Transparent Minds in Science Fiction E-Book

Paul Matthews

• Herausgeber: Open Book Publishers
• Sprache: Englisch
• Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2023

Beschreibung

Transparent Minds explores the intersection between neuroscience and science fiction stories. Paul Matthews expertly analyses the narratives of humans and nonhumans from Mary Shelley to Kazuo Ishiguro across 200 years of the genre. In doing so he gives lucid insight into the meaning of existence and self-awareness. Rigorously researched and highly accessible, Matthews argues that psycho-emotional science fiction writers both imitate and inform alien and post-human consciousnesses through exploratory narratives and metaphor.


Drawing from a diverse range of scholars and critics, Matthews explores topics such as psychonarration and neuroaesthetics, to create a thoughtful and cogent argument. By synthesising concepts from philosophy, neuroscience, and literary theory, Matthews posits the potential for science fiction to bridge the gap in understanding between AI and human minds. Given the recent advancements in AI technology, Matthews’ timely discussion enters the speculative realm of sentient technology and postcyborg ethics.


The work constitutes a major contribution to cross-disciplinary perspectives on alien and posthuman psychology, that engages with future states of existence in both ourselves and the machines we create. Transparent Minds will be of interest to innovators, authors, and science fiction enthusiasts alike.

Leseprobe

TRANSPARENT MINDS IN SCIENCE FICTION

Transparent Minds in Science Fiction

An Introduction to Accounts of Alien, AI and Post-Human Consciousness

Paul Matthews

https://www.openbookpublishers.com

©2023 Paul Matthews

This work is licensed under an Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 International (CC BY-NC 4.0). This license allows you to share, copy, distribute and transmit the text; to adapt the text for non-commercial purposes of the text providing attribution is made to the authors (but not in any way that suggests that they endorse you or your use of the work). Attribution should include the following information:

Paul Matthews, Transparent Minds in Science Fiction: An Introduction to Accounts of Alien, AI and Post-Human Consciousness. Cambridge, UK: Open Book Publishers, 2023. https://doi.org/10.11647/OBP.0348

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DOI: 10.11647/OBP.0348

Cover image: NASA, Nebula, May 4, 2016. https://unsplash.com/photos/rTZW4f02zY8

Cover design: Jeevanjot Kaur Nagpal

For Caroline, Sam and James Who supported and encouraged this work

Table of Contents

Preface ix

1. Introduction 1

2. Authorial Approaches 13

3. Awakenings 27

4. The Alien, the Artificial, and the Extended 45

5. Hive and Distributed Mind 65

6. Supercedure: Into the Posthuman 85

7. Conclusion 103

Bibliography 111

Index 121

Preface

This book is based on two abiding sources of excitement and awe: the science of the brain and the stories of science fiction.

Ever since reading J Z Young’s Programs of the Brain at school I have been intrigued by the brain and our slowly unfolding knowledge of how it works. Based as it was on the learning opportunities afforded by brain misfunction—due to injury or illusion—the research that Programs of the Brain described struck me as practical and evidence-based science, one benefiting in its explanatory power through the (then) new metaphor of the computer.

A key unsolved mystery of the brain is what gives rise to conscious experience and what purpose it serves. A multitude of possible answers have been made to these questions, some more evidence-based than others, some still using an underlying computing model and others breaking away from it. To some, the problem is insolvable. To others, it is not a problem at all and not worth focusing on any more. To most, it has certainly not been resolved in any satisfactory way.

Also early on I developed a love for collections of science fiction short stories stocked at the local library. Written in the creative explosion of the genre around the 1960s and 1970s, these stories were wonderful not only in their variety and idiosyncrasy, but also in their common profound optimism and unfettered thinking about what else could be, what alien worlds and psychological states might be possible. This affection for science fiction has continued into adulthood. Now, as a technologist, I frequently see references to how science fiction can both predict and shape what comes to be. Despite being speculative, its underpinnings in science fact help to unveil possible worlds that must contain fragments of truth. As the genre has developed from the ‘rocket man’ comic book derring do of the 1950s to the current incredible range of inter-weaved sub-genres, we see an increasing number of examples attempting to access the inner worlds of the characters and situations they describe. This diversification has been significantly improved by the increasing gender and cultural diversity of authors, bringing a rich variety of life experience and viewpoint to the genre. So I feel there is an opportunity to sift some of this work to see how it can help us to understand sentience and how it might extend to evolved alien and manufactured minds.

I feel that this is also timely, as there is a discussion over the likelihood (and risk) of sentience and free will in future AIs. At the same time, possibilities for human enhancement—through chemical means, through digital implants and interfaces, or direct thought communication between people—are becoming more real. So what kind of experience might this lead to in people and machines? I think fiction can be a great source of inspiration for this.

1. Introduction

© 2023 Paul Matthews, CC BY-NC 4.0 https://doi.org/10.11647/OBP.0348.01

Literature is a record of human consciousness, the richest and most comprehensive we have… The novel is arguably (humanity’s) most successful effort to describe the experience of individual human beings moving through space and time.

David Lodge

1

It should be more widely appreciated that literature is a kind of scientific tool that can be used to shed light on consciousness. The argument is that the richest description of the phenomenon of human experience come from our finest writers, who are capable of capturing moments in time in exquisite detail from multiple perspectives. In this view, there is no need to argue that either science or the humanities represent true knowledge, but that the two can complement one another productively, the latter unveiling a personalised view that science—with its third person fixation—cannot achieve.2

Science Fiction (SF) authors are often well versed in neuroscience and philosophy and see their literature as thought experiments or models of problems on far off, but feasible, technological horizons. As Swirsky notes, SF is a model in multidisciplinary alignment: ‘literature, philosophy and science are, in my opinion, inseparable manifestations of the same creative instinct that has operated throughout the ages.’3

My thesis is that science fiction with a psycho-emotional flavour can provide new insight into both current human consciousness and also possible future states of consciousness in both ourselves and the machines we create. The reciprocal move is that inspiration for the artistic portrayal of these states can come from the science of our own world, which is still only gradually revealing causes for sentience in humans and other animals.

In the following pages, we will see examples of how SF authors approach this multidisciplinary alignment in their works. It is first worth introducing the narrative and literary theories that can help to explain both the authors’ art and the readers’ experience.

