Artificial Intelligence (AI) has been a staple of speculative fiction since the time of Alan Turing (b. 1912, d. 1954); and the closer we creep to realizing the possibility, the more timely it seems. But the downside for today’s writers taking on the topic is two-fold: 1) there’s an ever-larger body of work on the subject to which an audience will compare any new work; and 2) increased knowledge of computers and neuroscience means there’s more for contemporary writers to know so that their work doesn’t enter the world already seeming dated.
Unfortunately, Thomas Gibbons’s Uncanny Valley suffers on both these counts—which means that even if you don’t know enough about the state of the sciences to spot where he’s engaging in heavy-handed exposition or convoluting the concepts in play, you probably can’t help thinking about where you’ve seen the same basic ideas handled far more interestingly.
Roughly three-fourths of the way through the 21st century, Claire (Susan Denaker) is a pioneering neuroscientist whose life’s work has been dedicated to advancing us closer to genuine AI. Her final project before retiring is Julian (Jacob Sidney), an android built to house the memories and personality of a dying tycoon who has not had his fill of life. We meet Claire and her creation early in the latter’s tutelage, when Julian is little more than a head to be filled with an encyclopedic knowledge base (he’s really strong on the Thirty Years’ War) and a growing sense of what it is to be human. Throughout Act 1 Julian acquires additional body parts and humanity, the latter mostly by way of Claire doing a sort of Henry Higgins thing.
I don’t know why a c. 2170 robot starts out sounding more robotic than c. 2010 Siri. I don’t know why a neuroscientist would pronounce synapse “SIGH-naps.” I don’t know why every time Claire calls her husband he answers so quickly he must have been not only holding his phone but staring at it. Probably I could have gotten past such cosmetic flaws if Gibbons’s script didn’t have bone-deep blemishes. But the playwright can’t keep straight whether the tycoon’s personality is downloaded directly or is a product of data input, and there’s an offstage subplot concerning Claire’s daughter that serves no purpose beyond giving Claire a reason to emote, and Gibbons is always off the mark when he aims at pith or erudition. (“Evolved?” asks pre-tycoon Julian. “But I don’t have the selfish gene”—meaningless if you don’t know Richard Dawkins, a real groaner if you do.)
The single scene that comprises Act 2, when tycoon-infused Julian visits Claire, is where Gibbons best gets into ethics issues, the most interesting of which is a ship of Theseus thing about whether new Julian has legal rights to the business empire old-man Julian left behind. But even here, the explorations never run deep. To make matters worse, neither Denaker nor Sidney deliver the dialog with much nuance, simply yelling the majority of their lines even when script doesn’t call for it.
In choosing to compose a work of fiction based on a rich subject, authors often make the mistake of not carrying their own weight, instead seeming to rely on the strength of their subject to do the heavy lifting. Uncanny Valley is exactly that. AI is a compelling, topical subject, full of dramatic possibility around the myriad issues (moral, ethical, sociological, psychological, technological) that intersect at the point where the non-biological entity in front of us is returning our sentient gaze. But if you’ve seen Blade Runner or A.I. or Ex Machina—or even a passable populist take like Bicentennial Man—it’s unlikely you’ll see much of anything in Uncanny Valley.
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(Photo credit: Steven Georges)