Reviews of The Stories of Ibis (2006) and related work
- Entry: “The Universe on My Hands” (2003)
- Entry: “A Romance in Virtual Space” (1997)
- Entry: “Mirror Girl” (1998)
- Entry: “Black Hole Diver” (2004)
- Entry: “A World Where Justice Is Just” (2005)
- Entry: “The Day Shion Came” (2006)
- Entry: “AI’s Story” (2006)
The Stories of Ibis (2006
)
Yamamoto Hiroshi (writer).
Read in 2022.
A storyteller has spent his adult life wandering between the few remaining human settlements, preserving the species’s literature and achievement. He is suddenly captured by an unusual sort of robot: An android built for martial arts. It, “Ibis”, mocks the man for his expectations about the apocalypse and the new rulers of the Earth. Through fiction, it begins to tell him little pieces of the truth, and then it shows him.
The novel The Stories of Ibis is a fixup, not a mosaic novel. It adds two novellas and a framing narrative to a set of previously published short stories by Yamamoto. Instead of depicting a shared universe, all but the last story are framed as existing within that shared universe as fiction, written by an unnamed author or authors, but with real dates of publication.
It’s a clever device because the overarching theme of each story is the development and safety of artificial intelligence. Extradiegetically, Yamamoto argues through fiction for a certain level of trust in the ability of skilled engineers to produce safe general-purpose AI in the future. Intradiegetically, Yamamoto’s character Ibis (alias Ai, from “AI” and the first sound in “Ibis”) similarly argues through fiction for human trust in AI, but from a future perspective where Yamamoto’s vision has been realized by his fiat.
While the device is unusual, the basic themes of Yamamoto’s vision are common in popular Japanese SF. Characters and narrators in his stories are mostly girls and young women who carry the burdens of the future, either inspiring or stewarding their societies to a better place by their empathy and strength of character. Symbolically, the hard work of saving the world from irresponsible men is outsourced to stereotypically responsible and nurturing women.
Ibis is explicitly named after the alien ibis plant in van Vogt’s “The Harmonizer” (1944), referenced by the author. Yamamoto’s Ibis is built on a fictional “SLAN kernel”, no doubt named after another van Vogt story, Slan (1946). There are many other allusions and references, both internal and external. The author and Ibis have the same agenda and apply the same unreliable method: Humanistic illustration by entertaining thought experiments in reply to earlier SF, both pessimistic like The Terminator (1984) and optimistic like The Caves of Steel (1954). There are frequent references to Asimov’s laws of robotics. The SLAN kernel, specifically, is a fuzzy implementation of Asimov’s laws, unreliable in theory and incompatible with Asimov’s robot-crime detective stories, but effective in practise.
In the framing device, Yamamoto supports his competent worldbuilding with a set of equally impressive hypodiegeses: The human protagonist first thinks he is in The Postman (1985), but Ibis’s AI civilization is instead implementing “A World Where Justice Is Just” (2005), essentially role-playing the human imagination for recreation in utopia while pretending to be the dystopia the humans themselves have invented in propaganda. As a result, appropriately, the protagonist inverts the mantle of The Postman, preparing to rekindle human civilization by telling truths rather than lies. I like how this works out: Instead of punishing curiosity like H. P. Lovecraft, Yamamoto rewards critical thinking.
References here: “Metalhead” (2017).
text Japanese production fiction
‣ “The Universe on My Hands” (2003)
Yamamoto Hiroshi (writer).
Read in 2022.
A society of amateur SF writers in an Internet forum collaborate on stories inspired by Star Trek (1966). Their leader learns that one of the members is wanted by the police and has gone into hiding.
Named after Space on My Hands (1951).
text entry Japanese production fiction
‣ “A Romance in Virtual Space” (1997)
Yamamoto Hiroshi (writer).
Read in 2022.
A young woman who spends much of her time in virtual reality is asked out on a date. She takes the opportunity to graduate from cartoonish C (child) grade games to more immersive, photo-realistic Y (young) grade.
Never mind the obligatory twist ending. Enjoy the clean extrapolation without the punk of cyberpunk, which includes the Facebook-like requirement for your avatar to look like you do outside of games.
References here: Belle (2021).
text entry Japanese production fiction
‣ “Mirror Girl” (1998)
Yamamoto Hiroshi (writer).
Read in 2022.
A simple hologram of a nine-year-old princess in a Western European fantasy kingdom becomes a real woman’s boon companion.
I assume this was inspired by the experience of watching the video game Princess Maker (1991) get old.
References here: The Manga Guide to Databases (2004), The Lifecycle of Software Objects (2010).
text entry Japanese production fiction
‣ “Black Hole Diver” (2004)
Yamamoto Hiroshi (writer).
Read in 2022.
An automated space station observing a black hole at the edge of human-controlled territory frets about the state of its creators’ decaying civilization while it hosts a rare explorer.
text entry Japanese production fiction
‣ “A World Where Justice Is Just” (2005)
Yamamoto Hiroshi (writer).
Read in 2022.
Teenage superheroes who normally battle giant monsters come to understand that a disease, created as a weapon, is devastasting the First World, a mythical place from which their own world was once created on computers. In the First World, people die and don’t come back; an obviously bad design.
The word “justice” here is seigi, specifically in the sense of 正義の味方 (seigi no mikata), a hackneyed phrase in super sentai and adjacent genres of Japanese children’s shows. It literally means “justice”, but the literal meaning is irrelevant here, as in the genres Yamamoto is spoofing. Protagonist Saika and her friend Mafuyu are magical girls while an ally of theirs uses giant mecha. Their world is similar to Project A-Ko (1986) and other comedy-action comics, games and shows. What they defend is not justice but goodness and human ideals in general. Yamamoto achieves the appropriate warmth: The characters, who are freed from mono no aware by the twin forces of escapism and censorship, continue their work as an unwitting monument to their creators, while humans themselves drop the ball.
References here: The Stories of Ibis (2006).
text entry Japanese production fiction
‣ “The Day Shion Came” (2006)
Yamamoto Hiroshi (writer).
Read in 2022.
The first intelligent android working in Japanese elder care learns on the job.
This is the most realistic story in the collection. Yamamoto clearly researched the working conditions of real caregivers, and his female protagonist is unusually compatible with feminism. Her understudy, Shion, has her flaws, but Shion is still an idealized, even idol-like robot, despite her relevation that all humans have dementia, not just the ones who are diagnosed with it.
text entry Japanese production mecha fiction magical girl
‣ “AI’s Story” (2006)
Yamamoto Hiroshi (writer).
Read in 2022.
The biography of Ibis who appears in the framing narrative of The Stories of Ibis.
An impressive trip from cyberpunk (VR, simulation, automation, overpopulation, crime, grey morality) to a more optimistic, white-morality scenario like Yokohama Kaidashi Kikō (1994), though YKK’s apocalypse by degrowth is only implemented in the frame, not in this novella.
To achieve this complex but ultimately positive vision, Yamamoto picked some unlikely premises. (T)AI needs human-like sensory input to work, and especially to learn how to communicate with humans. T(AI) is also designed to have a conatus. These two premises help produce the level of anthropomorphism that Yamamoto desires, but they don’t really make sense.