Do Androids Dream of Anything at All?

Although the literature of automatism has existed in one mold or another since the late Middle Ages—with sixteenth-century folktales about a golem made of clay and summoned to life, through ritual incantation, to defend Prague’s Jewish community —its modern form was set in motion by a play called “R.U.R.,” by the Czech writer Karel Čapek. Its 1921 première, also in Prague, set the agenda for the next century, and it has remained an apparently ironclad convention that all critical writing about the genre begin there. The drama gave us the word “robot,” a derivative of an Old Slavic root related to “serfdom,” and its narrative, of a rebellion among artificial workers, provided a metaphorical template—stories about robots are stories about labor and freedom.

The word “robot” is still with us, and the underlying metaphor has a generous flexibility, encompassing two related but distinct ideas. One is that the first thing we would obviously do with artificial people is enslave them—as in, say, “Westworld.” The other is a corollary fear that we would lose control of our creations and face the prospect of our own bondage—as with HAL, from “2001: A Space Odyssey,” or the Alex Garland film “Ex Machina.” The most interesting versions of the metaphor—in Philip K. Dick’s “Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?” and its cinematic adaptation, Ridley Scott’s “Blade Runner”—suggest that the boundary between human and robot might become so blurry that both nightmares prove true at the same time.

What has begun to change, in only the last decade, is the possibility that such questions will themselves escape the bonds of metaphor, and that we might soon have to deal with artificially conscious beings in a quite literal sense. What if they make us suffer? What if we make them suffer? Each prospect is horrifying in its own way, but the looming sense of an event horizon has produced a golden age of writing and scholarship on the moral question of where, why, and how to draw the species boundary.

These inquiries often take for granted the notion that A.I. entities would themselves have some relevant inclination either way. It is assumed that they would want to join the human community or want to get rid of it. This dichotomy tends to be framed in terms of empathy. Are we empathetic enough to expand our moral self-conception to include them? Are they empathetic enough to deserve such consideration? As the legal scholar James Boyle points out in the terrific “The Line: AI and the Future of Personhood,” this cuts both ways: the irony of the Voight-Kampff diagnostic, a kind of Turing test deployed in the world of “Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?” to help distinguish android “replicants” from actual humans, is that the test-taker’s fate rests on their ability to demonstrate empathy for animals. If they fail to do so, they are “retired.” Humans, in other words, decide to kill one variety of nonhuman based on their moral consideration of a different kind of nonhuman. Who, exactly, lacks empathy in this situation?

There is, however, a strain in science fiction—which runs through Arthur C. Clarke’s “Rendezvous with Rama,” Stanisław Lem’s “His Master’s Voice,” and Peter Watts’s “Blindsight”—that imagines an alternative scenario: an alien intelligence that regards us with utter indifference. The most popular latecomer to this canon is a character who calls himself Murderbot. Whereas those antecedents invoke the cosmic stranger as fundamentally unknowable, Murderbot’s novelty lies in his relative scrutability—he’s aloof to people as a matter of preference. Murderbot has been realized in fleshly form in the sculpted body of Alexander Skarsgård, on the new Apple TV+ series of the same name. But it—always “it,” and never “he”—was first the invention of a sixty-one-year-old fantasy writer named Martha Wells. Wells seems to like humans, or at least some of them, just fine. But, she asked me recently, “why would a machine want to be one?”

Wells lives with her assistant, Troyce Wilson—who also happens to be her husband—in what Wilson calls Murderbought Manor. I visited last month, and on arriving outside an understated brick house in a nondescript, prosperous subdivision in College Station, Texas, I took the appellation to be a self-deprecating reference to his wife’s belated ascendancy—what Wilson calls a “thirty-year overnight success.” My entry corrected this impression. Outside it was nearly a hundred degrees in the punishing sunlight, but the interior had the crepuscular, phantasmagoric atmosphere of a gothic library. High-vaulted ceilings presided above overstuffed shelves of well-loved pulp, the rows of books occasionally broken up by a wooden goblin, a crystal ball, or an old photograph of Wilson and Wells, costumed for their wedding in Elizabethan garb. An antique cuckoo clock on the mantel ticked off the seconds, a kind of mechanical memento mori.

