An Oblique Review of And Shall Machines Surrender Benjanun Sriduangkaew

by @BigEchoSF

Here is Shenzhen:  a jeweled oasis in a chaos of war; migrant flows, refugees, mercenaries; no horizon but survival and pleasure; no language but politics; here is AI that is not algorithm writ large; here powerful inhuman forces manifest in human form and learn to die.

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The prose is the worldbuilding: it crystalizes around ideas in unexpected ways; draws on a vocabulary accumulated beyond the canon; it is political, anti-industrial, anti-colonial; it takes pleasure in its own alienation; it is the pleasure of rubbing your hand against the grain.

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If there is an ethics it is organized around consent; the impingement of one collection of wants against another. It is kink: power and control freely given between humans. There are perpetual face-to-face negotiations between equals. All else is violence.

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Shenzhen is a field disrupted by concentrations of “needs and nerves.” Characters are distinguished not by traits but their locations in shifting grids of desire. The Pax American, a brittle accretion of fixed signifiers, is torn apart by his failure to account for flex.

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The backstory of Shenzhen is motherhood as slavery, the city-state an experiment in autonomy, in postpatriarchal domesticity. Families form in a matrix of affinity, convenience, cohere over food, sex, sleep. Past and future solitudes are a contrast that makes the present luminous.

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Shenzhen is a response to nihilism, the precariousness of human existence, the unfairness of who lives and who dies. How does one love in such a world? Shenzhen is one solution, impermanent from its beginning, a brief respite, an interlude, it cannot last, Shenzhen is a dream.