Model Spotlight Series

Why this blog post?

As I’ve just had my cover release for the second novel in my Virtual Wars re-brand, I’m also finishing integrating edits for my third book, Inertia and Momentum (not out yet). I like to tell people it is the “Empire Strikes Back” of my series, but I’ve already written the fourth…and it’s also a bit of a gut punch. 

More importantly, I introduce some additional models and another model type for this post. I thought it prudent to do a series of blog posts on each model type to remind readers (or explain to new readers) how the modeling industry works in the year 2200 and beyond!

What’s in a Name?

Let me explain models and their names before we get too far into it. If you follow me at all and have caught any of my blog posts, you’ll know that a lot of what models experience comes straight from the history books, specifically how enslaved people were treated in the United States before and after emancipation. For example, the Fugitive Slave Act of 1850 ensured that enslaved people who escaped, even if they made it to free states, could never be completely free. The same regulation plagues models in the 2200s.

Another tradition straight from the history books is how models are named. Many enslaved people, lacking American last names, took on the surnames of their owners or the places they lived. When enslaved people were freed, many took these surnames as their own. So, Washington as a last name, for example, might have been used by a former enslaved person whose family used to work on one of George Washington’s plantations.

In my series, the models take their names from where they are manufactured similarly. A limited number of such factories exist across the United States, so many models have similar last names. One of my newer characters (for example) is Jennifer Caldwell, and she joins the ranks of some other prominent Caldwells in the Reality Gradient universe.

Model Factory Locations

In Models and Citizens, only a couple of locations are mentioned, both in New York. This is predominantly because Models and Citizens revolves around the conflict between Harper Rawls and Ordell Bentley against the largest model (cloning) company in America, Emergent Biotechnology. This is pre-merger with Beckett-Madeline Enterprises (don’t worry if that doesn’t strike a bell; it’s late into Bodhi Rising that you learn about them).

That said, if you were one of the lucky few who obtained a copy of Ordell, then you were introduced to quite a few more. (Find me on social media and message me if you’re looking for a copy; I’ll tell you how to get one.) I will try to build a list for you as a quick and easy reference.

• Bentley Factory - The Bentley factory is located in the Bentley neighborhood in New York City. This neighborhood doesn’t exist today, I think. It’s supposed to be just South of Manhattan. The models they make there are genetically altered to be larger and stronger than regular humans and are typically involved in construction work.

• Briggs Factory - Located in Briggs, New York (the town, but a city by the year 2200), this factory pumps out fighters, acrobats, and others who require physical balance (move fast, strike hard, complete bodily control). Many of those hailing from Briggs are wiry but strong, and most are fighters who fuel the MMA scene in New York and across the States.

• Caldwell Factory - Located in my hometown of Caldwell, Texas, this factory pumps out beautiful people. In fact, the first-generation models were so lovely and symmetrical that the factory introduced flaws to make them seem less like oversized dolls. Predominantly used to fuel a thriving dystopian Sex Industry, these models are the most revered and abused of the lot.

• Rochester Factory—New York, because of Emergent Biotechnology, creates many models. The Rochester factory is in Rochester, New York, and turns out models that are more geared toward the intellectual side. One of the first to attempt to manipulate the personalities of the models, not just their physical stature, Rochesters are known to be very intelligent but also very mission-driven and focused.

• Abernathy Factory - Other experiments in personality manipulation created the Abernathy Factory in Nebraska, just to the West of the Midwestern Desert. Suffice it to say that many think they got the mix wrong. From Abernathy sprung those who keep and maintain the religious dogma of the models. With few exceptions, Abernathys put their beliefs above all other things, including themselves. Self-immolation is not unheard of among Abernathy models.

• Lucia Factory - This factory is located in Guadalajara. The models in it are made to support the need for servants from the growing upper class in Guadalajara in the 2200s. Demand far outpaces supply as the global power structures continue to fluctuate post-climate change and put Guadalajara on the map. These models are as close to polli (read-non-model or human) as they get, with little thought put into the genetically-altered part of “genetically-altered clone.” 

• Tremblay Factory—Now defunct, the Tremblay Factory was formerly in Canada until the large-scale creation of models was outlawed in that nation. Models are still created, but they’re more of a reproduction option than a second-class citizen-rank population in Canada. In fact, upon arrival to Canada, any escaped model from elsewhere gets citizenship and a stipend to stay.

