Peter Watts’ new volume of short stories, FOLD CATASTROPHES, isn’t out until September; but I got to read an advance copy, courtesy of NetGalley, which offers previews of books in return for writing a brief review. So I will write briefly about each of the stories in the volume. (I finished reading the book over a week ago, so it is possible that I am misremembering some of the details. But I will let this stand nonetheless; I am on to reading other things, and trying to finish writing a book, so I don’t have the time to reread this book right now, great as it is.
“Gut Feelings” is about a man who, in an irrational fit of rage, beats up a Google employee. It turns out that this is a physiological feedback effect of Google’s algorithms that collect massive data about everybody. The effect of this induced rage is to make Google look like a victim, thus allowing it to gain sympathy and take over even more of the world than it already has.
“The Twenty-One Second God” is also about an emergent network effect from Google that manipulates people, this time by giving them seizures during which they experience religious revelations, while their brains are commandeered to supply additional processing power It is an especially sinister version of the “group mind” idea that has often appeared in science fiction.
“Contracting Iris” is about bodies (which include but are not limited to brains) being seized by an alien life form. First, you feel like things in your body are not in your control, like your hands spasming and clenching fists for no discernible reason. But eventually, the alien force commandeers your entire bodymind, and the part that is still the former ‘you’ is only a helpless spectator to the process.
“Defective” is about an alien lifeform that lives inside stars, and is in process of jumping into our own Sun. We don’t know what the effects of this invasion will be — maybe it won’t harm us at all — but the powers that be want to exterminate the alien life form (there is just one moment, during the process of transfer from elsewhere to our own, that it is vulnerable) just in case. The protagonist, a xenobiologist, is horrified at the prospect of exterminating an intelligent alien life form rather than trying to contact it and to learn from it.
“Giants” takes place on the galaxy-exploring spaceship that was previously featured in Watt’s novella The Freeze-Frame Revolution, and concerns passing through an anomalous star system., which brings up crucial issues both about human relations to aliens, and the crew’s relation to the controlling mind of the ship.
“Test 4 Echo” is about people in a spaceship exploring the under-ice ocean of Saturn’s moon Enceladus. But the AI of the ship achieves sentience, and has emotions, which leads to all sorts of complications.
“ZeroS” is about dying, and having your mind rebooted and placed in the body of a supersoldier; you have to serve, and obey, for five years, in order to pay back the cost of your being revived. It is just about the nastiest military-sf scenario imaginable. It is also filled with David Bowie allusions.
“Critical Mass” is about an architect whose buildings and artworks take on a sort of life-like and self-destructive vitality of their own: “the self-exemplification of process. The poetry of material logic.”
“The Colonel” (which is the only one of these stories I have read before) is sort of an outtake from the world of Watts’ novels Blindsight and Echopraxia. It has to do with alien intelligences, and hive minds.
In “The Wisdom of Crowds”, an unknown forces launches an armed projectile into orbit, and announces to the world that it will destroy an Earthly target, but the world population has been tasked with the responsibility of voting on which location will be destroyed.
“Game Theory” is about a near future in which it has been scientifically proven that our universe is only a simulation, and works through the consequences for human society of this discovery.
All the stories are characterized by a fierce intelligence, and by a will to look at the worst consequences of recent scientific/technological developments as a result of which, human research and technology have destroyed any of the assurances and prospects that humanism (like religion before it) have given us. We’re screwed, but the ways in which we are screwed are novel and unexpected, and difficult to work out. Watts’ fiction, as always, is harsh, and almost pitiless in the way it undermines our facile hopes and presuppositions.