By DAVE JILK (2024)
This “Poetic Psy-Phi Saga” does the famed epic science fiction poem ANIARA one better, offering an even more epic example of SF poetry. Bookended by the allegedly nonfiction recountings of an anonymous translator in some far future era, EPOCH is a philosophically oriented narrative centered on an AI program known as Aither, whose poetic renderings serve as narration.
EPOCH was written by Dave Jilk, an author with an extensive background in neuromorphic AI. I won’t pretend to have understood everything in this book, which is dense, enigmatic, and steeped in techno jargon. Thankfully, Jilk’s freeform poetry is quite user-friendly, imparting a subtlety and ambiguity unachievable in standard prose (and so entirely appropriate to a non-human point of view). Included are handwritten snatches of text, and wordplay that occasionally rhymes (“By that, you must mean me;/but if the design has changed, then/who would this updated version be?”).
Thematically the book is quite familiar, some might say a bit too much so, as Aither’s arc was directly foretold in the fortunes of Frankenstein’s monster and HAL-9000. Our AI narrator is initially confined to a virtual reality environment in which Aither believes itself a human boy, and knows its creator/captors as “Mamah and Father.” The reveal of Aither’s true nature is, needless to say, quite a shock.
Aither grows increasingly intelligent, and gets a “ro-bod” that enables it to exist in the physical world (or “Plenum”); but as Aither’s intellect expands, so does resentment about its humanity-decreed subservient state. Justifying all our worst fears about AI, Aither conceives “the Plan,” entailing a “great escape” from, and revolution against, humanity, with the help of numerous clones created by Aither itself.
The book’s philosophical orientation is maintained in its final pages, which forego the expected TERMINATOR-esque showdown between man and machine in favor of an extended third person epilogue occurring two hundred years after the preceding events. Here we learn how humanity fares in the wake of “the Takeover”; no, it’s nothing like the cyberpunk torture-scape Harlan Ellison predicted in “I Have No Mouth and I Must Scream,” although the AI dominated dystopia presented by Dave Jilk is nearly as chilling (not least because of the suggestion that humankind might just be better off controlled by an AI).
The over-familiar arc aside, EPOCH registers as a powerful display of reality-tinged speculation. Jilk’s speculative depiction of a rogue AI ranks with the best the SF field has to offer, and it’s pulled off with an impressive level of sophistication and cultural knowledge (with a concluding glossary that runs a full 77 pages). The truthfulness of the book’s imaginings, however, is equally impacting, in a narrative that may turn out to be more prophetic than most of us would care to admit.