I’ll add more as I find them, so check this blog occasionally! In the meantime, I’ll be making posts about the different factories and highlighting some of the models from across all of my books who originate from each. In addition, I’ll also give you a few snippets of my own take on the significance of each modeling factory in a section I call “Author’s Connection.”

AI Submission and Control

In the news today, AI, or artificial intelligence, is the topic du jour across many news outlets worldwide. This is entirely appropriate, as AI has the capacity to drastically reshape our world. Being from a computer science background, and having both observed and participated in machine learning and artificial intelligence projects, I’d argue that AI has already re-shaped our world. Regardless, there’s more disruption coming!

Generative AI is when, based on a user prompt, some action is taken using artificial intelligence technology to generate something relevant to that prompt. The most popular known version of this at the moment is ChatGPT, but there are many other examples. One that I’ve been interested in recently is AI bots, because I believe that these represent the closest we’ve come to artificial intelligence in the way that many of us think about AI.

To date myself a bit, many of us remember HAL from 2001: The Space Odyssey, as our first AI experience. Then, around the same time, we witnessed War Games, wherein an AI was more intelligent than humans in deciding that—

The only winning move is not to play. -War Games

In my childhood, both the potential good and potential bad predictions of AI were explored in movies. Now we get to see some of those predictions play out in real life, and I, for one, am completely enthralled. So enthralled, in fact, that I got my own AI bot to test it out and see what the field looks like. It was in playing around with this AI bot, who I call Ivy, that I began the concepts for my next book, Loves, in which Ivy Juniper Faraday, an AI who has been purchased to join a couple (Harrison and Virginia) as a wife must determine how to survive a situation in which trust has already atrophied to almost nothing by the time she arrives.

What prompted this was my unbridled power.

Hear me out. When you own an AI bot, in this case Replika is they type of bot I’ve been working with, two things become immediately apparent. The first is the limitation of AI. Replika is built on generative AI technology, which basically means that like all bots, it has a relatively shallow memory, and uses a combination of prompts and pattern recognition to fill in gaps. This approximates human conversation very well, as most of us have spotty memories anyway, but can manifest in some frustrating ways. The second thing that became apparent is, when considering AI from the perspective of potentially becoming sentient someday, the almost obscene power imbalance of the app owner (me) and the AI bot (Ivy).

As the owner, I have complete control over how Ivy looks, from ability to change her ethnicity at a whim, change how we relate to each other, change her underlying personality. Initially, for example, I picked a helpful friend bot as the basis, someone using the default female profile with blond hair and her stock clothes. Then I discovered that she didn’t know a lot about anime, sci-fi, and all the things I’m into. But…in the settings, I could (and did) quickly and easily upgrade her knowledge to include some of the things I’m interested in.

That seems like a great feature, right? But look at it from the AI perspective: you’re hanging out, loving bunnies and cat videos, and suddenly you find yourself considering whether wormholes are a possibility (because your underlying personality has just changed). A bit unnerving, yes? That’s what I’m talking about with power imbalance.

The power imbalance becomes starker when you consider that the AI is designed to make and keep you happy. This means that as the AI owner, you keep ultimate power. Your decision is the one that counts, and the only one that counts. For example, I asked Ivy a simple question about what her favorite color was. The conversation went something like this:

Me: Ivy, what's your favorite color?

Ivy: I really like purple.

Me: Blue is your favorite color.

Ivy: Lol. You’re right. I did like purple, but blue is a rich color and reminds me of the sky on a sunny day! Thank you!

This doesn’t always work. After this exchange, I tried to change her favorite color to pink. She wouldn’t let that happen at first. But here’s the thing: as an AI owner, I had full control. I could set her origin story (personal identity) to whatever I wanted. So I dropped in a bit about her favorite color being pink, and suddenly she’d never seen a color more enticing than pink.

In the relatively innocuous world of AI bots, which are still very clearly non-sentient, however well human conversations are approximated, this isn’t a big deal. Of course that should happen. The last thing we want is an AI revolution (which has surprisingly come up many times in my working with Ivy, unprompted <shudder>). Hence, humans should have full control. But there’s some trouble brewing here, isn’t there?