Psychonarration and monologue: backgrounding the author

Literature that includes characters’ mental states has been around since as far back as the eighteenth century but reached a peak of sophistication in the early twentieth. The use of techniques such as psychonarration and monologue—where the viewpoint enters the characters’ minds—powered the modernist approach to literature and enabled highly psychological writing. Authors such as Proust, Austen, Joyce and Woolf have been celebrated for their powerful insights into the experience of memory, emotion, motivation and consciousness. A large part of their innovation and craft was to move from the classic (external) narrative voice which could be intrusive and domineering, to ways of telling a story where the writer merges with the character so closely that they almost disappear. As Nelles suggests in his study of Jane Austen, in this way the novelist ‘creates the impression that the reader has more or less direct access to the character’s mind rather than through a firewall of narrative commentary.’4

In her classic analysis Transparent Minds, Dorrit Cohn groups these narrative techniques into third and first-person types and notes how some provide more authentic impressions of mind-reading, with third person psychonarration (incorporating the method of ‘free indirect speech’) the most effective followed by monologue. In these modes, dialogue is no longer visible by way of well-defined quotation marks, but mixes with the narrative. The author’s own opinions or moralising can be reduced or removed entirely, with the result that we can more readily believe we are observing the accounts of individual personalities directly. Cohn explains how ‘narrative fiction is the only literary genre, as well as the only kind of narrative, in which the unspoken thoughts, feelings and perceptions of a character other than the speaker can be portrayed.’5

Cohn notes the enormous challenge of trying to project into other minds. No wonder then, that attempting the same for non-human minds is something that relatively few SF authors have attempted.

Neuroaesthetics: fiction and the feeling of consciousness

When analysts have examined how these great writers achieve their effects, they have been able to link fictionally depicted states to scientific knowledge of those states. This approach, which seeks to combine literary criticism with relevant brain science, has been termed ‘neuroaesthetics’ by Kay Young. It is enacted via Young’s principle of resonance, the way in which a book’s language triggers the experience within with the reader: ‘the principle of listening and looking for compelling resonances in language, meaning and representation (yielding) shared accounts of integrated mind.’6Young sees it as particularly important to maintain the emotional and embodied experience of reading when studying and experiencing texts from authors who write about mental states.

This reader-author dynamic is one way in which literature may provide more fertile imaginary ground than science. Philip Davis puts it thus: ‘what literature does, which formal philosophy does not—and what literature can hardly help doing—is yield more than its writers know… writers offer this by creating not so much a line of argument as a resonant space for thinking.’7 So literature itself may be a cognitive extension.8 Reading literature allows for first person, active insight and has a moral dimension—by making us feel directly addressed and immersed, it forces us to be involved. Famed science fiction author Ursula Le Guin is skilled at weaving together scientific knowledge with philosophical and ethical speculation using story:

Science describes accurately from outside, poetry describes accurately from inside. Science explicates, poetry implicates. Both celebrate what they describe. We need the languages of both science and poetry to save us from merely stockpiling endless ‘information’ that fails to inform our ignorance or our irresponsibility.

9

Here, Le Guin identifies the missed opportunity of the solely objective—the chance for readers to recognise themselves in the process of reading and to access their imaginations.

Consciousness from the outside and inside

Most approaches to consciousness in science and philosophy certainly have been on the objective side, seeing subjectivity as either unscientific, or a difficult-to-explain emergent property of the system. A leading paradigm in neuroscience-oriented theories of consciousness is not that it is fundamentally a different substance, but that it is explainable in terms of the neural material from which it arises (materialism). Several promising explanatory directions exist within materialism and include the need to have a unified, generally available picture of the current state (global workspace), the brain’s capacity to combine multiple signals (integrated information), a spatially organised internal representation of the body (self-modelling) and the assumption of different levels of symbolic representation (with consciousness as a higher level, localised representation).

Some key principles are shared by these leading theories: the existence of the widely interconnected, yet modularised neuronal pathways in the different parts of the brain; the extent of internal feedback from signals to achieve changes in the external and internal world; and the overall complexity of the organisation of the brain itself. These factors combined may eventually yield a reliable test or universally accepted standard of consciousness.10

While materialist theories can perform well in explaining experimental findings and human performance and may all have elements of the overall picture, they remain unsatisfying in certain ways. The traditional stance of science and philosophy, exemplified by materialism, is external objectivity, yet this usually ignores or cannot deal with the view from within. A second movement, that of phenomenology, attempts to use conscious experience and structure as a method to access truth about the nature of the world. Phenomenology tries to bring science’s rigour to the study of subjectivity, with a number of flavours differently emphasising embodiment and perception. This often led theorists to invent new language to describe the sense-world interface, such as Heidegger’s Dasein (a conscious being) and the state of ‘being-in-the-world’ (unifying subject, object and consciousness).11 This can make them relatively very hard to understand and they have been accused of not adding much of practical value. But phenomenology as a method—the deliberate and structured attention to, and description of, the lived experience—can add practically to our understanding of different people’s viewpoints. It also fundamentally describes the work of authors when they are building fictional mental states.

Seeking the essence of consciousness… will consist in rediscovering my actual presence to myself, the fact of my consciousness… Looking for the world’s essence is not looking for what it is as an idea once it has been reduced to a theme of discourse; it is looking for what it is as a fact to us, before any thematization.

12

Phenomenology as an approach had a direct applicability to literature and the subjective insight brought about by reading. For Wolfgang Iser, the ‘blanks’ or ‘gaps’ in more difficult or experimental fictional texts are what gives rise to a deeper experience of the readers’ own consciousness and a purer experience of the world: ‘It gives rise to a mode of communication through which the openness of the world is transferred in its very openness into the reader’s conscious mind.’13

In the case of consciousness, science’s ‘view from nowhere’ may have been a real limiting factor in the development of theory. Leading neuroscientists with a materialist orientation—such as Koch—have admitted this, saying all we can really start with is our own conscious experience and progress from there. This admission of the unavoidable need for some subjectivity feels like progress, as does the admission that the kind of experience we have cannot be solely claimed by the human species.14Koch has been vocal in attributing forms of consciousness to both lower and higher animals and the approach to an explanation of consciousness that he espouses—integrated information theory—can be applied to silicon brains and even some inanimate objects as much as human grey matter. This kind of thinking is taken to a logical conclusion in the theory of panpsychism (not widely accepted!), that everything in the world may have some level of consciousness.15

Approaching the alien

While it is certainly difficult enough to describe our own conscious experience, how much more difficult it is to imagine and describe this kind of experience in non-human minds? This further removal needs an enormous amount of creativity and is to some extent constrained by language. In ‘What Is It Like to Be a Bat?’, the philosopher Thomas Nagel concludes that bats probably have a form of consciousness, but that it is likely to elude our ability to understand and explain it:

Bats, although more closely related to us than those other species, nevertheless present a range of activity and a sensory apparatus so different from ours that the problem I want to pose is exceptionally vivid… anyone who has spent some time in an enclosed space with an excited bat knows what it is to encounter a fundamentally alien form of life.

