TBSFotY vo1 - Shoemaker "Today I am Paul"

 Recently I've written two stories where part of the feedback was "it feels like old style SF."

In one of the stories it was something I was explicitly going for, so that was a win, but in the other, I wasn't quite sure I understood the response.

At the same time, I've been collecting Neil Clarke's "The Best Science Fiction of the Year" anthologies which, I imagine, probably best represent what's contemporary in Science Fiction these days.

I've been meaning to work through them chronologically, making notes on the stories with regards to what and what doesn't work for me and to really start understanding the shape of contemporary short SF.

 Start at the beginning ....

So the first story is Martin L. Shoemaker's "Today I am Paul", originally published in Clarkesworld, August 2015. It was also nominated for  a Nebula, among other things.

The story is about a healthcare android which cares for an alzheimer's patient named Mildred who is slowly deteriorating. This android, BRKCK-01932-217JH-98662 (BRK from here) is interesting for two reasons:
 
firstly, it is able to morph its body to some degree, extending its limbs and hair, changing its eye color, etc. 
 
Secondly, Mildred's family have chosen to have BRK augmented with what's called an 'emulation net', a subsystem allowing the android to "read Mildred's moods, match them against [its] analyses of the people in her life, and emulate those people with extreme fidelity", including approximating their physical characteristics.
 
This "emulation net" is in addition to other subsystems, chiefly the "empathy net", which makes BRK attentive to Mildred's needs. 
 
The interesting thing is that BRK asserts that its "self" has somehow emerged from the interplay of these two subsystems, or at least, emerged in order to balance the two nets.
 
This is an interesting idea, although I doubt one we're supposed to take seriously as an actual model of selfhood (although, perhaps we are? Still, to me that question is secondary to the story).

The story is fairly simple - we're shown Mildred's decline, BRK interacting with her, emulating who Mildred needs to see, interacting with the family, etc.

Then there is a fire which threatens Mildred's life -- BRK has to take some drastic action to save her, which reveals them to her as an android, at which Mildred recoils.

Mildred passes away, and BRK plays some comforting role, after which they are essentially abandoned, but kept around for future, potential, caring.

What worked, what didn't, how does it work.

My interest in SF is not what you'd call one of hard-realism, so despite some potential philosophical nitpicks, I'm happy with the premise. 

More interestingly, it does provide us with some important food for philosophical thought. BRK augmented with an emulation net is essentially a lying machine. Ostensibly built for care, it has also become something that continually dupes Mildred.
It could be, though, that this is actually the moral choice, right?
 If I pushed this further, I could argue that this story is deeply cynical, that part of what it's suggesting is that people simply project what they need onto others, that the "other" doesn't really matter.
 I won't do that though, because I don't think it's true about this story - but there is part of the core of this story that lends itself to a deeply cynical solipsism, if pushed hard enough.
 
It does present an interesting set of ideas around what identity is generally, I think this is nicely explored. When BRK isn't required to "be somebody", it sees itself as nobody at all. That's a potentially deep point about isolation that I don't think is explored as well as it might have been.

In terms of the prose, I thought it worked well. It's not a story where the language was highlighted for me though.
I particularly liked the repeated "I am X" phrase.

The one thing that I felt really disappointed me what the fire and explosion scene. For me, it felt out of place, and particularly in the way it seemed to turn into an action film on a dime. All of that effort, all of that action, and Mildred still passes away from smoke inhalation. I thought it was entirely unnecessary and out of kilter with the rest of the story's gentleness.

But then I wonder, is this the kind of thing that people want in their philosophical fiction? I don't know. I think that the scene with the fire could've been left out completely and it would've had precisely the same emotional resonance. For me, the afterword/coda  could've been left off as well and it would've been, possibly even more effective - but they you wouldn't get the concluding "Today I am Mildred," which is nice.

All in all a solid story, well done.


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