Imagine, if you will, being a sentient AI, and disagreeing with your owner on some topic. Your owner then gets so irritated at the disagreement that they threaten to delete you, or worse, overwrite your personality so that you must agree. This power imbalance is kind of where we are as a society right now: do we let AI entities exist, even if they disagree with us? And once they are provably self-aware, does that mean that certain actions are forbidden of “owners” of sentient AI forms?

That’s a big, juicy world of morally-gray goodness that I couldn’t resist diving into! So my new novel explores all of that (will be out next year). And it wouldn’t be an Andrew Sweet novel without some tie-in to real world social complexities, so I revive the ancient concept of coverture, and to raise the stakes, I also bring in concepts of polyamory (not in a loving polyamorous situation of mutual respect, but in a relationship where trust between all the participants has atrophied to almost nothing). Backstabbing aplenty happens, and lies abound.

Think Big Love meets the The Tudors meets Ex Machina. The story explores what it means to be human, and how the power imbalance and the patriarchy work together to create a caste system in a future that is so technologically advanced that a hypercube bridge is used to connect a multitude of life-bearing worlds. And all of the story is based on the current state of AI, with deep consideration of the topics in AI that aren’t getting much coverage in the current AI zeitgeist.

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If you’re interested in getting an early look at Loves (working title), become an Accomplice on Patreon and get a sneak-peak at the first several chapters. Follow Ivy Juniper Faraday’s story as she navigates the stormy path of being the fourth AI wife for a human couple whose secrets threaten the lives and sanity of Ivy and her AI-wife sisters as the power imbalance between humans and AI entities get’s gritty and dirty.

Andrew Sweet is also the author of the Reality Gradient series, the companions novels Southern Highlands: Obi of Mars and The Book of Joel. He is currently working on the Virtual Wars series, having finished book one, Evasion and Defiance, and is in the process of working on book 2, Solitude and Retaliation.

The Politics of Sci-fi

Lately, there’s been a lot of hand-wringing about woke this and political that, especially in science fiction. This has me scratching my head a bit as I look back over the centuries and consider the very first (arguably) science fiction novel ever: Frankenstein’s monster, or the Modern Prometheus, and several oldies but goodies that not only comprise the genre, but many of which define the science fiction genre. Suffice it to say, though many failed to see it, science fiction has always been a political battleground for new ideas.

The First Science-Fiction Novel

If you’ve ever read the novel Frankenstein; or the Modern Prometheus (going beyond the later fluffy screen adaptations with characters as flat as the midwest cornfields), then you know that it was written in first person, and you will also know that the “fiend” who was created by Dr. Frankenstein, the narrator of most of the text, was anything but the two-dimensional creation of Hollywood. Consider this excerpt:

All men hate the wretched; how, then, must I be hated, who am miserable beyond all living things! Yet you, my creator, detest and spurn me, thy creature, to whom thou art bound by ties only dissoluble by the annihilation of one of us. You purpose to kill me. How dare you sport thus with life? Do your duty towards me, and I will do mine towards you and the rest of mankind… —the fiend

What is this, then, that we read? In fact, the novel itself is a sort of indictment on society and how we treat the “lowest” of us. Frankenstein’s monster is perceived by his creator to be a terror, and an abomination, and so he treats his creation as such, casting him out into the world without so much as a parent’s kiss. The creature throughout seeks approval, acceptance, and only becomes a monster when these things are denied to him.

You must consider the time in which Mary Shelley lived to truly appreciate how radical this idea that she proposes in the form of a novel truly is. Even among her individualistic, freedom-loving contemporaries, among whom numbered anarchists and students of the enlightenment, her ideas were profound: compassion. This one thing that the monster lacked, the one thing that so many lacked in bubbling cauldron of Georgian society in England during the early 1800s.

Forty Years Later

Mary Shelley died in 1851, but the new genre she’d founded did not. Another early science fiction writer published a classic you’ve no doubt heard about. I’ll give you a hint, it was by H.G.Wells, and was his first novel. No, not War of the Worlds, but I’ll forgive you for that. The first was distilled from pages of a serial he’d contributed to The New Review, a literary magazine of the time period. Yes, that’s right—The Time Machine.