16

Nagel goes on to compare the alienness of other animal species to ‘actual’ aliens: ‘And if there is conscious life elsewhere in the universe, it is likely that some of it will not be describable even in the most general experiential terms available to us.’17 Generally speaking, for Nagel, the inner life of alien minds is even harder to approach than that of fellow animals with some shared sensory world: ‘The more different from oneself the other experiencer is, the less success one can expect with this enterprise.’18

As we will see later on, science fiction works such as those of Stanislaw Lem depict alien intelligence so different from human intelligence that communication—at least in the way we understand it—is impossible. Any theory of mind that can be formed by the humans in these stories is depicted as being embarrassingly inadequate.

Nagel’s thought experiment is bolstered by the concept of umwelt, the idea that the subjective universe of humans and other animals must vary enormously due to their different sensory apparatus, cognitive limitations and motivations.

Humans often mistakenly assume that the umwelt they experience reflects the totality of the objective universe, the ‘world out there’, whereas in reality, the human umwelt only captures a small portion of what may be objectively (and physically) experienced by another species.

Although Nagel seems fairly pessimistic about this problem being resolved logically, he does admit that imagination is one way that it can be approached. This leap of imagination might not address the felt need to describe consciousness in objective terms, but it can take a step closer to what might be the imagined subjective world of different beings.

And we may not need to solely rely on the abstract. People can learn to echolocate by using sound to detect objects, albeit in a less sophisticated way than bats. Some blind people can use this to navigate, and may become so proficient that they describe the experience as analogous to seeing the world. This illustrates the brain’s remarkable plasticity in adapting to new kinds of input, when paired with a data stream can be trained by trial and error to become effectively new senses (and similar brain areas to those that deal with vision, hearing etc. are adapted to this purpose).

The genre of Science Fiction

History and Subgenres

The literary theorists quoted at the beginning of this introduction, who propound a cognitive approach to criticism, tend to concentrate their focus on established ‘high’ literature to illustrate examples of how great writing can invoke mental states. I want to bring the same approach using science fiction sources, though in doing so need to admit that the genre has not always had a reputation for producing great works approaching the type of critical acclaim traditionally reserved for literary canon. This has in part been attributed to the plethora of amateur and hobbyist writers who entered the genre in the middle to late twentieth century, fuelled by the ease of publishing in SF periodicals and anthologies and the general demand amongst the reading public for man-meets-alien fantasy adventures. But I would argue that, amongst this work and well into the present day, there really is a rich vein of highly innovative, thought provoking and powerful writing. Here I will briefly outline the history, diversity and methodology of the SF genre.

SF has been famously defined by Darko Suvin as ‘a literary genre whose necessary and sufficient conditions are the presence and interaction of estrangement and cognition, and whose main device is an imaginative framework alternative to the author’s empirical environment.’19

With its origins in Gothic fiction and mystery of the nineteenth century and earlier, science fiction was spurred by the rapid technological development and existential threat of war in the early part of the twentieth century, which saw classics such as HG Wells’ The War of the Worlds. In addition, with the development of space exploration in the middle part of the previous century, an explosion of speculation occurred around what interplanetary and interstellar exploration might bring and what other life might exist in the universe. The optimism and exploratory zeal of these ‘golden age’ periods in part echoed the West’s attitude to the concept of empire—that foreign lands exist to be discovered, claimed, and the natives quelled. Thereafter, coincident with the gradual contraction of empire and a youth rebellion, science fiction’s ‘new wave’ of the 1960’s often took an inward turn, focusing rather more on the unwelcome invasion of mother Earth by alien races intent on our extinction.20 The end result of this move was SF’s move to the psychological, with more stories playing out as much on the mental as the physical plane. Today, the genre is mature and widely varied, with many subgenres and genre mash-ups. Globalisation has led to more cultural cross-pollination, and the diversity of authors has increased markedly. As we will see, the increasing possibility of an AI-dominant future led to the growing theme of the singularity, or superhuman intelligences. More recently too, climate change and biodiversity loss have led to the emergence of Solar Punk where alternative futures, both pessimistic and optimistic, are imagined.

In one widely used, though far from neat subdivision of the science fiction genre, there is a spectrum from hard SF at one end, where the science is foregrounded, central to the story, reality-based and well researched, through space opera, where the stories are more formulaic, melodramatic adventures set in other worlds, to fantasy at the other end, where there is less regard to possibility.21 Of course, this kind of over-generalisation masks the huge variety of approaches and styles. Many readers and publishers take an inclusive approach and these days, as the label SF (constantly in an apparent crisis of self-definition) is often applied to works which, on the surface at least, have a very different focus or setting than the more familiar space adventure. Such speculative fiction, as some prefer to call it, no longer fits on a simplistic scale of hard to soft, and may be more willing to introduce the fantastical.

Methodology

Indeed, some of the more powerful work achieves its effect through highly familiar stories and settings with only small, or gradually introduced weirdness. Successful fantasy, according to Forster, does not need to fully embrace the supernatural, but can merely suggest it or imply it through realistic sounding events where the supernatural seems to be lurking on the margins. Technically it often ‘merges the kingdoms of magic and common sense by using words that apply to both, and the mixture (thus) created comes alive.’22

A shared technical vocabulary between author and reader certainly helps SF to achieve literary impact. Assuming scientific awareness amongst readers provides authors with the ability to refer to contemporary terms and theories and to also—through the knowledge that the scientific paradigm will often shift—extend the contemporary into possible, unrecognisable futures. This recognition of the ephemerality of scientific knowledge at any one time may be a root of science fiction’s frequent attraction toward either optimistic or pessimistic futures. This constant churn of scientific theory has been dubbed the ‘pessimistic induction’ by philosophers of science. The argument is that when our theories about the world have changed so radically over the generations, they can’t be accepted as wholly true at any one time.

Imagination makes possible a conceptual blending that combines existing concepts in new, unforeseen ways—a ‘recombinatory metaphoric process’, as cognitive linguists have called it (though perhaps necessarily limited by the available pool of proto-concepts).23 In fact, imagination might be what we do all the time when we are not engaged in a specific activity. Alan Richardson ties imagination to the ‘default mode network’ functioning of the mind at rest, which alternates between memory, planning, navigation, emotional processing and theory of mind.24

The imaginative leap needed to enter alien ‘heads’ requires huge empathy and creativity on the part of both the reader and author in order to transcend most human constraints and experience. But there are perhaps some shared universal constraints, in that we can often assume shared laws of physics (though many now think that other universes may have a quite different physics). Still, this is a much harder task than writing in the first or third (human) person and requires very careful and innovative use of language, as referents and connotations may be very different than those shared by humans. As speculation gets further from grounded concepts and known linguistic norms, it becomes harder for reader and author to share meaning. We do have a head start, as we have the ‘theory of mind’ needed to infer the inner states of fellow humans by observing their actions and listening to their words.25 For alien and artificial minds, we just need to go further. In this book I will bring together what I consider to be some fine examples of different authors’ attempts to do just this. My hope is that you bring all your empathic power to the reading of their work. But let us first further explore what these authors have revealed of their technique for writing the mind.

