James

Cute and slight at best. But I found this 150 page novella about robots who start a noodle shop mostly annoying.

For one, it uses the language of civil rights (slavery, segregation, discrimination, voting rights, property rights, etc) not within science fiction as a metaphor for today, but to argue that the civil right battles of today and recent history will next be fought for AI. It’s kind of a gross appropriation. A Silicon Valley engineer is a general in the Californian Revolution for independence? Yuck. The definition of a person, meant to include all AI beings, is also wrong headed. “If you could talk and feel, then you were a person. Period.” Sorry to all of the people who can’t talk, I guess? Turns out ChatGPT is more of a person than you are.

There’s a lot of language like this too, where the prose resembles a terminally online twitter user in 2016. It stops short of hand clap emojis, thank goodness. Still, these robots talk like chirpy millennials trying too hard to use gen-Z slang (“robot rizz” anyone?). Why do robots talk and text this way in 2060 or something? Why are all of their references popular culture up to 2020? Don’t worry about it. They’re just here to be every trendy social justice metaphor you can imagine: they’re immigrants, they’re ethnic minorities, they’re trans, they’re non-binary, they have (in a hard to read clunky sequence around a large memory file being “such a heavy burden literally to carry”) ptsd, and they’re gonna overcome it with their can do attitudes and online slang. I’m all for well told stories for those communities, especially in genre spaces where imagination can really run wild. This isn’t it.

In the end, the story boils down to owning some online trolls. I was mostly longing for everyone involved to log off for a bit.

I think this is every robot story in one novel.

Short and sweet, but with a lot of complexity around class, what people owe to one another, and providence. I loved the friendship between Silas and Dolly. Eliot also remains unmatched in writing terrible men. Yeah, I mean you, Godfrey. Justice for Molly.

Kuang's novels (well, I've only read this and Babel) are so messy but interesting. This bills itself as a love story, and although there is a traditional romance, I liked this best as a very complicated love story to academia. It would be unfair to read too much autobiography into Katabasis as well, but at times it also feels like an exorcism. Here are all the things she loves, hates, and loves-but-shouldn't in her other life. And I do like how life affirming this descent into hell becomes.

Katabasis also feels like a second draft. Better than a first, for sure, but with clumsy prose, janky world building, and contradictory character motivations. It's all stuff that could be smoothed out, but there were probably deadlines to meet (and other ones being missed). I won't make a list, but one that bothered me was the timeline with the Kripkes and Alice. Late in the book it's mentioned Alice once saw Magnolia Kripke as a college student. But beforehand, it's said they've been dead for at least ten years. So how old is Alice as grad student? Stuff like this is littered through the novel. Sometimes it's hard to tell when it even takes place (a list of metal bands suggests the 80s, but WWII is also mentioned a few times as more recent history). It's definitely not set in the 21st century, but it's not clear why this is a period piece as well as descent into hell. The feeling becomes like some ideas that should've been smoothed out in drafting were left as detritus, contradictory bits. I suppose you could say thats meta, given the landscape of hell herein, but I get the impression more that Kuang couldn't be bothered with details like that. Not when there were some sick jabs at academia or references to philosophers to be made. At least a good amount of the jabs are fun.

much weirder than the movie!