Blog by Sumana Harihareswara, Changeset founder

08 Dec 2017, 10:10 a.m.

A Theme in Newitz, Sugar, Wells, & Leckie

Hi, reader. I wrote this in 2017 and it's now more than five years old. So it may be very out of date; the world, and I, have changed a lot since I wrote it! I'm keeping this up for historical archive purposes, but the me of today may 100% disagree with what I said then. I rarely edit posts after publishing them, but if I do, I usually leave a note in italics to mark the edit and the reason. If this post is particularly offensive or breaches someone's privacy, please contact me.

I'm starting Annalee Newitz's Autonomous (enjoying so far; the science-sex-and-slaves narrative makes me also want to reread Nicola Griffith's Slow River). I'm fuzzily thinking about thematic echoes in Rebecca Sugar's Steven Universe, Martha Wells's All Systems Red, and Ann Leckie's Imperial Radch trilogy (Ancillary Justice and its sequels). I'm noodling around thinking about how all of them tell stories of networked identity and body violation. What is it actually like to have unaccountable masters who can alter your mind? How similar is that to being misinformed and betrayed, in normal human ways, by people and organizations who have power over you? These are all stories that ... take cyberpunk for granted, you know? Of course we are all always plugged in, or could be, and freedom depends on being able to unplug, and to freely choose fusion, conversation, association, intimacy.