FOREWORD

If you’re reading this, then we feel reasonably comfortable making two assumptions. First, you’ve purchased the omnibus edition of the Machine Dynasty trilogy. Second, you’re the sort of person who actually reads forewords. So, this is the part where we assure you that you’ve made a good decision, at least when it comes to buying the books. Madeline Ashby writes terrific action sequences; mixes in some horror, both visceral and conceptual; and anchors it all with both an effectively crafted near-future setting and a cast of well-realized characters. Whether you’ve made a good decision in reading this foreword? That’s something that you’ll have to decide for yourself.

When the publisher approached us – well, initially just Dan, but that’s not a very interesting story – about writing some introductory words about the Machine Dynasty, we responded with an enthusiastic “yes.” The Machine Dynasty trilogy is overflowing with ideas. Those ideas are sophisticated, the fruits of polymathic author with a presence in academia, futurism and forecasting, and, of course, science-fiction authordom.

In some ways, it’s hard to see how the trilogy really needs a foreword. It’s in a running dialogue with lots of other science fiction texts and tropes, social theories concerning such topics as gender and postcolonialism, and popular culture of the past and present. But if that doesn’t interest you, don’t worry, because Ashby mostly expresses those ideas via plot and mood. When she does make that dialogue – which academics often call “intertext” – explicit, it’s mostly with (darkly) humorous results.

This makes the Machine Dynasty catnip to academics, like us, who try to seize opportunities that bring together their professional interests with their interest in science fiction. We both teach classes that combine political theory and science fiction. Indeed, vN is part of Dan’s rotation of required readings. So, yeah, we jumped at the chance to write the foreword.

Then we ran into a problem.

There were a lot of different themes and topics that we planned to write about, but it soon became apparent that most of them required some pretty hefty spoilers. And you can’t have major spoilers in a foreword, now can you? Unless those spoilers concern other, venerable works. These we’ll spoil plenty.

One of the things that we can do instead is to look at one the central bits of “intertextual” dialogue in the Machine Dynasty trilogy, which concerns venerable science fiction tropes about artificial intelligence in general, and androids in particular. It’s actually pretty difficult to write a work of science fiction that deals with those topics and completely avoid engaging with this history – although, as Ursula LeGuin repeatedly pointed out, authors from outside the genre keep trying to ignore the genre’s history, with predictably cringey results. But Ashby, armed with an encyclopedic grasp of the genre, engages quite explicitly with the its traditional explorations of androids and artificial intelligence, and confronts it head on (and drops references and breadcrumbs for good measure).

One of those things you just cannot escape when writing science fiction is the shadow of Isaac Asimov’s “robot” novels and short stories. Asimov played a crucial role in constructing what are now clichés about helpful, mostly benevolent, androids. He borrowed the term “robot” from the Czech playwright Karol Čapek (watch for the explicit reference in ReV). Čapek’s 1920 play, R.U.R. (Rossum’s Universal Robots), ends with a bloody revolution and the extermination of humanity. R.U.R. tells a story about biochemical beings purpose built for their labor.

(If you’re thinking that the story of exploited industrial labor overthrowing their masters – written in 1920 no less – sounds a bit like a parable about workers of the world uniting, then you’ll be pleased to know that Čapek even references the existence of a post-revolution Robot Central Committee.)

Asimov didn’t care much for R.U.R. But he took the Frankenstein scenario of creations turn against their creators – one he considered far too common in stories of the type – seriously enough to devise a solution. His “Three Laws of Robotics” address the potential threat by creating rules to ensure robots cannot threaten humans, and embedding those rules in the robots’ “positronic brains.”

First Law: A robot may not injure a human being or, through inaction, allow a human being to come to harm.

Second Law: A robot must obey the orders given it by human beings except where such orders would conflict with the First Law.

Third Law: A robot must protect its own existence as long as such protection does not conflict with the First or Second Law.

Asimov does examine ways that the Three Laws could fail to prevent harm to human beings (for example, you could prevent your artificially intelligent warships from knowing that there are humans on the spacecraft you’ve ordered them to attack, and thus get a robot to unknowingly violate the First Law). His robot ex machina, R. Daneel Olivaw, eventually develops a “Zeoreth Law” that generalizes the First Law of Robotics to humanity itself. This provides a workaround that allows harm to individual humans in order to protect the human race. Daneel spends a lot of Asimov’s unified future history guiding humanity toward a point where he can trust in its ability to defend itself, even going so far as to eliminate all of the non-human sentient life in the galaxy in order to make it safe for human beings. (None of the Three Laws forbid that.)

