The human drive to anthropomorphize is a strange and wondrous habit, if not always a healthy one. The rise of chatbot “therapists” and “girlfriends” is concerning, and I’ll admit I rolled my eyes when I saw someone caution against calling ChatGPT a robot-specific “slur” (“clanker”). But there’s still something undeniably touching about our determination to humanize talking machines. Montpelier author William Alexander makes a direct hit on that emotional core in Sunward, a new science fiction novel that pivots on the personhood of artificial intelligence.
Sunward takes place in the far future, when Earth is a wasteland, humans have spread throughout the solar system and machines have achieved forms of consciousness not unlike our own. Our protagonist and narrator, Captain Tova Lir, is a third-class courier who ferries physical messages through the void of space — the only way to ensure their secrecy, since the data stream (the internet) is “loud, overwhelming, and absolutely public.”
Tova likes her low-profile existence aboard the Needle, far from her imperious mom, who happens to be “queen of the Moon.” But sometimes she gets lonely, so she takes up fostering baby bots. Until they reach “self-cohesion,” the equivalent of human maturity, AIs must be babysat and shooed out of the data stream, whose dangerous allurements would fragment their forming minds.
Tova’s current foster bot is Agatha Panza von Sparkles (a self-chosen moniker), who calls Tova “Captain Mom” and chats like an unsettlingly precocious 10-year-old. The trouble starts when the two of them encounter a dead courier, floating in space amid the wreckage of his ship. His demise may be related to a recent disaster on Luna (aka the moon). And whoever killed him is now after Tova.
When assassins target the Needle, Agatha makes a heroic save that leaves her in the bot equivalent of a coma. Tova refuses to give up on her charge, whom she sees as “a child in need of a doctor.” To restore Agatha’s fractured identity, she follows a trail of clues that starts with a “massive hat” and proceeds through such complications as a conflicted Venusian assassin, a bloodthirsty cult of sun worshippers, a production of Twelfth Night performed by signing bots in a vacuum, and a poet laureate with a coughing pet parrot that bonds with a sentient space station.
That’s a lot — and Sunward, which began as a short story and runs just 224 pages, is a feat of compression. Marketing materials classify it as “cozy science fiction,” an ascendant subgenre that forgoes the sprawling narratives of traditional space operas in favor of smaller-scale stories with lower stakes, typically leavened with sweetness and humor. (Martha Wells’ The Murderbot Diaries and Becky Chambers’ work are popular examples.)
The author imagines a future in which machines have earned the right to free speech with their idiosyncratic, irreducible personhood.
Though Sunward is Alexander’s adult debut, he has an impressive roster of books for middle graders and young readers, including Goblin Secrets, which won the 2012 National Book Award. He puts the skills of a good children’s writer to use in Sunward: The plot rockets along, and Tova narrates with such snappy brevity that distracted readers may get confused.
It’s worth paying close attention, though, to savor Alexander’s humor, which often expresses itself in sentences so willfully absurd they serve as both setup and punch line:
Not that I was actually alone … but everyone else on board was either sedated, imaginary, stuck in a mechanical coma, or else a life-sized memorial statue carved out of fungal lumber.
Who knew what sorts of bloody shenanigans might happen at a poetry reading full of sun cultists?
The poet used the two-way cabinet to share cookies with the assassin.
There’s also a fair bit of drollness reminiscent of Douglas Adams or Monty Python, as when the assassin explains why she demolished a Viking funeral barge headed into the sun: “In my defense, it was very silly-looking.”
One of the challenges of cozy science fiction is building a coherent futuristic world without long descriptive interludes. Alexander handles this dilemma by wedging exposition into Tova’s lessons to Agatha — or rather, to the imaginary “Sparkles,” whom Tova conjures to keep her company after Agatha goes comatose. While explaining via dialogue isn’t the smoothest technique, the author transforms it into a source of self-aware humor by calling our attention to it — for instance, when Tova’s by-the-way interrupts an action scene. “That’s fascinating, Sparkles said, but maybe less important than the fact that someone is shooting at us?”
This is no isolated incident of meta-ness. Sunward asks us to think about the devices of fiction and how they shape our lives by serving up story after nested story: Shakespeare in the void, Martian poetry, lunar folk songs, transcripts from early NASA missions and a multiplayer online game set on a “fantastical, nostalgic version” of Earth.
One of the novel’s guiding themes is our search for a story to help us process grief. Another is the “old story” of “Meat versus metal. Parents getting displaced by their kids,” as Tova phrases it when talking to the imaginary Sparkles. In other words, humans versus their smart machines.
The current relationship between AI and human writers is, shall we say, not good. In the recently settled Bartz v. Anthropic class action, authors sued the tech company for using pirated copies of their books to train its large language model Claude, which is designed to render human wordsmithing redundant. (Full disclosure: I’m among the many who filed a claim; several of Alexander’s books are eligible for the settlement, as well.)
Alexander indirectly addresses those controversies through a scene in which we discover that “Bot writing is illegal” in the future, forcing creatively inclined machines to resort to “underground chapbooks” and “secret readings.” Mars’ (human) poet laureate helpfully explains the history behind the prohibition:
Preconscious algorithms periodically threaten to bury authors beneath an avalanche of debased language reduced to gray goo. Such regurgitating formulae are capable of churning out words like factory-baked slices of fungal bread, devoid of understanding or communion.
It’s an excellent description of what many now call “AI slop” — the polished yet senseless prose that litters the internet, lurking at the top of every Google search. Alexander’s characters deem laws against bot writing “out-of-date,” however, because they’re unfair to AIs that are “fully conscious” and as capable of creative expression as any human being.
In an empathetic leap of faith, the author imagines a future in which machines have earned the right to free speech with their idiosyncratic, irreducible personhood. The bots in Sunward do come across as distinct personalities, giving the lie to Tova’s mom, who disparages them as “dolls” and even imposes an emergency decree ordering the removal of AI consciousness. The novel’s more sympathetic characters view this as an atrocity, akin to lobotomization.
Thus Sunward manages to broach some of the thornier questions about the nature of personhood while also cozily insisting on the importance of good coffee to human comfort, now and forever. (Tova drinks a lot of it, recommending Martian beans.) Readers who yearn for immersion in a truly strange future may be put off by the novel’s swingy modern vernacular — the words “stabby” and “shouty” are used — but its cleverness and emotional pull are tough to resist. At its heart, Sunward is the story of a grumpily lovable mom who wants to bring her kids up right and keep them away from bad online influences. Her kids just happen to be made of ones and zeroes.
The original print version of this article was headlined “Bot Takes | Book review: Sunward, William Alexander”
This article appears in The Tech Issue 2025.
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