Last fall, I travelled to Italy and purchased a few books by Italian authors. The Singularity by Dino Buzzati tells the story of a secretive government project taking place at a military base. At the beginning of the novel, we follow an engineer named Ismani who has been recruited into the project, but is told nothing about what he’ll be doing. The first third of the book has a satirical bent, as Ismani and his wife try to cut through military bureaucracy to find out just one little bit of information about the project. It’s a futile exercise as one soldier after another dodges their questions, and I thought it was a little bit funny, but in hindsight, it does kind of feel like the author himself was stalling to get to the meat of the story.
Ultimately, it’s revealed that the secret project involves the creation of a supercomputer, and in a further twist, the scientist in charge of the operation has imbued the machine with the consciousness of his dead wife. To me, it became predictable rather quickly, because in our time, we’ve seen this type of story depicted many times. (For example, the Black Mirror episode “Be Right Back”.) But I have to give Buzzati credit for being prescient because he wrote this in 1960.
I’ve covered all kinds of media on this blog—books, movies, TV shows, music—but there’s one form of entertainment that I’ve never written about: video games. Ironically, games are probably the hobby that I’ve spent the most time on… and that’s also part of the reason why I haven’t written about them. The truth is, I’ve always been a bit ashamed to be a gamer.
Video games are one of the more geeky realms of geek culture, and I grew up in a time before the geeks inherited the earth. As a kid in school, I learned to avoid revealing parts of myself that would invite mockery: being good at math and computers, enjoying Star (Trek|Wars), still watching cartoons well into my teenage years, and yes, playing video games. You had to make an effort to find people, other geeks, that you could safely be yourself around, because the self that you wanted to be was not the socially accepted norm. For the most part, I did fall in with a group of friends with the same interests, but we would only talk about nerdy stuff when we were at our cafeteria table, away from the “regular” kids.
I’ve also shied away from writing about games because I’ve always had the sense that I play them “too much.” Nobody wants to admit their bad habits in a public forum. Even though I don’t know how to clearly define what amount of play is acceptable, I know that I often feel guilty, that I should be doing something better with my time than gaming.
I recently visited Porto, Portugal, and one of the top attractions there is a bookstore called Livraria Lello. It’s got a beautiful interior with a curvy, kind of sexy, central staircase, making it just as picturesque as the numerous churches that you find in Europe. In fact, it’s become so popular that they charge admission to get in, and there’s a queue of eagerly waiting tourists/customers outside the door. Fortunately, the ticket price is applied to any book purchases, so naturally, I bought something.
The store sells a bespoke series of classic public domain works called “The Pop Collection”, and I picked one by a Portuguese author: Love of Perdition by Camilo Castelo Branco. To add even more local flavour, the novel was supposedly written while the author was imprisoned in a jail just around the corner from the bookstore. The book is small and fit nicely inside my satchel, and I carried it with me for the rest of the trip, reading it while sitting in public squares or park benches. It was cool to come across mentions of places—Viseu, Coimbra, and of course, Porto itself—that I had visited days before.
I’m spending a lot of time talking about the context of my reading experience because sadly, I didn’t enjoy the story itself very much. It follows a young couple who fall in love, but are kept apart because their fathers hold a grudge against each other. Their passion is unstoppable, and they refuse to give each other up, resorting to violence and eventually murder.
The setup of State of Wonder really drew me in: there’s a scientist, Dr. Swenson, who has gone into the Amazon jungle to develop some kind of miracle drug, but she’s stopped communicating with the Big Pharma bosses who hired her. The company dispatches another researcher, Anders, to find her, but months later, Swenson sends the shocking news that Anders is dead. Now, it’s up to his colleague and friend, Marina, to follow him and investigate the circumstances of his demise.
What seems to be a plot-driven thriller slows down quite a bit. Swenson does not want to be found, and Marina doesn’t seem to try very hard to advance her mission. She just gets stuck in the town adjacent to the jungle, distracted by the odd Australian couple who Swenson has hired as assistants. This middle section really dragged for me and felt like a needless narrative detour.
Things get more interesting when we do finally meet Swenson, along with Easter, a deaf indigenous boy who she’s taken under her wing. I enjoyed the character dynamics between the two scientists: it turns out that Swenson taught Marina in medical school, and even though they’re both professionals now, Marina still acts in a deferential way towards the older woman. And Swenson herself has a brusque, no-bullshit manner that I found entertaining.
I started the pasttwo years with what I called “optimistic non-fiction reads”; it was kind of a coincidence and I resolved to continue the trend annually. I don’t think that Searches by Vauhini Vara quite fits the bill, but I’ll try to give the most hopeful interpretation I can.
This book was born from “Ghosts”, an article published in The Believer magazine. In it, Vara prompts OpenAI’s GPT-3 with the start of a piece of writing about her sister’s death from cancer. GPT completes the story, using the “knowledge” it has gained from consuming and training on a vast corpus of writing. Then, she repeats the original prompt, adding a few more sentences to her story, and again, GPT attempts to finish the piece. Vara repeats the exercise nine times, and with each iteration, she writes a bit more of her truth. GPT’s completions vary wildly, sometimes giving a happy ending where her sister survives, other times inventing a wistful memory from their childhood, and yet other times spiralling into gibberish.
It’s a powerful piece and worth reading on its own. Expanded into a book, Searches explores the history of the Internet age, and how tech companies take their users’ data to relentlessly drive profit. The biggest asset of companies like Alphabet, Meta and Amazon is what they know about us, and this business model has evolved into the current trend of large language models, whose knowledge consists of basically all text on the Internet.