Asimov’s approach was innovative. It provided an alternative to the robots-run-wild-and-kill-people narratives that dominated popular science fiction. But what’s striking about Asimov’s work is how little he cares about the interior lives of his sentient creations. He does have at least one story from a robot’s point of view, but his favored perspective is decisively human; even when we see robots speaking to one another about how best to carry out their duties, they are generally thinking in terms of human beings. The concern is ultimately what different kinds of robotic actions mean for us, the human readers. As far as we know – and we did not review his entire corpus, so your mileage may vary – he fails the robot equivalent of the Bechdel test.

Although, to be honest, his women aren’t terribly well-drawn either. Liz Lutgendorf acidly notes that “Asimov’s characterizations of women have less emotion than his robots,” and what is widely regarded as his most three-dimensional female character, Dors Venabili, turns out to be (spoiler alert!) a robot herself, primarily dedicated to protecting her man Hari Seldon.

Asimov clearly saw his Three Laws as benign. He usually gives us depictions of more or less well-functioning positronic slaves. Complications arise from malfunctioning robots, or from nefarious humans who try to get their robots to circumvent the Three Laws.

But what it would be like to live as a roboti, a word Čapek derived from an Old Church Slavonic word for “drudgery” or “forced labor”? This is one of the central questions that Ashby poses in the Machine Dynasty trilogy: specifically, what would the First Law mean for those compelled to obey it? Through what mechanism would it ensure compliance? How would it feel to be subject to an absolute imperative to protect and help other sentient beings? The trilogy does have human characters. We do sometimes experience the events of the novels from their point of view. But the majority of the time Ashby’s narrative perspective is firmly anchored in one of the humanoid artificial intelligences: the vN.

The vN are quite different from Asimov’s “robots”. They have a single system, the “failsafe,” that makes it dangerous, even deadly, for them to see harm come to humans. This also makes vN compelled to please humans, in order to prevent themselves from “failsafing” and, if they are even reparable, requiring the vN equivalent of CTRL-ALT-DEL.

Ashby does not flinch from the implications of this design constraint: the vN are built for exploitation by humans, especially sexual exploitation. Because of course. It’s not like there aren’t entrepreneurs trying to make ‘more functional’ sex robots right now. The vN failsafe compels the vN to please the humans involved and to prevent them from coming to harm. This renders the issue of consent, the lack of which transforms sex into rape, electromechanically foreclosed.

But since the vN are sentient, and since the novels take their point of view seriously, readers get to see different vN characters struggle with and adapt to these design constraints in different ways. Key vN characters are aware that when dealing with human beings they cannot really exercise free choice, and they experience this as something more like a physical constraint and compulsion than in terms of the dispassionate logic typical of Asimov and his imitators. The slave is aware of their chains, so to speak, even as they are often powerless to remove them. vN take a number of different positions on whether the failsafe is “good” or “bad”; humans, as we might expect, disagree about the moral status – the personhood – of the vN themselves. Some humans exploit vN, others seek to live alongside them, and still others develop romantic attachments to particular vN and even marry them. In this way the novels present a wide-ranging examination of the social and political implications of a society with an engineered permanent subordinate class, and follows those implications for both the dominating and the dominated. For the failsafe, as we quickly learn, is not foolproof, and not all the servants are happy in their servitude.

As all of this suggests, The Machine Dynasty is deeply interested in the politics of bodies and the relationship between the body and identity. We don’t think it remotely an accident that Ashby wrote her first graduate thesis on “Transformative Bodies: Anime, Fandom, and Cyborg Sub-Cultures” that builds, in part, from Donna Haraway’s well-known 1985 essay, “A Manifesto for Cyborgs: Science, Technology, and Socialist Feminism in the 1980s.”

Cyborgs, in common parlance, are part human and part machine. Popular fictions often – but not always – portrays cyborgs as human beings with at least some mechanical prosthetics swapped in for, or added onto, flesh-and-blood body parts (think of Star Trek’s Borg or most of the characters in Ghost in the Shell). Typically, these mechanical prosthetics increase their physical or cognitive potential, allow them to control weapons systems or computer networks, or otherwise enhance their abilities. Sometimes they are mechanisms of control.

Haraway appropriated “the cyborg” as a way of thinking beyond binaries: binaries such as animal and machine, male and female, physical and nonphysical. The notion of the cyborg turns our attention to assemblages that mix and match attributes that society otherwise associates with one category or the other.

