Living Next Door to the God of Love

"Justina Robson is another writer who is astonishingly inventive. Pretty much everything she’s written is absolutely top notch, really boundary pushing science fiction. I think one of her more recent books, Glorious Angels , could have been on this list, and is start-to-finish one of the most mind-blowingly weird alien worlds and post-human civilizations… Post-humanity is one of the big strengths of her writing. She also wrote a novella called Paper Hearts , which is the go-to book for the question, what if we did have a God-like AI solving our problems? How would that work? Living Next Door to the God of Love is an exploration of the post-human, and it follows on from Natural History – which you don’t need to have read. You have a pretty advanced human world, with a certain level of artificial intelligence and people in artificial bodies and all that sort of thing. And then in Natural History we have our first contact with this alien entity. And even that is… it’s hard to pin down just what the word would be. It’s almost like an alien dimension that is a single being, and this alien dimension is fairly acquisitive when it comes to adding people to itself. But when we start off Living Next Door to the God of Love a detente has been agreed between ‘the stuff’ – which is how they refer to this alien – and people. The idea is that the stuff will just make worlds – you want a world where you can be a superhero? Here it is! And here’s a world where you can have fantasy adventures… The only downside is that the more you interact with these perfect, amazing dream-worlds, the more you’re just gradually becoming more stuff. At some point you will just be stuff, and you will be part of this enormous… not even hive mind, this singular entity that is a universe of absorbed consciousnesses. This would probably be fine, except that when we start the book, one of these worlds has just been forcibly and completely incorporated into the stuff: everyone on it is just gone. Which points out to the humans involved that while they thought they were making a deal, they have zero way of enforcing its terms. What’s really going on is that there is another another god-like entity out there that is not part of the stuff; and the stuff is very, very vexed about this, and wants it. Taking this entire world with thousands of people into itself without warning was part of it trying to close the trap, and failing. And this other entity, the God of love of the title, then falls in with a regular human person in another of these stuff worlds, and with this super alien consciousness still hunting it, sending out parts of itself… The entity being hunted is itself a kind of a rogue part of it. The reason this book is amazing is that you get to see the workings of these entities, both the rogue part and the loyal part, possibly the least human things ever, interacting with humans. And you get to see things from their point of view. Robson does not in any way skimp on the alienness of it, but at the same time, it is perfectly comprehensible to a human reader, which is the dream – certainly for the sort of science fiction I write. And this, I think, is a better example of it than I’ve ever put on paper. It’s genuinely amazing. There are also parts of this book which are absolutely brutal, and parts that are running at that cutting edge of ‘indistinguishable from magic’ – that very, very high end of sci fi, the sort of thing that Banks worked with. But I think Robson is more interested in the genuine scientific logic of it; Banks was more interested in the social and the adventure side. I don’t think I’ve ever read anything else quite like it, it’s an amazing read, and it’s very, very affecting. And like I say, the depiction of non-human characters, which is something that Robson is extremely good at throughout all of her writing, is just absolutely mind blowing. Yes. You build up to the question ‘how does the thing think?’. You’ve got ideas: where did it come from, what are the constraints on it, what’s the environment it’s come out of… A certain slice of sci fi has tended to do aliens as just people with funny heads and reduced emotional palettes. We tend to do post-human as, basically it’s a human, but maybe it’s a little smoother or a little more detached from its biology. But Robson goes the full way and says, if you leave humanity behind you’re not going to go around being perfectly urbane and nice and just happening to have a weird robot monster body or something like that. It’s going to change you. And if you are something that is so completely unhuman, like the god-like entities she’s describing, any humanity is going to be a very thin veneer floating on the surface. I’m trying to think, if anyone is writing stuff like that at the moment… I was working on some Stanislaw Lem stuff earlier in the year, and I read the series of Pilot Prix stories which go from the mid 60s, so before the moon landing, well into the 70s. And that was really interesting, because early on, he’s talking about the science; there is a certain amount of social stuff, but it’s for laughs. It’s not the focus of the book in any way. The focus of the book is very much, here is a technical challenge, and here is how we solve it. That was written at a time when the thrill of science fiction was being in space, and that was all you needed, because that was sufficiently novel. Then you see that shift as you go through; he starts doing robots, and by the time you get to the story I was actually asked to adapt, he is asking, what if you had robots replacing people? Which is one of the base conditions of science fiction from the very, very start, artificial people; it’s one of the oldest tropes in science fiction. Arguably Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein is doing artificial people. Certainly R.U.R. is doing artificial people. The idea of how we interact with our artificial people is a science fiction question, but at the same time, it’s a political and philosophical question. It’s a bit tired to say there’s politics in everything, but it is kind of true. If you are envisaging a future, you’re inherently making both philosophical and political decisions. I suspect that if you had a future that was entirely dependent on just questions of technology, it would be a very dry read. But also, I think a lot of the books that people would claim are that are in fact extremely political. It’s just that they’re political in a very conservative, reactionary way, which the people citing them assume is the standard norm, the status quo – and that, of course, is never the case."