(courtesy Pan Macmillan Australia)
World-building is everything when it comes to science fiction aka sci-fi and one writer who absolutely excels in this department is Adrian Tchaikovsky, who stands as one of the genre’s most talented writers of the moment.
His ability to conjure up a sense of a plant or animal or the way a building looks and operates with just a few well-judged words is nothing short of magnificent, and it means that his vividly imaginative novels never come close to grinding to a halt while we come to grips with what a particular society is like or how it’s people are likely to respond to a given situation.
The Expert System’s Brother, published in 2018 and part of a two-part novella series, shows how effective his ability to evoke a lot with just a little is, with its 176-pages of rawly human storytelling full to the brim with the sort of world-building that other more massive novels of the genre might struggle to match.
Set in a world populated by humans, and it becomes very clear, very quickly that this is not Earth – so either aliens have been abducting people like crazy for centuries or this takes place sometime in a future with evacuees or colonists – The Expert System’s Brother is essentially the first part of a coming-of-age story where one young man, still in his mid-teens, finds himself having to navigate a world that once seemed so familiar and which has become cruelly alien.
‘Ostel, please,’ I said, and all the more desperate because a part of me wanted to take what he was offering. If I just let Sharskin be right in all things, how much simpler life would be. I’d never have to make a decision again.
Quite what happens to Handry must be left to Tchaikovsky’s masterfully clever storytelling, but suffice to say that Handry begins the novella as part of a cosy village of some three-hundred souls where a feudalistic way of life is augmented by people who are clearly being assisted or controlled, depending on your point of view, by some kind of AI-interface.
That’s never explicitly stated but the resident doctor, lawgiver and architect aka town planner/administrator have all ceded a large part of their humanity to their Ai companions who arrive via a sting by a “wasp” which live in a “tree” in the centre of the village.
The inverted commas are all this review’s addition, but they point to the fact that while The Expert System’s Brother begins with everything seeming medievally bucolically rural, it soon emerges that something isn’t quite right with the society of which Handry is initially a part caught in some sort of stasis where things neither deteriorate nor progress; they just simply are, and you are expected to simply accept it.
Handry’s issue is not that he challenges this pallid, inconsequential status quo; rather he is a victim of its inability to do anything other than the same-old, same-old and to live by rules which, when you boil them down, are unremittingly authoritarian and quite cruel.
No one of course questions this, controlled as they are by a mindset and, you suspect, a technology that allows for no questioning and where active thinking is discouraged.
(courtesy official author site)
Cast out into the world, Handry has to learn how to navigate himself through places where the old rules apply but not exactly and where he is changed in a way that means where he once fit perfectly, he no longer does, whether that’s societally or even in the food he can consume.
He is suddenly an alien on a planet he once intimately called home, and his physiological incompatibilities with his environment are just the start.
He wanders from place to place trying to find somewhere he might be able to call home but everyone, whether it’s in small villages or rambling, noisy towns, all seem to be caught in the same mindset – the world is the way it is and you have to listen to those in charge who are given guidance which must be obeyed.
Where The Expert System’s Brother is so clever is that in Handry you have a coming-of-age protagonist who must find a place to call home in a world that no longer wants him to be a part of it — the question is what’s going on and how he can go from being intricately part of the world to a weird imposition on it?
We do find out of course but the way Tchaikovsky provides the answers is not entirely straightforward which if you’re a reader who likes mysteries to slowly, and rewardingly unfold, is a real pleasure and a delight.
‘Do you think he really believes it?’ I asked Ostel. ‘The ancestors, changing the world, Severing everyone. Is it right that way, in his head, or is it just that it would make him in charge of everything? Priest of the whole world.’
Rather than simply plonk a whole lot of answers into the narrative with the elegance of an unholy avalanche of words, what Tchaikovsky does is situate them in the midst of some very real growth and development by Handry.
At first, he can’t understand much of what he is told by a charismatic cult leader he encounters because it sits so diametrically with his then-limited worldview; but as he comes to understand life better, and how people operate within it, and he is catalysed by a searing moment when all the scales fall off his eyes as someone he loves is endangered, everything he is told begins to make so much more sense.
It’s at that point in the novella that he has a huge choice to make and a massive opportunity for growth – does he go along with what he’s been told is the truth and act in a way that could be just as harmful as the life he was forced to leave – it’s unsettlingly fascinating how someone’s revelatory truth can quickly become as imprisoning as the orthodoxy they seek to overthrow – or does he, possibly for the first time ever, think for himself?
It’s a brilliant quandary because it contains so much humanity within it, and as The Expert System’s Brother comes to a close it becomes abundantly clear that Handry might be able to make his mark on the world and change things for the better but only if he rejects everything he’s known up to this point, and takes all the newly-acquired knowledge and hard-won fresh perspectives and charts his own course which will not only seismically change his life but that of everyone around him and the world on which they live.