As Ashby suggests in her thesis, we live in a world of cyborgs: a world of just such composites. Social relations, whether at the level of entire societies or at that of households, can be understood as cyborgs. Modern militaries are cyborgs, made up of humans, electronic computers, mechanical sensors, aircraft, tanks, and satellites. Smartphones aren’t connected to our brains by wires, but in many respects, they render us cyborgs too. They alter our behavior and brain activity, and serve as “extra memory” for appointments, messages, and records. Indeed, all tools – even tools such as scissors and reading glasses and shoes – are not unlike the prosthetics of science-fiction cyborgs: they afford humans with abilities they would not otherwise have.

Of course, this concept of the cyborg extends well beyond combinations of the biological and mechanical. It includes non-binary and transgressive presentations of gender, sex, race, and ethnicity. Indeed, in The Machine Dynasty, Ashby introduces involves something that is completely alien to the world of Asimov’s robots: vN reproduce, creating iterated copies of themselves as soon as they have sufficient resources to do so. This is true of all vN, regardless of whether they have the bodies of – or consider themselves – men or women.

The term “vN” is derived from the name of the mathematician who theorized self-replicating machines in the late 1940s and early 1950s: John von Neumann. Von Neumann’s explicit goal was to explore how machine evolution might work. He argued that at a certain level of complexity, the forces of natural selection would shape successive generations of machines the way that they shape successive generations of biological organisms. Ashby’s vN certainly have the requisite level of complexity. Over the course of the novels she explores how evolutionary principles operate across vN generations – including how variations during the copying process, roughly akin to genetic mutations, introduce additional sources of innovation (there are other mechanisms through which vN evolve or mutate in the novels, and we suggest reflecting on these as they appear in the narrative).

Ashby also uses this capacity of the vN to further complicate the boundaries between biological and artificial life. vN bringing their iterations into the world understand themselves – and are seen by many humans – as parents giving birth to children. Characters compare bits of code, like the failsafe, to any other lesson that a parent might impart to their children. As reader will see, some vN parents place great emphasis on teaching their children how to manage the failsafe – which makes sense, as it’s a matter of life and death.

As the conceptual line between human and vN gets deliberately blurred, Ashby invites to consider how our own human societies might look from a non-human, machine point of view: are we not programmed like any machine, and are we not the next version down from our parents, giving rise to the next version in turn? Why would many humans think that they’re so different from, and superior to, their mechanical creations?

And: how should we live in a world populated by both human beings and sentient androids? The failsafe hard-codes a hierarchical relationship between humans and vN, but there’s always what we might call the “liberal tolerance” alternative: recognize the vN as having rights, forbid the most egregious forms of exploitation, even give the vN their own polity where they can live lives free of the need to please human beings. But since the failsafe also makes vN want to please humans, segregating them in their own space means denying them the ability to act as they please. Freedom from exploitation at the cost of freedom from desire?

This kind of dilemma has numerous parallels in, for example, accounts of how patriarchy conditions women to want to fulfill subordinate roles because such roles are deemed “appropriate” for women, or accounts of how capitalism conditions workers to want to work for a wage as a way of achieving dignity. “False consciousness,” it’s sometimes called: we think we want something, but in reality, we have been taught to want that thing because doing so serves someone else’s interests. But try convincing the addict that they don’t really want their drug, or the religious believer that they don’t really want to live under their tradition’s moral code, and see just how far rational persuasion takes you. (Hint: not far.) Here different kinds of freedom, layers of autonomy, and paternalism come into conflict: why does someone else get to decide what’s best for a person who earnestly believes – and perhaps also deeply feels – that what they are doing is not exploitative, but gratifying?

There aren’t easy answers here, and Ashby makes no effort to provide any. Instead, she explores the strengths and weaknesses, the positive and negative dimensions, of various different possible solutions to the problems raised by a society composed of human beings and vN. Her characters themselves – human and vN – disagree about these possible solutions. Like all sentient beings, their perspectives are structured by their experiences, their desires, their treatment at the hands of others, and their own choices. The twists and turns of her narrative hold out possibilities for a resolution, only to snatch them away.

You can read The Machine Dynasty primarily as metaphor for power and difference in human relations. Or you can read it as a meditation on the very real ethical and moral dilemmas we face as we build increasingly sophisticated robots to serve our needs. Or you can decide that it makes no difference: it’s cyborgs all the way down.

There’s one more option, of course: you can simply explore the world of The Machine Dynasty and appreciate its story.

Patrick Thaddeus Jackson, School of International Service, American University

Daniel Nexon, Department of Government and School of Foreign Service, Georgetown University

June 26, 2020