By Ash Caton
News that global superpowers are racing to incorporate artificial intelligence into their nuclear weapons systems hardly feels like news at all. Science fiction has yelled itself so hoarse with this with this contingency that only a reality hackneyed as ours would go through with it.
To induce more than a collective nervous giggle, A.I. must produce an original doomsday scenario, not merely rework one of ours. Up until now, its creative output has been shockingly copious but reassuringly feeble; I can’t be alone in thinking if its achievement is limited to replacing human authors whose work already sounds artificially-generated, so be it.
Let writers of sensibility press on, untroubled. We all know their labours amount to more than algorithmic syntheses of “what I have read and the films I have seen, combined with my memories”1 . . . right?
The devilish and time-worn question of how to measure a human consciousness against a man-made simulacrum is not always on the surface of Alice Thompson’s latest novel. But throughout their journey on board the Chimera, the reader will be aware of its presence – it is the malevolent scuttle from the cargo hold, the rogue energy signature scorching onscreen.
For the lion’s share of Chimera, we read the account of Artemis, a dream researcher assigned to the eponymous vessel. She and the rest of the crew are on a mission to Oneiros, in the hope of retrieving a carbon dioxide-eating bacteria to salvage Earth’s collapsing ecosystem.
While the setting is that of a deep-space horror flick, the novel has the atmospherics and pacing of a ghost story; chilly interiors complete with cobwebs of wiring, whose hum and ciphering lights produce the impression of a hive-mind at work. Amid “cathedrals of data”, emerging memories must be processed. A revelatory frame story promises a gothically nasty surprise. The crew are assisted by doll-like ‘dryads’; biosynthetic, artificially-intelligent humanoids.
A little more than mortal and a little less than human, these dryads are one of the many inspired correspondences Thompson builds between the worlds of classical mythology and science fiction. One of the book’s pleasures is watching this network of affinities develop to the point at which it can playfully enliven the stock language of its genre. When “a siren [goes] off” on Thompson’s ship, its ring of alarm has more than one note.
This analogical design also provides a reminder of A.I.’s literary heritage: the spirit of Frankenstein and Pygmalion are as clearly felt as the spectre of ChatGPT. And so the book itself becomes a forceful chimera of old and new; its futuristic environment peopled with characters nominally hailing from antiquity.
Joining Artemis are Jason, Troy, Cressida – crew members who are themselves loaded with a shipload of symbolic freight. That they seem unaware of the destinies and interrelationships encoded into their nomenclature is entirely in step with Thompson’s portrayal of a human race that has lost its cultural memory. And here Thompson’s future feels most contemporary: a world of “ceaseless entertainment” in which “virtual reality had destroyed downtime and dreaming.”
Misgivings about the rise of A.I. are related to the stifled discomfort common to all empires on the wane; humanity as a venerable, well-kept sovereign eyeing up their attentive heirs with a mixture of fright and envy. We witness the insecurities provoked by a creation returning to plague the inventor. A human being of great beauty is likened to a sexbot. (Shouldn’t it be the other way round?)
When Artemis encounters a complex stanza of poetry, she assumes it must come from an android consciousness, when in fact the poet (Sylvia Plath) is one of our own:
Starving my fantasy down
To discover that metaphysical Tree [. . . ]
I must watch sluttish dryads twitch
Their multifarious silks in the holy grove
Until no chaste tree but suffers blotch
Under flux of those seductiveReds, greens, blues
On the Plethora of Dryads; Sylvia Plath
Addressing doubts about our literacy and creativity, Thompson lays bare the queasy joke behind names of real-world A.I. writing programs like SudoWrite and BrainDump. As if we didn’t already know this was the definition of mental complacency, they spell it out for us.
Novels about artificial intelligence are formally obliged to ask what it means to be human. And once the measurable criteria like IQ are stalemated, the final dispute conventionally relocates to more dubious territories like “love”, “talent”, “originality”; battlegrounds on which some indefinable “human factor” will counter-intuitively save the day.
Chimera argues, earnestly, that such a factor enfolds artistic imagination alongside morality. In fact, the two are mutually co-dependent; as the incriminating spectacle of shoddy dreams, interpreted and brought to life by machine learning technology confirms. If we sedate our imaginations, we can hardly blame machines we trained to borrow from them for any horrors they might produce.
This conundrum is the crankhandle of Chimera’s inventively unsettling plot. It will have you second-guessing the schlockier details: the technocratic ruling class being called the “ElITe”, a character opening a dryad’s “cranium hardware” and deadpanning the line: “his sense of self had gone askew”. It will also convince you that giving away our dreams and words on the cheap might prove just as catastrophic as pillaging the Earth.
About our contributor
Ash Caton is a poet and playwright living in Edinburgh. He regularly performs his work in the city, and has been published by the Edinburgh Literary Salon and Poetry Scotland. He is also the creator and host of Ear Read This (“Edinburgh’s most powerful book podcast”) and editor of John Kay’s Press based in John Kay’s bookshop in the Old Town.
- Chimera by Alice Thompson (Salt Publishing, 2023) ↩︎
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