As I’ve been reshelfing books down in the stacks recently, I’ve found myself mulling over how every truly excellent work of science fiction I’ve read over the past fifty years of reading inevitably returns to one question: when does technology stop being tool and start being a living part of us? Call it an existential crisis, but maybe ten years ago I would’ve told you I noticed this thread winding through sci-fi stories. Now, I find it impossible to read/watch a sci-fi story without noticing.
My return to this thought spiral started with rewatching Ghost in the Shell a couple months ago. I watched it back in ‘95, when it was originally released—I was thirty-three and reasonably well-read in cyberpunk already, so I thought I knew what to expect. But watching Kusanagi agonize over her mechanical body and synthesized memories felt different this time around.
Part of it is age; another part of it is thinking deeply about where those questions lead. What happens when your body can be replaced, part by part, and your memories can be uploaded to a hard drive? When I read Masamune Shirow’s original manga two decades ago, it felt like the farthest flung future. Now, not so much. I’ve had college students tell me they spend more time interacting with the world through their Twitter avatar than they do face-to-face.
Sci-fi has been playing with the concept of artificial life and its relationship to human identity since Frankenstein, obviously. But lately, I’ve found myself drawn to stories that tackle this topic from slightly different angles. Like Her, which I watched in theatres three times because it just kept revealing more subtleties on repeat viewings. Theodore’s AI relationship with Samantha isn’t science fiction at all; it’s a study on how humans project onto our technology, how we use relationships with algorithms as insulation from complex human feelings.
After Her, I left the theatre feeling nauseous, not because I thought the concept was ridiculous but because it felt like inevitable progression. How many patrons walk into my library having more intimate relationships with their phones than they do with their dining room tables? How many of us curate versions of ourselves online that we start to believe over what we look like in real life?
Black Mirror pushes that uncomfortableness even further. Charlie Brooker starts each storyTechsing a few years into our future and then pushes the premise forward just far enough to unsettle you. When Martha has Drew’s coworkers upload his persona onto their networked AI in “Be Right Back,” she’s not rebuilding him from science fiction – she’s reconstructing the same memorial service we all give our dead friends by scouring their social media for leftovers.
Librarianship has changed radically since I started working in libraries over twenty-five years ago. Used to be you walked into a library with questions and learned how to find answers via the card catalogue. You roamed the stacks, flipping through actual books stamped with the library’s borrowing ink. You got lucky sometimes and found what you wanted. Other times, you got distracted by the treasure surrounding what you came for.
But today, everything we look for comes served up algorithmically. Library catalogues search terms to give you what we think you want. World Book tries to predict what you’ll want to read before you do. Amazon and Google make enormous profits convincing you they know you better than you know yourself.
Don’t get me wrong, I’m not foaming at the mouth to throw out all the tech. I work with databases. I teach students how to use our digital library resources. I manage the library’s Twitter account. But ask yourself: how do search tools and prediction models affect what we think we’re looking for? If Amazon predicts which books you’ll buy based on your past purchases, if Google finishes your search terms for you, if Facebook curates which friends’ posts you see – are you really making choices about what you want to find and read, or are you training a more refined version of yourself to behave exactly how they want you to?
That’s why old-timey sci-fi authors like Philip K. Dick and Ursula K. Le Guin continue to inspire me. They knew the best science fiction stories have nothing to do with technology. They’re about what happens to human consciousness under stress. Dick obsessed over what constituted reality; Le Guin examined how individual identity was shaped by collectivism.
And now here we are, each of us living several incompatible versions of self. There’s the version of you that writes professional email, the one that posts on Twitter, the one that uploads sexy pictures to dating apps. The face we show at work. The face we save for close friends. The face we think we show to strangers.
I see my students juggling these different versions of self every day. Coding between academic research databases and Instagram, swiping between @librarybot missives and texting their friends. They live in these schizoid realities better than I did at their age. And yet they struggle with the same questions of authenticity I did. In a world where every conversation leaves a digital footprint, where we edit every photo we take of ourselves, where we conduct more and more of our relationships through programmed strangers, how do you know what you really look like?
The science fiction stories that resonate with me these days aren’t the ones with answers. Stories like Ted Chiang’s “Exhalation,” which asks big questions about what constitutes consciousness and life through the lens of mechanical beings. Or Martha Wells’ Murderbot Diaries, in which a bot designed to protect humans from dangerous field research worries about everything from social anxiety to imposter syndrome.
Perhaps my love of science fiction comes from how it allows us to ask the big questions of what it means to be human without needing to come up with answers. To try on versions of humanity and see how they fit, to imagine what we may become without forgetting who we are.
I don’t know where all this will end up. The tech will keep advancing, human consciousness will keep struggling to keep up, and science fiction will keep posing the same questions in different wrappings. But at least until we can build AI smart enough to wonder if it’s human, we’re all still wondering.
Kathleen’s a lifelong reader who believes science fiction is literature, full stop. From her book-filled home in Seattle, she writes about thoughtful, character-driven sci-fi that challenges ideas and lingers long after the last page. She’s a champion for under-read authors and timeless storytelling.