5 Works of Speculative Fiction to Read while also Reading "Sapiens" by Yuval Noah Harari

A Brief History of Life, the Universe and Everything...

By Péter MARTON

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Sapiens is a very popular and (somewhat less flatteringly) a fashionable book these days. It's really not bad, even if it is at least in part a summary of earlier works and research by others and certainly not unprecedented in its theme and scope. As I was reading it, back in January, I was already thinking about how easy it would be to tag further readings to it from the field of speculative fiction, works that have already explored some of the core ideas discussed in Harari's book, and how that could be turned into a blogpost.

This is that post now.

So, a brief reading list. I could think of more items to list here, of course, but five is the kind of number that looks good in a click-baiting headline... My aim is to bring up some new and also some lesser known works, so this is not even an "ultimate" list of best of whatever.

1. Simon Guerrier: The Artificial Bees (Uncanny Magazine, 2016)

2. E. Tegla Davies (1880-1967): The Strange Apeman 

3. Vilmos Csányi: Bábosok (The Puppet Players, 2009)

4. Adrian Tchaikovsky: Dogs of War (2018)

5. Mike Jansen: Fluxless (Samovar, 2018)

Brief explanations may also be due, to justify my selection.

Guerrier, because this very short story nicely links up with the idea that Harari keeps hammering away at early in his book, that humans are also animals, and that distinctions between humans and animals are in many ways false. The post-apocalyptic retrospective offered in Guerrier's piece emphasizes the need for solidarity with all thinking creatures -- be they organic/biological or synthetic. 

Edward Tegla Davies, a Welsh writer, because the short story cited here from him is basically speculative fiction, with a load of the ironic and the absurd. A reflection on the moment when the "first man" may have emerged from among the apes, only to be pulled back for falling out of line. Try to hunt this down like it's a special Pokémon Go monster. It can be captured in this volume, for example.

Vilmos Csányi, an internationally well-known Hungarian cultural anthropologist, because of the discussion of the idea of development. Surprise, surprise: given that he is well-networked among people from the realm of highbrow fine literature, some will rush to state that Bábosok is not genre literature. What such people don't quite get is that most good SF and, more broadly, speculative fiction is not really "genre literature," either. As to Csányi's work in particular, it can be easily associated with the kind of anthropological SF that was established in Ursula K. Le Guin's writings. Csányi's characters are a little schematic (puppet-like?) in this novel, but overall the philosophy is strong in this one. The story discusses the fate of a long-secluded village that seeks to preserve its own culture even as a big company has already set its sights on their lands for lucrative gas extraction. Befitting a more modern era of the scramble for resources, the company-men try methods informed by cultural anthropology at first, to get the locals to move. As it presents the dynamics of the interactions in this situation, the book may well be used as a cultural anthropology textbook, too. But, beyond that, it offers much criticism of "development" and "modernity." Just as Harari claims about the agricultural revolution that it was only partly about convenience and in the end just bred a whole new set of constraints for humans, Csányi's novel suggests that much of human development may have been in fact like that. Who overall live a better life in the end? The sunrise people or the highrise people?

Adrian Tchaikovsky, because his book is about where evolution may lead in the future, and because Harari's point about corporations being inter-subjective/non-existent entities (a set of rights and obligations) shows up here, too... only, in a literal form as you will see. Dogs of War is a fantastic story about the intelligent, cognitively augmented bioforms who may do all kinds of complex tasks to help humanity, for example in the medical field, but will at first most likely be deployed in some shitty battlefield in Ruritania to take part in questionable business. This book is great for people who want to contemplate anything from AI to biotechnology or humanitarian law (or just dogs) from a new perspective. A slight downside was that I couldn't help but think sometimes of what it would be like if protagonist Rex would have been based not on a clever shepherd dog but, say, a chihuahua. Or a happy and poorly trained retriever. What would hearing his thoughts be like?

Chihuahua: Master wants me to track down those targets... I want to, but I guess I'm going crazy again...! Yes I am! Crazy am I! CRRRRRRRRRRRRRRAZY!

Retriever: Master wants me to track down those targets... I'm so grateful to Master... I want to run back to Master, so he can scratch me... There I am! Scratch me, Master! Scratch me! No, still keep scratching me! Just do it!

Scene from the movie "Marley and Me," for illustration

Mike Jansen's story, because the various kinds of Singularity that we can now easily imagine may lead to an endless number of futures, one more bizarre than the other (and many potentially free of traditional human content). In this world, the combination of nano machines, bacteriophage viruses and other synthetic as well as biological entities breaking out of the laboratory resulted in the "Wilding," a planet reshaped by runaway algorithms (the scenario of nano infestation brought Philip K. Dick's short story "Autofac" to my mind). The protagonist embarks on a flying bike tour from Hilversum through Hengelo and Münster all the way to Dresden to try to make amends for this, to see a wide range of new lifeforms on the way, from pole dance grass to fractal pines and phage clouds. She needs to "flux" often, using small electromagnetic impulses to preserve her bodily integrity. Really creative world-building, it could see expansion into a novel one day.

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So that's it. An overview of human evolution and its possible direction in a nutshell. Reading breeds more reading, at least that one thing is sure, so be a good reader now and follow up on this post as may be convenient for you...