Observing objectives

 kw: book reviews, science fiction, anthologies, speculative fiction

Terraform publishes speculative fiction with a strong environmental/social activist emphasis. The editors, Brian Merchant and Claire L. Evans, have published a trilogy composed of stories from the site as an omnibus volume: Terraform: Watch|Worlds|Burn. I decided to review the sections separately.

Watch is about observation…sort of. Extrapolation! What science fiction authors do best. Each of the 16 stories takes a societal trend to the extreme. The trouble with "linear" extrapolation is misunderstanding "linear".

All the formulas and charts shown here represent formulas or solutions to linear differential equations (LDEs). These are actually rather mild. Some LDEs produce functions that look like white noise. But in the realm of mathematics, much of nature is described by LDEs, which frequently "go all over the place", while our understanding of the world around us is typically based on fitting a straight line to a (temporarily) smooth curve, such as the line AB in the outlined area.

Many, perhaps most, science fiction stories explore the consequences of straight-line extrapolation of one or a few societal trends. Some of the better stories incorporate a Black Swan that breaks the trend (the turning point in the combined history of the I, Robot and Foundation series by Isaac Asimov does this masterfully). Nonetheless, such exploration is useful and entertaining. A few examples:

"Earth's Most Customer-Centric Company" by Kevon Nguyen takes the Amazon and Google paradigms, combines them to a global enterprise, Googlezon, and imagines the consequences of being excluded from it. (The image is mostly a Dall-E outpaint. Guess how much of it is a genuine Amazon warehouse.)

"Moved" by Chloe Cole takes the concept of the sex doll about halfway to the extreme ("Helen O'Loy" by Lester del Rey takes it from a different angle, and in my opinion does it better, adjusting for cultural norms of a 1938 milieu). The full extreme would have the doll sentient and intentional, and no doubt full of surprises both pleasant and terrifying.

"The End of Big Data" by James Bridle presents a final revolt against "the cloud"; the protagonist is a soldier in orbit, tasked with finding and destroying the remaining data centers that were used to bully the populace for so long.

The background of "Blue Monday" is corporatization of all those funny cat and cute puppy videos, and the niche markets opened by creating clickbait. This image approximates the protagonist's view during working hours. It made me wonder, how many YouTube animal videos are produced en masse in studios?

Production values are high for Watch, and I presume for the sections to come. As I've mentioned before, I am an idea guy, and the ideas arrive in firehose succession in this anthology. I don't mind that many of the authors are probably ultra-left-leaning. The writing is great fun.