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(SFF Bingo): The Resisters, by Gish Jen
May. 6th, 2022 08:36 pmHere are two (real) stories about computer vision.
-Machine learning tries to match textual labels of pictures to the image files themselves. The training data is important, because a computer can only extrapolate based on what data it's given. If its images of human faces are disproportionately white, an artificial system might fail to recognize nonwhite people as people. The results are predictable and horrific. This wasn't caused by any malice on Google's part, but it's a reminder that, if the humans behind the code aren't careful, unintentional biases (in this case, reflecting existing real-world disparities) will enter into increasingly complex computer systems.
-Some baseball minor leagues are experimenting with using "robot umpires" to automatically call balls and strikes. The strike zone is defined by the batter's body and the shape of home plate, and in principle, should be fairly deterministic--computers could compensate for the limitations of humans, who occasionally make mistakes and sometimes make egregious mistakes. But it turns out that the "real" strike zone, as ruled by human umps, is nebulous--pitches on the corners are, literally, corner cases, called balls some percentage of the time and strikes some other percentage. Moreover, the same pitch is more likely to be called a ball if the pitcher is ahead in the count, or a strike if the batter is ahead in the count (making the at-bat more likely to continue rather than an automatic walk or strikeout). Is this good? Is this bad?
"The Resisters" is a dystopian novel about baseball. The narrator, Grant, has a daughter, Gwen, who happens to be a pitching prodigy. While at first it's difficult for her and her peers to have safe playing fields because they're part of the societal underclass in near-future dystopia USAA (United States of Auto-America), her skills eventually put her on the map, and she struggles to decide whether to take advantage of the opportunities that become available to her, or refuse out of solidarity.
I found the middle section of the book, when Gwen is away at college, to be the strongest: she occasionally sends pleasant updates home over the all-seeing Net so her parents won't worry about her, but also writes clandestinely, and meanwhile Grant is spying on her, worried about how she'll be treated by "Netted" society. Her coach is just as obsessed with baseball as she is, and he even led the campaign to "Keep Umps Human" and preserve some measure of subjectivity in an increasingly robotic world. There are lots of playful baseball-name allusions.
The tech dystopia features products with CamelCase names like SpritzGram, which I felt was realistic and amusing.
But in many places, the book falls into the trap of "literary fiction author decides to try their hand at genre fiction, thinks they're reinventing the wheel, does not reinvent wheel." The dystopian struggle of "Aunt Nettie," the AI authority, versus "Aunt Nellie" (Grant's wife, Eleanor) felt fairly unoriginal. It's certainly possible that a future-dystopian USA would carry over many of the prejudices we have right now, but given how heavy-handed the book is with characters talking about "gosh, this reminds me of how we studied Lincoln in school and he talked about 'right for might,'" I would have appreciated something like the Google AI link made explicit, rather than just assuming "oh well people are doomed to be racist because people are stupid and never learn." (I'm cynical enough to assume "people are just stupid and never learn" is the underlying assumption, in stories that come across as this didactic. There are a couple scenes that lean into Gwen's tension with assimilation versus defiance, as well as the privileged Netted also not liking the state of the world, that could arguably push against this.)
The fourth wall crumbles several times in places like "the turnaround was like something out of a novel...[but] no novel ever ended there," as if to say "teehee, I know how contrived this is," but doesn't seem to earn that level of meta-awareness. Similarly, Grant has a verbal tic of saying "as my mother would have said" before introducing a novel turn of phrase. We get it, Grant's mom was Caribbean and had her own idiolect! But in general, those words could either be left uncommented or, if you think it would pull the reader out of the story too much, maybe this is a case where "kill your darlings" applies.
Maybe you're wondering, as I was for the first third or so: why is this a baseball book rather than about fencing or knitting or any of the characters' other hobbies? It's not because the games create any tension, that's for sure--Gwen's "first no-hitter" is mentioned in a casual offhand, and when games do get more detailed description, it's not because Gwen's skill is in any doubt. But baseball is both a US-American pasttime and an international pasttime, and that is eventually made concrete:
A couple other things:
-social credit system ("LivingPoints") as dystopia is something I've seen from the "right" in fiction before, this was a new-to-me lefty take (admittedly I've never tried Black Mirror)
-the Olympics and sports in general are sex-integrated; there isn't much focus on "are women's sports a thing that should exist? why?" But there's enough dystopian genetic modification, sometimes-consensual and sometimes under pressure, that the point is kind of moot
-there's an scene relatively early when Grant has to make a speech to the then-underground league: "Someone ignored our precautions and did something that puts us all, indirectly, at risk. I don't want to point fingers, I just need to let you all know that you've been exposed, and we need to figure out what precautions to take now." Blah blah. Someone responds:
I'm someone who tends not to enjoy the "litfic author tries and fails to reinvent wheel" subgenre, and the baseball premise was a major part of the reason why I picked this book up. So overall, "The Resisters" didn't really work for me. But if you for some reason haven't read a lot of dystopian stuff and want Satchel Paige allusions mixed in with your DoomTech and BadFeels, maybe it will for you!
Bingo squares: Family Matters, Standalone, Author of Color. If you squint you could probably make a case for "Revolutions and Rebellions" but I don't think it's a great fit.
-Machine learning tries to match textual labels of pictures to the image files themselves. The training data is important, because a computer can only extrapolate based on what data it's given. If its images of human faces are disproportionately white, an artificial system might fail to recognize nonwhite people as people. The results are predictable and horrific. This wasn't caused by any malice on Google's part, but it's a reminder that, if the humans behind the code aren't careful, unintentional biases (in this case, reflecting existing real-world disparities) will enter into increasingly complex computer systems.
