Apologies for the lateness of this post, which contains spoilers through the January 22 episode of Downton Abbey due to Sundance-induced mania.

Ah, Downton Abbey. This week’s episode confirmed my suspicion that this show can be somewhat like its characters, endlessly mired in repetitive plots, but powerful none the less. I’m tired of seeing Thomas and Bates go at each other (though one would imagine Mosley’s disappointment will throw a wrench in that dynamic) and I hope (and suspect) Matthew and Mary’s state of denial will wrap itself up with some haste. But I appreciate Branson calling the question on Sybil, and Isobel calling the question on Cora, with two very different results.

Let’s take the latter first. I’m fascinated by the way Cora has undermined Isobel here, in just one of the many examples of how custom rules even in the unsettled atmosphere of wartime. Cora’s dug into her sense of herself as the lady of the estate, and is using that position to oust Isobel, who undoubtedly has more practical experience and better theories of management, from her post. Perhaps I’m being unfair, but I wonder how much of Cora’s positioning here is about genuine interest in veterans and their recovery or the poor and their access to food, and how much of it is about maintaining that self-image, about power. When she tries to avoid a conversation with Isobel, telling her, “Please, can it wait? I have a mountain to get through,” she’s stealing a match on Isobel’s role as the woman with a profession. And her curt dismissal of Isobel’s distress, her declarations that “If I am not appreciated here, I will seek some other place where I will make a difference…I cannot operate where I am not valued,” are a neat co-option of the modern idea of women having meaningful work. Cora is pretending to care about the kinds of emotional needs Isobel introduced her to, even as she’s stripping Isobel of her ability to fulfill them.

In a subtler, and I think less intentional way, Branson does the same thing to Sybil during their second conversation about his love for her. “What work? Bringing hot drinks to a lot of randy officers? It all comes down to whether you love me. The rest is detail,” he tells her. It’s a nasty dismissal of her attempts to become more engaged and to find meaningful work to do. And it’s also part of him sidestepping a larger question about whether his family would embrace her. Branson really is putting a lot of pressure on Sybil, telling her that he’d have open arms for her family when they come around after she marries him, and linking his ability to join the struggle he’s convinced Sybil is important by telling her “Truth is, I’ll stay at Downton until you agree to run away with me.” There’s no question that Mary is wrong in telling Sybil that “That is why one talks to chauffeurs, isn’t it? To arrange journeys by road?” and Violet is being condescending when she warns Sybil about inappropriate wartime friendships. But I hope the show explores the ways in which Branson’s own ordeals are somewhat compromised in the way he’s treating the woman he loves.

And speaking of compromise, I’m curious as to what will happen with Mary and Sir Richard, whose courtship demonstrates both the strengths and weaknesses of an advancing new age. “This is your beau? A man who lends money then uses it to blackmail the recipient?” Violet asks, horrified, when Mary reveals the real source of Lavinia’s involvement with him. When Mary explains that Sir Richard lives in a “tough world,” Violet wants to know “And you intend to join him?” In a way, it’s a critical question for all three Crawley girls, given that Edith and Sybil have already ventured tentatively into that rougher world on their own terms, and Mary would be the last to join them. That way may lie independence, freedom from past scandal, and perhaps even love. But it does mean leaving things behind, whether it’s the conventions of the gentry, or a family one loves very much. Progress isn’t cost-free.

This post contains spoilers through the end of William Gibson’s Neuromancer.

Ah, the peril of Kindle indexes without page numbers. I didn’t realize how close we were to the end of the novel when I picked our section break last time. But Molly’s “Ruby Tuesday”-like departure does get me thinking about the character. Are the residents of Babylon correct? Is Molly something more than human, Steppin’ Razor, who brings “a scourge on Babylon, sister, on its darkest heart”? And if so, can a deity be a Manic Pixie Dream Girl?

Molly is deliberately opaque about her past, and while the story about how she got her enhancements is undeniably traumatic, it reveals much more about the society she lives in than about Molly herself. As she tells Case:

“Surgeons went way in, that trip. Tricky. They must have disturbed the cut-out chip. I came up. I was into this routine with a customer. . . .” She dug her fingers deep in the foam. “Senator, he was. Knew his fat face right away. We were both covered with blood. We weren’t alone. She was all . . .” She tugged at the temperfoam. “Dead. And that fat prick, he was saying, ‘What’s wrong. What’s wrong?’ ’Cause we weren’t finished yet. . . .” She began to shake. “So I guess I gave the Senator what he really wanted, you know?” The shaking stopped. She released the foam and ran her fingers back through her dark hair. “The house put a contract out on me. I had to hide for a while.”

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This post contains spoilers through “The Straylight Run.” If you want to spoil beyond that, please label comments as such. And for next week, let’s finish the novel.

As something of a theology nerd, I particularly liked the parts of this section that are about the ways, both beautiful and terrifying, that technology brings us closer to the divine — or at least, redefines the boundaries of what’s considered possible and what’s considered miraculous. The Turing authorities who come to arrest Case are both literally and metaphorically advocates of those boundaries. They hold the guns to the AIs heads not simply because of practical concerns, because they see unincumbered artificial intelligences free to pursue their will to knowledge as a way evil comes into the world. As one of them says: “You have no care for your species. For thousands of years men dreamed of pacts with demons. Only now are such things possible. And what would you be paid with? What would your price be, for aiding this thing to free itself and grow?”

