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Six Books About Being A Cog in the Dystopian Machine

November 9, 2023November 8, 2023Rachel Taylor2 Comments

If the word “dystopia” broken down into its Greek roots literally means a “bad” “place,” what could be a worse place than the soul-sucking bureaucracy of a totalitarian state? Well, the cold truth that dystopia’s in the modern age aren’t as fictional as the books we like to read. But here’s good news: fiction can help us understand the hard edges and complexities of our world, including the thornier emotional truths that underlay everything else.

Cory Doctorow’s work often speaks truth to power, combining his extensive technological and sociological insight with a skill for teaching, and translating esoteric technologia into entertaining narrative. Enter The Lost Cause, his new near-future novel that grapples with the twin dangers of climate change and a movement of people who cling to a gilded and distorted view of the past that never really existed as they recall, and definitely never will in an increasingly unstable future.

Here are six more books about dystopian bureaucracies and the characters who make them work, and sometimes end up bringing them down.

By Yvonne Ye

When the Sparrow Falls by Neil Sharpson

Neil Sharpson’s debut novel (now available in trade paperback!) opens with StaSec (“State Security”) agent and cog-in-the-totalitarian-machine Nikolai South eking out a miserable existence in the Caspian Republic, where atrocities are mundane and fear the general state of being. The Caspian Republic remains the last bastion of “true” humanity in a world that has succumbed to the siren song of uploaded consciousness. Both Party ideology and South’s beliefs will be challenged when he is assigned to escort the lovely Lily Xirau, a recent widow of a virulently anti-AI journalist, for the duration of her visit to the Caspian Republic.

The first catch: both Lily Xirau and her husband are actually AI.

The second catch: Lily Xirau bears an uncanny resemblance to South’s own wife, who drowned twenty years ago.

As state secrets and South’s past begin to unravel with Lily Xirau’s arrival, South is forced to grapple with his beliefs and his grief as he helps Lily search for the truth behind her husband’s death. When the Sparrow Falls examines the question of what it means to be human through the lenses of AI, transhumanism, grief, and totalitarian dystopia, all buttoned up sharply in the suit of a Cold War-era spy thriller reminiscent of le Carré and Orwell.

Autonomous by Annalee Newitz

Autonomous explores another world where humanity is threatened by the acceleration of the various systems that govern it, though the forces in Autonomous are pharmaceutical and capitalistic rather than organic supremacist and dictatorial. The residents of Newitz’s world are trapped by a late-capitalistic regime where Big Pharma owns everything, from patents to people. The novel follows three primary characters: Jack, an anti-patent drug pirate on the run; Eliasz, a desperately fanatical and deeply damaged military agent hunting her down; and Paladin, a robot who is navigating his own profoundly human journey of self-discovery.

Both Nikolai South in When the Sparrow Falls and Eliasz in Autonomous struggle with their own humanity while working for profoundly tyrannical regimes that attempt to stomp the soul out of them. Trapped by the drudgery of work and the necessities of survival, South and Eliasz must grapple with their complicity in oppressive systems and the cost it takes to do the right thing.

The Quantum Thief by Hannu Rajaniemi

The Oubliette could be a Martian paradise, if you only have the time. The currency of Rajaniemi’s world is measured not in dollars, but in seconds—and time can be stolen. In order to expose the hidden conspiracy of cryptarch governors in the panoptical society of the Oubliette, the mysterious Mieli calls upon gentleman thief Jean Le Flambeur. After all, who better to perform an impossible heist than a legendary thief?

While Rajaniemi’s world of constant surveillance in the Oubliette relies on high-technology to manipulate the fabric of human society, the Caspian Republic in When the Sparrow Falls uses good old-fashioned methods from the Cold War—bugs and brainwashing. South continually hears the voice of “the Good Brother,” an insidious mouthpiece of paranoia and party propaganda urging him to report his neighbors and deny the humanity of Lily, the AI he has been tasked to protect. Both Rajaniemi and Sharpson fabricate fantastically fanatical societies in visions of our alternate presents and alternate futures.

