Who Goes There?

Despite being in her fifties, Suzanne Palmer is part of the generation of SF writers to come about in the past decade and change, those whose work coincided with the expanding of the genre market online. (If you’re someone quite a bit older than me and anxious about starting a career in writing fiction, just know it’s not too late!) In Palmer’s case however she’s been a more frequent contributor to Asimov’s Science Fiction than any of the new outlets. She didn’t make her debut in Clarkesworld until 2017, with today’s story, but “The Secret Life of Bots” immediately struck a chord with readers as it would also win Palmer her first Hugo. It would even spawn a series of short stories starring the recommissioned robot Bot 9, all of which for some reason reference movies with their titles. This story is what you might call a comedic thriller crossed with a space opera; the stakes are high, but the lightness of character interactions keep it from becoming too serious. I don’t like it as much as readers clearly did at the time, but it’s an effective and undemanding read that’s sure to please the crowd.

Placing Coordinates

First published in the September 2017 issue of Clarkesworld, which you can read online. Despite being less than a decade old it’s been reprinted quite a few times (somehow I don’t have any of these reprints in my library), including The Best Science Fiction & Fantasy of the Year: Volume Twelve (ed. Jonathan Strahan), The Best Science Fiction of the Year: Volume 3 (ed. Neil Clarke), The Year’s Best Military & Adventure SF: Volume 4 (ed. David Afsharirad), and The New Voices of Science Fiction (ed. Hannu Rajaniemi and Jacob Weisman). The only major year’s-best anthology it did not make was the last entry in Gardner Dozois’s series.

Enhancing Image

Bot 9 wakes up, or rather is reactivated, after a long hiatus to find that business aboard the Ship (with a capital S) has gone really sideways in the interim.

Dust was omnipresent, and solid surfaces had a thin patina of anaerobic bacteria that had to have been undisturbed for years to spread as far as it had. Bulkheads were cracked, wall sections out of joint with one another, and corrosion had left holes nearly everywhere. Some appeared less natural than others.

There’s still a human crew, although not as many people as Bot 9 had expected, and of course there’s a whole army of bots of different classes who really do the work maintaining Ship: hullbots, silkbots, and so on. Ship, along with the bots it directs, is sentient, although it’s unclear just how sentient each of the bots is supposed to be. The bots are able to make complex decisions of their own accord, and even to go into “Improvisation,” but officially they’re to take orders from Ship, who then takes orders from the Captain. (The humans have names, but honestly it’s easy to forget they do and I’m not totally convinced Palmer should’ve bothered.) Ship is in quite the pickle, being on course to meet with a hostile alien ship, nicknamed Cannonball, which Ship is really in no condition to fight; and to make matters worse there’s some kind of alien creature aboard Ship that’s been wreaking havoc, called “the Incidental,” although Bot 9 posits a more accurate name would be “Snake-Earwig-Weasel.” Ship is quite literally falling apart and so are some of the bots, including a damaged hullbot named 4340 whom Bot 9 helps out and quickly befriends.

Ship and the bots often come off as more human than the actual humans, which might be the intention, although while reading this story my mind couldn’t help but trail off and ponder stupid questions, such as: “So if the bots are sentient, does this mean humanity has reintroduced non-prison slave labor in the future? Are the bots slaves?” The humans become a good deal less sympathetic if we’re to believe they knowingly invented sentient life, only to enslave it, though I might be too harsh on this. (Actually it’s impossible to be too harsh on the institution of slavery, but understand that this whole line of thought with the bots-as-slaves is meant to be taken semi-jokingly.) Ship and the bots tell us repeatedly they exist “to serve,” and obviously this blind servitude is set up to be subverted later in the story. Bot 9, being outdated and not even included in the newfangled “botnet” the other bots take part in (direct communication, like telepathy), starts out as an outsider; but it’s this status as outsider that may prove to be an asset, as Bot 9, for all its jank, has a surprising capacity for ingenuity. If we’re to take the bots as analogous to humans then Bot 9 reads as elderly/disabled, being released into a society of mostly abled-bodied members, who has to and ultimately does prove its worth despite the odds. This is potentially a can of worms, but on the bright side it’s refreshing to read SF where robots are explicitly not gendered, even if Ship is very much coded as feminine (motherly, patient, a foil to the bullish humans).

The mix of adventure and humor would very much appeal to readers, but another thing I couldn’t help but notice is that if you remove the occasional salty language you could have feasibly published this story in the ’40s. This is a Campbellian narrative to the extent that the humans, while at times irrational and helpless (not to mention slavers), are ultimately shown to have the best intentions, and ultimately the bots stay loyal to the interests of their human masters. After all, they’re all on Ship together; the humans’ problem will inevitably also be the bots’ problem. But also the bots, while charming and shown to be perfectly capable of making their own decisions, are less prone to rebellion or existential crises than Asimov’s own robots. Human and bot must collaborate in order to take care of the small problem of the Incidental and then the much larger problem of Cannonball. And of course the alien race is written as totally unknowable and hostile to human interests—capable of thinking as well as a man but certainly not like a man. This town ain’t big enough for the two of us. Diplomacy is impossible. The solution thus is that one side or the other must be annihilated. In a way the story’s view of contact between humanity and alien life is no more sophisticated (and no less hawkish) than Fredric Brown’s “Arena,” the only substantial difference being that Palmer’s story isn’t subliminally racist against the Japanese. I really like Brown’s story, for the record; you can find something problematic while also enjoying it. We’re all adults here.

There Be Spoilers Here

The big twist, admittedly, is a pretty effective one, helped by it also being perfectly logical. Ship is not equipped to take on an alien warship—at least not with the expectation of succumbing in the battle. A kamikaze attack might just work, though, if it holds off the aliens from invading Earth. During all this there’s been a McGuffin called a “Zero Kelvin Sock” which, if Ship can get close enough to Cannonball, basically acts as a fusion bomb which will destroy both ships. The humans have come to this decision and Ship is prohibited from objecting, but the bots have a different plan in mind which could save all of them while still making use of the device. Of course the plan ends up working, with Bot 9’s direction, which technically involves the bots committing mutiny (going against the Captain’s orders). The Captain wants Bot 9 destroyed for having led the mutiny, even though its plan saved the goddamn ship, but… the Captain doesn’t know what Bot 9 looks like, and there are some out-of-commission bots that could serve perfectly well as the “corpse.” You know how it is. Personally if someone wanted me executed for doing what is objectively the right thing then I would hold a mighty grudge against that person, but while the bots can think of themselves they seem to lack a sense of Old Testament-type justice. But, the point being we get our happy ending, which if you know about the sequels then you could’ve already guessed that in advance.

A Step Farther Out

It’s cute, but ultimately frivolous. It’s very much the sort of crowd-pleasing story that would win a Hugo, but if I can put my cynicism aside for a second I have to admit I was entertained. Sometimes you need a short story that’s challenging and layered, and which can be picked apart, but other times you need a story that’s perfectly unchallenging.

See you next time.