Apparitions
ANDROID, n. There are androids in one of this week’s small-r romances. This newsletter has covered “robot” and “construct” before, so I figured it was time to look up “android,” even though it’s pretty etymologically straightforward. Andro- as in “man,” -oid as in “having the form or nature of, resembling.” A thing that has the form or nature of a man! There you go.
Surprise: Unlike “robot” (b. 1923), “android” is old as hell. The OED’s first recorded use is 1657. The citation comes from Gabriel Naudé’s History of Magick, and Naudé is using the word “android” to describe a human-looking automaton that he says was created by thirteenth-century philosopher Albertus Magnus. The android was maybe just a head without a body, but a head that could speak and tell the future. (I found an academic article about this that looks interesting, but I don’t have library access, alas.) I’m sorry to say I could not find an image of the android, but here’s Albert:
Albertus Magnus, AKA Saint Albert the Great, AKA Albert of Cologne, a German friar and philosopher. The painting is Apparition of the Virgin Mary to Saint Albert by Vicente Salvador Gomez, 1660, sourced from Wikipedia. She is bestowing his philosophical abilities on him, so I think we can extrapolate that in this painting, she is giving him the plans for the android.
Albertus Magnus is in two of the OED’s three citations about androids. The third citation refers to Hungarian inventor Wolfgang von Kempelen. In 1770, Von Kempelen claimed to have invented a chess-playing automaton. He hadn’t. The alleged android, dressed in a turban and robes like a Turk, was operated by a person concealed in a cabinet. The hidden person had to have superior chess skills; if it had been me in there, nobody would have been impressed. If you want to see several apparently inaccurate diagrams of this whole chess-android-cabinet arrangement, Wikipedia’s got you covered.
The presence of the person was a closely guarded secret for decades. At the height of the machine’s fame, the chess automaton toured the palaces and cities of the world, beat Napoleon I and Ben Franklin, and was the subject of a debunking essay by Edgar Allan Poe in 1836 (correct in its grand idea that there was a person operating the machine, but wrong in its particulars). This hoax gave us the phrase “Mechanical Turk,” meaning a function that appears to be automated but is actually performed by a human being.
The device itself was lost in a fire in 1854, but its memory lives on. In extremely sinister modern usage, Amazon named one of its services “Mechanical Turk”: an online hub where businesses hire (“crowdsource”) remote workers to do small tasks that humans are still better at than computers. They answer surveys, transcribe text, describe images, categorize products, identify gore and pornography, and disseminate spam (nb: the linked article is from 2014, but here’s one from 2023 that’s even more dire). Like everything Amazon does, Mechanical Turk is rife with labor issues. Workers make cruelly low wages and are “independent contractors,” which is US English for “they have no rights.”
Amazon also refers to Mechanical Turk as “artificial artificial intelligence,” a barely comprehensible phrase that would be funny if it weren’t so yikes.
While we’re on the subject of artificial artificial artificial intelligence, ChatGPT isn’t quite in the “Mechanical Turk” category. Humans—many of them hired through Amazon’s Mechanical Turk—were involved in reading and filtering the huge amounts of text needed to “train” ChatGPT not to spout hate speech, though it still has issues of bias. But when you interact with ChatGPT, it’s not secretly a person on the other end. It’s a machine. It’s a machine that makes extraordinarily natural-sounding sentences. That’s impressive, and a friend with a sunnier outlook on technology has encouraged me to see the bright side here: a more naturalistic interface between humans and computers could be a good thing.
But you know what else is a machine that makes sentences? Me. I’ve got a carbon-based artificial android form, I generate paragraphs, I cite sources, and not to brag, but I do all that and still use way less water. I can’t beat you at chess or tell the future, but I’ll work on it.
Here’s what I’ve read lately in small-r romance:
Paladin’s Faith (m/f, both cis and het, fantasy) by T. Kingfisher. Sometimes I feel like I write the worst reviews for the books I love the most. The more emphatically glowing the adjectives—superb, hilarious, perfect—the emptier the recommendation seems. You all are gonna think it’s exaggerated discourse hiding mediocre affections. It’s not. It’s not! My affections are straight-up overflowing this cracked cauldron. I love T. Kingfisher. I love these paladin books specifically. I love how the seemingly incongruous mixture of romantic yearning, swashbuckling adventure, whimsical horrors, grounded fantasy economics, divine mystery, and genuinely funny jokes all comes together. In the hands of a lesser writer that combination could induce cringe whiplash, but in T. Kingfisher’s hands, what it induces is desire (1) to reread the hell out of these marvelous books (2) to take you gently by the shoulders and make uncomfortable eye contact—I’m not great at eye contact so this is really saying something, y’all—and earnestly proselytize these books to you. I have been so sad since I finished this one because all I want is to be back in this world, laughing at unexpected perfume jokes and mentally yelling “KISS” at Marguerite (sneaky, clever spy with a flexible moral code who sometimes does sex work and happens to need a sword-wielding bodyguard who can’t be bribed) and Shane (deeply un-sneaky, very straightforward holy warrior who is tormented by his feelings of lust for Marguerite, who he’s supposed to be protecting). They do kiss, I’m delighted to report.
