Russ Allbery: Review: Machine

Review: Machine, by Elizabeth Bear

Machine is a far-future space opera. It is a loose sequel to
Ancestral Night, but you do not have to
remember the first book to enjoy this book and they have only a couple of
secondary characters in common. There are passing spoilers for
Ancestral Night in the story, though, if you care.

Dr. Brookllyn Jens is a rescue paramedic on Synarche Medical Vessel
I Race To Seek the Living. That means she goes into dangerous
situations to get you out of them, patches you up enough to not die, and
brings you to doctors who can do the slower and more time-consuming work.
She was previously a cop (well, Judiciary, which in this universe is
mostly the same thing) and then found that medicine, and specifically the
flagship Synarche hospital Core General, was the institution in all the
universe that she believed in the most.

As Machine opens, Jens is boarding the Big Rock Candy
Mountain, a generation ship launched from Earth during the bad era before
right-minding and joining the Synarche, back when it looked like humanity
on Earth wouldn’t survive. Big Rock Candy Mountain was discovered
by accident in the wrong place, going faster than it was supposed to be
going and not responding to hails. The Synarche ship that first discovered
and docked with it is also mysteriously silent. It’s the job of Jens and
her colleagues to get on board, see if anyone is still alive, and rescue
them if possible.

What they find is a corpse and a disturbingly servile early AI guarding a
whole lot of people frozen in primitive cryobeds, along with odd
artificial machinery that seems to be controlled by the AI. Or possibly
controlling the AI.

Jens assumes her job will be complete once she gets the cryobeds and the
AI back to Core General where both the humans and the AI can be treated by
appropriate doctors. Jens is very wrong.

Machine is Elizabeth Bear’s version of a James White
Sector General novel. If one reads this book
without any prior knowledge, the way that I did, you may not realize this
until the characters make it to Core General, but then it becomes obvious
to anyone who has read White’s series. Most of the standard Sector General
elements are here: A vast space station with rings at different gravity
levels and atmospheres, a baffling array of species, and the ability to
load other people’s personalities into your head to treat other species at
the cost of discomfort and body dysmorphia. There’s a gruff supervisor, a
fragile alien doctor, and a whole lot of idealistic and well-meaning
people working around complex interspecies differences. Sadly, Bear does
drop White’s entertainingly oversimplified species classification codes;
this is the correct call for suspension of disbelief, but I kind of missed
them.

I thoroughly enjoy the idea of the Sector General series, so I was
delighted by an updated version that drops the sexism and the doctor/nurse
hierarchy and adds AIs, doctors for AIs, and a more complicated political
structure. The hospital is even run by a sentient tree, which is an
inspired choice.

Bear, of course, doesn’t settle for a relatively simple James White
problem-solving plot. There are interlocking, layered problems here,
medical and political, immediate and structural, that unwind in ways that
I found satisfyingly twisty. As with Ancestral Night, Bear has some
complex points to make about morality. I think that aspect of the story
was a bit less convincing than Ancestral Night, in part because
some of the characters use rather bizarre tactics (although I will grant
they are the sort of bizarre tactics that I could imagine would be used by
well-meaning people using who didn’t think through all of the possible
consequences). I enjoyed the ethical dilemmas here, but they didn’t grab
me the way that Ancestral Night did. The setting, though, is even
better: An interspecies hospital was a brilliant setting when James White
used it, and it continues to be a brilliant setting in Bear’s hands.

It’s also worth mentioning that Jens has a chronic inflammatory disease
and uses an exoskeleton for mobility, and (as much as I can judge while
not being disabled myself) everything about this aspect of the character
was excellent. It’s rare to see characters with meaningful disabilities in
far-future science fiction. When present at all, they’re usually treated
like Geordi’s sight: something little different than the differential
abilities of the various aliens, or even a backdoor advantage. Jens has a
true, meaningful disability that she has to manage and that causes a
constant cognitive drain, and the treatment of her assistive device is
complex and nuanced in a way that I found thoughtful and satisfying.

The one structural complaint that I will make is that Jens is an
astonishingly talkative first-person protagonist, particularly for an
Elizabeth Bear novel. This is still better than being inscrutable, but she
is prone to such extended philosophical digressions or infodumps in the
middle of a scene that I found myself wishing she’d get on with it already
in a few places. This provides good characterization, in the sense that
the reader certainly gets inside Jens’s head, but I think Bear didn’t get
the balance quite right.

That complaint aside, this was very fun, and I am certainly going to keep
reading this series. Recommended, particularly if you like James White, or
want to see why other people do.

The most important thing in the universe is not, it turns out, a
single, objective truth. It’s not a hospital whose ideals you love,
that treats all comers. It’s not a lover; it’s not a job. It’s not
friends and teammates.

It’s not even a child that rarely writes me back, and to be honest I
probably earned that. I could have been there for her. I didn’t know
how to be there for anybody, though. Not even for me.

The most important thing in the universe, it turns out, is a complex
of subjective and individual approximations. Of tries and fails. Of
ideals, and things we do to try to get close to those ideals.

It’s who we are when nobody is looking.

Followed by The Folded Sky.

Rating: 8 out of 10