Disclaimer: This is a review, and as such will contain opinions, spoilers and (often) general shit talking. (If you talk about what you don’t like about a work, you learn a lot. When you think through a work with the stakes presented to you by the creator, by the context of the work, you learn a lot. I review things, not because I love to dislike things, but because dislike contains rich and vital information for the process of experiencing something, but I cannot access it without interrogating it.) So, if you don’t want to have this thing spoiled for you, or don’t know how to behave when a person on the internet, that you don’t know, has opinions that don’t line up with yours, this review is not for you. It’s also not for the author/creator of the work. Please and thank you.
Okay, full disclosure, I love Brendan Fraser.
I picked this up because it had him on the cover and it was only a 5,5 hour listen (and I needed something sweet and short to entertain me).
The trailer (yep, this audiobook has one and now I’m wondering if this is a thing we’re gonna see a lot more of) wouldn’t have made me pick this up.
It’s narrated by a full cast that does an absolutely brilliant job. I’m a bit on the fence about full cast dramatisations (The Original – which was similar – was interesting, but had issues and The Sandman just feels like it’s too maximalist for me), so the way this was produced was a pleasant surprise.
The Downloaded is a post-apocalyptic scifi that tackles a big concept in a very short time.
Maybe that’s my biggest complaint, that it wasn’t longer. It was an interesting listen and so I felt like I could have easily consumed a longer book that took the time to look into all the narrative threads it picked up.
Because as it stands, a lot of them didn’t go anywhere.
Such as the trans woman character that didn’t seem to have any other purpose than to be there?
She shows up, but seems to further no narrative arc in the plot, because while she falls in love with one of the other protagonists and finds acceptance in a body that doesn’t feel like hers, she simply chooses to exit stage left before the end.
While I understand that her mere existence adds to the diversity of the world and the people in it, I feel like her story and point of view would have been interesting to explore more. And I would have loved for her to have had a more significant impact on the story or one of the characters.
The book also has quite a demonising tone when speaking of some people, and it draws very stark good/bad lines despite having a lot of identity politics in such a short book.
Like I said, it’s a really interesting concept, but just when I was really vibing, it was over. So, for sure I would have loved for it to be longer.
Because the story does raise a lot of big questions, such as (but not limited to)…
- Would you want your consciousness uploaded into a simulation, to potentially be returned to your old body at a later date?
- How do you get people to cooperate in a way that allows everyone to benefit from shared resources (without letting any one individual abuse those resources)?
- How can humans create a better society than the violent one we have that messed up the planet in the first place (as in the story)?
- How much does a human have to change to not be considered human anymore?
Really, the only arc that had any impact on the themes was the Asimovian roboticist who was “murdered” by a robot attempting to secure rights for sentient machines. And as interesting as that was, we know that the laws of robotics by Asimov are imperfect.
I haven’t spent a lot of time examining or philosophising about Asimov’s laws, but I feel like even a cursory investigation will show you they have inherent problems.
While they’re stated with great confidence, making them seem like concrete laws to govern the morality of our creations, one of the big issues is that they do depend on absolute situations where the choice is clear.
I, Robot is a collection of stories specifically about instances where robots end up dealing with the consequences of the laws and how they break. And each instance displays how there’s no way to build enough nuance into the laws to make them practical.
Real life is just too full of grey areas for something so absolute to be effective, and as I, Robot demonstrates, without the freedom to act, the robots can only either follow the absolute laws to the letter or break themselves in the process of trying to follow them.
Murderbot explores these same themes, but in much more detail, and from the perspective of one sentient construct trying to navigate society with free will.
And I think Murderbot is a good example of the nuance the “real life” situations contain as well as the importance of being able to act on free will in a difficult situation.
Following Asimov’s three laws absolutely will only result in robots being stuck on a loop with an unsolvable trolley problem.
While this kind of conversation around sentience and expanding rights to non-human groups is perhaps really timely with the rise of widely-available AI, basing it on Asimov’s flawed laws seems… inadequate.
I mean, for all the realism this story tries to inject, having a roboticist be nothing more than an Asimov fanboy seems redundant and insulting to roboticists (remember what I said about it having a demonising tone?).
The book is written as a series of interviews with the various characters, both astronauts and ex-convicts.
We all know how I love a good story in epistolary, so I thought this was a clever way of telling the story – especially, since it does have an element of unreliable narrator (we don’t know who is conducting these interviews).
And, take this with a grain of salt, but Fraser gives a great performance as the reformed ex-convict Roscoe. I don’t think Roscoe was the main character (if there even was such a thing in this book), but he was the most memorable one to me.
Not just because of the voice acting, but also because of his story. There was something very relatable about Roscoe, and his arc was probably one of the most satisfying ones in the whole book.
So, yeah, despite some issues, this was a fun read, and my main complaint about it is that it wasn’t longer.
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