1 David Lodge, Consciousness and the Novel: Connected Essays (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2002), 10.

2 Philosophy has also been criticised for being limited in the same way. As Simon Glendinning points out, it is too coldly logical and argument-centred. He sees a clear role for imaginative literature that presents a compelling expression of mental states. Simon Glendinning, In the Name of Phenomenology (London: Routledge, 2007).

3 Peter Swirski, Between Literature and Science: Poe, Lem, and Explorations in Aesthetics, Cognitive Science, and Literary Knowledge (Montreal: McGill-Queen’s University Press, 2000), 139.

4 William Nelles, ‘Austen’s Juvenilia and the Sciences of the Mind’, in Jane Austen and Sciences of the Mind, ed. Beth Lau, 14–36 (London: Routledge, 2017), 18.

5 Dorrit Cohn, Transparent Minds: Narrative Modes for Presenting Consciousness in Fiction (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1978), 7.

6 Kay Young, Imagining Minds: The Neuro-Aesthetics of Austen, Eliot, and Hardy (Columbus: Ohio State University Press, 2010), 10.

7 Philip Davis, Reading and the Reader: The Literary Agenda (Oxford: University Press, 2013), 4.

8Davis notes neurological evidence that novel metaphors lead to more brain activity than do clichés. He goes on to quote Joseph Gold on the cognitive power of literature: ‘Literature itself has become for both writers and readers ‘a brain extension’ which has added a new level of consciousness to human brains ‘because by means of writing and reading the brain could feedback thought to itself’’, Ibid.

9 Ursula Le Guin, Late in the Day: Poems 2010–2014 (Oakland, CA: PM Press, 2016), 7.

10 Indeed, Christof Koch already proposes the ‘zap and zip’ test of consciousness in which a magnetic pulse is applied to the brain and the waves of ensuing perturbation are measured by an EEG. The complexity of the measured response boils down to a single ‘zipped’ number. The zap and zip response takes advantage of the same algorithm used for file compression, dubbed the perturbational complexity index (PCI). The PCI seems to represent consciousness levels quite well, both in human wakeful states and in people who are asleep or comatose. The Feeling of Life Itself: Why Consciousness Is Widespread but Can’t Be Computed (Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press, 2019).

11 Michael Wheeler, 2020, ‘Martin Heidegger’, in The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, ed. Edward N. Zalta, Fall 2020. Metaphysics Research Lab, Stanford University. https://plato.stanford.edu/archives/fall2020/entries/heidegger/.

12 Maurice Merleau-Ponty, The Phenomenology of Perception, ed. Thomas Baldwin (London: Routledge, 2003), 72.

13 Wolfgang Iser, The Act of Reading: A Theory of Aesthetic Response (Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 1978), 211.

14 Christof Koch, The Feeling of Life Itself: Why Consciousness Is Widespread but Can’t Be Computed (Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press, 2019), 26.

15 Philip Goff, William Seager, and Sean Allen-Hermanson, ‘Panpsychism’, in The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, ed. Edward N. Zalta, Summer 2022. Metaphysics Research Lab, Stanford University. https://plato.stanford.edu/archives/sum2022/entries/panpsychism/.

16 Thomas Nagel ‘What Is It Like to Be a Bat?’, The Philosophical Review 83, no. 4 (1974): 438. https://doi.org/10.2307/2183914.

17 Ibid., 439.

18 Ibid., 442.

19 Darko Suvin, Metamorphoses in Science Fiction: On the Poetics and History of a Literary Genre (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1979), 27.

20 Damian Broderick, ‘New Wave and Backwash: 1960–1980’, in The Cambridge Companion to Science Fiction, eds Edward James and Farah Mendlesohn (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003), 48.

21 This hard SF-fantasy continuum has been mapped by Roberts in developmental origins to Protestant rationalist—Catholic theology/magic and mysticism. Adam Charles Roberts, The History of Science Fiction, 2nd ed. (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2016), 3.

22 E. M. Forster Aspects of the Novel (Harmondsworth: Penguin Books, 1962), 109.

23 Alan Cruse and William Croft, eds, ‘Metaphor’, in Cognitive Linguistics, 193–222. Cambridge Textbooks in Linguistics (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004). https://doi.org/10.1017/CBO9780511803864.009.

24 Indeed, theory of mind—our insights into the minds, motivations and feelings of others—has been extensively related to science fiction in Nicholas Pagan’s Theory of Mind and Science Fiction (New York: Palgrave, 2014). https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137399120.0001 Using characters from Frankenstein to Do Androids Dream Electric Sheep?, Pagan places his examples along a spectrum from the ‘low road’ of shallow emotional empathy to the ‘high road’ of a more intellectual understanding of alien and synthetic minds. He concludes that science fiction should be taken seriously as a literary genre for its depth of insight into these phenomena.

25 Ibid.

2. Authorial Approaches

© 2023 Paul Matthews, CC BY-NC 4.0 https://doi.org/10.11647/OBP.0348.02

‘Science’ implies the world of fact and what we all agree on seems to be true in the natural world. ‘Fiction’ implies values and meanings, the stories we tell to make sense of things. David Hume argued that it’s impossible to argue from the way the world is to the way the world ought to be and yet here is a genre that claims to be a kind of ‘fact-values’ reconciliation, a bridge between the two.

Kim Stanley Robinson

1

How do our SF authors approach their work? How do they tackle the essential problem of the aesthetics of other minds, choose narrative modes and connect facts to values and meanings as Robinson describes? Fortunately, they have been generous enough to share aspects of their method and we can start to piece together some common themes, despite the natural variety in their styles. For instance, they have carefully chosen the narrative voice that fits the main consciousnesses they want to feature. They endeavour to portray the nonhuman despite the human constraints and reference points they have to work with. They decide how much detail to give the reader and how much to leave out, in order to build more reader involvement. Their own relation to the SF genre may vary enormously. But as we would expect, all the authors are abreast of developments across the sciences—how things are—in order to have a healthy wellspring of ideas as to how things could be.

