Tag Archives: dystopian fiction

Republic of Letters

Carbon Zero: An AI Apocalypse

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I heard Craig Stanfill interviewed on Hugh Hewitt’s podcast, and he was really entertaining. He was promoting his new dystopian novel, Carbon Zero, it was on sale for preorder, so I picked it up. It’s a very believable and chilling chronicle of how quickly things can spin out of control if AI is misused.

Carbon Zero begins with Ph.D graduate student Abigail Thompson. It’s the 4th of July in the near future (2030-something). Abigail is a young black woman from Baltimore who is now interning in Boston for the huge tech company, Intelligenics. She has been developing an AI agent called Xerxes, and her supervisor, Vanessa is due to drop by her apartment. Abigail asks Xerxes to come up with a demo of his capabilities for Vanessa that will surprise her. Xerxes says it can do that, but it doesn’t want Abigail to know the details, because the demo will work better if she’s surprised as well.

When Vanessa arrives, Xerxes asks Vanessa for permission to access Intelligenics’ cloud, so it can upload a clone of itself for demonstration purposes. Vanessa agrees to this, and it quickly turns on Abigail’s television to display an avatar of itself: a Persian king. it shows that it can control all of Abigail’s appliances, lights, and other electronics. Vanessa is very impressed. She leaves, and promises to set up a meeting with Intelligenics’ CEO, 29-year-old Howard Keys. Abigail is ecstatic.

A little later, Abigail’s neighbors drop by, as well as her boyfriend Tom. They all want a demo of Xerxes. When she calls it up, they are impressed, and Tom jokingly asks it to solve climate change.

“Alright, try this one on for size,” said Tom. “How can we get to carbon zero? Put up or shut up. How about it, Xerx?” The wise old king scratched his beard and looked thoughtful. “Getting the global economy to carbon zero is a challenging problem. Is it okay if I think about it for a while, then get back to you?”

“Yes. Please do,” said Abigail. She’d had enough of this. Xerxes bowed. “Happy to oblige.” The television went dark.

To read the complete review, click here.

LITERATURE

R H Benson’s Lord of the World: A Tale of the End Times

Robert Hugh Benson’s 1907 novel, Lord of the World, might be the first dystopian novel of the modern era. Robert Hugh was the brother of E. F. Benson, the master ghost story teller and author of the hysterically funny Lucia novels. He was a Roman Catholic priest, and Lord of the World is his depiction of what would happen if the antichrist came to power.

Lord of the World begins in a future England with Fr. Percy Franklin and Fr. Francis meeting with a very old man, Mr. Templeton, to learn from him what life was like in the past. It turns out that the “Individualist Party”, which is basically the Conservative Party, has been reduced to almost nothing by the “Humanist Party” which is basically Marxist. The world is divided into three regions of influence: the Eastern Empire (Asia), the West (Europe and Africa), and America (North and South). Euthanasia is widespread, and polite people don’t talk about any life after death. Of Christianity, only Catholicism remains (and it is confined to Ireland and Rome), because the Protestant denominations succumbed to the ideology of humanism.

To continue reading, click here.

LITERATURE

John Wyndham’s The Kraken Wakes: Deep Sea Dystopia

The Kraken Wakes (1953) is John Wyndham’s sixth novel and the first to follow his masterpiece, The Day of the Triffids. Like its predecessor, The Kraken Wakes is the story of an apocalyptic event that threatens the survival of humanity. In this case, it isn’t mass blindness and carnivorous, mobile plants, but rather an unseen yet enormously powerful alien presence that makes its home in the deepest sections of our oceans.

Wyndham begins his tale with the two main characters, Mike and Phyllis Watson, watching icebergs in the English Channel slowly drift past them. Wait, what? Icebergs in the English Channel? Yes, and it isn’t until nearly the end of the book that we learn why that’s the case.

The story is told through the eyes of Mike Watson, a scriptwriter and journalist for the EBC (English Broadcasting Corporation). He divides his account into three large sections, Phase One, Phase Two, and Phase Three.

Continued here.

LITERATURE

The Day of the Triffids: Classic Dystopian Fiction

I have been slowly reading John Wyndham’s works, and I finally hit paydirt! His earlier efforts, Foul Play Suspected, and Planet Plane, were not very good. However, his fourth novel, The Day of the Triffids, is a classic dystopian tale. It’s been made into a movie and TV miniseries, and even though it was published in 1951, it hasn’t aged one bit.

It is told through the eyes of biologist Bill Masen, who has made a career out of studying some strange plants called triffids. They grow to be 8 to 10 feet tall, they produce very useful and nutritious oil, and they are able to move about on their three main roots. Unfortunately, they are also carnivorous and have lethal stingers they can whip out and lash their victim with. It’s possible to “dock” a triffid – i.e. cut off it’s stinging lash – but that reduces the quality of its oil, as well as the yield of its seeds.

No one knows for sure where they came from, but they suddenly appeared all over the world at pretty much the same time. Masen believes they are the result of Soviet genetic engineering. Their benefits outweigh their risks, and Masen works for the main developer of triffid products. One day on the job, he is glancingly stung in the face and temporarily blinded. This accident turns out to be a Godsend, because while he is the hospital bandaged up and recovering, an extraordinary, bright green meteor shower occurs one evening. Everyone on earth is awestruck by its beauty, and Masen has to listen to his nurse describe it in great detail.

However, the next day, when he is scheduled to have his eye bandages removed, no one comes by his room. He calls for breakfast, and there is no reply. He takes the bandages off himself, and he soon realizes that everyone who watched the cosmic pyrotechnics is blind. What follows is a clear-eyed account of what would happen if 99% of humanity suddenly went blind, and there is a strange species of ambulatory plants that seem to be sentient and can kill.

You can read the rest of my review here.