Tuesday, February 16, 2021

SciFi/Fantasy Book Review: Machinehood by S.B. Divya

 


Full Disclosure:  This book was read as an e-ARC (Advance Reader Copy) obtained via Netgalley from the publisher in advance of the book's release on March 2, 2021 in exchange for a potential review.  I give my word that this did not affect my review in any way - if I felt conflicted in any way, I would simply have declined to review the book.     

Machinehood is the first novel by SciFi/Fantasy short fiction writer S.B. Divya, who managed to pick up a Nebula nomination for best novella in 2016 for her story, Runtime.  I remember not loving Runtime, but mostly due to the fact that the setting contained within felt too constricted by the novella format - I felt that the story could have benefitted from being a full novel instead.  So when I saw on Netgalley that Divya was finally releasing a full length novel in 2021, I was definitely intrigued.  

And Machinehood is a really interesting scifi novels, with some really interesting ideas about how humanity will progress in the future as machines and AIs become more intelligent, and how human work and protest changes to match, and how much everything will be the same.  I think its ending is a bit abrupt and it could've perhaps used a longer final act, but its two main characters and their lives are generally really interesting, making this a really solid read.  It's not a perfect book or one of the most powerful I've read, but its content is one that got me really thinking for a while, so it's more than worth your time.  

-------------------------------------------------------Plot Summary---------------------------------------------------
The world of 2095 is one greatly different than that of the start of the 21st century.  Bots and Weak Artificial Intelligences (WAIs) may not be sentient, but they are powerful enough to replace much of the world's human workforce - with many humans doing jobs that consist mainly of just supervising the bots.  Cameras and drones are everywhere, and privacy is a thing of the past - and people exploit this by taking gigs to draw attention to themselves, where they might receive tips from entertained audiences.  And the remaining human workers compete with machines via bio-enhancements and drugs like Flow or Zips, that provide short term physical and mental enhancements to allow them to compete.  But as the machines get better and better, the Funders behind the drugs are forced to work even harder to improve their stock so that humanity doesn't get further obsolete....

Welga Ramirez was once a groundbreaking special forces officer....before her country betrayed her.  Now she does work as a specialized bodyguard for Funders, stopping the various pestering protest groups in entertaining fashion so as to maximize the tips she earns from her audiences.  It's a safe job, since no protestors will actually cause lethal harm anymore - although Welga is experiencing weird inexplicable muscle spasms from her Zip usage of late.  Or so the job is supposed to be.  

But when strange seemingly artificial humans attacks Welga's Funder and two others around the world in a suicide attack, the world is thrown for a loop.  The attackers are followed by a message from an entity known as The Machinehood - threatening more attacks if the world doesn't give full rights to intelligent machines and if the world doesn't cease its production of drugs.  Soon Welga and her sister in law Nithya will be pressed into action to try and figure out what's really behind the attacks and how to stop them from destroying the world and everyone they care about.....
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Machinehood is essentially an idea-focused story told from the perspectives of two different characters, Welga and Nithya, in a world that is very different....and yet very similar to our own.  On a surface level, certain things are still very much identical to our own world: the Earth still very much has as central powers the US, India, and China, with a fourth major power being a Middle Eastern allegedly religious based country that the West is at work with (we only see them through biased eyes, so take that for what it's worth).  The world is much more global, with travel between countries much easier to accomplish (our protagonists jet from India to the US and back a few times) but citizens are still tied to the laws of those countries (and the laws of their spouse's country), so for example, when Nithya gets unexpectedly pregnant, she is subject to American anti-abortion laws due to her husband's American citizenship.  

And yet this world is very different from our own in many other ways....at least on the surface.  The increase in machine and AI technology may have made lives easier, but they also have removed most of the world's potential jobs.  And so humanity has been forced to rely on more and more drugs to enhance both physical and mental abilities - drugs that are supposedly safer than cyborg like enhancements that were once tried only to disastrous effect.  It's a vicious cycle where machine improvements require more and more drugs for humans to compete, and it winds up with humanity being forced to supplement their own incomes by exploiting the global lack of privacy - anyone can view cameras of everyone anywhere - to earn tips from interested onlookers.  It's a cycle where those who can't take drugs for biological reasons are left way behind, and while the telecommunication and travel capabilities make people able to work with each other anywhere in the world, disasters and war can still result in one losing everything and becoming a refugee.  It's a very plausible looking and disastrous seeming future, which makes it easy to buy in to Divya's ideas.  

Indeed, in this world are two - really three people, but the third is a spoiler so I won't mention them - point of view characters who illustrate the scope of the problem as they try to handle the crisis that forms this plot.  Welga wants to help people but was betrayed by her country, and so while she dreams also of one day possibly retiring and forming a cooking business with her romantic partner, she can't conceive of the idea of quitting once a new military crisis comes about by the Machinehood.  And yet governments show again the signs of betrayal and the very drugs she's reliant on seem to be betraying her, so what is the point of it all when there seems to be no future?  Her sister-in-law Nithya also genuinely wants to help people - through her work on drugs and the science behind them, through aid to a co-worker who is in a desperate state, and however she can: but when the choice to do so threatens her own livelihood and the love of her husband, can she really do it?  And what is a world that forces these two to make such choices?

This intersects with a plot that features a faction with its own spin on Buddhism, and with a potential new path forwards in the end.  And yet things aren't quite easy either going forward, and nor is anyone in a position that seems quite clearly to lead to better things, which makes sense given the inertial of history to this point in this book.  I'm not quite sure that it all winds up working - the arc of the book leads to one major event and choice by Welga and another character, and I feel like 1-2 more chapters in that arc perhaps could've allowed it go carry on its argument more clearly - because while I was left thinking about it all in the conclusion, it's kind of hard to see necessarily how to apply such thoughts to our own world, which I suspect was the author's intent.  Like you'll note I basically say nothing above about rights of sentient beings like bots and AIs above, which seems like it should be a major theme, but it never really seems to come across as such? 

But Still, Machinehood is still a mostly interesting story with a really believable and curious take on the future and mostly satisfying ending, even if it's too abrupt for my taste.  Worth your time just for that alone, even if I don't quite think it stuck the landing with its themes in retrospect.
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