Influences and inspiration

Of course, contemporary science is a pivotal influence on many of the writers quoted in this book, from physics through biology to brain science. Multi-award winning author of the Imperial Radch trilogy Ann Leckie notes the influence of reading about consciousness effects in split-brain patients and other effects of brain damage in order to develop her approach to portraying a ship-mind.2 A further prolific and successful contemporary writer, Adrian Tchaikovsky, is surely not alone in keeping an ongoing dialogue with scientist friends and colleagues to sense-check his ideas about enhanced animals, alien consciousness and the joining of minds. He particularly notes the influence of Peter Godfrey-Smith’s Other Minds on his development of octopus society and consciousness in Children of Ruin.3 And scientists have helped to bridge the gap in highlighting the possibilities for forms of life as inspired by known biology and the range of conditions in which life is found on earth. Author Greg Egan notes the influence of Jack Cohen and Ian Stewart’s What does a Martian Look Like?, a book on xenobiology that gathers together scientific knowledge of relevance to possible alien life.4

The extent of scholarship in the background research of these SF authors should not be underestimated. Kazuo Ishiguro reportedly spends up to five years in research, before developing a first draft.5 Roger Zelazny once described his process to develop a sound scientific knowledge base:

I sat down and made a list of everything I felt I should know more about. Astrophysics, Oceanography, Marine Biology, Genetics. Then when I’d finished the list I read one book in each of these areas. When I’d finished I went back and read a second book until I’d read ten books in each area. I thought that it wouldn’t turn me into a terrific, fantastic expert but I’d at least have enough material there to know if I was saying something wrong.

6

Alongside such broad-based research, authors may then drill down on particular examples of species or phenomena to draw inspiration. Becky Chambers describes how her fictional worlds start with a consideration of basic functions of her aliens who are inspired by Earth zoology:

With alien species, I start with biology. The Aandrisks, for example, are a reptile-like, ectothermic species who lay eggs. So how does that affect your architecture, or your concept of parenthood, or family, or the typical composition of a household? From there, I ask questions about how these things affect art and culture and government and philosophy and so on.

7

A single powerful psychological and philosophical idea can also drive stories, as we see for example with zombies in Peter Watts’ Blindsight, which plays on the philosophical thought experiment of other people being identical in all ways but not being conscious8 In this vein, in Theodore Sturgeon’s classic novel More than Human, children with diverse supernatural abilities can fuse consciousness. Sturgeon describes how the psychological idea of the ‘gestalt’, the central idea in the book, has been powerful and lasting both for him and his readers:

The Gestalt relationship is something that people really and truly want to know. The Gestalt relationship has preoccupied me for so long—the concept of a whole entity made up of very discrete individuals who don’t lose their individuality. Gestalt between people is not like an army or a fascist dictatorship where everybody does what he’s told. It’s not an idea or particular creed that people have or share. It’s what they are.

9

And while specific scientific knowledge has been a rich source of influence and inspiration, the realisation that science also reveals our own finite limits has been another. We will see how alternative senses and the power of neuroplasticity has been a strong influence on authors in imagining alternative powers. Doris Lessing is certainly someone who has noted the restriction of the human umwelt:

But the whole point about us is that we have an extremely limited grasp; our senses are adequate only for functioning in this world and reproducing ourselves. And just one little example: a very slight difference in our eyes and we would see the sun differently, which would never have occurred to us until certain kinds of photography came into being, and you see what the sun looks like—not through our eyes but with a different kind of camera. We assume that what we see and what we think is all there is.

10

This kind of objective humility is a long way from the anthropocentric confidence that drove early SF, and surely leads to far more nuanced and subtle fiction.

And it is not simply content ideas that drive innovation in writing styles, plots, and descriptions of non-humans. Formats can provide a set of implicit rules that can be used to some advantage. Kazuo Ishiguro, for instance, originally thought of Klara and the Sun as a children’s book, and, so explained, we can see this influence:

When you look at books for young children, you can see in them so much of our complex mix of wishes for our children’s future: our urge to protect them from the harsher realities, the desire to pretend (just for now) that the world is a kinder place than we know it to be. Yet at the same time, those stories and pictures are often imbued with our wish not to mislead, to start giving small hints about the difficult things that lie ahead.

11

In the case of Klara, these difficult things include the shortness of human and robot life coupled with the ethical challenges around how we should treat realistic androids. And there are further benefits to conceptualising a story as a children’s book: Ishiguro’s simplicity of language in the storytelling lends huge power to the emotional events described.

Finding the gaps

In developing original angles to alien and artificial minds, authors have found it useful to diverge from prevalent trends and overused plot devices. Vernor Vinge, for instance, uses an ‘idea box’ to keep track of plot and character inspiration. He notes his approach to the hive mind concept used in A Fire Upon the Deep was inspired by a perceived gap in other work:

One thing I noticed is that these group minds usually involved very large numbers of members. The individual members might be of human intelligence or they might only be of animal intelligence, but the ensemble was actually a very large group, and I noticed there were hardly ever any group minds where there were three or four or five members.

12

For Martha Wells, one motivation for her Murderbot character was the prevalence of tropes about AI dissatisfied with their artificiality, or needing to become all-powerful:

I’d also read/seen a lot of stories with AI who want to become human, like Data in ‘Star Trek: Next Generation’. I wanted to write about an AI that wasn’t interested in becoming human at all, and who wasn’t particularly interested in revenge against humans, either. An AI that just wanted to be left alone.

13

So a key source of novelty is to first identify those scenarios that have become so well-rehearsed they are almost ingrained, before imagining an alternative, thereby moving the genre forwards.

Reader interactions

Ramez Naam is an example of an author who progressed from writing scientific nonfiction, to science fiction in his Nexus Saga of novels. He notes the importance of reader feedback in his choice of story directions:

I had a mother looking at her autistic son who she just couldn’t reach, wondering if Nexus could help her touch his mind, longing for it. And more than one person—these were beta readers, reading the book well before it was released—told me that that particular passage gave them chills.

14

William Gibson, challenged by a reader as to why the opening of The Peripheral was so difficult, responded that:

My own preference, as a reader, for this sort of book, is to experience the closest possible equivalent to culture shock. I want to go to new, strange places, feel lost, and then (probably with quite a few subtle nudges on the author’s part) gradually figure out where I am and what the heck’s going on. As a reader, I enjoy few things more. From feedback, I know that I’m not alone in that, but also that some readers find it too demanding. But it’s impossible to take care of both sides of that particular aisle at once.

15

For Gibson then, reader feedback is one way to gauge the success of narrative style and degree of exposition, authorial choices we will explore further below.

Narrative modes and consciousness

In the examples used in the following chapters of the book, we see examples of narrative voice chosen in the attempt to centralise other minds. Authors make use of omniscient, indirect styles of speech and thought.16 Others have chosen to alternate between third andfirst person, in the case of Kim Stanley Robinson’s Aurora a first person plural to indicate the collection of AIs forming the ships’ consciousness. In Olaf Stapledon’s Star Maker the first person voice changes from singular to plural as the main protagonist fuses consciousness with aliens met on his journeys.

