We have entered an era of AI slop. Periodicals are struggling with floods of submissions cooked up by ChatGPT rather than human imaginations, while readers downloading ebooks from Amazon are faced with the possibility of their latest purchase being the churned-out product of AI masquerading as actual creativity or scholarship.
While science fiction is no more affected by this than any other genre, its duty to predict the future (albeit often through an escapist lens) puts it in a unique position. SF has always had an ambivalent relationship with the real world’s scientific and technological advances; never before, though, has the genre been faced with a development that offers such a direct existential threat. So, as publishers are faced with deluges of machine-generated hackwork and technology actively strips itself of romance, what futures are SF authors dreaming up?
There are many works that can serve as answers to this question, and when the Hugo Awards were presented earlier this year, they pointed out two particularly relevant examples: namely, the pair of contrasting yet thematically overlapping stories by Naomi Kritzer which won the Best Short Story and Best Novelette categories. Even though neither addresses ChatGPT or other pseudo-creative AI directly, both stand as strong-minded retorts to our era of ever-encroaching digitisation.
The longer of the two stories, “The Year Without Sunshine,” was published in the November/December 2023 issue of Uncanny and takes place in the midst of a cataclysm that has devastated society. As the first two sentences make clear, the story is not concerned with the exact cause of this situation, but rather with its immediate impact on the characters:
During one of the much smaller disasters that preceded the really big disaster, I met a lot of my neighbors online. I can’t remember if we set up the WhatsApp group because of the pandemic or the civil disorder or both.
The disaster, whatever it may have been, has deprived narrator Alexis’s community of the comfort and support long taken for granted: the Internet, clean water, and, over time, even retail outlets. And so, the locals set about making up for their losses. No longer able to use WhatsApp, they paint “Whatsup” on a public noticeboard, initiating a system where people can post offers and requests for supplies and repair jobs.
The mutual support network, which starts out by covering basic services such as water-purification and electricity, is soon faced with the additional needs required by certain members of the community Tanesha needs insulin; this can still be obtained from the pharmacy, but another resident, Susan, requires bottled oxygen, something harder to get by:
“Susan has COPD. What we used to call emphysema. She needs supplemental oxygen, so we run an oxygen concentrator. Turns room air into pure oxygen. Concentrator won’t run without power, so I fire up the generator every time the power goes out. But we’re running out of propane. Don’t know what we’re going to do when we run out of propane.” He patted Susan’s hand.
“The Year Without Sunshine” is characterised by an overarching sense of optimism and determination, laced with a sense of fun – before getting to know each other, the characters fall back on nicknames like “the people with the poodle” or “the teenager with the really loud car, although he hasn’t driven it since the gas stations all closed” – despite the grave nature of the situation never being far from the surface. Owen Webster, in 1959, described John Wyndham’s Cold War-era science fiction novels as focusing upon “a remnant of the fittest who survive with a stiff upper lip and a trembling lower one.” Naomi Kritzer offers a sort of folksy, Midwestern, Covid-era variant on this set-up with the crucial distinction that here, the fittest help the more vulnerable to survive.
Alexis is able to obtain the propane needed for Susan’s generator – for free! – and Susan’s husband Clifford cries with joy; yet the stated fact that the propane will last only four weeks shows that this is only a short-term solution with struggles still ahead. Even as the community builds and strengthens its network (much time is spent on the characters’ individual skills: Clifford is a carpenter; Susan a former theatre costumer; Valeria a gardener; and so forth), it faces ongoing issues such as declining stock of medications.
There is also the fact that not all communities are as congenial. Alexis’s neighbourhood is an electric-car ride from the suburbs, an area that offers both supplies and suspicion; and when the time comes to visit for a trade, the job falls upon Alexis:
I offered to go. My car is electric, so I could get there. I’m white and look “respectable” unless I put on my “eat the rich” t-shirt – paranoid suburbanites were unlikely to start by shooting at me. (We’d heard stories. I sure didn’t want Tanesha taking the risk.) Once we started discussing this seriously, Frank said he’d come with me; he’s got the same “could be a suburbanite myself” vibe but he’s also huge.
During the trip into suburbia, Alexis encounters such sights as a lynched mannequin with a sign reading “looters” and a resident who insists that things will be back to normal in a month.
The neighbourhood sees some conflict of its own during the latter half of the story. One character, so contemptible that he is not even given a name, suggests letting Susan die and is swiftly silenced (“You’re just delaying the inevitable,” says the man; “You delay the inevitable every time you eat lunch,” replies Tanesha). Another bone of contention concerns Lem and his fondness for firearms: the community consensus is that hunting deer is a valid means of pest control, but shooting looters is off the table, unless the other party threatens violence first.
