Introspective AI

I like to read Science Fiction in the summer, I actually like it any time, but for some reason I always classify SciFi as a summer genre.  In that vein I had saved Ancillary Justice by Ann Leckie to read by the pool.  I picked it up because a whole ton of people who have similar taste in books as me gave it rave reviews.  I found it to be...very thought provoking and introspective, but first as always SPOILERS AHEAD!

I will do my best to give you the gist of the story, as it is laid out in a two separate story format.  In essence the story focus's around a piece of AI named Breq, except that it isn't about Breq per se.  It is about a being called The Justice of Toren which is a giant ship that is controlled completely by an AI who is able to...I don't know how to explain it...maybe fragment is the word, yeah I'll use that, who is able to fragment it's consciousness and use human bodies as ancillaries.  This means it take a human and submerge it's being into itself and essentially control, get input and be in many different physical places at once.  The AI organizes itself in a complex system that I am not going to go into, but it gets the point across.  In the flashback story The Justice of Toren and more specifically an ancillary designated as One Esk get caught up in a galaxy wide conflict with the head of the Radch, which is the giant empire that pretty much has taken over everything.  The head of the Radch is a being known as Anaander Mianaai, who has also fragmented itself and is now having some sort of internal conflict with itself, resulting in the destruction of The Justice of Toren all except a single ancillary which escaped.  This ancillary, that used to be designated as Esk One, now calls itself Breq and is looking for revenge for the death of her ship, and more importantly one Lt. Awen, with whom Breq as One Esk had bonded (are you completly confused yet?).  Along the way Breq meets up with a former officer, that it did not particularly like, but for some reason saves and brings along the adventure.  The whole story culminates in Breq hooking up with one aspect of Anaander Mianaai, who tells us that the entity it is part of is conflicted and one part is trying to bring about change, and another part is trying to preserve the status quo.  Breq picks a side (kind of) an chaos ensues and things happen and thoughts are thunk and Breq obtains a ship to sail off into the next story.

If the that did not make any sense I don't blame you, this book is full of intricacies and logic leaps that have to be read and thought over to be of any value, and a summation is not the place to do it.  There are several things that caught my attention in this book and I will go through them one by one and maybe my feelings, or the gist of the book, or whatever will become clear...or maybe not.  One of the first things that jumps out is the language choice the author made.  In her world the Radch do not use gender identification, so the only pronoun that is used is she.  While this is a very interesting choice, it gets a bit confusing, especially when it is still used even after a character is identified as male.  The other language choice the author made was to make it clear there were other languages that are used extensively, but they are never differentiated int the book, so it got really confusing sometimes.  The combination of these two choices made the conversations a bit hard to follow some times.  The biggest concept in this book was the AI and it's vastness.  The idea of this huge AI that could and did control everything in it's domain, and it's casual acceptance by the masses

was very well done.  The use of the human ancillaries was very very thought provoking, making me think of the various aspects of personality over and over.  I had a hard time wrapping my head around the idea that a being could essentially fragment itself and control the various aspects of itself completely independently, yet still always part of the whole, but that is not the authors fault, it is just a really complex and huge concept that I think is meant to be mulled over.  The other piece of the AI concept was the idea that it might be possible for a schism to happen within the myriads of facets of such a huge AI's consciousnesses, effectively putting it at odds with itself.  This is shown mostly in the facets of Anaander Mianaai and it's ability to hide what it was doing from itself.  Moving on, the Radch have a very inclusive religion that allows for conquered worlds to add their own deities to the pantheon of an almost Buddhist like structure, the concept of balance being the biggest tenet.  The religion is very intertwined in the day to day activities, customs, and even running of the government.  It is mentioned many times, and the local temples tend to be used as settings on many worlds that are visited during the course of this book.  There is also some sort of super strong alien presence that accounts for a treaty that is part of the schism in the governmental entity, but unfortunately this is not very well explained and for me adds to some of the confusion I had reading this book.  The flashback stories, the bits of history, and the current story are all well told, though I liked the flashback and history part the best.  As you can probably tell from the stunted, stuttering, stilted (yes I am in an alliteration mood today) review that this is not the most reviewable of books.  Overall I felt it was a book of idea's and concepts.  The characters were fairly interchangeable and the stories while good, seemed to be more of a backdrop or context of an idea the author was trying to get across.  I had a hard time following the nuances of the plot and conversations, and to be quit honest I'm still not sure if I actually understand the plot, but I loved the ideas this book posed.  I liked that it was fodder for many hours of thinking, of pondering, of hypothesizing, sometimes I really enjoy that kind of thing.  Overall I found it to be more of a philosophical idea novel then I did a scifi space tale.  I found it a bit confusing and wanted more information on certain things, but enjoyed being able to mull it over when I put it down.  I will give it 7 out of 10 ancillaries and will probably pick up the sequel when it comes out.