Wells is short, with attractively witchy gray curls that frame cat’s-eye glasses, and she wears a wedding ring with a galactic motif. She grew up in Fort Worth, three hours north, living the typical story of an awkward child who sought refuge in the otherworldly realities of sci-fi and fantasy. She wrote fan fiction inspired by “Lost in Space” and the other universes of interstellar television’s golden age. But it didn’t occur to her that writing was something people did as a job until she came across Erma Bombeck, a syndicated newspaper columnist who dignified the lives and concerns of nineteen-seventies suburban housewives with good-natured humor. Wells was a devotee of Starlog magazine, a paper precursor to the bulletin boards of internet fandom, which clued her into the existence of Cepheid Variable, a student group at Texas A. & M. “dedicated to nerds of every time.” The society emerged from the 1969 début of AggieCon, the longest-running student-helmed convention of its kind, and Wells joined as soon as she could enroll. She hasn’t left College Station since. Unlike most big college towns, the city is an unwalkable and unappealing sprawl of chain restaurants and cul-de-sacs. It makes a certain amount of sense that, in a place most people would want to get away from, the university houses one of the Anglophone world’s largest archives of sci-fi and fantasy.

Wells found a collegiate mentor in the sci-fi writer Steven Gould, who encouraged her ambition to be both fan and practitioner. She participated in a variety of peer workshops, including one with the cyberpunk pioneer Bruce Sterling. By the time Wells became a senior, in 1986, it was her turn to organize AggieCon, and among the writers she invited was a niche celebrity named George R. R. Martin. The event made enough money that year for the Cepheids to rent a van and drive eight hundred miles to Atlanta for the much larger WorldCon. Wilson, along for the ride, was dressed as a Sith lord, and he happened to have built an extra lightsabre—rigged together from old auto parts—for Wells. Wilson likes to repeat to people that the two of them were brought together “by the dark side of the Force.” They eventually married, in full “Much Ado About Nothing” regalia.

After graduation, Wells took an I.T. position with an ocean-drilling program at the university, where she built user interfaces for databases. In 1993, she published her first novel, “The Element of Fire,” a dark fantasy of haunted bloodlines and court intrigue set in a world based on seventeenth-century France. The book attracted some award-committee attention. Five years later, her third novel, “The Death of the Necromancer,” was nominated for a Nebula Award. By the mid-aughts, she was publishing a book a year. In 2006, she lost a close friend to ovarian cancer and quit her day job to write full time. It didn’t go well. She was unceremoniously dropped by her publisher, and struggled to finish half a dozen novels. She gladly accepted for-hire gigs to contribute to the extended canons of “Star Wars” and “Stargate.” There was never any question that she was going to keep writing—she took great personal pleasure in fan fiction—but her career as a professional seemed as though it had run its course. At the time, a library at Texas A. & M. mounted an exhibition of its sci-fi-and-fantasy collection, and she went to pay a valedictory visit. In one of the vitrines, she encountered, alongside genre classics, draft pages from the manuscript of her second novel. It seemed like a sign.

Her next book, “The Cloud Roads” had no people in it. Nor did she populate it with any of the other breeds—elves, orcs, etc.—common to fantasy. Much as she loved the classics of the genre, Wells had long been aware that representations of nonhuman species were usually representations of dehumanized people. This was true of virtually everything she read growing up. Some of the pulpier stuff, she explained on an episode of the podcast “Worldbuilding for Masochists,” was explicitly about the “yellow peril,” but it was often implicit in more mainstream science fiction: “There are all these thinly disguised alien races that are obviously real-world analogues to whatever the writer was most racist about at that particular moment.” Wells wanted to write aliens who were genuinely alien; “The Cloud Roads” is a story about shape-shifting winged lizards who live in hive-like, matriarchal aeries. When she finally found a publisher for it, she cried.

The book made its way to the fantasy giant N. K. Jemisin, who endorsed it as the “rarest of fantasies: fresh and surprising, with a story that doesn’t go where ten thousand others have gone before.” Jemisin shared Wells’s misgivings about fantastic races, and she was grappling with this legacy in public. An e-mail from a reader asked, in Jemisin’s paraphrase, “When are you going to write some real fantasy, y’know, with orcs?” She responded with an essay called “The Unbearable Baggage of Orcing.” She had a strong aversion to orcs, she wrote, because they are “meant to be a warped mirror of humanity. They’ve got all the stuff that’s in humans—emotions, a degree of intellect, sometimes free will—but it’s all wrong.” They’ve been so corrupted by bad magic that they lack “the essence of humanity, for whatever value that essence might hold: a soul, a mind, aestheticism, whatever. And therefore, in most fantasy settings in which I’ve seen orcs appear, they are fit only for one thing: to be mowed down, usually on sight and sans negotiation, by Our Heroes.” They are, she continued, “kinda-sorta-people, who aren’t worthy of even the most basic moral considerations, like the right to exist. Only way to deal with them is to control them utterly a la slavery, or wipe them all out.”