Jul

21

Book ‘Em: The Mind of the Machine.

Posted by Christopher Waldrop

July 21, 2008 |

correspondence.jpg It’s amazing how adaptable people are. As recently as 1991, when Sue Thomas’s novel Correspondence was published, online commerce was still an idea of the future. While there were a few people using the Internet, it wasn’t as commonplace as it is now. That’s what makes the novel so prescient, at the same time that it’s so disquieting. The novel combines a story within a story with brief essays on technology, philosophy, and history, each one presented as an “infodump”. And there are “breaks”, when a travel guide voice interrupts the narrative, treating the story like a guided tour. In lesser hands this might have come off as very clumsy or even just padding, but Thomas fits all the parts together perfectly into a short but dense novel. Opening with a quote from Marvin Minsky, a scientist who works in the field of artificial intelligence, the book really begins with an unnamed character, a “you”. Although we learn pretty quickly on that “you” is not human, once a “real woman” but now a reclusive thinking machine, the use of the second-person pushes us into familiarity. We feel for her when, forced to go out and get money from a cash machine, she encounters a group of drunks. One of them confronts her and gets a shock when he looks into her eyes:

Like so many others in the past, he didn’t comprehend what he saw. But his status as leader meant that he must straight away translate his fear into violence.

As afraid as we might feel for her at this point there’s also an uneasy feeling of recognition here. We tend to respond to the unfamiliar in the most primitive way, and that’s not always best.

Safe at home she, working as a “compositor of fantasies”, creates a character, Rosa, from her research material, but then Rosa takes on a life of her own. Thomas goes beyond technology, exploring the very nature of the creative imagination, and the consequences of both machines and humans being more than the sum of their parts.


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