The Island

Sunflower Cycle #1

by Peter Watts

Fantascienza - racconto lungo (46 pagine) - Un essere vivente grande come un sistema solare e con la massa di un piccolo pianeta. E intelligente. Premio Hugo 2010
Quella strana intermittenza nella luce della stella li aveva portati a una scoperta c'era un essere vivente, lì nello spazio. Attorno al sole. Un sottile strato, non più di qualche millimetro, che circondava come una sfera tutta la stella, a 1,4 unità astronomiche di distanza. Un'essere vivente grande come un sistema solare e con la massa di un piccolo pianeta. E intelligente. Ma quando poteva essere intelligente un essere con una quantità di cellule cerebrali equivalente a quella di dieci miliardi di cervelli umani?
Canadese, classe 1958,  Peter Watts  ha vinto il premio Hugo nel 2010 col racconto  L’isola , ma c'era già arrivato vicino nel 2006 col romanzo  Blindsight . Biologo specializzato nei mammiferi marini, Watts ha sfruttato le sue conoscenze scientifiche nel romanzo con cui ha esordito,  Starfish , al quale ha dato finora tre seguiti. 

Genres: Science Fiction, Short Stories, Fiction, Novella, Speculative Fiction, Space, Horror

76 pages, ebook

First published July 1, 2009

Reviews

[Nataliya · Rating 5 out of 5]

Existential ennui and a clever but cold reality smack in the face across space-time unimaginable vastness.

Released in 2009, this unexpectedly biting short story predated my newly beloved “The Freeze-Frame Revolution” in publication order and can certainly be read on its own (like I read it back a few years ago), but for the maximum impact I’d advise reading that one first and this one after.

“Mission accomplished is a meaningless phrase on Eriophora, an ironic oxymoron at best. There may one day be failure, but there is no finish line. We go on forever, crawling across the universe like ants, dragging your goddamned superhighway behind us.”

Set many millions of years after The Freeze-Frame Revolution, it brings us back to Sunday Ahzmundin (the protagonist of that one) and the Chimp (the AI of the wormhole-building black-hole-powered asteroid starship) and their strained dynamic through countless millions of years lived a few days at a time, punctuating deathlike eons-long cryosleep.

And in his signature no-talking-down-to-readers style Watts mercilessly delivers a cruelly clever slap to the face made entirely of brilliant pessimistic realism. (He must be a hoot at parties). It’s dark and lonely and claustrophobic and ultimately gutting — in a way I would not expect from quite a compact story where the impactful moments are so short that if you blink you’ll miss them. But if you pay attention and think, you just may end up needing to stare at a wall for a little while, feeling uncomfortably unsettled.

“I was a fool: I let myself believe in life without conflict, in sentience without sin. For a little while I dwelt in a dream world where life was unselfish and unmanipulative, where every living thing did not struggle to exist at the expense of other life. I deified that which I could not understand, when in the end it was all too easily understood.”

Awe-inspiring and awesome are not the same thing.

Depressingly excellent. 5 stars.
That 2010 Hugo Award for Best Novelette was well-earned.

——————
——————
There are a few more short stories set in this universe. The proper reading order for these (different than publication order) with links to the stories on Peter Watts’ website:
- Hotshot
- The Freeze-Frame Revolution (my review)
- Giants (from Clarkesworld website)
- The Island
- Hitchhiker (unfinished)

——————

Also posted on my blog.

[carol. · Rating 4 out of 5]

Now THAT was a story. It'd be five stars, except I don't think I'd ever want to read it again.

https://rifters.com/real/shorts/Peter...

[Mundy Reimer · Rating 5 out of 5]

Super glad my last book in the Sunflower Cycle 🚀🌻 left me with Watts' signature philosophical taste on my lips. The short story can be found for free here. In case you are reading this without having first read all the other shorts in this series, you might want to instead check out Hotshot and then move on to the recommended reading order of The Freeze-Frame Revolution -> The Island -> Hitchhiker -> Giants. With that said, the order doesn't matter much as a few of the stories take place from the POVs of different characters and there is kind of a running mystery theme of trying to piece together events, so if you do happen to consume it out of order, you might even enjoy the meta-immersion granted by a bit more personal confusion like I did. By the way, I'm giving a ***spoiler warning*** that what I'm about to talk about might ruin some of the mystery for you.

