Peter Watts

"This--THIS--is the cutting edge of science fiction." --Richard K. Morgan, author of Altered Carbon She believed in the mission with all her heart. But that was sixty million years ago. How do you stage a mutiny when you're only awake one day in a million? How do you conspire when your tiny handful of potential allies changes with each shift? How do you engage an enemy that never sleeps, that sees through your eyes and hears through your ears and relentlessly, honestly, only wants what's best for you? Sunday Ahzmundin is about to find out.

The Freeze-Frame Revolution

“This—THIS—is the cutting edge of science fiction.” —Richard K. Morgan, author of Altered Carbon How do you stage a mutiny when you're only awake one day in a million? How do you conspire when your tiny handful of potential allies changes with each job shift? How do you engage an enemy that never sleeps, that sees through your eyes and hears through your ears, and relentlessly, honestly, only wants what's best for you? Trapped aboard the starship Eriophora, Sunday Ahzmundin is about to discover the components of any successful revolution: conspiracy, code—and unavoidable casualties. Note from the publisher: The red letters in the print edition (highlighted letters in the e-book) indicate special bonus content.

Edward Steel

Mundy Otto Reimer

Yes! Perfect hopelessness with a smile on :) Cracking this series of short stories open after taking a long hiatus from Peter Watts and his Firefall series 🚀👾, I didn't realize how much I missed his cold, dark, deterministic, and grim scientific materialism that seems to poetically permeate all the spaces between his words rolling around my mentally simulated tongue. I can almost say that like our serpentine cousins I find great joy in licking his nihilistic thoughts off the patterned photons emitting from the glare of the screen staring back at me, but then that'd just be like the joy of one machine syncing its biochemical clocks that encode utility functions with yet just another machine. Yes, it's highly rewarding. But it's only logically necessary that this should occur. 

Big disclaimer, I *love* both Blindsight and Echopraxia. The "hard" sci-fi subgenre that Watts finds himself in doesn't bug me either, but rather has an opposite almost stimulatingly soothing effect. I came at this Sunflower Cycle starting in chronological order with Hotshot, but honestly my reaction was initially rather lukewarm at best. The Freeze-Frame Revolution thankfully remedied that. Although obviously not as good as both Blindsight and Echopraxia it still packs Watts' singular style that I've come to find rather rare in the literary world. 

The story's plot centers around a crew destined (and Watts does NOT take that word lightly) to continually travel further and further into space in an apparent attempt to escape the fate that befalls every species on earth whose branch among the great tree of life begins to age and bend ever downwards by the gravitational force of evolution. In Watts' world you either evolve to something so radically different from your former ancestral self, or you become the equivalent of either an inconsequential roach or maybe even food sustenance for your evolutionary progeny. Or you can try to make a run for it!

Anyway, the crew sleep in coffins live their lives staggered apart by what seem like millenniums among small Dunbarian-inspired sized tribes. They travel inside a refurbished asteroid powered by a black hole and sustained by a neat ecosystem that only a former marine biologist like Watts can write (his descriptions of non-traditional lifeforms are like crack to me and are the main reason why I absolutely adore his stories). The crew is accompanied by an Artificial Stupidity to lovingly attend to their needs and captain the ship, even if they themselves are the organic workarounds past computationally-intractable halting states while being the cheap insurance from EMPs that only agents in the form of radiation-shredded meat with momentum can provide. 

Now having read oh so many fictional and non-fictional pieces around the general theme of Consciousness, I usually roll my eyes at the recycled tropes that get regurgitated in Sisyphean assembly-line fashion, but Watts seems to always massage my brain in the right way. Thinking about it, it might be because he himself is a hybrid species of both Science and Poetry, but certain phrases he crafts just seize me so, like his "ghosts of Engineers past" which is reminiscent to me of something like Bishop Berkeley's famous and my favorite "ghosts of departed quantities" satirical quote in The Analyst: A Discourse Addressed to the Infidel Mathematician regarding criticism of the as-of-then nascent theory of Fluxions and Fluents, or what students of math just drably call "Calculus" today. 

So going back to those thematic elements of Consciousness that only a Metzinger-saturated Watts would steep himself in, let's talk about his mentioning of the Law of Variety. The term 'Variety' comes from a niche little community centered around the historical field of Cybernetics and more specifically around the work of one of the field's pioneer species and a mathematically-inclined psychiatrist, W. Ross Ashby. You can think of the term 'Variety' to mean the number of states that a system can exist in, which is almost analogous to the modern-day term of 'Information' or if we are taking the long-running average, then we can use the term (Shannon) 'Entropy' (I mean, Ashby was in contact with the famous Claude Shannon after all 🤷‍♀️). 

Ashby's Law of Requisite Variety or The Adequacy Principle roughly states that a regulator must be able to at least represent that which it regulates, or in Ashby's words "only variety destroys variety" or "only variety absorbs variety". You can think of a 'regulator' as a type of glorified homeostatic device like your thermostat, in that it tries to keep one's local environment stable in the face of fluctuations (he invented the Homeostat). Ashby is basically positing that to be a regulator one must be greater than or equal to in complexity than that which is being regulated (if curious for more, I personally write about the 'coupling' or contact between systems of different complexity and how one will enslave or subsume the other at my blog here).

Anyway, all of this is relevant to Watts' story because it ultimately speculates how a system like this spaceship and all of its crew can maintain its goal cruising ever outward past the stars and across thousands and thousands of years perhaps indefinitely to the potential heat death of the universe while strictly keeping to its core mission without altering course. To do this, one must regulate all the potential interactions and conflicts (like a mutiny!) that can arise with the presence of a complex network of humans and a ship. And apparently, the original engineers and those in charge of the mission at the outset designed an Artificial Intelligence to do just that. Except they then promptly lobotomized and handicapped it to be stupider than humans so as to not developed goals and motivations of its own. And the important thing to note is that after all these thousands and thousands of years it didn't. So what's the problem? You can either study Ashby's Law of Requisite Variety, study biological complexity theory, or read Watts' story to find out! As he says, "The simple can't prophecy the complex...".

"Everything moved with complex precision, each device a moving part of some elaborate whole: as if the components of an intricate clockwork had come apart in zero-gee, yet continued to move in correct and proper relation to one another. It was precise and deterministic and I suppose there was a kind of grace to it. But it was—sterile. It was exactly what you’d expect from an algorithm parsing —used to watch you dance— without any real understanding of what dancing is, what it means, without any recollection of the time when it breathed life and wonder into a thousand glittering facets of self. A time when, just maybe, it had some kind of soul. This was not that. This was a collection of lifeless objects jiggling on threads, and it almost broke my heart to realize what else it was..."

And lastly, for those that read this novella and don't notice...THERE'S A HIDDEN MESSAGE ENCODED IN THE TEXT!!! It's subtle and you might be forgiven for thinking it's just bad e-reader/kindle formating, but it'll lead you to extra short stories that flesh out more of the situation. Super cool! 

Oh, and on another note, if I ever weirdly find myself in some management or leadership type position (assuming my inner Peter Principled self happens to not realize this and shoot me on the spot 😅), I'll have to keep the following line in my back pocket in case it ever comes in handy:

“You’ve been an asset for the vast majority of this mission...Not everyone’s going to perform to specs a hundred percent of the time. I can’t blame you because you happened to draw the short straw this time around...It doesn’t make sense to discard valuable mission elements if they can be repaired.”

Very fucking clever indeed 🙃🔧🤖🔫

The Freeze-Frame Revolution

Reviews

Highlights