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Red Scholar's Wake Q4: Technology and AR
The book has most of the space opera tropes (which isn't necessarily a bad thing). Two distinctive features are the mindships and the ubiquitous use of AR overlays. Intellligent ships aren't that distinct, but I don't recall seeing such extensive use of AR in other fiction.
Was the AR handled well? Did it make sense in the setting, and did the characters interact with it in plausible ways? Were there elements of the AR use that jarred with you? Is it something you'd like to see in more fiction?
(I asked de Bodard online, and she replied that mindships are "born from a human womb, implanted in the ship's body, and raised by their mother.")
Comments
Similarly, it’s not really a romance, and it doesn’t explore love (a huge number of GR reviews of the book speak to this).
I thought the writing itself was pretty good, and I had no issues with pacing or description or anything else. The craft of telling a story is there. But without really having a compelling story to tell, or any ideas to explore, it all feels rather pointless.
I think this is an interesting point. (Which also bears upon the Discord conversation about good SF books to potentially recommend to people). Back in the days of my youth, SF was a fairly marginal genre which was looked down on by serious writers, critics and publishers. Since then, for all kinds of reasons, it has become a valid mainstream topic to explore (when a Nobel prizewinner like Ishiguro tackles it then it surely has to be mainstream?). So that means that it has become fair game for laying, as you say, an SF veneer over what is actually a fundamentally different kind of novel. So one gets crime books with an SF setting, or political books. or romances, whatever.
Now this can be a Good Thing or a Bad Thing depending, I think, on whether the author can make creative use of conventions and tropes rather than flat and boring use. So I don't have a problem with the idea that someone wants to write (say) about LGBTQ+ relationships in a setting which reads like SF, any more than if someone wants to rewrite an Arthurian myth into space, or tackle matter of colonialism in a stellar empire. But there's the question of balance, and for my money this book was too weak on the SF features, which therefore suffered in the desire to write about a particular kind of relationship. I think it could have worked much better as a book if the SF trappings had been gone into more seriously.
Ah, "what is SF" and "what is genre". I think this book could be an exploration of ideas. What does a non-WEIRD spacefaring culture look like? How can you have personal relationships across "species" boundaries? (This could be an exploration of real-world differences across gay/lesbian, trans, or disability differences.) How does ubiquitous AR affect society and art? The potential is there, but it was executed poorly in this case.
I don’t like to say ‘poorly executed’ because I really don’t think this kind of exploration was what she was going for. I think she was mainly (a) fleshing out a bit of her setting in the wider context of her books (though not enough to satisfy as a stand-alone), and (b) wanting to explore this same gender relationship and how it might arise. I’m right in that, then I have to agree these things didn’t hit the mark, so I suppose ‘poorly executed’ is appropriate in the end.
Totally agree - is being turned into a ship mind a reward or a punishment? Does the individual and/or their parents (adopted, biological?) have any say in it or is it simply something imposed - a bit like being a eunuch in former days. How do they adjust mentally to being in such different "housing" and are there any long-standing physical or emotional problems resulting? Do they feel superior? Inferior? Same? Different? Alien? Maybe some of this is in the other books but if not there's a whole world of possibility here
To add to that list of questions - is a shipmind - human relationship normal or unusual (whether same sex or different). Or do shipminds normally hook up with other shipminds?
As I think we’re learning with AI, a single AI can seem like a different person to different individuals, so why even have monogamy?
As I understand it, in this setting, ship minds aren't human and were never human, and will always become ship minds. They're not (I think) humans that are chopped up and trapped in a ship.
That shuts down a bunch of questions about "how can we do this to a human". But it does open up questions about having essentially two intelligent species living alongside each other. I don't know if it's in other books, but there could be interesting topics around how the different physiology of shipminds and people leads to different types of people.
I think in one of the novellas, there's mention of relationships between ships. But I could be wrong.
As for monogamy... well. That's such a fixed aspect of human relationships, isn't it? I take it as being a purely cultural feature.
Which itself raises another bunch of interesting questions and potential book topics! For example when Rice Fish and Xich Si have sex, do we understand this as a lesbian human relationship, or as sex between different species? Not unlike Larry Niven's rishathra on the Ringworld where it provides bonding and intimacy without any expectation of similarity.
Well, not always through human society. The 2013 film Her (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Her_(film)) tackled this head-on by having the human protagonist expecting a monogamous partnership and the AI one expecting hugely parallel multiple ones.
Going back to the aspect of this question which addresses AR, I actually thought that this was well done and provided an interesting extra dimension to the story. Not just "what does it look like compared to what it actually is" but also "who's actually here in person rather than by avatar". So yes, this aspect of the book worked well for me and I would like to see it done more often. I think I first read this kind of concept in Tom Clancy's Net Force series. As novels I didn't really click with them, but (from memory) the idea of the virtual overlaid world worked .