The title of this short story, The Island refers to our main character's name given to the Other in our first-contact scenario. Our alien entity happens to be this giant photosynthetic flesh-like Dyson sphere feeding off the star of which it encapsulates and the surrounding molecular cloud-like soup that it filters from in space. Following the same overarching plot from the rest of the series, our main character Sunday finds herself with her intelligent ship hurtling through space at a fraction of light speed building one worm-hole gate after the next. And in this upcoming star system, she witnesses an entity apparently attempting to communicate with her by blinking itself on and off, almost like a band of shadow propagating across the surface of its giant blob-like alien body undergoing an enormous wink, or perhaps something akin to the strobing effect produced by the chromatophores of our real-world cephalopod friends.

Sunday interprets this strobing activity as a sign of intelligence, and furthermore, because of its speed of propagation across the surface, a sign of a singular Consciousness. From Watts:

"The thing about I is, it only exists within a tenth-of-a-second of all its parts. When we get spread too thin— when someone splits your brain down the middle, say, chops the fat pipe so the halves have to talk the long way around; when the neural architecture diffuses past some critical point and signals take just that much longer to pass from A to B— the system, well, decoheres. The two sides of your brain become different people with different tastes, different agendas, different senses of themselves. I shatters into we. It's not just a human rule, or a mammal rule, or even an Earthly one. It's a rule for any circuit that processes information, and it applies as much to the things we've yet to meet as it did to those we left behind. Fifty-nine thousand kilometers per second, the chimp says. How far can the signal move through that membrane in a tenth of a corsec? How thinly does 'I' spread itself across the heavens?"

Watts is basically saying that the speed at which a system can properly synchronize into an identity that possesses a *singular* Consciousness is rather limited and time-dependent since some area X needs to coordinate a line of thought with another area Y within a small enough span of time for it to be considered a "cohesive thought".

Because I'm in a philosophical mood at the moment, let's take this concept to its logical limit. If the first-person *I* part of consciousness is indeed a time-dependent phenomenon like this (which as someone who is neuroscientifically-trained is a claim that is within the realm of plausibility), then does this imply that if we were to simulate a human brain on a computer and slowed-down time in our simulation to enough fine-grained granularity / "zoomed in" (or alternatively sped up our external observer reference frame relative to the computer doing the simulating) to observe subsets of the entire network (where these subnetworks can communicate with each other much quicker due to their proximity to each other), would we witness something more like a *community of selves* coinhabiting that same brain, rather than a singular unified Self? Maybe something like a bunch of miniature selves all vying/voting for control of the entire bodily system, both cooperating and competing, forking and coalescing whorls of individual self-patterns like the beautiful swirls of color created when water meets an oily pavement?

Could this line of reasoning then be taken to its extreme on the opposite side of the spectrum? Some philosophers propose that maybe even systems such as whole countries like the United States of America might even be conscious given that it possesses the necessary material and functional processing capabilities to be granted such. If indeed the United States is a Conscious entity, might we just be unable to recognize it as such because the time scales at which a country enacts its thoughts and behaviors do not match our individual human time scales? (on a similar note, have you heard of something called an Egregore?)

Furthermore, would any individual component or subset of some system not be able to recognize the Singular Agency that it is part of if the timescales of information propagation are so vastly different? Darwin once commented something along the lines that a plant is just an upside-down animal, with its sense organs buried underground and its sexual organs exposed up on top. Might we not even be able to recognize the consciousnesses of other entities like trees just because they live their experiences and inner mental lives painted across such broadly encompassing and vast time scales that render them practically invisible to us, versus us humans and our comparatively short lives as mere fruit flies to them, living, breeding, and dying within a subjective blink of a tree's eye?

Going back to the story, our main character extrapolates out the size of this entity that seems to encapsulate its sun and estimates that the intelligence behind this massive behemoth must be on par with that of a god. She further speculates and looks forward to a possible communion with a much greater, more angelic and ethical mind,

"I thought of waking myself when the time-lag dropped from prohibitive to merely inconvenient, of working out some pidgin that could encompass the truths and philosophies of a mind vaster than all humanity."