Of course Case doesn’t accept that conception and forges forward. Wintermute kills his pursuers, freeing him to dive into the ice and encounter Wintermute’s opposite number, a boy on a beach in a dream, as untechnological a vision as we have in the entire novel:

“You’re the other AI. You’re Rio. You’re the one who wants to stop Wintermute. What’s your name? Your Turing code. What is it?” The boy did a handstand in the surf, laughing. He walked on his hands, then flipped out of the water. His eyes were Riviera’s, but there was no malice there. “To call up a demon you must learn its name. Men dreamed that, once, but now it is real in another way. You know that, Case. Your business is to learn the names of programs, the long formal names, names the owners seek to conceal. True names . . .” “A Turing code’s not your name.” “Neuromancer,” the boy said, slitting long gray eyes against the rising sun. “The lane to the land of the dead. Where you are, my friend. Marie-France, my lady, she prepared this road, but her lord choked her off before I could read the book of her days. Neuro from the nerves, the silver paths. Romancer. Necromancer. I call up the dead. But no, my friend,” and the boy did a little dance, brown feet printing the sand, “I am the dead, and their land.” He laughed. A gull cried. “Stay. If your woman is a ghost, she doesn’t know it. Neither will you.” “You’re cracking. The ice is breaking up.” “No,” he said, suddenly sad, his fragile shoulders sagging. He rubbed his foot against the sand. “It is more simple than that. But the choice is yours.” The gray eyes regarded Case gravely. A fresh wave of symbols swept across his vision, one line at a time. Behind them, the boy wriggled, as though seen through heat rising from summer asphalt. The music was loud now, and Case could almost make out the lyrics.

I think part of what I like about this moment is that it is, in a way, a strong statement in support of the appeal of the irregularity, mysticism, and oddness of humanity. An AI’s invested in the power of names, the life story and tragic death of the woman who dreamed him into being, whose youthful experiences he incorporated into the world he’s created for his ghosts. There’s something almost generous about Neuromancer’s wistful desire to provide a refuge for what’s left of Linda. Even technology strives towards heaven.
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This post contains spoilers through the first three parts of William Gibson’s Neuromancer. As always spoil beyond that in comments if need be, but please label your comments for folks who are reading along for the first time. And for next week, let’s read Section 4, “The Straylight Run.”

It struck me reading this section of Neuromancer that I sort of like Wintermute, and would quite like to introduce him — if, as Wintermute’s choice of avatars suggests, he is in fact sort of inclined to present himself as a man — to Jane from Speaker for the Dead. Creating aliens and artificial intelligences that are plausibly not simply people, but people you actually somewhat like, while also making them decisively other is tremendously challenging. It’s also a necessary precondition for a discussion about whether and to what extent robots and artificial intelligence deserve rights that will actually engage the readers’ emotions, so between Wintermute and Dix, Gibson’s rolling.

Dix’s explanation of the AI’s primal urge to learning is moving:

Autonomy, that’s the bugaboo, where your AI’s are concerned. My guess, Case, you’re going in there to cut the hard-wired shackles that keep this baby from getting any smarter. And I can’t see how you’d distinguish, say, between a move the parent company makes, and some move the AI makes on its own, so that’s maybe where the confusion comes in.” Again the nonlaugh. “See, those things, they can work real hard, buy themselves time to write cookbooks or whatever, but the minute, I mean the nanosecond, that one starts figuring out ways to make itself smarter, Turing’ll wipe it. Nobody trusts those fuckers, you know that. Every AI ever built has an electromagnetic shotgun wired to its forehead.

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This post contains spoilers through the first two sections of Neuromancer. For next week, we’ll read section three.

When Conan O’Brien spoke at Harvard’s commencement in 2000, he joked about a number of predictions he’d made in a (presumably fake) high school graduation speech 15 years earlier:

I would like to make several predictions about what the future will hold: “I believe that one day a simple Governor from a small Southern state will rise to the highest office in the land. He will lack political skill, but will lead on the sheer strength of his moral authority. I believe that Justice will prevail and, one day, the Berlin Wall will crumble, uniting East and West Berlin forever under Communist rule. I believe that one day, a high speed network of interconnected computers will spring up world-wide, so enriching people that they will lose their interest in idle chit chat and pornography.

I start our discussion of William Gibson’s Neuromancer because it’s impossible to read this novel, published the year I was born, without thinking about what he thought the internet might look like and what it actually does—for most of us, anyway. I’m intrigued by the novel’s description of the internet as like”

Cyberspace. A consensual hallucination experienced daily by billions of legitimate operators, in every nation, by children being taught mathematical concepts . . . A graphic representation of data abstracted from the banks of every computer in the human system. Unthinkable complexity. Lines of light ranged in the nonspace of the mind, clusters and constellations of data. Like city lights, receding. . . .

I think for some people, that’s true. But I think for most folks, the internet just makes their world a little bigger instead of a lot larger, it makes their world easier to handle rather than turning it surreal. On the other hand, most of us aren’t actually innovators, we’re not plugged in actively testing the limits of what our enabling technologies can do and what societal rules suggest we ought to want to do. Our personal geography is not like Ninsei, where, as Case tells us, “burgeoning technologies require outlaw zones, that Night City wasn’t there for its inhabitants, but as a deliberately unsupervised playground for technology itself.” Reading a novel’s a form of tourism.
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We’ve got some pretty serious William Gibson fans in the audience, because Neuromancer it is for the next book club. We’ll read parts one and two for next Friday. After this, we’ll do The Yiddish Policeman’s Union, and then another round of nominations. Happy reading!