Competing to Save the Future: A Review of Machina

When the people behind Serial Box offered a copy of Machina to Speculative Chic for review I jumped at the chance, because I liked the work of three of the involved authors, and the fourth, I’d heard good things about. Plus, the plot piqued my interest: scientific teams competing to see whose AI might just save humanity? Sure. Sign me up!

Machina (2020)
Created by: Fran Wilde
Written by: Fran Wilde, Malka Older, Curtis C. Chen and Martha Wells
Genre: Near-future SF
10 episodes (Audio and eBook)
Publisher: Serial Box Press

Disclaimer: I received a free copy of this book from the publisher in exchange for a fair review.

The Premise:

With Earth becoming increasingly uninhabitable, some look to space for humanity’s salvation. In the arid California desert, two companies face off for the opportunity to develop the autonomous robots that will precede settlers to Mars. Scientists and staff alike mingle at Moonshot Bar, and they all begin to realize that there’s more than scientific discovery at stake.

Minor spoilers below. Note: This review encompasses the entirety of season 1, including the final episode released today, April 1st. Feel free to err on the side of caution and skip down to the conclusion.

Discussion: I started early on science fiction because my Dad is a fan. When it turned out I devoured books faster than the schools could keep up with, he started me on his collection: Heinlein and Verne, Asimov and Wells. He took me used-book shopping where I found Gordon Dickson, James H. Schmitz, and Madeleine L’Engle. My mother fed me A Canticle for Leibowitz, and when I ran shrieking from that (I was 11!), she offered me Keith Laumer and Harry Harrison instead, and let me watch Star Trek with her. I loved SF.

But over the years, I began backing away from SF because it seemed like it was getting mean or nihilistic. Too much focus on man’s inhumanity to man, too many stories about how people were unfailingly venal or greedy, or that we were doomed to perpetual miscommunication, or that we were all monsters and… I don’t know. I was probably reading the wrong books. I kept in touch with enough SF to know I still wanted to love it, but a lot of what I read made me unhappy, even if they were high quality stories.

Recently, I’ve lucked into a heap of SF books that I think of as the kinder, gentler SF. Books that quietly go around saying, “yeah, things are bad, we made them bad, but we’re smart and adaptable and maybe we can fix things,” and where the characters might make bad decisions, but they aren’t evil people. This doesn’t mean the storylines are all rainbows and cuddly kittens, or that everyone acts sweetly and sanely with each other at all times. It does mean that people make hard decisions with conscience as their guides. That as a whole, the characters are striving to make things better.

Becky Chambers’ Wayfarers series is a good example of this, as is Naomi Kritzer’s Catfishing on CatNet. Fantasy-wise, Vivian Shaw’s Greta Van Helsing books scratch that same “competent people working to take care of problems and others” itch.

Machina is 100% in that category and that made me love it.

The premise, as stated above, is that Earth is doomed (cheerful, right?) but that people have hopes of terraforming Mars, using an AI to do the work so that by the time the Martian home is essential, it’s ready to accept settlers. But of course, first they have to create a reliable AI that will do the work and do it right. Hence the competition. There are five corporate contenders, but the story focuses on the top two contenders — old friends turned bitter rivals and their teams of programmers.

I was afraid that the storyline was going to be too uneven, too much The Mighty Ducks. I thought that it was going to be a clear case of one team being evil and the other the scrappy underdog. I thought that Trey Lowell, the bad-tempered and judgmental CEO of DevLok, was going to be entirely focused on profiteering, even if it meant endangering the future of the human race. I thought that the Watchover team, headed by partners Steph and Lakshmi, were going to be the easy and rightful winners.

But Machina is more nuanced than that: both teams have their significant issues. They both have blind spots. It’s easy to see that one team is making a huge mistake by trusting code they don’t know the source of; but the other team makes a potentially huge mistake by trusting code that does the right things, but in ways they don’t understand. Sins of commission, sins of omission. People being too trusting and not trusting enough. It’s a lot of meaty stuff packed in between all the fun stuff in season 1.

The characters are all engaging and, more importantly, plausible as researchers who might be entrusted with such significant work. I never doubted any of them were smart, focused, and dedicated to the mission even while their personal lives took center stage here and there. I rooted for them and in the end, I kind of wished I was a part of their crew — working long, productive, world-changing hours, then staggering off to play games at a local bar called the Moonshot, staffed by an ex-programmer and his robot dog bartender.

One of the things I particularly liked in Machina was how the ending did a sharp pivot. It’s easy for the reader (and the characters!) to get locked into seeing the competition as the main plot thrust, with the Mars terraforming project as a distant future need. But the ending twisted to point out another major aspect that the reader and the programmers had taken for granted: they’re making AIs. They’re not just building a tool to do the work that humanity can’t: they’re creating independent artificial intelligences and setting them loose. The focus has been on the desired results — winning the competition, habitats on Mars! — and less on the potential consequences of creating a type of new life. When the AIs start acting up, it helps open the story beautifully to a new conflict.

The only part of the storyline that bothered me was the dangling mystery of the secret coder — not that their identity hadn’t been discovered; I’m content to wait for next season — but that the characters didn’t seem to wonder or worry about it. That seemed implausible for the sheer number of worrywarts on these teams.

In Conclusion: I thought this was a really fun read, well worth checking out. There’s an audio narration that goes along with the story if that’s your jam. I listened to it long enough to hear that the narrator (Natalie Naudus) was smooth and professional, but ultimately exchanged listening for reading just so I could dive through the story quicker. I look forward to reading and hearing more set in this world.