Poseidon's Wake

Poseidon's Wake is the third and (currently) the final volume in Alastair Reynolds's Poseidon's Children series. There's another time skip forward, different members of the Akinya family taking the spotlight. The novel has interesting details and numerous story points to continue from but the plot drags in parts, the ending is unnecessary and forced, and character relations are painful to witness -- the book reminded me a lot of the author's 10 years older novel, Pushing Ice.

The setting had had few developments since the end of the previous novel and over the passed time. In On the Steel Breeze, the Mechanism governing humanity in the Solar System was found to have been compromised by an artificial intelligence, a technology whose development had been made illegal -- for a good reason, I guess. The merfolk had devised some sort of method, practically magic, to destroy the Mechanism but handed it for Chiku Yellow to decide if it was needed. She, with the help of the basically resurrected Chiku Red, released it and humanity was free once again to commit crimes and wage war without nano implants stopping them.

Despite the age of peace being over, humanity doesn't appear too worse for wear in the novel, though I did get the impression that were more competing factions. The Solar System is not the main stage for the novel anyway and is ignored once one of the viewpoint characters starts their journey to where the actual happenings are.

Another development is the machine Evolvarium on Mars -- unintentionally created by the Akinya family matriarch Eunice -- having developed into a full inorganic nation. They have taken over the whole planet where humanity now keeps them blockaded. Only few humans live on the planet -- as ambassadors -- one of them being Kanu, the son of Chiku Yellow. His functional merfolk genetic alterations, like gills, have been reverted but he still looks unusual for a human. After few twists, Kanu with his ex-wife Nissa, set off to the Gliese-163 system on a yet another secretly built and stored Akinya family spacecraft, dubbed the Icebreaker (after it breaks through Europa's ice layer).

In the first novel of the series, Blue Remembered Earth, the Mandala structure was spotted on the distant planet Crucible. In Breeze, a fleet of holoships were sent to it. The AI compromising the Mechanism had hidden the fact that there were also massive objects orbiting the location. That's a rather ominous discovery to make -- why had it done so? The objects turned out to be sentient machines, Watchkeepers.

Due to their size and advanced technology, the Watchkeepers reminded me of Mass Effect's Reapers. Visually the Watchkeepers are described as black pinecones that open up and shed blue light when they do something.

The Watchkeepers largely ignore humans, mostly just float in place, but they have apparently taken three ambassadors aboard from the arrivals of the holoship Zanzibar: Chiku Green; Dakota, one of the uplifted Tantor elephants; and the artilect construct recreation of Eunice Akinya. Eunice was put together by Sunday Akinya in the first novel from public records and in the second novel the artilect developed further from the partial neural scans recovered from the remains of the actual Eunice.

The event that sets this novel in motion is Crucible, now colonized by humans and elephants, receiving a mysterious message requesting Ndege Akinya, the daughter of Chiku Green, to come to Gliese-163. The bluntness of the message -- which was intercepted by the Evolvarium -- told me right away it was from Eunice but the book's people don't seem all that certain who sent it. Crucible eventually puts together an expedition but Ndege is unable to attend. She is elderly and in a lifelong house arrest for managing to activate the Mandala, which resulted in the Zanzibar blowing up.

In her stead, her daughter Goma boards the Travertine, as does Mposi, who is Goma's uncle and Ndege's brother. He's not a viewpoint character like Goma, though. Goma was another Reynolds character whose gender I forgot by some point until the book finally mentioned her again specifically being a woman.

Goma and her wife Ru are both in the same business as Geoffrey Akinya: elephant research. Unfortunately for them, the Tantor on Crucible have been devolving, losing their engineered intelligence. They hope that they will find Dakota to somehow restore the elephants to their uplifted status.

The uplifted elephants are such a cursed thing. On a planet supporting life they're one thing but space is such an unnatural place for the large and clumsy beings compared to primates -- or even uplifted cephalopods from Adrian Tchaikovsky's novels. In this novel the elephants even have spacesuits for EVA but it requires others' help to get one on. And of course they're unable to control their excreting. What a horrible day to be able to read.

The word the elephants met later use for themselves confused me quite a bit. It seems in English they're the 'Risen' which would indeed be somewhat troublesome to translate to Finnish in this context. But 'ylösnousseet' simply looks weird because 'ylösnousemus' is the word for biblical resurrection. I suppose it works for "ascending to heaven" and such as well.

There's an actual translation failure by Hannu Tervaharju too: 'understatementeja' is not Finnish! Like what the hell even is that? He couldn't remember what the Finnish word for understatement is on the spot and just slapped an inflection on it and it passed every revision afterwards or something? There's also a literal translation of 'greater good' in the novel which never sounds proper to me.

At one point, Eunice mentions how a Finnish astronaut once said to her that travel companions start to smell on the third day (or something like that). I thought that oddly random, like fan service for Finnish readers -- Finns do love being noticed! -- but I just now realized that the astronaut being named Hannu was probably not a coincidence. As the continuing Finnish translator for over a dozen Reynolds's novels, Tervaharju has most likely exchanged few words with the author. It's a pretty fun way to acknowledge someone.

After the Travertine and the Icebreaker set off, the plot slows down until they finally arrive at the destination. Despite the potential saboteur plot on the Travertine, the journey is not an interesting one. And I'd say even tortuous: the ship is filled with people with trust issues, including Goma and Ru. And Nissa is not accompanying Kanu voluntarily on the Icebreaker either. It's Pushing Ice all over again.

Once at the destination, the novel continues quite grippingly but after the climax, the ending feels prolonged and completely lacks any point. It's as if some sort of reverse deus ex machina forced the Icebreaker to land on the titular Poseidon planet, resulting in a difficult rescue operation. It felt like it was there so that Reynolds could kill off characters for another potential sequel to have fewer plot threads to continue from. I really don't want to think that the pointlessness is tied to the discovery that is made in the story related to the M-builders. Such a metacontextual theme is rarely a good realization.

The most interesting part of the novel is when Kanu gets to hear about the nature of the Watchkeepers theorized by an AI hitchhiker he brought from back home. The basis of the conversation is an actual thing, integrated information theory, but Reynolds put a bit of fiction on top of it by having had mid-2100s researchers June Wing and Jitendra Gupta taken it further.

Wing and Gupta argued that a human brain is self-aware because it can't afford to not be: it has only a limited amount of neural pathways to work with so it has to be an integrated network. Sentience is merely a byproduct of that integration. But given unlimited processing power, the same functionality could be provided by feedforward networks that are not self-aware: like the cerebellum. (I wish I had read the novel in English so that I'd know what exact terms Reynolds used.) For an outside observer there would be no discernable difference but internally there'd be no conscious activity.

With such resources, an entity is tempted to outsource all its functions to a series of feedforward systems. And the moment it does so, when it crosses the Gupta-Wing Threshold, the self disappears and it's too late to go back. The entity has become a computational zombie.

I was curious if anyone was talking about this concept but the search term gave basically no results, merely one random Halo interview specifically mentioning the threshold. That could be just current day google being useless, though.

For fun I asked different AGIs what the Gupta-Wing Threshold is. I'm pretty sure that a couple of weeks back when I first did that, Aria wasn't able to answer in a satisfactory manner. But just now it was, even mentioning science fiction and Alastair Reynolds. DeepSeek seemed to be drawing its answer from the novel too, though the wording was curiously generic and it didn't mention science fiction at all. Finally, the European AGI, Le Chat, managed to spout complete nonsense with confidence (and so very quickly compared to the other two), mixing in real people named Gupta and Wing and claiming the threshold was about debt-to-GDP ratio. I got a good laugh out of that.