Blog Tour Guest Post: PERHAPS THE STARS by Ada Palmer

I’m very excited to be on the blog tour for Ada Palmer’s Perhaps the Stars, the finale to her Terra Ignota series. Big thanks to Tor Books for the blog tour invite! For my stop, I have a fascinating author guest post about the future of civil rights, so I hope you enjoy this glimpse into the mind of Ada Palmer! First, here’s what the book is about:

World Peace turns into global civil war.

In the future, the leaders of Hive nations—nations without fixed location—clandestinely committed nefarious deeds in order to maintain an outward semblance of utopian stability. But the facade could only last so long. 

Now, war spreads throughout the globe, splintering old alliances and awakening sleeping enmities. All transportation systems are in ruins, causing the tyranny of distance to fracture a long-united Earth and threaten to obliterate everything the Hive system built.

With the arch-criminal Mycroft nowhere to be found, his successor, Ninth Anonymous, must not only chronicle the discord of war, but attempt to restore order in a world spiraling closer to irreparable ruin.

The fate of a broken society hangs in the balance. Is the key to salvation to remain Earth-bound or, perhaps, to start anew throughout the far reaches of the stars?

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Octopus Rights and Imaginary Civil Rights Allies

The Octopus Rights Movement is a hot button issue in the imagined 25th century of my Terra Ignota, one of many background details in which I join in other authors in imagining the future civil rights struggles which might follow today’s, as past civil rights pushes—votes for all economic classes, votes for all races, votes for all sexes—followed each other one by one.  This is part of what Malka Older has termed “speculative resistance”; by depicting other ways the world could be set up—other economies, voting systems, family units, labor models, or social values—speculative fiction can help remind us that the status quo is a choice, not an immovable default, and encourage hope and action, and above all the simple questioning which is so often the seed of both.  

In writing about future civil rights movements specifically, we can look at the gradual expansion of what I call our empathy sphere, i.e. the range of beings we instinctively consider coequally a person as ourselves, and which we feel uncomfortable seeing treated badly. If most of us today can’t find More’s Utopia (1520) truly utopian since it includes slavery and subjugation of women, that shows how our empathy sphere is broader than that of More’s 1500s audience, and when we read 19th century stories about whaling, or watch older TV with racist tropes, we feel how audiences’ empathy sphere has continued to change with time.  Speculative fiction can follow that shift beyond today, depicting the dangers of a contracted empathy sphere in dystopias like Atwood’s The Handmaid’s Tale (1958), or new frontiers of empathy expansion works like Astro Boy (1952) or Star Trek the Next Generation (1987) which depict struggles over rights for A.I.s and aliens.  

Why octopus rights?  Because it gets at so many aspects of what makes some civil rights movements extra sticky.  In Terra Ignota, cloned meat of any animal you wish can be grown in few hours in a home meatmaker, much like a home breadmaker, resulting in a large cultural shift away from animal-sourced meat.  One could imagine such a future banning animal-sourced meat entirely, but I wanted instead to look at the plural and complicated version where attitudes and law vary person by person and place by place, as they do today for alcohol, marijuana, marriage equality, and so much more.  Thus in my imagined 2450s some governments ban animal-sourced meat, others allow it freely, others allow the consumption of fish but not birds or mammals (think of today’s pescatarianism), and others allow it only for culturally-important traditional recipes that can’t be effectively replicated without the whole or bone-in animal, such as the types of traditional food practices protected on UNESCO’s Intangible Cultural Heritage lists. And since cultural mores parallel but never precisely match law, I imagine a world where many people feel uncomfortable about eating a real animal, but others less so, just as today’s attitudes vary about things like veal, foie gras, and exotic animal sport hunting. 

High-intelligence animals are already close to the edges of our empathy sphere, so person-like in our empathetic imagination that many feel uncomfortable seeing them suffer in fiction or nonfiction, so in a future where most of our civil rights movements for humans have long since succeeded, high-intelligence animals are a likely next frontier.  In my 2450s, global treaties grant to dolphins, elephants, and high primates what this future’s law calls Minor’s Status i.e. the same protections as a human child.  Current conflict: the octopus—high-intelligence yes, but anti-social, un-cute or gross in many people’s opinion (cuteness has a huge impact on publics’ willingness to protect endangered species), with a hard-to-detect microscopic larval form (does that get rights?), a short lifespan (only 2-5 years), death after mating (does that make it murder encouraging them to breed?), and eaten far more widely than any primate or cetacean, especially in a future where pescatarianism is a more common.  