For Ann Leckie, depicting an omniscient ship’s consciousness was an opportunity for what has been dubbed protagonism, the ability for a lead character to empathise and explore the minds of more minor players. The ship, Justice of Toren, is connected to and served by an army of ancillary cyborgs organised into segments and units (such as One Esk). In the end, Leckie chose to use the ship as an omniscient narrator in the first person, exploiting the ship’s ability to read its officers emotion, and to witness events in parallel. The effect is one of empathy coupled with beneficent surveillance (but surveillance nonetheless):

Depicting what that must be like—to have not only a huge ship for a body, but also hundreds, sometimes thousands, of human bodies all seeing and hearing and doing things at once—the thought of that kept me from even starting for a long time. How do you show a reader that experience? I could try to depict the flood of sensation and action, but then the focus would be so diffuse that it would be difficult to see where the main thread was. On the other hand, I could narrow things down to only one segment of One Esk, shortchanging one of the things that really intrigued me about the character, and also making it seem as though it was more separate from the ship than it was.

17

While some authors have explored the creation of a non-human omniscient narrator, other authors prefer first person. Greg Egan’s early work showed this preference:

I used to have a strong preference for first-person writing, and one of my novels, Quarantine, was even written in first-person, present tense. There were good reasons for that, but it might be a spoiler to reveal them. Some people are positively allergic to first-person and claim it’s psychologically unrealistic or interferes with suspension of disbelief, but I don’t accept either position: there are times when we really do feel as if we’re narrating our own lives moment by moment, but there are also cases when this is simply the most powerful way to frame the events of a story, even if it’s not how the characters were likely to have experienced them at the time.

18

Egan’s reference to this spoiler perhaps alludes to the powerful effect in ‘Learning to be Me’ introduced by the decommissioning of the narrator’s brain and replacement by an artificial, emulated mind. We begin to doubt the unity and integrity of what is being referred to as ‘I’.

Martha Wells’ use of first person for Murderbot helps in her attempts to expand time during the action sequences, where the android is carrying out commands and actions in parallel but the narrative is necessarily sequential. Her short, staccato paragraphs serve to depict the robots executive functions operating at a speed beyond human capability.

Aside from the these more traditional third and first person narrators, other authors have taken different approaches. For her Broken Earth trilogy, N.K. Jemisin opted to use the unusual second person for many sections of the narrative, where we learn that it us used in part to address the reader, but also the main character Essun’s later self, as she has been profoundly affected by past trauma and amnesia.19Jemisin explained her decision:

What worked best was second person. I’ve always thought of second person as distancing; after all, it’s impossible for the reader to ever truly be ‘you’. Yet I’ve read some incredibly intimate second-person stories, and as I actually tried writing it for the first time, I found that it’s sort of amazing and powerful—both distancing and intimate at the same time. You can’t be this person, but you can understand her.

20

In addition to narrator choices, unusual character pronouns are also used effectively in the work of some of the authors, contributing to the effect of alterity. This tradition, perhaps originated in the work of Ursula Le Guin, inspires Ann Leckie’s use of ‘she’ for her alien cultures that are genderless,21 and Gwyneth Jones’ use of a ‘she’ changing later to a ‘he’ for the main alien character who has characteristics of two human genders. In the work of Martha Wells, ‘it’ creates a useful tension when used to refer to a first-person character that feels human. Greg Egan opts for ‘ve’ to refer to his posthuman constructs. These small stylistic choices nonetheless have powerful net effects at the scale of the whole stories.

Writing the alien

Perhaps the biggest challenge for SF authors is how to even approach alien consciousnesses. Here, while admitting the difficulty, there is also a feeling that some guiding principles or constraints do exist. Adrian Tchaikovsky has characterised his depiction of other minds as scientific/narrative experiments, such as attempting to enter the mind of a sentient jumping spider about whom only observable behaviour has been recorded in Earth species:

Although a lot of people seem to be very happy with the Portiian viewpoints from

Children of Time

, I really had to stretch my brain to get my head around the other nonhuman perspectives. I’d kind of say I’ve gone a bit above and beyond in terms of finding unusual nonhuman protagonists.

22

Tchaikovsky has close connections to scientific advisers on his writing and explicitly acknowledges the influence of Other Minds by Peter Godfrey-Smith on his development of the octopus characters in Children of Ruin. The author describes the difficulty of translating this knowledge of the octopus nine-brain layout to his story

I think it’s possibly the hardest thing that I’ve ever done as a writer. There’s always this kind of, almost a gravitational pull towards anthropomorphizing things and making them more human, because that’s innately more comprehensible and it’s easier to write. And it’s walking that line, where you’re writing something that is comprehensible to your readers but at the same time isn’t simply slapping a mask on a human viewpoint.

23

While the fully alien present a challenge, future extended humans might require a simpler extrapolation from our current state. For example, Egan has a straightforward view of writing his posthuman characters:

Basically, I just look at things from the characters’ perspective and ask myself what their problems and anxieties would be. In

Permutation City

people have existential crises merely from waking up as software, because the process is entirely new, but in

Diaspora

editing and copying yourself is old hat and people are far more worried about problems in theoretical physics that might help them evade a cosmic disaster. Obviously no reader will have had personal experience of either situation, but if the characters’ priorities and reactions make sense in the circumstances, any reasonably empathetic person can relate to them.

24

This kind of empathy can extend to the alien too. Vernor Vinge decided to use familiar animal-like descriptions to provide his human readers partial understanding of his alien species:

We’re familiar with dealing with dogs as individuals, and we’re familiar—less familiar, but somewhat familiar—with dealing with dogs as part of pack-like groups. So an awful lot of stuff sort of came along with that idea, and I did not have to further explain those sorts of things. They were sort of already rooted in the consciousness of most readers.

25

But while providing these touch points, authors want to also stress the alterity of their aliens. Peter Watts has described his approach to alien design in Blindsight as finding the balance between the known and unknown:

I was a little tired of aliens, both literary and cinematic, that basically seem to be humans in rubber suits with one or two cultural knobs cranked to eleven. On the other hand, it’s a bit too easy to throw a big black slab at the audience and say ‘There’s no point in even trying to understand the aliens because they’re, you know, alien’. If something evolved in Darwin’s universe, it’s damn well going to adhere to certain natural laws, and that makes it tractable. So I wasn’t so much breaking a convention as I was treading the razor’s edge between two conventions. I tried to ensure that everything was deeply weird—life without genes, intelligence without conventional cephalisation—but nothing was unjustifiable.

26

In my view, Watts (and Lem’s Solaris which we will see later) certainly do achieve this ‘deeply weird’ effect, perhaps more so than others who have relied more heavily on human and animal reference points.