This issue raises its head in the story’s climax in which a gang of raiders attacks the neighbourhood. Many a Hollywood production would, at this point, default to a gunfight at the nearest approximation of the O.K. Corral. But in Naomi Kritzer’s optimistic vision of social collapse, there is no need for deadly force. By gathering together to protect one of its most vulnerable members, the community forged bonds strong enough to hold off the invaders who turn out to be clueless teenagers. Once the physical struggle is over, the spread of decency and mutual support is enough to turn some of the rowdy youngsters over to the neighbourhood for an honest life.
Naomi Kritzer’s other Hugo-winning story of the year, “Better Living Through Algorithms” from the May 2023 Clarkesworld, opens its narrative a world away from “The Year Without Sunshine.” Social media is very much alive, bringing with it assorted fad-apps: first Pokémon Go, then Wordle, and now something called Abelique. This latest app gives out lifestyle suggestions which its devoted userbase seems duty-bound to follow:
Sometimes, once you hear about a new thing, suddenly it’s just everywhere.
It was like that with Abelique. I couldn’t un-see it. Or un-hear it, really, because it’s not like I was peering over people’s shoulders at their phones, I was overhearing people talking about it. Abelique told them to make clam chowder for dinner. Abelique had assigned them a movie to watch. Abelique sent them to bed at nine p.m. It was that last one that caught my attention enough that I actually looked it up. “A complete lifestyle app” was what Wikipedia called it. This was not actually all that enlightening.
Although protagonist Linnea has a friend who swears by Abelique, another of her acquaintances is skeptical towards the app and its cult-like following – and Linnea tends to agree. Nevertheless, she downloads Abelique after her boss pressures her to do so as a productivity-booster.
Linnea’s initial experience with Abelique is disconcerting. After filling in a questionnaire, she finds that the app now understands that she is using Abelique at the behest of her employer and consequently gives her advice on how to best “look like an obedient little worker bee.” The story successfully taps into the unsettling feeling experienced by anybody who sees a tailored online ad for the first time; simultaneously, though, it plays with the irony that the soulless algorithms of Abelique are connecting people in the real world:
“Last night it had me try a new recipe, which was really good, and then it had me watch a movie I hadn’t heard of, which was also really good, and then I got my bedtime phone call—”
“Your what.”
“I mean, no one’s going to go to bed just because an app reminder comes up so there’s a phone tree. You get a call, and you make a call.”
“You have to use your phone as a phone? I’m out,” I said.
“Are you considering trying it?” June said, eagerly. “You should!”
And so “Better Living Through Algorithms” is not as distant from “The Year Without Sunshine” as might initially be thought. Just as that story charts an evolution from WhatsApp to the physical community centred on the Whatsup notice board, “Better Living” follows Linnea’s journey as her usage of the hot new app grants her a new real-world social circle: when she expresses interest in taking up drawing as a hobby, Abelique directs her to a local group of artists.
Yet, the app retains some concerning aspects. The story takes the issue of data privacy – just how much information are we giving to our apps? – and filters it through Abelique’s close concern with physical space: before it can offer fashion advice, it requires users to submit videos of their closets. Consequently, public attitudes towards the app shift from infatuation to deep suspicion.
The big twist is the lack of a twist, and the more we learn about the workings of Abelique, the more banal it becomes. Quite simply, this work of very-near-future science fiction is based around the high concept of an AI which ends up advising its users to spend time in the physical world (“an app that tells you to put your phone down more,” as one character describes it). The story’s climax focuses on Linnea’s involvement with her art group; and significantly, the group uses traditional tools such as watercolour and pastels. There is nary a Wacom tablet in sight – let alone Midjourney.
“The Year Without Sunshine” takes place in Naomi Kritzer’s home state of Minnesota, while the setting of “A Better Life Through Algorithms” is unspecified. For all intents and purposes, however, each is located in the Kansas to which Dorothy Gale returned: a place of comforting familiarity and community, all the better appreciated after we have spent time in a colourful but sometimes menacing land of tin men and false wizards.
This approach has obvious limitations, and science fiction will still need to engage with the ever-growing encroachment of the digital into society. Even so, there is most definitely a place for SF which reminds us of all that we risk leaving behind. Can anybody blame the Hugo voters for choosing to celebrate the exploits of Alexis and Linnea, two protagonists who – one by necessity, the other by desire – left the algorithms behind?
