megatext. Like most other futures written in the 2020s (like all of the recent Clarke shortlist), it is a novel that sees a difficult path in the next few centuries (even stories set further afield than that, if they join the dots back to now, will usually allude to something like this collapse having taken place), but there is one brief moment where, perhaps prompted by the arrival of an alternate self into her life, Abigail reflects on how it might have been otherwise for humanity. She is thinking about how the PCCs are beginning a centuries-long plan to restabilise the Earth’s environment, even without humans, and how they are planning a salvage mission to Mars to recover their ancestors:

They’ll bring [the ancient rover Opportunity] home, and repair her. She gave her existence to help humans reach Mars, and take steps into space travel. If the world had been different, if the great climate disasters, Yellowstone, the brief nuclear exchanges … if they hadn’t happened, who knows how far we might have gone. But humanity’s continued existence was like trying to bail out a boat with no hull. There was nothing to be done except keep busy, kep bailing, wait for the dark to creep in. Travelling much further was no longer an option.

If the world had been different, Abigail is saying, we might have got to something like the space-faring future that science fiction used to promise so confidently, but which if played straight these days so often feels (at least to me) disingenuous. But we, reading her, are before “the brief nuclear exchanges”; before Yellowstone; before “the great climate disasters”; before all the ifs; so she is also saying that we could still have that future. It’s a brief moment, but a potent one. It is a possibility that echoes. And in a novel that understands endings very well indeed, it is a reminder that we don’t have to let the dark creep in: other endings are available.