Casey Dorman's 3 favorite reads in 2024

The whole Children of Time series is one that stretches the boundaries of science fiction by featuring unusual creatures, such as spiders, ants, octopuses, parasites and birds, as well as an artificial mind, in starring roles. The humans, and their ethnocentric need to not just terraform planets they plan to colonize, but to try to hasten the development of earth-like species on those planets, have created super creatures, with human-level intelligence, but who use their own unique ways of seeing the world and thinking. Children of Memory, being the last book in the series, is not just a continuation of the story, but is a reflection on what all these types of thinking mean in terms of our understanding of ourselves, an of things such as consciousness. While some readers have viewed these reflections as a distraction from the plot, more philosophical readers, such as myself, will see them as the main stage on which the action of the book takes place. While ants have hive consciousness, spiders their own type of consciousness, octopuses, whose brains are distributed in their tentacles, have distributed consciousness, and a parasitic creature such as Miranda, who has symbiosed with then combined those she's interacted with in the past has a reflective, composite consciousness, the discussion becomes focused when Miranda and the AI version of the human scientist, Dr. Avrana Kern argue about whether the two crows, Gothi and Gethi, one of whom is minutely aware of everything and the other who integrates its partners observations into meaning, are, together, a consciousness or not. It's a grand discussion, which prompted my own thoughts to go on their own tangent again and again. Being a writer about AI and consciousness myself, in my science fiction, I loved it. In fact, I thought it was a more productive analysis than I was able to glean from Tschaikovsky's most recent novel that is explicitly about AI. if you're philosophically oriented and love to see philosophical ideas debated at a high level in the context of a thrilling sci-fi adventure, this is a novel you'll love as much as I did.

Reading Ray Nayler’s The Mountain in the Sea reminded me of my experience reading Dune decades ago, when I was a teen. It opened up another world, another way to experience the world, but in the case of Nayler's book, that new perspective didn’t require traveling to a fictitious, distant planet. It was the world of a conscious, intelligent octopus here in earth’s oceans. Nayler takes us inside the minds of a number of his characters. In fact, much of the intrigue of the book is experiencing the central situation from myriad perspectives, each of them with a different and only partial understanding, almost none of them cognizant of each other. Besides the motivations of the various human players in the story, the chief mysteries involve understanding both Evrim, an AI emulation and the octopuses, that is, comprehending how they think and understand their world. We never really do. As in real life, we are unable to get beyond our own human, anthropocentric perspective. While Dune was wildly imaginative, but scientifically implausible, The Mountain in the Sea attempts to stick reasonably close to science, both with regard to AIs, and octopuses. A human insight on which The Mountain in the Sea directs a spotlight, is that humans are predators, and we are prone to see the world through the lens of a predator, i.e., what profits our survival, especially access to food, but also territory, power, and dominance, is what determines our relationship with other species, either animal or plant. So, like most really good books, The Mountain in the Sea causes us to examine our own psyche as well as those of the non-humans the book is “about.”

In Isabella Hammad’s The Parisian, published in 2019, I turned away from science fiction to my other love, literary fiction. The story begins in 1914 when the protagonist, Midhat Kamal, from Nablus in Palestine, now the West Bank, travels to Montpelier, France to study medicine. The opening third of the book, focuses on the intense internal feelings of Kamal as he experiences the indefiniteness of the immigrant’s position in French society, at once treated as an important person, but always with reservations, suspicion, and never as quite an equal. The writing is some of the most beautiful I have read in a modern novel. When he returns to Nablus, disconsolate but resigned to being rejected by the woman he loves, he is immersed in both his father’s business and the social and political life of his town and region. He finds that his identity as a Palestinian is as indefinite and vague as was his identity as an Arab in France. Kamal, suffers severe melancholia when he finds out that the French love of his life didn't reject him as he'd thought, and he missed out on their being together. At the same times his friends and relatives are risking their lives to fight for some kind of independence for their land. In the end, nothing is settled. Kamal emerges from his depression to find that the fate of the region is slipping even further from the grasp of its people. It’s a story that can’t quite decide if it’s about politics or. about the inner life of its protagonist but manages to portray, with compassion and beauty, the displacement of identity that both the main character and the population of Palestine experienced at the time.