What did you think of this book?  Do you like more abstract concepts, or do prefer a more solid story?  How rambly and incoherent is this rambling?

Different

Hello All, sorry about the crazy timing of my posts, but work is happening at all hours...so I guess is this blog :-)  Just finished The Different Girl by Gordon Dahlquist.  I had heard a ton of good things about it from various sources and the cover was yellow...and we all know my weird obsession with yellow covers.  It is not a long book, I read it over the course of two days, but could have easily knocked it out in couple of hours, but it is packed pretty full.  As always SPOILERS AHEAD!

Veronika is one of four girls who live on a remote island.  The four girls are identical except for the color of their hair.  Veronika has red hair, Isobel has lemon yellow hair, Caroline has brown hair and Eleanor has black hair.  The story is told in Veronika's voice and lends an innocent air to the whole book.  We watch as the four girls have lessons, take naps and live a very simple basic life.  The girls are told that their parents died in a plane crash and that they were taken to the island to live.  Right off the bat you can tell that there is something different about these girls.  The girls are all told to take a walk and observe various things around the island for a specific amount of time and then report back.  They at first find it difficult to separate and make their own decisions on where to go, but it gets easier over time.  Veronika eventually even goes so far as to make a decision to stay past her allotted time to continue to study something.  The girls are constantly questioned and taught to think about things, but seem to be very well cared for by the only other people on the island.  Irene and Robbert.  The lives on the island are interrupted by the arrival of May, the different girl.  When she first see's Veronika and her sisters she screams, letting us know that they are even more different then originally thought.  May's arrival changes everything and the girls, especially Veronika and Caroline start to display curiosity and start making their own decisions about May.  Eventually we find out that May was on a boat with her Uncle and his friend, and that the boat they live in was attacked.  This caused the boat to blow up and May to wash up on the island.  Their is a constant curiosity on the girls part and a constant fear/frustration/curiosity on May's part as Robbert and Irene try and figure out what to do with her.  Irene and Robbert try and continue the girls lessons, adding in more questions and trying to get them to think.

 Eventually Robbert tells the girls that they were built by 8 mothers and 8 fathers who were on the plane that crashed, but the plane did not crash, it was blown up on purpose and the plane with the girls, Irene and Robbert escaped.  Apparently in the future (I'm assuming this is future Earth although it is never clearly stated) it seems that people are afraid of the AI/robot/cyborgs (again never fully explained) that the girls are.  It seems from the vague tidbits we get that there are schools that all children go to that tends to brain wash them into a certain style of thinking.  Eventually another boat comes to the island, scaring May into taking the four girls into hiding, while Irene and Robbert greet the boat.  Caroline decides she need to go get Robberts notebook and leaves the other girls.  While they are hiding the people on the boat apparently shoot Irene and Robbert, destroy the little compound they had been living in and leave.  Caroline shows up with the notebook, but is broken and falls to her "death" on the cliffs below.  The remaining three girls and May use the notebook to rebuild the little compound and are living there still.
This book is different, it is less of a story and more of an idea.  The point of this book is not to explain what is going on in the outside world, though we get a few hints of a possible dystopia, the point is more about the girls and how they think.  If I had to pick a point to this book...I'm not sure what it would be, and yet it is fascinating all the same.  The decision to use one of the four AI girls as the voice of this book was spot on.  It gave an uninformed, yet present voice to all the happenings.  Everything we know is from an almost emotionless, yet innocent perspective and it makes you think differently about things...which may be the point.  The patience and obvious care that Irene and Robbert have for the girls, obviously goes beyond just programming a machine, a certain parent child bond seems to be apparent in their actions.  The

disconnectedness, yet bond the four girls share is an odd one, but it makes a weird sort of sense.  I think my favorite part about May was her frustration in the four girls.  They knew they were constructs, yet they thought of themselves as alive and sentient.  May on the other hand at times had a hard time getting past their differentness, sometimes letting the idea that they were machines get in the way of getting to know them.  In the end though May bonded with them and called them friends.  This book is a really different (there is that word again) mix of man and machine, thinking and feeling, logic and intuition.  It is really hard to talk about, because it is really hard to explain.  Go read it and tell me what you think.  I give it 7 out of 10 AI's
At what point does a machine become human?  At what point does a human become a machine?  Is this a really heavy book for YA or am I just older then I thought?