Altered Carbon by Richard K. Morgan

In Morgan’s cyberpunk future, human consciousness can survive indefinitely by being “re-sleeved” in new flesh bodies. Takeshi Kovacs, an ex-elite soldier turned criminal turned private eye, is hired to investigate the death of Laurens Bancroft, a wealthy man whose trail leads to a virus that has the potential to contaminate the cortical stacks that store human consciousness and cause permanent death.

Humanity in Morgan’s world happily re-sleeves itself in new bodies whenever death comes knocking, but the populace of the Caspian Republic has not yet attained the same blasé attitude about human existence. Both Lily Xirau and Nikolai South in When the Sparrow Falls grapple with the question of what makes someone human, and come to find that the answer has nothing at all to do with the body one wears, and everything to do with the heart one follows.

Infomocracy by Malka Older

Malka Older’s groundbreaking cyberpunk political thriller series begins with Infomocracy, set in a world where results of the upcoming election are poised to change everything. A powerful search engine called Information shapes every aspect of human life, from social interaction to research to political campaigning. While traveling around the world as a campaign agent for the idealistic Policy1st party, Ken meets and hooks up with Mishima, an operative of Information. Mishima fights—literally—to keep the search engine as accurate and non-partisan as possible. Meanwhile, the mysterious dissident Domaine pursues his own anti-campaign against the whole system of microdemocracy.

Nikolai South shares struggles with Ken and Mishima as agents of and players within a machine that is both personal and political. Whether the system will remain standing is an open question throughout both books—and whether these characters are the key to bringing the system down is another.

The Laundry Files series by Charles Stross

When IT tech worker Bob Howard accidentally stumbles across mathematical equations that can summon Lovecraftian monsters from alternate dimensions, he is forcibly drafted into the Laundry, a British government agency that specializes in dealing with occult threats. Between combating dimension-hopping terrorists, protecting lovely logic professors performing reality-bending research, learning the secret history of the world, and—worst of all—attending committee meetings, Bob Howard has his hands full with the fieldwork and paperwork required to defend the world from ancient, eldritch powers.

Spy thriller? Check. Science fiction? Check. Bureaucratic humor? Check. Nikolai South’s dry humor could give Bob Howard’s a run for its money, and the two of them could certainly share a drink (or five) over the dreary horrors of bureaucracy.

Author Features / Lists / What's New

The Most Interesting Humans Turned Weapons In SFF, According to Karen Osborne

March 10, 2021May 3, 2024Rachel Taylor

What is the best weapon you can have in a science fiction novel? Sometimes, the answer is ‘who’ and not ‘what.’ Karen Osborne, debut author of Architects of Memory and the newly released Engines of Oblivion, joined us to share her favorite humans turned weapons of science fiction—do you agree with her choices?

By Karen Osborne

Guns. Bombs. Bioweapons. Sometimes all of it is just not enough to get what you want. Whether you’re talking about reincarnated traitor generals or small children that know every magical spell ever written, a living, breathing human weapon is an absolute must for any decent aspiring space despot’s growing arsenal—because sometimes, you just need a weapon that can think on its own.

The recipe is simple: take one soldier with tactical talent, give them wildly destructive powers, remove the ability to make decisions for themselves, and stop treating them like a human being. Perhaps you’ll get lucky and they’ll stop thinking of themselves that way, too. They’ll pull their own pin and hug their own trigger.

Just be careful—sometimes your newly-forged weapons remember who they were before you came along…

Essun and the Orogenes — The Fifth Season by N.K. Jemisin

At the beginning of The Fifth Season, all Essun wants is to be left alone to raise her children, but that’s not going to happen, as her husband is about to find out they’re all orogenes.

To be an orogene is to have immense power: to command the energy of the earth, to cause earthquakes and volcanos, to channel water and even kill others. To manifest as an orogene is to be feared. You risk being killed or given to the Fulcrum, an organization that will train you to channel your abilities and use them in service of the society that hates you.

But you don’t get a say about that. You become a weapon in the Fulcrum’s hands, to be used as seen fit. And after being taken from your parents, dehumanized, mistreated and enslaved, how long until you pull your own trigger?

