C.I.T.O.K.A.T.E.

After reading "The Will To Battle", the third novel in the Terra Ignota series, I started to worry about what was going to be revealed about Utopians in the fourth and final novel, "Perhaps The Stars". I wrote this essay. I didn't want to publish it. It might be spoilers if I guessed correctly. I read "Perhaps The Stars" and the guesses in this essay about what would happen were not correct. Having given myself some weeks to mull it over, I have decided to publish the essay after all. My speculations did not come true. But I can't stop thinking about the themes I discussed here. I wrote the following in 2019. This does have spoilers for the first three novels.

---

I had a dream in which Apollo Mojave had a second coat... forgive me. I am getting ahead of myself.

I did yet another re-read of the series to collect a list of every fact stated in the text about the Utopian Hive, and my resulting speculations. I posted it to the Terra Ignota subreddit. But this is an essay in which I reach conclusions about Utopians by meta-textual speculation about what the author is attempting to achieve. And in so doing, it illustrates why the Terra Ignota series was exactly what I needed to read during the span of human history in which it is being published, the second decade of the twenty-first century.

We are readers of 20th/21st century science fiction, so Utopians are tailor-made to seem flattering to us. We are expected to see ourselves in them; like them; trust them; even want to be them. I do. Every time I read Cato's swearing in, I cry tears of joy. Raise your hands if you do.

So then of course my skeptical nature kicks in, and I'm wary that I'm being set up to be taught a lesson by a plot twist about Utopians in "Perhaps The Stars". After all, they are invisible masters of secrecy, illusion, and espionage. Their clothing is literally crawling with technological snakes and insects.

(Bear with me, Reader. What I am about to say will be sad and narrowly-considered, and then it will get worse, before it turns around to more hopeful, a bit inspiring, and more broadly-considered. Take care of your emotions part way through, and come back later, if you have to.)

To the degree that I could be called a proto-Utopian, it's because I'm inextricably situated within my own historical time period and subculture, which shaped the development of my thoughts. Terra Ignota's author is educated in history, and specializes in the study of how a time period shaped the thoughts of those in it, and of future generations. What is she trying to say?

In the scope of humanity's millenia, we WEIRDos (White, Educated, Industrialized, Rich, Democratic nations) are a recent psychological phenomena. Non-WEIRDos have had a much wider variety of philosophies, other than Progress, such as those of the Hives other than Utopia. They continue to hold varied approaches to happiness and meaning to the present day. But when I grew up in the twentieth century, I lacked a broad education in the humanities, leaving me ignorant of all this variety, eclipsed by the shadow of Progress. Through my modern eyes, the archetype of the Ur-Utopian was not Voltaire, but Isaac Asimov and John W. Campbell. I eventually learned Asimov tended to get really handsy with women. Like, all the time, consistently. Campbell was a racist and a misogynist whose favored narrative was of a smart rich white male conquering the Moon (without any help from a community, just his own rugged individualism). It was a limited and provincial mindset.

Growing up visiting EPCOT center every year since it opened, I loved the Future and Progress. One thing I didn't realize was that because of inequality and racism, spaceships and life extension treatments are not exciting to those who tend to get the short end of the stick. They are the majority of humanity. They are not excited about Progress which they expect to be denied access to. I only believed otherwise through ignorance.

The first decade or two of the web had us optimistic about the progress of reason and the internet spreading science and education. My outlook on life was full of optimism, willingness, and excitement. The dominant mode of interaction on the internet was that most human minds were just waiting to be set free from superstition and darkness, if only given the facts in a civilized public discourse. In this decade we all finally had to accept the limits of what information can do, and how the darkness sometimes reacts when exposed to light. All the atheist bloggers I read in the aughts are social justice bloggers now. They were ready for a fight before, but now they could hardly be more Delians if they bore Apollo's sun sigil.

I am a vocateur if ever there was one. In my adult life as a technologist and tech advocate, full of optimism and pride, I used to say death and taxes were just engineering problems. I used to have every expectation that the fruit of my labor would defeat death and reach the stars. Recent years have been like a devastatingly incisive sensayer session. I saw the work of my hands contribute to the resurgence of fascism and the teetering of democracy. I have cast about for what else to aspire to.

In the year Terra Ignota was published, all of these things were saturating the cultural and historical zeitgeist of my subculture, SF&F conventions and rationalists and hacker spaces, the sort-of proto-Utopians. That's where my head was when I read it.

In such a darkness, wondering if things which I thought gave my life the core of its meaning might be folly and shame and vanity, it occurred to me to wonder all manner of dreadful things about Utopians.

(Continue to bear with me. We're almost to the other side of it.)

What if the Utopians' U-beast companions are not there to protect them, but to ensure their silence? To enforce their compliance with a hive-mind who secretly puppeteers their words and actions? Then their eyes would be concealed by visors because otherwise, their acting performance is unconvincing.

Or, what if all Utopians, after their swearing-in, are quietly killed, secretly incinerated, and replaced with illegal bipedal U-beasts? Decades later, when they are said to have "died", they are supposedly buried on Mars, because no one can go there and check.

And what would motivate some kind of AI to want to do this to people? Well, algorithms cannot yet be granted legitimacy as a polity among intelligent beings, without pretending to be human. Any human is as good as another to serve as a surrogate; so, no application to join the Hive need ever be rejected. This would explain why Utopia never rejects an application.

Apollo Mojave, like all Utopians, wears a coat which serves as a display screen, simulating a fantasy universe in which the world is at war. How can it simulate an entire universe in such detail?

Can the universe outside of it be a simulation too?

I had a dream. In this dream, Mycroft and Saladin did not avert Apollo's war after all. Appollo killed Mycroft, who never went on to write the history we read. Apollo's war began. And in that war, Apollo's coat simulated not war, but peace. In its simulation was an entire simulated world. In that simulated world, all the events of the novels took place, and a simulated Mycroft narrated the book we read. And in those simulated events, there was a simulated coat. In my dream, I stood in the rubble of that war, and looked through a coat simulating peace.

The simulated coat-in-a-coat which we read about in the novel seemed to be simulating war. It was not simulating anything. The simulated coat was presenting, to a simulated world, an image of real war in the environment of the real coat. This would explain why a magical child can exist in the story; Bridger and his miraculous creations are revealed to be a product of the computer simulation in the coat. The take-away would be that peace requires the impossible.

This novel series about a collapsing Utopia could not be more perfectly timed for 2016 through 2020; a time in which everything about Progress which I believed in, and which has ever given me joy ever since childhood, has simultaneously contracted and expanded. The subculture in which I am embedded only seems shameful and malevolent if I continue to overlook science fiction authors and technologists who were previously invisible. It's not something hollow which has shattered in scandals and is now let empty; instead it's fuller, because I am now given so many more people. There is such a broader range of stellar talent. Instead of considering my skills and talents to be unnecessary and harmful, lacking in purpose, I now have far more purpose than before. It's driving me to change which projects I work on. I'm older, and, I hope, wiser.