Murderbot Q5. Technology
This is clearly a sterotypical science-fiction story, with spaceships and robots and computers and all that stuff. What did you think of the technology? Does this story count as "hard SF"?
What did you think of the state of information security, given that both Murderbot and ART were able to control just about every computer system they came across?
Comments
The only true hard SF is one minute into the future. Knowing many hackers as I do, the only thing different was the speed with which they did things. The end result is the same. They were also taking over systems that barely had any security at all, actually. Like most systems today.
I think the key word here is stereotypical. It's a space opera. Technology is not what this story is about. I think I remember a quote from PKD about this. I'll try to dig it up.
Here is the quote. I got it from https://biblioklept.org/2017/09/19/the-shock-of-dysrecognition-philip-k-dick-defines-science-fiction/
One of the interesting things about this is that it seems for Dick that SF depends on the reader as much as the text and the author, which raises interesting dilemmas for analysing genre fiction.
Hard SF - no, not in my view, as there's no real attempt ever to present a coherent view of the state of the art. For example we have seen no glimpses into why SecUnits (and presumably ComfortUnits) are a mix of organic and synthetic material - no rationale as to which bits are which and why. We have a whole spectrum of "regular" humans, augmented ones, XYZ units and bots and constructs of multitudinous types, so ranging from fully biological to fully synthetic, but no real understanding of how this has come into being. I don't mind that at all as a narrative device, and it is quite secondary to the story Martha Wells wanted to tell, but it kind of highlights that the whole tech side of things is just a backdrop rather than a key area.
Turning to security and such like, all these gizmos of various types speak the same protocol and are mutually hackable, the outcome apparently depending only on the processing power involved. There doesn't seem to be a dimension of levels of security (eg encryption key length in contemporary terms), there doesn't seem to be any real struggle involved... the strong just overwhelms the weak. (Hence my comments in another thread about the murderbot's double standards about feeling bad about getting a partial memory erasure, while happily doing much worse to loads of other gadgets.
Now, some of that is covered by the often-repeated theme "the company makes cheap shit so there's no real sophistication in any of the systems" but I found this very unconvincing. So that was a weak point of the books for me, but again I don't think Martha Wells really wanted to focus on that. The inferior gizmos were basically Red Shirts who were dispensable in the grand scheme of uncovering what really happened at the mine.
That made for an interesting read, though I think I ended up in only partial agreement with it! Penned in 1981, it was before a lot of the transformation of SF to cover internal worlds and interpersonal relationships rather than external worlds and confrontation. I get what he was saying about one's evaluation of a genre depending on one's world view - could magic every happen or does it make it automatically fantasy? for example. And I get the internal struggle he has when saying Thus “good science fiction” is a value term, not an objective thing, and yet, I think, there really is such a thing, objectively, as good science fiction. Still thinking about all that.
I struggle with the "what is hard SF question", but I guess if forced I would say it was not. I like my hard SF to be full of intricate explanations that I can barely understand half the time. This felt very much like the technology provided just the barest cover for the story that Wells wanted to tell about being a human etc.
@clash_bowley is right that the failure of the security in all of these devices feels pretty much in line with today.
I suppose I reckon that "security's rubbish today so it'll always be so" isn't very convincing! I mean, space travel is kind of rubbish today but by the time of the book they've got it cracked quite nicely. And current medical science or robotics can't do lots of what's assumed in the book. Now, I get that security is a kind of unending arms race and that the hackers' skills will increase along with the defenders', and maybe there's a kind of gentlemen's agreement between the various companies involved that they deliberately won't spend too much on security.
Going back to the question of hard SF, space travel is another tech which is just assumed to work somehow, with journey times being a bit dull but unremarkable in length... but so far as I recall not a word is spent sketching out for us how it works, with wormholes or warp drive or funky mushroom spore drive or unobtanium or whatever. In the context of the book that works extremely well, but if Martha Wells was intending to write hard SF it's an odd omission.