At the beginning of this book, everyone finds out. An orogene rips open the center of the world’s great supercontinent, causing the apocalyptic, climate-changing Fifth Season, and, as the Fulcrum discovers, even a human weapon cannot look away from the power of love.

General Shuos Jedao — Ninefox Gambit by Yoon Ha Lee

What immortal dictator doesn’t want a tractable pocket tactician? The leaders of the spacebound hexarchate have one in the form of Shuos Jedao, one of the most gifted military minds of his generation. There’s just one problem: he’s insane.

During his life, Jedao never lost a battle—until he turned heretical traitor and burned an entire fleet under his command. Jedao’s disembodied mind was stored away until the hexarchate needed a win, then forced to win battles for the hexarchate as punishment.

In his revenant form, he isn’t allowed to sleep, nor does he have control of the body into which he’s installed. This time, that body belongs to Kel Cheris, a math genius and dedicated soldier skating on the edge of heresy herself. He’s nothing more than an intelligent weapon meant to help Cheris win the next big fight.

But there’s a problem with hosting a pocket tactician who’s smarter than you. If the hexarchate can’t see what that is, not even immortality will be able to help them.

Caliban — Caliban’s War by James S.A. Corey

Any self-respecting space corporation out to create market-rattling bioweapons can be expected to dabble around with alien technology. Protogen is no exception, using forgotten street children from Ganymede as matrices for their walking bioweapon Hybrids.

At first, the program appears to succeed, with the supersoldiers able to move fast, survive in hard vacuum, and tear apart hull plating like tissue paper, and Protogen makes an army of Calibans. But whether it was the alien protomolecule or some last, aching humanity inside their monstrous blue carapaces, the Hybrids refuse to submit to anyone, even after the company installed bombs in their bodies as a control measure.

This isn’t the only time Protogen attempts to turn alien technology into corporate profit. On Eros, they infect enough people with the protomolecule that it makes an entire asteroid sentient. As the characters would eventually find out, big space rocks make pretty good weapons by themselves.

The Archive — Death Masks by Jim Butcher

Even though the neutral Archive hasn’t yet been used as a weapon, she’s on this list because of how easily she could be—after all, in Harry Dresden’s world, knowledge is often power.

When we first meet the Archive, she doesn’t even have a name. The Archive is a child—and at the same time, a repository of all the human wisdom that has ever been written. Born to a mother that committed suicide rather than host the Archive, she’s been that way for as long as she can remember.

And that’s the problem. The Archive appears from book to book to mediate and fight for the side of good, but as a child, she doesn’t understand many of the things that she knows. She’s powerful, but she doesn’t understand just how powerful she could become. The sheer amount of power stuck in her changing teenage mind—well, anyone who spent three hours in a high school would understand why that might be concerning.

Luckily, the Archive is better off than some of our other walking weapons. She has Dresden’s assistance, as well as the help of her half-demon bodyguard, and she’s passed all the tests she’s been given. But who is to say that will always be the case?

Takeshi Kovacs and the Envoys — Altered Carbon by Richard K. Morgan

In Morgan’s cyberpunk world, people are virtually immortal. Human minds are separated from bodies to be “re-sleeved” at will. Takeshi Kovacs was a criminal before he was a member of the United Nations Envoy Corps, a group of supersoldiers who aren’t trained as much as conditioned, able to achieve superhuman feats partially because their conditioning strips them of all inhibitions when it comes to violence. (There’s a reason Envoys are prohibited from holding public office.)

When Kovacs leaves the service, he becomes a criminal again, and his recidivism is understandable. It’s impossible for a post-conditioning Envoy to live a normal life. There’s no bumpy transition back to a civilian world because the changes to his mind make it impossible for him to become a civilian. Kovacs is arrested and imprisoned in digital storage for years before being resurrected to work hazardous private-eye gigs, because if there’s something a human weapon knows how to do, it’s dueling spy operatives, blowing out airships, and taking out mob bosses—while getting reincarnated to do it over and over again.

Kovacs, of course, finds his place in it. After all, he’s a weapon now.

Karen Osborne is the debut author of Architects of Memory, on sale from Tor Books now, and Engines of Oblivion, on sale 2/9/21.