Sunday goes further to imagine that this vast intelligence is also one that is pure and good because it does not develop on a planet where resources come in gradients with more stuff there and less stuff here, or in other words, the "zero-sum mentality" cannot be baked into an entity which never had to struggle given its infinite supply of resources gained by surrounding a star in a near-perfect spherical bubble with a homogeneous distribution of energy.

"I acquaint myself with phenotypic plasticity and sloppy fitness, that fortuitous evolutionary soft-focus that lets species exist in alien environments and express novel traits they never needed at home. Perhaps this is how a lifeform with no natural enemies could acquire teeth and claws and the willingness to use them. The Island's life hinges on its ability to kill us; I have to find something that makes it a threat. But all I uncover is a growing suspicion that I am doomed to fail — for violence, I begin to see, is a planetary phenomenon. Planets are the abusive parents of evolution. Their very surfaces promote warfare, concentrate resources into dense defensible patches that can be fought over. Gravity forces you to squander energy on vascular systems and skeletal support, stand endless watch against an endless sadistic campaign to squash you flat...Take one wrong step, off a perch too high, and all your pricey architecture shatters in an instant. And even if you beat those odds, cobble together some lumbering armored chassis to withstand the slow crawl onto land— how long before the world draws in some asteroid or comet to crash down from the heavens and reset your clock to zero? Is it any wonder we grew up believing life was a struggle, that zero-sum was God's own law and the future belonged to those who crushed the competition? The rules are so different out here. Most of space is tranquil: no diel or seasonal cycles, no ice ages or global tropics, no wild pendulum swings between hot and cold, calm and tempestuous. Life's precursors abound: on comets, clinging to asteroids, suffusing nebulae a hundred lightyears across. Molecular clouds glow with organic chemistry and life-giving radiation. Their vast dusty wings grow warm with infrared, filter out the hard stuff, give rise to stellar nurseries..."

However, similar to before, could we perhaps follow Watts' logic even further? Could Consciousness with an individual first-person view even develop in the presence of a near-ubiquitous and homogenous energy source with no other competing agents to begin with? We can maybe reason that with a homogenous or absolutely even distribution of resources, there is no such evolutionary need for a notion of direction. This then implies that there is no such need for cephalization or central processing of incoming sensory data to coordinate movements to get from one place to another, because for one thing there is no real difference in sensory data (there's food and light coming from everywhere) and two, there's no need to move anywhere else (we get all the food we could ever want just by sitting here)! Granted, there are probably non-homogeneous distribution of resources due to solar events that flux, as well as an inherent resource gradient in the orthogonal direction of the sphere when considering the inside of the bubble versus outside, but compared to the evolutionary demands when placed on a planet, this alien entity is more similar to a singular cell living in nutrient-rich broth but just all inverted inside-out. We can perhaps speculate that the inner life of such an entity just consists of a value-axis corresponding to inside vs. outside qualia.

With that said, maybe we could try to bring in some of Watts' thoughts regarding the nature of the Self from his other books like Blindsight. If we adopt Watts' view that the singular self or 'I' might just be a parasitic subroutine that randomly got its chance to bootstrap itself into existence and then eventually take over the entire host brain/system from which it came from (in his other books like Blindsight, Watts speculates that you can have intelligent entities which don't have to be bogged down with the recursive processing power that Conscious entities demand, i.e., what's known in philosophy as p-zombies). We can then maybe question how this parasite would even come about in the presence of near-ubiquitous resources since there is no competition and hence a super-relaxed form of evolutionary pressure shaping the forces within. For example, if one guy evolves the ability to eat 10x as much food as another, why even bother if we all get infinite amounts of food to begin with? We're all abundantly fed in the end so what's going to kill some other random person off in favor of that guy? What edge does he have? In other words, there's no evolutionary pressure selecting him over another. Similarly, we can ask why would a singular conscious 'I' even evolve to begin with, and moreover, why would it possess an angelic morality?

So doing something like a proof-by-contradiction, let's assume the opposite. Let's assume that we accept that this ginormous flesh-bubble blob that winks at us has a singular Consciousness 'I'. In Watts' view this means that it had to have evolved by some means or developed like a parasite that eventually took over its host. Either way presupposes a selection mechanism favoring the singular 'I' versus no singular 'I'. Because of this selection mechanism, there is competition occurring and hence a 'zero-sum' mindset gets baked-in as a corollary. We thus have means to believe that this zero-sum mentality serves as a potential contradiction to also assuming an angelic, innocent morality. And because this chain of deductions led to a contradiction, one or more of our premises must be false. QED. In other words, there is no such thing as *solipsistic friendly individuals* (because that's self-contradictory!) No Island. And thus we must assume that either there are either multiple entities making up that island or that that Island is really Islands plural! And again by just strict deduction, we must assume a zero-sum game is being played out and that we might be duped and manipulated in our apparent first-contact scenario.

