The world has become strange and unfamiliar. I don’t like it.
Here we are just a little under 4 weeks before the release of book 3 of the Foundry series, the Tempering. It has been a long and strange road, not just in my personal life, but for the world in general. As a science fiction writer, you spend a great deal of time thinking about what the world could be, good or bad. Every variety of sci-fi has an aspect of speculation, of future casting. Sometimes that future is hopeful, and sometimes it is grim.
In the Foundry standalone book, Ground Control to Major Thomas (currently my least read book in the series despite it being really good), I decided to go down several paths of a future I saw as possible but unlikely. I started writing this book in 2017 but really ramped up circa 2021. It was a short story first, then became a novella, and then was a short novel. It’s a heist in which our protagonists of motley outsiders who have fallen down on their luck steal a car floating in space in exchange for billions of dollars. I certainly don’t want to ruin any of the surprises, but I explored the ideas of future climate change deniers (which in this book are an extreme group of evangelical Christians who believe sin is the cause of climate change) and historical revisionism (where a man is attempting to author an alternate history free from any center or left of center ideas).
Before you quit reading because some rage bait online has tried to close your mind to anything but a strict interpretation of reality, hang with me. I know you’re open-minded.
Looking back over the past few months and seeing all the things I have seen, we have seen, I can’t help but feel a little prophetic. There are some serious parallels with what is happening now in our country and around the world, though it is happening far more rapidly than I had anticipated. My intention with the book was not to make a political statement based on a certain party, however, it was to say that life and politics are messy, and there are good guys and bad guys, and that the best outcome for all is to work together. Which is what I still believe even when the powers that be try so hard to pull us apart. The book was my attempt to reconcile what it means to be American, to take the vice, the virtue, the love, and the hate, and to resolve them. But national identity is a complicated issue, as is personal identity. That said, working together for the benefit of all feels right every time.
In the Tempering, again not to ruin any surprises, I explored the concept of a rogue AI that has data poisoned itself through a series of events. This is not a new idea, but when I started writing about it, the whole generative space of AI was a joke. It’s not funny anymore. AI can be a remarkable tool for good, and it can in its current state be a demon of noise and endless slop which steals value from everyone, even that of its corporate overlords who created it.
Will it open new avenues for economic growth? Almost certainly. Will those be greater than that which it destroys? Who can say? And as for super intelligence, or AGI… Being that we don’t really understand what consciousness is, I’m not sure if those things are even possible. So, will we just continue to make more and more efficient machines that merely simulate our human interactions? Guaranteed.
And so, all of that is to say, the past few months I’ve been existential about the world. We are perched on the edge of something as a species. What that is, I don’t know. There are major swings in what is considered “normal” in politics, an economic structure and civil society that is being tested by the rise of democratized AI, and personal privacy something of the past.
In the Tempering I offer a future for humanity. You will have to decide if it’s the right future or not. There is no good without evil, no light without dark, no life without death.
What does that mean then for us to be human?
What world do we leave for the next generation?
Are we as humans obsolete, or is just the underclass obsolete?
Great questions, and I don’t have the answers, but what I do know, my fellow Cosmic Traveler, is that we’re in it together.
“I knew that change was inevitable. No matter what we do, no matter how grand the things that we build, something always changes. Growth, decay, death. It doesn’t matter if in our minds we have a perfect picture of what is, or what should be—these ideas are mere constructs of our will and desire. We exist in a universe of a billion-billion-billion variables, all in constant flux, forces of gravity, expectation, and intent pulling at one another, shaping and reshaping existence. And as lowly humans, as singular life forms of any species, all we can hope for is to embrace entropy, find beauty in chaos, and adapt as best we can.”
– The Tempering, J Fitzpatrick Mauldin