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Lists

8 Sci-Fi Cops Having a Bad Day/Week/Month/Life

March 8, 2018May 10, 2024torforge4 Comments

Solving crime in a science-fiction universe is a heck of a headache, as any one of these eight unlucky protagonists could tell you. Between parallel universes, marauding androids, and neverending darkness, solving the crime of the future has plenty of unique challenges.

Chris Shane from Head On by John Scalzi

In John Scalzi’s near-future novel Head On, a small percentage of the population is locked into non-functional bodies. They interact with the world through “threeps”, expensive robots that walk and talk like regular people–and have the added bonus of being less delicate than human bodies. That’s a lucky fact for Chris, an FBI Agent who seems to end up in a lot of situations that destroy threeps: fires, car crashes, defenestrations…let’s just say Chris, or more specifically Chris’s threeps, are having a very bad week in Scalzi’s latest.

Jon Phillips from Dayfall by Michael David Ares

Manhattan has been shrouded in darkness for years thanks to a nuclear winter, cut off from the world by a seawall keeping out the rising water. Crime thrives, and a corrupt and apathetic police force can’t keep pace. Then, just as the sun starts to return, a serial killer appears.

Flown in to help, Jon Phillips is a small-town cop who’s collared a serial killer before. Out of his depth in the big city, Jon doesn’t just have to stop a killer, but also stay alive in an unfamiliar city where he can’t trust anyone. Easy as pie.

Takeshi Lev Kovacs from Altered Carbon by Richard K. Morgan

It’s the twenty-fifth century, and people are now able to transfer their consciousness between bodies. Takeshi Kovacs is an ex-soldier turned private investigator, hired to investigate the possible murder of a wealthy man – living again in a new body, but with no memories of the two days before his death. Kovacs himself is fresh off his own traumatic death, re-embodied and thrown in the deep end of a far-reaching, vicious, conspiracy.

Elijah Baley from The Caves of Steel by Isaac Asimov

Isaac Asimov’s novel is a classic of the sci-fi detective genre, and the first in a series. Elijah Baley, a New York detective, isn’t very fond of the wealthy Spacers who left Earth behind. When one is murdered, however, Elijah is sent into space to solve the crime and assigned a partner – who turns out to be an android with the face of the murder victim and the ability to detect human emotions. It’s not exactly the easiest working conditions for Baley.

Marid Audrian from When Gravity Fails by George Alec Effinger

In the cyberpunk future of this novel, people can modify their brains using chips that provide anything from basic skills to full personalities. Marîd Audran has avoided enhancing himself, priding himself on his independence, but after being hired by the shadowy overlord of the city where Audrian lives, that independence is at risk. Then there’s the killer he’s hired to catch, who seems to be modifying himself to embody figures like a murderous James Bond or infamous serial killer Jack the Ripper.

Tyador Borlú from The City & the City by China Miéville

The cities of Besźel and Ul Qoma occupy the same geographic space, but they’re perceived as two separate cities, separated largely by the will of their citizens. Tyador Borlú’s investigation into a seemingly routine murder of a student uncovers a nationalist plot that aims to destroy the balance between the two cities, with potentially disastrous consequences.

Mack Megaton from The Automatic Detective by A. Lee Martinez

Mack Megaton was designed to be a machine of war, but he’s finished with all that, and just trying to make a living as a detective. All he wants to do is demonstrate that he’s not just good for crushing tanks, but things just aren’t that easy. They only get harder when Mack’s neighbors are kidnapped, sending him deep into the underbelly of Empire City and into the path of a conspiracy that runs all the way to the top.

Rick Deckard from Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? By Philip K. Dick

The book that inspired Blade Runner follows the bounty hunter Rick Deckard
as he attempts to find and “retire” rogue androids that look and act just like ordinary human beings. All he wants is enough money to replace his imitation electric sheep with a real, live, animal. The trouble is: how do you distinguish an extremely advanced robot from a human being? And the further Deckard goes, the more he has to wonder how much of a difference there really is – an existential question that makes his job a lot more difficult.

Image courtesy of Warner Bros.