As Sunday says, "I deified that which I could not understand...I still have so much to learn."

Feel free to check out my other reviews of this Sunflower Cycle, such as this one where I analyze the story's influence from the real-life historical Cybernetics movement and more specifically, W. Ross Ashby's Law of Requisite Variety.

Also, if you enjoyed this brief philosophical discussion on Consciousness, feel free to check out my blog post On Thermodynamics, Agency, and Living Systems :)

[Ian Payton · Rating 5 out of 5]

Superb short story that follows on from The Freeze-Frame Revolution. It’s very satisfying to revisit the Eriophora to see how things stand after the events of that book, but this story is also a great little exploration of human nature, trust, and the nature of intelligence.

There are only two characters, and it is their relationship with Chimp, the resident AI, that makes this short story so engaging. Trust is strained anyway, given their mutual history, and opinions differ on what to do when their path is blocked by an unusual phenomenon that may have intelligence of its own - the titular island.

In only 40 pages the story manages to cover a lot of ground, including power dynamics and morality - and with a subtle but pleasing little twist at the end.

[Nooilforpacifists · Rating 5 out of 5]

Watts is the best “hard science” SF author I’ve been pointed toward in ages. His writings typically are short—short stories or novellas. This is a 40 page short story available free on the author’s website. It’s part of the “Sunflower Cycle”—but I’ll be darned if I know the proper order of this cycle (if there is one), although this story takes place later in the timeline begun by “Hotshot,” the first Peter Watts short story I finished days before.

What’s it all about? Ultimately, it’s about re-seeding the galaxy and preparing to meet the expansion of an alien race from another galaxy that is Earth bound. Though it’s never clear there’s much of a human—as opposed to radioactive mutant—population on Earth. The same is true of the protagonist Sunday’s (not Friday—that’s Heinlein; Watt skipped Saturday; but Sunday seems much like Friday, except less of a ditz and less consumed with having sex) wormhole-producing spaceship, where the original Earth generation lay in suspended animation as long as possible. Their kid’s genes also are going to the dogs…

Other than the name, Heinlein would feel right at home. And that’s high praise.

[Jamie · Rating 5 out of 5]

Fantastic Hugo award winning novelette, set chronologically after The Freeze-Frame Revolution, but published several years prior. Reading that first, however, made it easier to piece this together, which I think otherwise might be more difficult to pick up.

[Oleksandr Zholud · Rating 5 out of 5]

This is a hard SF novelette, part of Sunflower Cycle. It won Nebula Award in 2009.

The story is chronologically happens after The Freeze-Frame Revolution, even despite the fact that it was printed almost a decade earlier. While it can be read as a standalone, the knowledge of rest of the cycle adds to the understanding.

Billions of years passes after the ship started its journey. And for a first time, Chimp, the ship’s AI detects strange signal, which can be from a sentient being. Sunday, the protagonist, is woken up to help in decision making. She found that the ship birthed and grew her son, ship’s Mowgli, while she was hibernating.

Great story, unusual aliens and interesting musing about evolution and how it can go the way, different from ours.

[Francisco · Rating 5 out of 5]

Excellent. Excellent. Excellent. Pure Hard Science Fiction aiming directly from the pages of the book to your (relaxed) mind to fill you with a sense of wonder that makes you finish this novelette asking for more. Fortunately, there is more.
Warning: Exclusively for Hard Science Fiction lovers. Even lovers of Science Fiction could hate this story. It's full of technobabble and other terms that could make you toss the book against the wall. That being said read it slowly, savoring every line of it, even stopping for a moment to realize what you just have read.
Six stars.

[Riju Ganguly · Rating 4 out of 5]

It had lots of things— hard science, emotional drama on board a spaceship that's tearing wormholes across time and space, fascinating and ambiguous ending, etc. But for me, the best part of this huge work were the alien entities. They were incredibly alien, in every sense.
Overall, a compelling read.
Recommended.

