Providence

Song by Sonic Youth on their album Daydream Nation.
Well, I would suppose it is only really a song in the John Cage sense of being a song. Sheet music might fall short. For that matter, a description may fall short, as the lyrics are not really all that clear, and it is not "written" as such.

But here goes:

A haunting, reverbed-out piano part accompanies a series of answering machine messages left by Mike Watt of fIREHOSE, who is calling from Providence. The messages seem to relate to the location of Thurston Moore's mota, and the memory problems associated with the use of such. Possible locations mentioned in the exchange are a trash can, or in a van.

At once I’m granted motion
With the bound’ries of a body
And the boundless thoughts of time;
I’m stranded in an ocean
Of a snifter bowling toddy,
And my mind’s best set to rhyme.

It seems a waste to some men,
But by me, the drug will do,
If the spice it solves is born
So I’m too drunk to contend
That the space beyond my mew
Could be void poetic form.

 

 

 

If you imagine everything is a symbol

you look for meaning in everyday things

 

Songs heard on certain days whisper secret significance

random billboards send messages

intended only for your eyes 

 

A stranger who drops her keys at your feet

unconsciously wants to meet you; 

was meant to meet you 

 

but of course,  

none of that is real, despite what our imaginations tell us 

Real life is random 

 

Some day I will probably see that

but for now all I know is that she's from Rhode Island 

that means she has a plan for me

Providence is an English language science fiction short novel in the thriller and survival horror subgenres by Australian author Max Barry, published on 31 March 2020.

The plot follows the four-member crew of the artificially intelligent wartime spaceship Providence as they pursue an aggressive extermination campaign against an openly hostile alien race called Salamanders. The Salamanders first invaded the Solar System seven years prior to the plot, initiating an attempted immediate eradication of all humans they encountered, during their very first contact; they are explicitly demonstrated to be an existential threat with intentions to terraform Earth, and at the start of the plot, no successful communication has been achieved between humans and Salamanders, that might be used to attempt peace negotiations. Salamanders have the ability to expel "quark-gluon slugs" from their mouths, creating localised extreme gravity distortions which are described in plot as behaving like miniature black holes, capable of depressurising spacecraft and imploding human bodies in the vicinity.

The story rotates through the points of view of the four crew members, each of whom has unique insights, prejudices, and misunderstandings about the others, and each of whom has been led by military command to believe they alone are the most important and necessary member of the crew. Gilly, an engineer with what is strongly implied to be an autism spectrum disorder, is mainly preoccupied with supervising the ship's AI and "repairing" the ship, even though the ship has "service crabs," small robots which allow the ship to repair itself without human assistance. The ship's targeting computer does not actually require a human operator, so Anders, a fighter pilot and weapons specialist, strongly implied to have ADHD, attempts to alleviate his understimulation by coercing his crewmates into playing violent hide and seek games on the ship, relying on the medical bay to be able to bring them back from the brink of death when the games go too far. Jackson, the commanding officer and lone survivor of the Salamanders' first major campaign against a human space station, is explicitly stated to have PTSD from those events, and she is the only member of the crew who openly distrusts the ship's AI, due to a failure in AI judgment being what had allowed the previous attack to happen unopposed. Beanfield, the officer in charge of maintaining morale and balancing the crew's complicated interpersonal dynamics and mental health issues, as well as documenting day-to-day life on Providence to maintain good publicity on Earth, secretly harbours a nearly religious attitude toward the ship's AI, resulting in her forming a closer subjective sense of emotional connection with the AI and with her social media followers back on Earth than with the other humans on board.

Some of the themes of this book are rather direct and on-the-nose; the human temptation to perceive inhuman things as thinking the way humans think, and feeling the way humans feel, is routinely shown to be a mistake, but only insofar as the things being anthropomorphised are actually inhuman. A reasonable argument is made that anything crafted by human hands and fed data processed through human intellects, becomes itself an extension of humanity, including being subject to uniquely human errors in judgment, and not necessarily so "artificial" as the protagonists believe. Ideas like mercy, fairness, and negotiating peace only make sense to life forms which place a value on individual members of their species, but this does not mean that the individual members will not attempt to preserve their own lives by any means available, including imitation of the social behaviours of individualistic humans. These alien perspectives are compared and contrasted with how alien the four human crew are to each other due to their drastically differing values, experiences, and psychology.

