Tachyon Publications Pub Date 12 Jun 2018
Publisher’s Description : She believed in the mission with all her heart.
But that was sixty million years ago.
How do you stage a mutiny when you’re only awake one day in a million? How do you conspire when your tiny handful of potential allies changes with each shift? How do you engage an enemy that never sleeps, that sees through your eyes and hears through your ears and relentlessly, honestly, only wants whats best for you?
Sunday Ahzmundin is about to find out.
Review:
From 2001: A Space Odyssey to James S. A. Corey’s Expanse many science fiction plots love the idea of a network of stargates left by an elder civilization. In Peter Watts’s new novel (or novella, depending on who you listen to) he turns things around and puts the task of seeding the galaxy with gates to humans on a voyage that will only end with the heat death of the universe. Or maybe in a revolution that takes place bit by bit over the eons.
The gate building asteroid/spaceship is run by a sub-human intelligence AI, everyone calls “the Chimp.” The human crew of 30 They’re all on an endless voyage of creation leaving stargates in their wake and waking a handful of humans from hibernation when the Chimp needs a way to think outside its box or to do something its drones can’t.
Sunday Ahzmundin is the Chimp’s favorite human, waking more often and interacting more freely with the AI than the others. Unlike most of the humans, she thinks of the Chimp as an actual creature. She was onboard during its activation and watched its intellect grow, wondering where it would stop, and grieving when she saw its gifts sacrificed to the mundane priorities of the mission. She’ll be an unlikely mutineer unless the Chimp gives her cause.
Though the humans were happy to leave the Earth behind, they expected that someday they’d be relieved by the next wave of gate builders. 65 million years into the mission, mostly spent in hibernation, it dawns on some that this is a voyage without end. Unless you really wanted to see the heat death of the universe, that’s the sort of realization that could lead to wanting to pull the plug on the mission, or at least the AI in charge. But not only does the AI have total awareness of the ship, only a few people are ever awakened at a time, and there’s no telling who it will be. Plotting a revolution under those constraints isn’t going to be easy; Fortunately, the Chimp isn’t quite as smart as a human, so it might be barely possible to leave messages for whoever wakes up next with clues only a human level intelligence (or greater) could pick up. A slow business, but they’ve got forever.
If you read Greg Bear’s Hull Zero Three (See our 2010 review), you’ll note some structural similarities. Bear’s novel was about a colony ship where the AI went off the rails, and the main character is a clone sharing information through a notebook passed down from generation to generation, because each generation is born dreaming a dream of a successful landing that never happened, and unprepared for the chaos about the damaged ship. The story also reminded me of one of my favorite poet/designer/inventors, Danish poet Piet Hein. Hein made up nonsense poems called Grooks that made fun of the Nazi invaders but were just a bit too hard to parse in German to get him killed. They’re still available and worth checking out (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Grook).
The Freeze Frame Revolution is short, only 192 pages, and in the afterword, the author says that despite the publisher’s insistence and that the book goes a thousand words too long for the category, it’s really a novella. I’ll buy that, but for pity sake, couldn’t he have found a way to cut a kilo of words and just make it so? Costing $9.99 (Kindle) or 14.95 (paperback) seems steep for the word count.