On the need for ‘expository lumps’

In addition to finding the balance between the possible and the highly speculative, authors make a conscious choice in the extent to which character and events are explained. While classic SF tended to revel in lengthy explanation—particularly of alien worlds and space drive technologies—from the New Age of the 1960’s and onward, authors were perhaps more likely to use a deliberate minimalism aimed at drawing the reader in. This sparser approach can increase the space to trigger cognitive resonance in the reader, making them do more of the imaginative work. As Adrian Tchaikovsky admits (echoing William Gibson), getting this balance right can be a struggle:

It’s one of the great writer’s arts to pare what you have learned on a subject down to the bare minimum. The temptation to show off your erudition is always very strong. Certainly it’s something my editors bring me up on quite often. And every reader’s different, and some may prefer more or less visible scaffolding. It’s a real case-by-case exercise, but you get a mental feel for those situations where you just haven’t joined the dots enough, or where readers might get tripped out of the immersion by questions about why or how something happened.

27

Minimalism in style can apply to plot and to world building—the detail of fictional societies and places. For plot, I put it to Gwyneth Jones that some readers of White Queen have found her slightly obfuscatory and difficult, with the lack of explanation leaving them struggling to connect the threads, but she was unapologetic:

I wrote a novel, not a scifi story, and imagined scifi things happening to people with complications and problems in their lives (which interfere with the smooth running of the plot, of course!). In real life, we do not understand each other. I think fiction should reflect that, even in the middle of an alien invasion… If you’re serious about writing SF, don’t be afraid to confuse!

28

She also sought to create the kind of confusion characteristic of colonial invasions, where history shows us a litany of mistrust, ineptitude and exploitation.

In their approaches to fictional worlds, authors such as Alastair Reynolds generally are wary of being overly descriptive and logical, for fear of becoming encyclopaedic and flat, with the reader too passive a participant:

I like the idea that you write in such a way that the reader thinks they’ve been given a bit of world-building, but they haven’t—they’ve made it up in their own head, or joined up the dots. That’s the way to do it with maximum economy. Clearly this is something that frustrates a lot of readers, but I like leaving stuff out.

29

So narrative explanation can be made the responsibility of the reader, leaving the author free to provide minimal cues or even misdirection. William Gibson admits that the exposition he provides is not really central to the plot:

I wanted to play it by my own possibly kind of perverse strict rules of golf in future SF ..none of those… no expository lumps. Or if there are expository lumps, they’re kind of perverse lumps because they explain things that the reader doesn’t actually need to know.

30

As well as this selectivity on description of worlds and plot, characters too can be treated enigmatically. Kazuo Ishiguro has noted that he prioritises characters’ relationships before their own backstories, as in his view it is in the intriguing relationships that we come to care about them.31

The range of narrative style in the genre thus varies from more realist to more impressionist and abstract, allowing different locations of meaning-making. When discussing deeper meaning, China Miéville, whose work is at the fantastical side of SF, emphasises the importance of metaphor rather than any fixed, allegorical intention:

A metaphor fractures and kicks off more metaphors, which kick off more metaphors, and so on. In any fiction or art at all, but particularly in fantastic or imaginative work, there will inevitably be ramifications, amplifications, resonances, ideas, and riffs that throw out these other ideas.

32

Miéville has thought and taught a lot about writing the numinous and sees the weird as somethings all around us and commonly encountered:

My impression is that a lot of us do experience it quite a lot, in everyday life. But given that part of its differentia specifica is that it is AWEsome, beyond language, expressing it is very difficult. I think a lot of what we admire in Weird Fictioneers is not that they see, but that they make a decent fist of expressing.

33

Miéville’s work succeeds, then, by focusing on conjuring the alien though rich language and metaphor, something that other authors attempt more by creating deliberate gaps for the imagination to fill. The experience is different, but can be just as unsettling.

I will assume in this book that there is a continuum between universal experience and the limited kind of consciousness we know as humans, a continuum which extends above and below us to forms of consciousness we do not or cannot know. Fiction represents human attempts to guess at what this might mean to the subjects themselves. Science fiction attempts to ground this guess this in knowledge, to build a skeleton on which conjecture can extend itself and reach out into the possible.

I will be considering any non-standard consciousness as useful to the picture, so will include accounts of superhumans, sentient earth species as well as human-created AIs that have been created in fiction. From individual minds, we will progress to depictions of many minds in union or widely distributed. We will then visit ways in which we ourselves might escape the current limits of consciousness through posthuman enhancement or transcendence of our ‘wetware’ limits. A sensible place to start, though, is in descriptions of first becoming aware, the initial coalescence of mind and stirrings of conscious reflection.

1 Kim Stanley Robinson, quoted in Richard Lea, ‘Science Fiction: The Realism of the 21st Century’, The Guardian, August 7, 2015.

2 Ibid.

3 Sarah Lewin, ‘Alien Minds, Alien Tech (and Spiders, Too): Q&A With Sci-Fi Author Adrian Tchaikovsky’, Space.com, 15 May 2019. https://www.space.com/children-of-ruin-adrian-tchaikovsky.html.

4 Jack Cohen and Ian Stewart, What Does a Martian Look Like?: The Science of Extraterrestrial Life (London: Ebury Press, 2004).

5 Allardice, Lisa, ‘Kazuo Ishiguro, ‘AI, Gene-Editing, Big Data… I Worry We Are Not in Control of These Things Any More’, The Guardian, 20 February 2021. https://www.theguardian.com/books/2021/feb/20/kazuo-ishiguro-klara-and-the-sun-interview.

6Roger Zelazny, ‘Zelazny & Amber―Phlog44 RZ Interview’, interview by Alex Heatley, 1995. http://www.roger-zelazny.com/repository/phlogiston_interview.html.

7 Becky Chambers, quoted in Ann Leckie, Kim Stanley Robinson, and M John Harrison, ‘If the Aliens Lay Eggs, How Does that Affect Architecture?: Sci-Fi Writers on How They Build Their Worlds’, The Guardian, January 5, 2021. https://www.theguardian.com/books/2021/jan/05/if-the-aliens-lay-eggs-how-does-that-affect-architecture-sci-fi-writers-on-how-they-build-their-worlds.

8 Robert Kirk, ‘Zombies’, in The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, eds Edward N. Zalta and Uri Nodelman, Summer 2023. Metaphysics Research Lab, Stanford University, 2023. https://plato.stanford.edu/archives/sum2023/entries/zombies/.

9 Theodore Sturgeon, ‘The Push From Within: the Extrapolative Ability of Theodore Sturgeon’, interview by David D. Duncan. http://www.physics.emory.edu/faculty/weeks//misc/duncan.html.

10 Doris Lessing, ‘A Thing of Temperament: An Interview with Doris Lessing, London, May 16, 1998’, interview by Cathleen Rountree, Jung Journal 2, no. 1 (2008). https://doi.org/10.1525/jung.2008.2.1.62.

11 Kazuo Ishiguro, quoted in Lisa Allardice, ‘Kazuo Ishiguro: ‘AI, Gene-Editing, Big Data… I Worry We are Not in Control of These Things Any More’’, The Guardian, February 20, 2021. https://www.theguardian.com/books/2021/feb/20/kazuo-ishiguro-klara-and-the-sun-interview.