What shape would legislative debates over the octopus take?  Individual feelings would likely vary much as feelings about whales or primates do today, but securing rights under the law is often shaped, partly by changing social mores, but substantially by legal precedent, and the specific wording of old law.  Imagining the octopus as a late addition to the movement to secure rights for high-intelligence animals, I thus tried to rewind a century or two to imagine how the first protections might have been established, likely for the species we already find most person-like: cetaceans (thank you Jacques Cousteau and Star Trek IV) elephants (thank you Lawrence Anthony and Dumbo), our primate cousins (thank you Jane Goodall and Koko the signing gorilla).  

The question of what criteria a legal system might develop to define high-intelligence and/or sentient life—and ways those criteria might go wrong—is a great science fictional question, often looked at in the context of aliens.  In Heinlein’s The Star Beast (1954) a multispecies council offers protections for sentient species requires limbs capable of tool-use, because they have never found a sentient species without, which creates problems achieving recognition for a shapeshifting species without consistent limbs (and invites the reader to consider apes vs. dolphins).  Piper’s Little Fuzzy (1962) has a future Earth government offer protections for aliens only if they speak and use fire, a very human-culture-centric criterion in which we can feel the anthropological triumph-of-technology ideas of the mid-20th century.  Tezuka’s Tomorrow the Birds (1971-3) posits a galactic multispecies council that has never found a dominant/intelligent species which did not have wings, and on encountering Earth decide their legal duty is to intervene to help the obviously-intended-to-be-dominant birds overthrow the can’t-possibly-be-sentient humans.  In Terra Ignota, I wanted to develop something similar, but a definition humans would make without alien contact, based on our interactions with other intelligent Earth species, and with the many imagined aliens which by now are very much a part of how we define what it means to be human vs. sentient vs. not.  The characteristics I most often hear people mention currently that make a being feel person-like to them are language and complex communication, and the formation of close friendships and intimacies, perhaps best shown in how moving we find videos of elephants mourning their dead, or the story of Koko mourning the death of Robin Williams who had been her friend for more than a decade, since her human mentors asked the actor to help cheer her up after the death of her gorilla friend Michael in 2001.  

Thus, while the first legislation could take many forms, I imagined a scenario in which the first global laws protecting high-intelligence animals defined the characteristics species needed to qualify as including (A) high-level problem-solving or tool use, (B) language or complex communication, (C) forming social groups and passing on culture (as whales teach their songs, and chimps teach their young medicinal herb use), and (D) mourning their dead.  Such a strict list could easily help the first versions of the laws to pass in a 24th century where most people already empathized with elephants and whales but might balk at the prospect of protecting every tool-using crow, or complexly social ant colony.  It is fairly common in the history of law for language put in to make something acceptable in one decade (yay, we saved the dolphins!) to prove a hurdle decades later, so by the 2450s we find my imaginary octopus rights activists struggling with the hurdle of the undeniably intelligent yet highly anti-social octopus, which can solve the most complex maze, but does not love its microscopic children, does not mourn its dead, avoids others of its species when it can, and does not teach or share with fellow octopus—and which a large bloc of my imagined voters and legislators find un-cute, and delicious.  Much like civil rights conflicts in the past, debates over the octopus would test our ideas about what it means to be human, and what makes intelligent or sentient life worthy of preservation, as arguments such as “But they recognize and form relationships with humans!” ask what capacities make something precious: the culture of a group? the feelings of an individual? capacities for grief? friendship? pain? love?  An octopus has nine separate nervous systems, so is each octopus a group/family/culture in itself?  Is intelligence without emotion full sentience?  Does sentience require a valuing the other as well as the self?  Such debates, held both on senate floors and over dinner tables, are plausible successors to 20th and 21st century debates over whether same-sex parents or neuroatypical parents can successfully raise children, and earlier centuries’ debates over whether women, people of color, or the laboring classes had the capacity for rational thought and political judgment.  And they are also continuations of the 20th century’s speculative debates over whether E.T., Astro Boy, Commander Data, or Deep Blue the chess computer are fully people.