Providence is a short and fast-paced read, a matter of a few hours from start to finish, and plenty of fun, though it is worlds away from qualifying as a classic or masterpiece of the genre; I regard it more as a pleasantly chilling "snack" to enjoy between other similar works, and the unexpectedly providential and uplifting ending left me tickled and pleased, after how tense the rest of the plot had been. I can gladly recommend this book to anyone who greatly enjoyed Starship Troopers by Robert A. Heinlein; that is definitely what it most reminded me of, in theme and atmosphere as well as the mental frames of the four protagonists. I was also strongly reminded of Blindsight by Peter Watts, specifically regarding how the human characters relate to intelligences which are altogether inhuman, but also in the creeping dread and mental deterioration expressed by the characters, in their (usually mistaken) efforts to anthropomorphise both hostile aliens and the ship's AI, while simultaneously failing to understand their own human crewmates very well at all.

For a far more "hopepunk" and less "grimdark" sci-fi short novel, also focusing on a ship with exactly four crew, I recommend To Be Taught, If Fortunate by Becky Chambers.

Iron Noder 2020, 17/30

"Providence" is a 2020 science-fiction novel by Australian science-fiction writer Max Barry. Interestingly, while Max Barry wrote several works of cyberpunk science-fiction, "Providence" is a rather straightforward example of spaceship and laser gun science-fiction, albeit with a modern take, including a discussion of social media and artificial intelligence.

The book starts with a prologue describing the slaughter of human space explorers by a group of aliens that resemble ants (or other social insects) that can spit miniature black holes. The book then continues to the present day, where a crew of four are boarding a massive, AI controlled space battleship, the Providence. The crew includes the cerebral Gilly, the computer officer, the impulsive Anders, the weapons officer the thoughtful Beanfield, basically a ship's psychologist, and Jackson, the tough captain. It soon turns out that these four people crewing the ship are mostly extraneous---the ship's AI can do almost everything, and the only reason it includes real people on it is as a form of propaganda to increase political support for the war. The crew take short "clips" of their lives, which are broadcast back to Earth to give people a human face. Nothing the crew do, we are told, and they are told, really matters. At first, the book seemed to be a satire of the era of social media and the almost surreal comfort we find ourselves living in.

As a reader, I was also wondering if this would be a commentary on a manufactured war and propaganda in general. Would it turn out that the ant-like "salamanders" had attacked humans by accident? Both internally, from some statements in the book, and from the external events of the past few decades, I was wondering if that would be a turn that the book would take.

About halfway through this short book (my copy was a 300 page trade paperback), it turns out that the crew are a little more necessary, and after the ship gets into trouble, the book becomes a fast-paced and improbable war novel, a la Aliens, with the crew needing to fight and kill directly. After the cerebral set-up, the last 100 pages or so are a fast-paced war novel where the crew have to fight the aliens face-to-face.

There are a number of things I could talk about in this book---it has good characterization and an interesting setting. But without giving away too much of the ending, the biggest thing I am surprised about in the book is the disparity between the style and the substance. Some years ago, I wrote a review 13 Ace Double novels, and I continued to read Ace Doubles and other "pulp" science-fiction. And with a few exceptions, most of those square-jawed white male heroes in Ace Doubles ended up being tricksters who found a better way than violence. But this book, with its cyberpunk trappings and cynical look at media manipulation---ends up being much more jingoistic than that corny, classic science-fiction (although I don't know if that is not part of Max Barry's satire). This book is another example, to me, of how the scorn of the styles of the past has let people ignore their substance, and left us with cynicism that doesn't accomplish anything.

Prov"i*dence (?), n. [L. providentia: cf. F. providence. See Provident, and cf. Prudence.]

1.

The act of providing or preparing for future use or application; a making ready; preparation.

Providence for war is the best prevention of it. Bacon.

2.

Foresight; care; especially, the foresight and care which God manifests for his creatures; hence, God himself, regarded as exercising a constant wise prescience.

The world was all before them, where to choose Their place of rest, and Providence their guide. Milton.

3. Theol.

A manifestation of the care and superintendence which God exercises over his creatures; an event ordained by divine direction.

He that hath a numerous family, and many to provide for, needs a greater providence of God. Jer. Taylor.

4.

Prudence in the management of one's concerns; economy; frugality.

It is a high point of providence in a prince to cast an eye rather upon actions than persons. Quarles.

 

© Webster 1913.