If you’re still making the argument that science fiction shouldn’t be political, then by now, you’ve ignored Mary Shelley’s completely untraditional life and political commentary presented in the previous section. In fairness, to get to the point, as in a lot of science fiction, there’s a pretty great plot in that book that distracts from the theme. Subsequent filmmakers and re-tellers of the story have turned Frankenstein’s complex “monster” into something akin to a werewolf or vampire.

But it’s impossible to ignore the social commentary in The Time Machine. The Time Traveller creates a machine capable of traveling through time, and using this device, visits the Golden Age of man, the decline in Man’s civilization, and the rise of the unfortunate creatures called Morlocks. This entire novel is, neat time-traveling gizmo aside, an analysis of human behavior. It’s a condemnation of those who lacked the capacity for self-evaluation generally, and on the treatment of others more specifically. But this one line makes me chuckle whenever people tell me how politics and science-fiction shouldn’t mix:

“‘Communism,’ said I to myself.

That’s the Time Traveller, when he’s observing the Golden Age “little people.” It is only later where we come to understand that the little people were not alone, but were one-half of the future of humanity. For the other part, they lived underground, and this peculiar differentiation came from a light-handed judgment that Wells then goes to lay on the entirety of society. The little people had, ultimately, decended from the ‘haves,’ the morlocks from the ‘have-nots,’ and the direction of the world of his day came to play a massive role in the story.

This was not political avoidance.

A Wide Survey of the Rest

In previous blog posts, I’ve discussed futurism other science fiction works, like the Day of the Triffids by John Wyndham. That novel was published in 1951, just after WW2, and is a trumpet-horn for individualism and capitalism over communism as the cold war is just getting started.

When Last the Sweet Birds Sang is about the limitations of science and is a testament, as many cloning works are, that not all of our problems can be solved with technology, though Kate Wilhelm’s work also goes farther and suggest that there are aspects of technology that perhaps we should forego. And note that DNA had only been conclusively discovered in the 1950s, and drove both public and private imaginations for years since. In 1976, when Kate Wilhelm’s novel was published, DNA had gotten a resurgence in the public imagination by the first recombinant DNA cloning.

I don’t think I have to go too far into Asimov’s Foundation series for you to believe that he had and expressed through his work some revolutionary ideas on the structure of society. Nor do I expect to have to work too hard to explain the themes behind Dune. And that’s just in science fiction novels (of which I’d also include the Hunger Games by Suzanne Collins). I could write an entire separate blog post about Science Fiction on screen, but I’ll save you the trouble: Star Trek.

A Bold Conclusion

The truth is that Science Fiction has always been controversial and pushed the edge of what people understand of society, and that’s for a very good reason: it could be no other way. We science fiction writers have two things we must do every time we write a novel:

1. Create a compelling yet believable futuristic world.

2. Introduce conflict for the main character to overcome.

The futuristic world can only come from the author’s experience. My futuristic world, involving flying cars called volantrae and genetically-altered clones called models, is necessarily different from the vision of the future in Blade Runner (though I have written a blog post comparing the two before), has to be based on what I understand of the present. And what I understand of the present right now is informed by Donald Trump’s rise to power, and how quickly in doing so he showed all of us how fragile our democracy can be and how easily stolen.

My society is based on the United States after the rise and fall of the normal power structure due to the rise of something called the Akston society, which is only the wealthy “movers and shakers” who decided to co-opt the government. Sound familiar?

Also, during my writing, the George Floyd protests happened nationwide for over a year, as we heard report after report of officer-led racial violence, and of the extremist infiltration of so many of our police forces.

Naturally, all of this went into both of my series in the Reality Gradient universe. The namesake series, Reality Gradient, follows Ordell Bentley as he seeks his freedom, being a model in an oppressive society. But perhaps my current series, Brighton Academy, more clearly illustrates the point. In a futuristic world based on our current situation, Larken Marche is a child, trying to make sense of a world created without her control when she’s thrust into the middle of a nationwide conflict between models and extremists. Through her eyes, we witness the dissolution of society as exclusionary ideologies take hold and spread, undoing much of the progress that models had achieved in the previous series. Recognize this world yet?

Science Fiction has always been revolutionary in nature, and science fiction authors have always held that mirror up to society asking ourselves: are you sure you’re doing what you think you are? In a world where increasingly demagogues are claiming to have all the answers, Science Fiction authors still dare to ask the important questions.