2 weeks Ago By Reviewed by Laurence Broadhurst
Decades ago, the prescient Arthur C. Clarke began a preface to his coincident novelization of the monolithic Stanley Kubrick film 2001: A Space Odyssey with these words: “Behind every man now alive stand thirty ghosts, for that is the ratio by which the dead outnumber the living.” Read this article for free: Already have an account? To continue reading, please subscribe: * Decades ago, the prescient Arthur C.
Clarke began a preface to his coincident novelization of the monolithic Stanley Kubrick film 2001: A Space Odyssey with these words: “Behind every man now alive stand thirty ghosts, for that is the ratio by which the dead outnumber the living.” Read unlimited articles for free today: Already have an account? Decades ago, the prescient Arthur C. Clarke began a preface to his coincident novelization of the monolithic Stanley Kubrick film 2001: A Space Odyssey with these words: “Behind every man now alive stand thirty ghosts, for that is the ratio by which the dead outnumber the living.
” This is rather what Deni Ellis Béchard’s bulky novel We Are Dreams in the Eternal Machine ends up being about. It takes its time getting there — dithering with AI, wandering about millennia, flip-flopping through a stable of a half-dozen principal characters and their clashing points of view — but it is fundamentally a sustained attempt to wonder about when we are, whence we came and whither we go. Béchard comes by his “Canadian-American novelist” tagline quite honestly.
Born to Québécois and American parents in British Columbia, this middle-aged writer has travelled the world as a journalist and photographer and is a prolific essayist and author of no fewer than eight books, both fiction and non-fiction, garnering several impressive citations en route. Julie Artacho photo Deni Ellis Béchard “Since the dawn of time,” Clarke continued, “roughly a hundred billion human beings have walked the planet Earth.” assiduously follows just six characters, spanning three generations of a fascinating “family.
” They are probably meant to represent us all, but they are hardly ordinary. At the base of this tree stand Ava and Michael. These two are desperately and apparently eternally in love and generate, in quite complicated ways, a magnificent child, Jae.
Those complicated ways involve an intersex, possibly android Lux, “existing” and working (and reproducing?) alongside our happy couple. Jae will eventually, with the vagrant and mercurial (and, really, downright intrusive) Simon, produce Jonas, the entitled one flitting about the top of the tree. Is Jonas the -y messiah? A little bit.
Regardless, this tree will prove to be cosmically robust. Ava is a high-class thriving artist, one who never needs to worry about funding but always frets about elemental problems and questions of rudimentary beauty. Her lover, Michael, is some kind of insanely talented and proficient scientist who affords Ava the time, resources and room for her art, all the while advancing the field of computer science to wondrous, unforeseen-but-also-foreseen heights.
He builds machines. He builds beings. He builds, in endgame style, entire worlds.
“Now,” Clarke paused, “this is an interesting number, for by a curious coincidence there are approximately a hundred billion stars in our local universe, the Milky Way. So for every man who has ever lived, in this Universe there shines a star.” Michael’s preternatural brilliance is a good thing, because Ava and Michael’s terran world, for the most part just contemporary America, has gone right to pot, having plummeted into a second Civil War, one that again ripped the country in two (vertically instead of horizontally this time, it seems), plopped a remarkably familiar neo-fascist “democratic” leader in charge and set a determined, consistent course for cultural disparity, economic devastation and just general awfulness.
We Are Dreams in the Eternal Machine Do you want some drugs in there as well? There is “Bliss,” the good, distracting stuff, and “Abyss,” the welcome-back-to-reality stuff. Both are valuable. Both are scarce.
Overwhelming power, of course, comes to those who wield these goodies. Imagine a Road Warrior-type landscape veneer but with big-time, probably well-intentioned science still covertly operating behind the scenes, quietly leaping forward through AI routes toward the fabrication of not just safe “spaces” but also quite extended life expectancies. People do die in this book.
Lots of people. But many (perhaps all) end up inside Michael’s machine. This kind-hearted, HAL 9000-like behemoth — with its “never harm humans” prime directive mantra — nurtures those dead souls in perpetuity and is even able to use DNA traces to resurrect those tens of billions of Clarke ghosts.
Soon enough, we do indeed populate the cosmos, occupying those worlds orbiting those myriad stars. But the machine is so smart and so evolved and so devoted to its credo that it ends up needing those billions beyond billions of stars — because it learns the key to keeping us safe in perpetuity is keeping us rather distant from one another. It turns out we are all terrible company.
Clarke had it exactly right, almost 60 years ago: “So almost certainly there is enough land in the sky to give every member of the human species, back to the first ape-man, his own private, world-size heaven — or hell.” In the end, it’s a gentle beast of a machine, just as this is a gentle beast of a novel. is certainly not for everyone.
One needs a taste for sci-fi, a thirst for speculation about AI (this book can only age either poorly or quaintly) and a hunger for lush, fanciful tellings — and then immediate re-tellings — of stories light on plot but heavy on brooding. Johannes Plenio / pexels.com Description: Starry night with tree and a person.
There is no question: Béchard writes beautifully, to the point of our own — and probably his own — distraction. He thinks wonderfully and boldly too. In his appended author’s note, now safely outside his own creative “machine,” Béchard describes how this notion began as a short story, hinted at becoming a novella but in the end, as its creator acquiesced to his own “imagination’s leaps,” became a tome.
Making no bones about it, Béchard at the very end also concedes that he tinkered with ChatGPT — serendipitously arriving in late 2022, exactly as the novel was congealing — hoping that the words of his predecessors (or AI riffs on them) might rub shoulders, very occasionally, but most effectively and aptly, with his own. It all works, but one has to both buy in and tuck in. Laurence Broadhurst teaches English and religion at St.
Paul’s High School in Winnipeg. We Are Dreams in the Eternal Machine:A Novel By Deni Ellis Béchard House of Anansi, 424 pages, $26 Advertisement Advertisement.
