Boy, this is a big topic! From classics of Science Fiction through contemporary novel both highbrow and “popular” there runs a common thread. It goes something like this: Humans are creatures that make meaning for themselves. What does that meta question mean?
Put it more simply: it’s not enough simply to be. Creatures that simply are don’t torture themselves with existential questions. Questions like: Why am I here? Why was I born? Is there something I ought to be doing right now? What is my purpose? (Cue Talking Heads) Is there a larger truth that I’m supposed to discover? And if I was born for a reason and I don’t like that reason, can I do something else? Can I become something else? Is that all there is? (Cue Peggy Lee)
Just about everyone has done existentialism, but nobody’s done it quite like Becky Chambers has in the second volume of her Wayfarer’s Series, A Closed and Common Orbit. Chambers runs parallel storylines (not an uncommon plot device) and keeps them discrete until the very end. It’s a nervy decision, to bet that both plots will carry equal weight and to trust that each will comment implicitly on the other. And then, the impossible but oh-so-natural knitting together!
We met Pepper and Blue in The Long Way to a Small Angry Planet, where the pair provided Jenks, Kizzy and the crew with specialty tech. We also met Lovelace at the end, the AI program that steps in when Lovey is destroyed. Recognizing the difficulty that Lovelace would have negotiating the a place in the crew, Pepper offers the AI sentient a choice of whether to leave the ship or to say. Lovelace leaves with Pepper.
In A Closed and Common Orbit, gradually we become aware that we’re reading two timelines, the first of which involves Lovelace, who renames herself Sidra, and her explorations in becoming — well, I want to say human, but let’s settle for honest, ethical, responsible, and happy. Part of Sidra’s growth requires that other beings recognize her as an independent sentient individual, a person, if you will, provided that personhood also applies to other alien species (and let’s say for our purposes that it does). As important as it is that Sidra is recognized as a full individual by others, it’s equally important that she accepts herself as something more than her programming, that she is capable of friendship, risk, and choice.
The second timeline involves Jane 23 and her life, first in the factory and then, after an explosion makes her escape possible, raised by Owl, a sentient AI ship program. Here Pepper and Blue’s history comes into play, and the questions implicit in both plotlines become explicit: when we start out programed to be one thing, what happens when we become something else?
If you haven’t read it yet, I’m not going to spoil the plot(s) for you, even though it’s well past the 2-year plot spoiler expiration date. But….
Well, if you want to understand Chambers’ approach to humanity, it’s encapsulated in a few paragraphs:
The only planet she’d ever known lay below. Clouds tumbled thickly, but she could see through the patches between them, down to the scrapyards, the factories and pockmarked land that stretched on and on until they reached . . . seas! There were seas down there, stained sickly orange and grey. But those colors faded, gradually clearing into a deep, breathtaking blue. The shuttle continued around the planet, using gravity to throw itself free. Seas met land, and Jane saw cities — sparkling, intricate, flocked with green. They were so far from the scrapyards neither would ever know the other was there. You could live your whole life in one of those cities and never know how ugly it was somewhere else.
‘Why?’ she whispered. ‘Why’d you do this. How could you do this?’
Jane clung to the wall, breathing hard. Her head swam, but it had nothing to do with launch, or the fake gravity, or any of that. Everything was too much. Too much. The planet was beautiful. The planet was horrible. The planet was full of people, and they were beautiful and horrible, too. They’d made a mess of everything, and she was leaving now, and she was never coming back.
(pp. 288-289)
If you’re thinking about Omelas and the ones who walked away, so am I. If you’re thinking about Central Park or the ocean or the Blue Ridge right outside my window starting to turn green with the spring and also the coastal cities in India and Bangladesh where ships are beached and slowly disassembled by desperate hungry people, so am I. Humanity contains multitudes; some of it beautiful and some of it horrible. All of it human.
And in both parts of A Closed and Common Orbit, protagonists reject their programming, their planned lives, the constraints placed upon them.
What then?
Here’s where Science Fiction soars — because we are meaning-making creatures and, being such, we interrogate the easy answers; we doubt them, or reject them. We make meaning for ourselves. A child bred to be a slave to a certain age and then . . . well, spoilers, and a sentient computer intelligence that is capable of nurturing, of falling in love, or risking heartache throwing off the constraints placed upon it by its programmers in order to become something more.
Somewhat tangential but related is the question of AI itself. In our popular depictions of both extraterrestrial life and artificial intelligence, we’ve collectively expressed our fears and our hopes as a species. For every HAL-9000, there’s a Data; for every ET, there’s a Dalek. Both alien life and computer intelligence are mirrors that show us ourselves.
Chambers’ reflection, in both categories, is humanism writ large and lovely; her message is that growth, even if it seems unlikely, is not only possible but necessary, and we all have the capacity to be so much more than we are.
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