World Running Down (trans m/embodied male AI, both gay, sci-fi) by Al Hess. One of the very best sci-fi tropes is “non-human among humans,” especially when paired with “figuring out embodiment,” because those are just such excellent starting points for asking questions about sentience, bodily autonomy, what it means to be human, and what it means to be a person, even if you’re not human. This book delivers and it’s an action-packed, post-climate-apocalypse/dystopian roadtrip through the desert in what used to be Utah. The setting deftly combines a kind of Mad Max and weird Western vibe (when the characters are kicking up dust on the run from pirates in their beat-up van) with a retrofuturistic, Jazz Age and robots vibe (when the characters are admiring suit fashions and neon lights in Salt Lake). The romance is adorable, which is a nice contrast with the depths of human villainy that drive the plot and all the horrifying mutant animal experiments running amok in the wilderness. There is trans pain here—estranged family, misgendering, transition that feels far out of reach—but it’s balanced by lots and lots of trans joy. I especially appreciated this book’s depiction of a complex friendship; romance has a lot of ride-or-die besties, so it’s surprising and poignant to find a book showing something thornier. Anyway: renegade Mormon desert pirates, android sex workers who will stab you, a sentient AI who is discovering that maybe having a body is kind of nice, actually, and a big-hearted trans guy trying valiantly to save the world and keep his van running.
A Cowboy to Remember (m/f, both cis and het, contemporary) by Rebekah Weatherspoon. Evie Buchanan, a Black celebrity chef who co-hosts a cooking show, gets assaulted by an unhinged rival and the resulting head injury causes amnesia. To recover in privacy, she leaves New York for the California dude ranch where she grew up. She hasn’t set foot there since she ran away from ten years ago when she lost her grandmother, her last blood relation, and got her heart broken by her childhood best friend, Zach Pleasant, a Black rodeo exhibition rider who now runs the ranch with his brothers. Evie and Zach haven’t spoken in a decade, but her recovery brings them together and makes them both realize they’ve never gotten over each other. She can’t remember anything, but he shows up in her dreams. This book doesn’t use Evie’s amnesia as a starting point for bonkers machinations (don’t get me wrong, I love bonkers machinations) but is instead gorgeously tender and real. Her head injury is a serious health concern and a nurse keeps her company all the time. Everyone is honest and gentle with her. The way her amnesia is treated as a kind of grief is particularly striking; she lost her parents and her grandmother once already, and now she can’t even remember them, and the book doesn’t gloss over that. But she has the love of her friends and her found family, people who knew her parents and her grandmother and will drive her to the storage unit for the old photo albums and tell her all the stories, and that carries her through. Also, she gets to bask in California sunshine while a sexy cowboy tries his best to make up for being a twenty-two-year-old dodo who couldn’t see what was right in front of him back in the day, and I love that for her.
Keep You Both (m/f/f, all cis and bi, contemporary, novella) by Kathryn Nolan. This New Year’s Eve romance stars a wedding planner who is trying to plan a wedding for her two best friends while hiding that she’s in love with them; meanwhile they are awkwardly avoiding planning their own wedding because they’re both in love with her. All three of them end up snowed in at a cabin for the weekend and everything comes to light in the sexiest possible way. Everyone is bisexual in a cool, carefree, queer-film-festivals-and-dance-parties way that made me baselessly nostalgic for a life I did not live (I am a spent-their-20s-hunched-in-a-library-carrel bisexual). Everything about this is so fun. Polyamorous friends-to-lovers romance, snowed in, hot tub, what more do you need? The incredibly sexy queer intimacy of doing someone else’s lipstick? (Yes, I need this. Always.) I have some great news for you about that.
In things that are neither Romance nor romance, Summer Awad’s “Love Poem” and “Syllogism for Palestinian Grief,” along with some beautiful art by Dana Barqawi. These made me cry. Sometimes it’s right to cry.
One last note: my novel The Mischievous Letters of the Marquise de Q was one of Tor.com’s Best SFF Romances of 2023, which is such a thrill. Such good company on that list, too. Many of those books are in my giant to-be-read pile and might well appear in future emails. And one of them, Bitter Medicine, was in this very newsletter in October.
That’s all for this time—and for 2023! Happy new year, readers. I’ll be back in your inbox in January.