Readers who love the tiny puzzle-piece-hunt of world building can even piece together the dates and chronology of the evolution of rights for non-human intelligences, and observe that, in my timeline, advanced Artificial Intelligences received the same rights as dolphins and high primates the same year they did—in fact, they received these rights before A.I.s complex enough to qualify for them existed, the law promising that once an A.I. was developed which did meet the criteria, it would receive such protections.  Why easier for the A.I. than the octopus?  Partly because science fiction started doing the work of making us eager for A.I. rights decades ago, as early as Astro Boy’s 1950s battles with fictitious anti-robot hate groups (depicted in the comic wearing KKK robes) and with the genocidal anti-robot dictator Hitlini, fictitious struggles which, like those in many other SF works, aimed to parallel and comment on human rights issues like racism and antisemitism, but also drew robots so much into our empathy sphere that we already feel uncomfortable reading about imagined futures that don’t give them rights.  And in many ways it is easier to grant rights to something that does not exist, since no one gives up anything protecting robots we don’t yet have, not like octopus rights activists asking the 25th century to give up eating octopus, the 20th century urging nations to give up whaling, and suffragettes asking men to give up their monopoly on power.  In fact, A.I.s having legal rights before they existed is fact, not fantasy: the first birth certificate and legal citizenship granted to an A.I. happened in 2003, since back in the 50s Osamu Tezuka had chosen 2003 as Astro Boy’s creation date, and when we reached 2003 the Japanese government issued the fictitious robot a legal birth certificate, to celebrate a fictitious hero as dear to Japan as Superman to the US, but also as a symbol of (and fascinating legal precedent for!) humanity’s readiness to welcome robot friends.

Octopus and animal rights are a tiny background detail in Terra Ignota, whose more foreground civil rights conflict is over set-sets, people raised from birth within complex computer interfaces that re-map their sensory processing to let them analyze masses of data far beyond what other humans can perceive, but making them unable to experience more typical sense perception (a little like the Mentats in Herbert’s Dune, but maximizing humans’ ability to use computers instead of replacing them).  Debates in my 25th century focus on the ethics of parents making such a life-shaping choice for their children, since the process must begin at or before birth, and polarization focuses on anxiety over taking away the chance for a ‘normal’ life vs. set-sets’ own insistence that they love their computer senses, as one set-set character puts it, “I may have grown up never seeing a sunset, but you’ve never seen a six-dimensional homoskedastic crest up from the data sea, and you never will because you’re wasting those nerves on telling you your knee itches.”  

The imagined 2400s of Terra Ignota have seen decades of prejudices, hate crimes, riots, and legislative proxy battles waged over set-sets, and the larger issues their existence bring up: the ethics around parents’ choices for their children, and tensions over neurodiversity.  Even the octopus becomes a proxy debate for this, as questions of whether the asocial octopus can be a person like a dolphin or chimp without forming emotional relationships or transmitting culture become proxies for questioning whether a set-set or other neuroatypical human can be fully a person if they do not share many typical human experiences.  Readers engaged in today’s debates over the autism spectrum, especially those interested in what some call the educational tyranny of the neurotypicals, and eugenics questions over things like conditions detectible in utero and the future possibilities of CRISPR, often talk to me about how powerful it is to see the set-sets, both as representation, and as a future iteration of today’s debates, transformed by a hypothetical technology.  And, like Terra Ignota’s engagements with race and gender, my world build around set-set issue and neuroatypicality stresses how progress toward justice and equality can be made and yet new versions of an issue still arise—a reminder that, just as with race, sex, and gender, civil rights tensions tend to recur in new forms over decades and centuries, rather than being won once and for all.  

Recognizing that there will be new civil rights struggles after the struggles of our time is a wearying prospect, but the fictional futures of speculative resistance can not only furnish tools for articulating and exploring our impulses about inclusion and exclusion (which is more like a human, a robot or an octopus?), they also help us anticipate future iterations, so we can help today’s movements avoid weakening tomorrow’s, as Terra Ignota’s dolphin rights rhetoric accidentally harmed the octopus, as the galactic councils in The Star Beast and Tomorrow the Birds did harm with their narrow expectations about sentience, and, in real world examples, as some legal rhetoric generated in marriage equality legislation could weaken bisexual and asexual rights, and as feminist activism must be careful not to harm trans rights.  And I also think SF’s imagined worlds can help give us the emotional stamina to think long-term even when we often feel exhausted by the short-term.  For me at least, as we face the fact that today’s civil rights tensions will take on new forms tomorrow, it helps to remember that our allies in imaginary worlds, like Astro Boy and Commander Data, are also with us, helping to make real empathy victories in this one.

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Haven’t started the series? Check out the first three books here.

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About the author:

ADA PALMER is a professor in the history department of the University of Chicago, specializing in Renaissance history and the history of ideas. Her first nonfiction book, Reading Lucretius in the Renaissance, was published in 2014 by Harvard University Press. She is also a composer of folk and Renaissance-tinged a cappella vocal music on historical themes, most of which she performs with the group Sassafrass. She writes about history for a popular audience at exurbe.com and about SF and fantasy-related matters at Tor.com.

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Find Ada and her books: Website | Twitter | Facebook | Goodreads | Amazon | Bookshop.org

Follow the rest of the blog tour:

Monday, Nov. 1: Track of Words

Tuesday, Nov. 2: Nine Bookish Lives

Friday, Nov. 5: Before We Go Blog