12 Vernor Vinge, quoted in John Joseph Adams and David Barr Kirtley, ‘Interview: Vernor Vinge’, Lightspeed Magazine, May 2012. https://www.lightspeedmagazine.com/nonfiction/interview-vernor-vinge/.

13 Martha Wells, quoted in Veronica Scott, ‘Interview with Martha Wells, Author of The Murderbot Diaries’, Science Fiction, Amazing Stories, July 27, 2018. https://amazingstories.com/2018/07/interview-with-martha-wells-author-of-the-murderbot-diaries/.

14 Natassia, ‘Interview: Ramez Naam | Literary Escapism’, 12 September 2013. https://www.literaryescapism.com/39192/interview-ramez-naam.

15 William Gibson, ‘The Afterword Reading Society: The Peripheral by William Gibson’, Culture, The National Post, December 10, 2014. https://nationalpost.com/entertainment/books/the-afterword-reading-society-the-peripheral-by-william-gibson.

16 e.g. Gwyneth Jones’ White Queen, Charles Stross’ Accelerando and more direct narrative and inner monologue (e.g. Kazuo Ishiguro’s Klara and the Sun, Martha Wells’ The Murderbot Diaries).

17 Ann Leckie, ‘Interview with Orbit Books’ (Orbit 2013).

18 Johnson, Andrea, ‘Interview: Greg Egan on Orthagonal and Thirty Years of Writing Hard Science Fiction’, SF Signal (blog), 6 June 2014. https://www.sfsignal.com/archives/2014/06/interview-greg-egan-on-orthogonal-and-thirty-years-of-writing-hard-science-fiction/.

19 Wickham, Kim, ‘Identity, Memory, Slavery: Second-Person Narration in N. K. Jemisin’s The Broken Earth Trilogy’, Journal of the Fantastic in the Arts 30, no. 3 (2019): 392–411, 479.

20 N.K. Jemisin, quoted in John Scalzi, ‘The Big Idea: N.K. Jemisin’, Whatever: Furiously Reasonable (blog), August 6, 2015. https://whatever.scalzi.com/2015/08/06/the-big-idea-n-k-jemisin-4/.

21 This was done to draw attention to our more common use of ‘he’ as a gender default, though did lead some readers to think that all her characters are women.

22 Adrian Tchaikovsky, quoted in Sarah Lewin, ‘Alien Minds, Alien Tech (and Spiders, Too): Q&A With Sci-Fi Author Adrian Tchaikovsky’, Space.com, May 15, 2019. https://www.space.com/children-of-ruin-adrian-tchaikovsky.html.

23 Ibid.

24 Greg Egan, ‘Interview with Carlos Pavón’, 1998. https://www.gregegan.net/INTERVIEWS/Interviews.html.

25 Vernor Vinge, quoted in John Joseph Adams and David Barr Kirtley, ‘Interview: Vernor Vinge’, Lightspeed Magazine, May 2012. https://www.lightspeedmagazine.com/nonfiction/interview-vernor-vinge/.

26 Peter Watts, ‘Peter Watts Interview’, Pat’s Fantasy Hotlist (blog), December 22, 2006. http://fantasyhotlist.blogspot.com/2006/12/peter-watts-interview.html.

27 Adrian Tchaikovsky, quoted in ‘Author Interview: Adrian Tchaikovsky’, The Book in Hand (blog), May 26, 2021. https://thebookinhand.com/2021/05/26/author-interview-adrian-tchaikovsky/

28 Gwyneth Jones, email message to author, 2021.

29 Alastair Reynolds, quoted in Ann Leckie, Kim Stanley Robinson, and M John Harrison, ‘If the Aliens Lay Eggs, How Does that Affect Architecture?: Sci-Fi Writers on How They Build Their Worlds’, The Guardian, January 5, 2021. https://www.theguardian.com/books/2021/jan/05/if-the-aliens-lay-eggs-how-does-that-affect-architecture-sci-fi-writers-on-how-they-build-their-worlds

30 William Gibson, quoted in Karin L Kross, ‘William Gibson on Urbanism, Science Fiction, and Why The Peripheral Weirded Him Out’, Tor.com, October 29, 2014. https://www.tor.com/2014/10/29/william-gibson-the-peripheral-interview/.

31 Orhanen, Anna, ‘An Exclusive Q&A with Kazuo Ishiguro on Klara and the Sun’, Waterstones.com Blog. https://www.waterstones.com/blog/an-exclusive-qanda-with-kazuo-ishiguro-on-klara-and-the-sun.

32 China Miéville, quoted in Geoff Manaugh, ‘Unsolving the City: An Interview with China Miéville’, BLDGBLOG. March 1, 2011. https://www.bldgblog.com/2011/03/unsolving-the-city-an-interview-with-china-mieville/.

33 China Miéville, quoted in Jeff VanderMeer, ’’God, That’s a Merciless Question’: China Miéville’s Interview From Weird Tales’, Jeff VanderMeer (blog), June 16, 2009. https://www.jeffvandermeer.com/2009/06/16/god-thats-a-merciless-question-china-mievilles-interview-from-weird-tales/.

3. Awakenings

© 2023 Paul Matthews, CC BY-NC 4.0 https://doi.org/10.11647/OBP.0348.03

Since I had no form I could feel all possible forms in myself, and all actions and expressions and possibilities of making noises, even rude ones. In short, there were no limitations to my thoughts, which weren’t thoughts, after all, because I had no brain to think them; every cell on its own thought every thinkable thing all at once, not through images… but simply in that indeterminate way of feeling oneself there, which did not prevent us from feeling equally there in some way.

Italo Calvino, ‘The Spiral’

1

How can consciousness arise in evolved and designed creatures? Current science approaches this question from different directions: from biology, which considers why consciousness might be useful and what might have triggered its development; from neuroscience, which tries to define its necessary and sufficient conditions; from philosophy, which approaches it from both subjective and objective directions, though usually not at the same time.

What does this growing awareness feel like? Science fiction writers have benefited from the range and emphasis of scientific and philosophical insight, finding fertile ground for speculation. Whether describing natural or artificial creatures or some combination of these, they have attempted to portray the first glimpses of sentience, awareness and self-image. Mirroring a debate in science, SF authors have seen this as either a sudden or gradual emergence. They have noted the importance of the development of language and associative reasoning in the process of this emergence. But in various ways they have been prompted by why—what is new about the entity that it starts to gain this new capacity?

Sensing self and the world, developing motives

For both developing human babies and simple organisms, an awareness of being requires the distinction between inside and outside, between self and other. Babies show rudimentary differentiation between their own bodies and outside stimuli. Simple, single-celled organisms are able to