-Some baseball minor leagues are experimenting with using "robot umpires" to automatically call balls and strikes. The strike zone is defined by the batter's body and the shape of home plate, and in principle, should be fairly deterministic--computers could compensate for the limitations of humans, who occasionally make mistakes and sometimes make egregious mistakes. But it turns out that the "real" strike zone, as ruled by human umps, is nebulous--pitches on the corners are, literally, corner cases, called balls some percentage of the time and strikes some other percentage. Moreover, the same pitch is more likely to be called a ball if the pitcher is ahead in the count, or a strike if the batter is ahead in the count (making the at-bat more likely to continue rather than an automatic walk or strikeout). Is this good? Is this bad?
"The Resisters" is a dystopian novel about baseball. The narrator, Grant, has a daughter, Gwen, who happens to be a pitching prodigy. While at first it's difficult for her and her peers to have safe playing fields because they're part of the societal underclass in near-future dystopia USAA (United States of Auto-America), her skills eventually put her on the map, and she struggles to decide whether to take advantage of the opportunities that become available to her, or refuse out of solidarity.
I found the middle section of the book, when Gwen is away at college, to be the strongest: she occasionally sends pleasant updates home over the all-seeing Net so her parents won't worry about her, but also writes clandestinely, and meanwhile Grant is spying on her, worried about how she'll be treated by "Netted" society. Her coach is just as obsessed with baseball as she is, and he even led the campaign to "Keep Umps Human" and preserve some measure of subjectivity in an increasingly robotic world. There are lots of playful baseball-name allusions.
This drew the side eye, Gwen said, from the other freshman pitchers--people like Righty Grove and Rube Foster and Ichiro Mariner. But luckily, since everyone except Ichiro was a fastballer, they competed more with one another than with her. And the upperclassmen, including the legendary Pietro Martinez, were happy to have a strong new woman pitcher to replace the old one, Renata the Witch.
The tech dystopia features products with CamelCase names like SpritzGram, which I felt was realistic and amusing.
But in many places, the book falls into the trap of "literary fiction author decides to try their hand at genre fiction, thinks they're reinventing the wheel, does not reinvent wheel." The dystopian struggle of "Aunt Nettie," the AI authority, versus "Aunt Nellie" (Grant's wife, Eleanor) felt fairly unoriginal. It's certainly possible that a future-dystopian USA would carry over many of the prejudices we have right now, but given how heavy-handed the book is with characters talking about "gosh, this reminds me of how we studied Lincoln in school and he talked about 'right for might,'" I would have appreciated something like the Google AI link made explicit, rather than just assuming "oh well people are doomed to be racist because people are stupid and never learn." (I'm cynical enough to assume "people are just stupid and never learn" is the underlying assumption, in stories that come across as this didactic. There are a couple scenes that lean into Gwen's tension with assimilation versus defiance, as well as the privileged Netted also not liking the state of the world, that could arguably push against this.)
The fourth wall crumbles several times in places like "the turnaround was like something out of a novel...[but] no novel ever ended there," as if to say "teehee, I know how contrived this is," but doesn't seem to earn that level of meta-awareness. Similarly, Grant has a verbal tic of saying "as my mother would have said" before introducing a novel turn of phrase. We get it, Grant's mom was Caribbean and had her own idiolect! But in general, those words could either be left uncommented or, if you think it would pull the reader out of the story too much, maybe this is a case where "kill your darlings" applies.
Maybe you're wondering, as I was for the first third or so: why is this a baseball book rather than about fencing or knitting or any of the characters' other hobbies? It's not because the games create any tension, that's for sure--Gwen's "first no-hitter" is mentioned in a casual offhand, and when games do get more detailed description, it's not because Gwen's skill is in any doubt. But baseball is both a US-American pasttime and an international pasttime, and that is eventually made concrete:
For was this not the level playing field we envisioned? The field on which people could show what they were made of? And didn't we Americans believe above all that everyone should have a real chance at bat? Didn't we believe that with the good of the team at heart, something in us might just hit a ball off our shoetops and send it sailing clear out of the park?
But again, given how heavy-handed everything else was, I expected this digression earlier than page 153.A couple other things:
-social credit system ("LivingPoints") as dystopia is something I've seen from the "right" in fiction before, this was a new-to-me lefty take (admittedly I've never tried Black Mirror)
-the Olympics and sports in general are sex-integrated; there isn't much focus on "are women's sports a thing that should exist? why?" But there's enough dystopian genetic modification, sometimes-consensual and sometimes under pressure, that the point is kind of moot
-there's an scene relatively early when Grant has to make a speech to the then-underground league: "Someone ignored our precautions and did something that puts us all, indirectly, at risk. I don't want to point fingers, I just need to let you all know that you've been exposed, and we need to figure out what precautions to take now." Blah blah. Someone responds:
We can understand your desire not to point fingers, and we do not particularly want to point fingers ourselves. But what if our children are hanging around with this girl? The one who played unhacked, I mean. Don't we have a right to know? Don't our kids have a right to make an informed decision about whether to remain friends? Does this girl's privacy trump our kids' safety?
This book came out in 2020. Based on the February and March dates of some of the reviews, I don't think COVID was quite on the horizon in the US yet, but for me it was impossible not to read it in that light!I'm someone who tends not to enjoy the "litfic author tries and fails to reinvent wheel" subgenre, and the baseball premise was a major part of the reason why I picked this book up. So overall, "The Resisters" didn't really work for me. But if you for some reason haven't read a lot of dystopian stuff and want Satchel Paige allusions mixed in with your DoomTech and BadFeels, maybe it will for you!
Bingo squares: Family Matters, Standalone, Author of Color. If you squint you could probably make a case for "Revolutions and Rebellions" but I don't think it's a great fit.