[mesal · Rating 3 out of 5]

i had no clue what on earth was going on in the first 20 pages of this novella! please note that the whole thing was 40 pages long. my lack of understanding wasn't the author's fault: clearly hard sci-fi is simply not the genre for me, no matter how good it may be when you know what's happening.

what i actually understood was intricate and well-written, something i enjoyed. what i did not enjoy was the incestuous-ish-ness. seriously, what?

[Chris · Rating 4 out of 5]

More than a billion years into the future, and humans travel at 20% of light crisscrossing the known frontiers of the universe, empty of other life, dragging a wormhole portal to a superhighway behind them. As the wormhole links disparate points in spacetime, their machine and biological descendents chase the humans, for domination, in perpetual war. Humans on board this ship have allotted lifespans but eke their time out over the eons by spending most of their time asleep, and arising forcritical moments. Somehow the ship's AI is stunted by hard code to never develop beyond a humans reasoning. Then right in the middle of the planned space highway is potential alien life, but not as we know it. The scene is set up for a fascinating three way interaction between an AI, human, and an alien "mind" in the context of neoliberalist notions of endless economic expansion. One of the more interesting times I have clicked I am not a robot to get my Goodreads review saved!!

[Natalie Skiller · Rating 4 out of 5]

I think this might be one of the best novellas I've read. It is brilliantly written, thought provoking and an interesting take on the human condition. Peter Watts was recommended to me recently and I stumbled upon The Island.
While only being 32 pages or something like that, it fits a lot within those pages.

You are left with questions, for me they were; how did it get to this? What were we humans thinking? How did they break us? How possible is this? This could happen? Oh seriously?

I look forward to reading the rest of the novellas in this series.

[Robin · Rating 5 out of 5]

I'm too stunned to say anything much. This story is about relative intelligence and the importance of knowing where you are in the rankings.

[Daniel · Rating 4 out of 5]

Very good story. Watts is a good writer. This is one of the stories in the sequence that includes Freeze Frame Revolution. Definitely recommend Claudia's suggested reading order. (Hotshots, FFR, Islands, Giants. There's another fragment on his site, I forgot the name, that fits somewhere after FFR.) Interestingly I found myself feeling some empathy for Sunday here. Not sure if that's all inherent to the situation in this story or some carry over, getting to know her across all of them.

[Володимир Кузнєцов · Rating 5 out of 5]

Давно не читав ��оттса. А він, між тим, прекрасний. Сфера Дайсона як форма життя, конфлікт людини і штучного інтелекту, проблема батьків і дітей - як завжи, насиченість текста ідеями у пана Пітера зашкалює) Чудово.

[John S · Rating 1 out of 5]

Not impressive but interesting to see a familiar character.

[Matthew Ochal · Rating 4 out of 5]

That was a really great short. A lovely set read

[Carter · Rating 3 out of 5]

3.5
Very depressing! Not sure how I feel about it.

[Princessjay · Rating 4 out of 5]

Sunday is part of a crew on a ship built to seed the galaxy with gates, woken up to deal with an unexpected sight: a sentient being the size of a planet, signalling them to stop their upcoming build because a space gate will likely kill it.

Over eons of life, the crew has evolved to learn from all the new things they've encountered--even though they encounter them for a couple of days every millennium--while the ship AI remains as rigid as the day it was programmed... leading to a long war between crew and AI that is now in cold stalemate.

She fights with the AI to change the build location and save this sentient creature, believing it to be inherently peaceful. The planet seemed to give them a new coordinate for them to build. By threatening to kill Dix, a human raised by the AI in an unsuccessful attempt to replicate the crew, Sunday made the AI change the build location to the new coordinates. Except, the sentient planet appeared right where the new gate is. As they flew through the gate, receiving panicked and surprised signals from the planet, they realized.. the signals and coordinates they got before were from some other entity who wanted this enormous creature dead... and succeeded..

