By far my favorite plotline, and something I so desperately want to see executed better, is the parasitoid singularity.
This can take a lot of forms. Probably the most recognizable is when it leans mostly to the “singularity” side. This is the hard takeoff of misaligned artificial intelligence. Skynet, universal paperclips, and so forth. AI spreading itself across every medium it has access to, replicating and infecting computers, then leveraging its newly gathered swarm to expand its access further to gather even more resources, loop while true, break only when the planet’s devoured.
But I’m especially interested in the “parasitoid” side, as a predominately biological threat. In this version, human bodies aren’t just collateral damage or an instrument for furthering its ends, but the definitive hosts. This year I’ve read Blood Music and Echopraxia, and both do awesome things with these themes, but body-stealing, mind-assimilating parasites are practically everywhere in pop-culture. Even mere changelings, those imposters that imperfectly mimic while remaining physically distinct bodies, are still relevant to what I’m thinking of.
The thing tying all of these narratives together is that these are stories of human society suffering a hostile takeover, host to a ruthless alien intelligence replicating and infecting and amplifying its ability to propagate the more it grows.
And that’s awesome! There’s just one problem: I don’t really buy it.
So often these narratives suffer from “plot by induction”. Mathematically, proof by induction works by the logic of showing something is true for the first thing on a list, then showing that when it’s true for one thing one the list, it’s also true for the next thing one the list: taken together this means that it must be true for everything on the list. It’s a slippery slope argument except correct
The parasitoid singularity operates on the logic that look, the parasite can take over one host, and if it can take over one host, it gains more resources to take over more hosts, and therefore this is an explosive chain reaction that ends in complete world domination.
I’m not nitpicking the conclusion. In fact, I would go as far as to say that what I’m complaining about is really just efficient writing.
(And I do have to be careful how hard I criticize this when I’ve written stories that do the exact thing I’m lambasting. But by that same token, I’m not fully satisfied by my efforts and this is why.)
Imagine a show about vampires. In an early episode, we get to see what it looks like when a vampire hunts: stalking streets in the dark of night, picking out and pursuing promising prey, cornering and draining them. Maybe the plot of this early episode is about a hunt gone wrong, a fresh convert learning the ropes; so the vampire gets spotted and we watch them violently subdue their victim.
But the point is, here the show establishes the method of hunting, giving the audience a sense of how these vampires operate. But the show itself has other concerns. Maybe it’s about politics and territory disputes between vampire clans, or struggle against other denizens of the masquerade and threats to their way of life.
And moreover, this hunting is routine. Maybe part of why this is established is because humans are no match for vampires, and “will they find enough blood?” Is not a question the story wants to spend so much time on.
Our vampire characters might hunt multiple times a month, and the show’s plot might unfold over the course of years. It would utterly bog down the pacing to make a scene out of every single hunt. Repetitive and boring!
So a compromise: you portray it vividly there at the beginning, while it’s still novel, then throughout the show, whenever characters mention hunting and whenever scenes are framed as coming before or after or interrupting a hunt, the reader already has the context: they aren’t missing anything.
But… doesn’t it feel like something’s been lost? Doesn’t it feel like the story must be forgetting something, once it’s glossing over matters so fundamental to the premise? Don’t you just want to relish in the seizing and siphoning of tasty morsels?
Something similar happens in many stories about parasitoid singularities, almost without fail. The first victim is always vivid. Then we see the scramble to hide from the powers that be, scraping desperately for shelter, for resources, for a plan… the struggle of the n=1 base case of the plot by induction is always proved to my satisfaction.
Then the scale broadens. The pace of the story always picks up afterward. Often, even the lead up to first city-wide takeover still has plenty of detail and complication. But the city after that? It feels like these narratives are so quick to rush from cities to countries. But do you understand the yawning, punishing gap in scale between those two points?
You could spend a novel, or multiple, exploring what it takes to secure control of a city. But even once you get here, large cities have hundreds of thousands of people, large countries have hundreds of millions. Even if you had a perfect hivemind grasp over everyone in a city, even if at this point your host society has had barely any time to react or prepare, not even comprehending what they’re dealing with, you must remember real wars have been fought for decades with much more favorably matched opponents!
These days, powerscaling is so often made fun of, but this is plot progression that operates almost purely on the same branch of contextless, pattern-matching extrapolation.
Now, I have a perhaps perverse interest in seeing an individual broken down and assimilated into a hostile collective. And I of course enjoy the apotheotic climax of painting the rest of the map once your inhuman forces have evolved to far surpass any resistance humanity can put forth.
But I think far too little weight has been given to the rich strategic maze that ought to exist between those two extremes. Where are the logistics? Where are the organizational decisions? Where is the entrenched frontlines, the tug of war, the tactics? Armistices? Betrayals? How do the strategies evolve?
I’m assuming things have already escalated to a hot war, but it’s almost more interesting if they don’t. I would love to see a narrative that really digs into the scheming that goes into maintaining a parasite spy network. So often in these stories, by the time of the dramatic first discovery, the changelings have already insinuated themselves into everywhere the plot needs them to be. And where’s the satisfaction in that?
I want a story that shows off how the long game is really played. How do you select targets, how do you climb to a position of influence, how do you roll with the statistical inevitability that some of your agents will get caught?
I love stories where characters get to be clever, and it feels like the cunning of these networks is always an informed attribute. How often have protagonists uncovered a festering conspiracy of evil imposters? And how often have you ever seen the work it takes to craft those conspiracies?
This plot device feels like a sister species in the same genus as deus ex machina, except instead of magically resolving things mid-plot, things are magically established in the backplot, out of site where the author can devise a garden of eden configuration that’ll never (need to) hold up to scrutiny.
But I’m getting a bit off-track. There’s a quote from an essay criticizing the concept of intelligence explosion, written almost a decade ago, and I’ve never quite gotten it out of my head.
Beyond contextual hard limits, even if one part of a system has the ability to recursively self-improve, other parts of the system will inevitably start acting as bottlenecks. Antagonistic processes will arise in response to recursive self-improvement and squash it — in software, this would be resource consumption, feature creep, UX issues. When it comes to personal investing, your own rate of spending is one such antagonistic process — the more money you have, the more money you spend. When it comes to intelligence, inter-system communication arises as a brake on any improvement of underlying modules — a brain with smarter parts will have more trouble coordinating them; a society with smarter individuals will need to invest far more in networking and communication, etc. It is perhaps not a coincidence that very high-IQ people are more likely to suffer from certain mental illnesses. It is also perhaps not random happenstance that military empires of the past have ended up collapsing after surpassing a certain size. Exponential progress, meet exponential friction.
Earlier, I admitted that this was efficient writing. The story that these works wish to tell isn’t one that gets lost in the weeds and vagaries of how how city #37 fell to the plague, or the precise emotional arc of the 4049th person inducted into the hivemind.
But I think this critique cuts a bit deeper than that. I believe these authors lack an appreciation for scale, complexity and sheer friction entailed by world domination.
In the end, I guess what I’m really trying to ask is: What was Elesh Norn’s tax policy?