[Thomas · Rating 4 out of 5]

Watts, Peter. The Island. The Sunflower Cycle No. 1. Self-published, 2009.
The Island is a novelette in which a deep space mission traveling at near light speed encounters a culture in a Dyson’s sphere. If this were Star Trek, they would stop, send in an away team, and invite them into the Federation of Planets. But this is Peter Watts. The mission of this ship is to build a hyperspace gate they will never use, and because of time dilation, they will never know who will use it. The ship is run by an AI called Chimp. It brings a crew member or two out of hibernation to make emergency decisions. Whether Chimp will listen its crew is another question. Will trying to save the culture make things better or worse? These are surprisingly open questions.

[Norman Cook · Rating 4 out of 5]

2010 Hugo Award Winner - Best Novelette

This is a first-contact story at its core. A deep space mission encounters a being that is essentially a Dyson sphere around a star. The crew, composed of an AI and humans who spend most of their time in suspended animation, must figure out whether to change course or risk killing it when their ship flies through it. Complicating matters is that the captain finds out she has a son as part of the crew, and has to deal with the emotional ramifications.

I read this story in its original form in The New Space Opera 2 (2009) edited by Gardner Dozois and Jonathan Strahan. 34 pages

[Kiel Gregory · Rating 5 out of 5]

This is such a good (novelette?) short story! I love the way Watts writes. Sometimes I have to return to a passage just to make sure I understand what's happening, but Watts' way of telling a story is so unique: It's worth the extra time.

This story takes place within the Sunflower Cycle, after the events of "Hotshot" and Freeze-Frame Revolution, and before "Giants". Beside F-FR, this is my favorite story in the Cycle. This story will make sense outside of the Cycle chronology, but some events from earlier installments are referenced here; I'd suggest starting at the beginning.

I really hope Watts keeps this serial alive!

[Lex · Rating 1 out of 5]

DNF at page 32/40 at the surprise incest. What the fuck.

[Olga · Rating 3 out of 5]

This was a kind of a reread because I skimmed through this a year ago. Short stories are still better than the novella because it's okay if you only have a cool concept. But (and this deserves a point):
1. Superintelligence is never convincing!
Well, obviously. At least Watts did it somewhat better (usually your typical genius will be a huge jerk because that's what being intelligent does to people. Don't try to think too often, kids!). Still unconvincing, though. When you watch an animal minding its own animal business, are you always able to guess what the purpose of its actions is?
Conclusion: If The Freeze-Frame Revolution is a 3-star, then this short story is 3+, maybe 3.5 stars.

[Drake Parker · Rating 1 out of 5]

You think you've found an interesting author, and then surprise, incest!

Seriously. What the fuck, man.

Would've been down on this story even without that just because the ending felt very "fuck you for having hope". Also, the whole storytelling vibe was getting weird - nonconsensual childbearing, building the gates as a rape metaphor - yeah, I don't know why I thought this author would be any different.

[aden · Rating 5 out of 5]

I don’t need to be coddled, though. I was a fool: I let myself believe in life without conflict, in sentience without sin. For a little while I dwelt in a dream world where life was unselfish and unmanipulative, where every living thing did not struggle to exist at the expense of other life. I deified that which I could not understand, when in the end it was all too easily understood.
But I’m better now.

[Kiwi · Rating 4 out of 5]

Since goodreads doesn't have entries for half of them and they're all short stories I'm gonna use this as a catchall for the whole Sunflower Cycle minus Freeze-Frame Revolution.
I continue to find the sense of scale really interesting and the glimpses of how the culture of the ship and the dynamics between the Diaspora and the Chimp change over millions of years very cool. Some really fun glimpses at some truly Alien aliens too.

[Mark Gongloff · Rating 3 out of 5]

Very cool hard sci-fi ideas, well-executed, with even some characterization. Could do without the snappy, grizzled patter, though this dose is small enough that it's not too bothersome. But there is a jarring character interaction toward the end of the story that feels, uh, gratuitous and knocks a star off my review.

[Sony · Rating 3 out of 5]

It took me two tries to actually get to the story.
It is really interesting, the way it begins without you knowing anything really, in parts annoying and in part intriguing.
I give it a 3.0 stars, sci-fi really isn't my thing but I did like this one but I felt it left me too many questions when it ended. But oh well the ride even if short was good.

[Matthew Tszen · Rating 4 out of 5]

Жёсткая и мрачная научно-фатастическая новелла (длинный рассказ или короткая повесть), о корабле и экипаже, отправленных на досветовой скорости в бесконечную миссию по строительству порталов для мгновенного перемещения в пространстве.