Argo By Rick Griffin

Argo 

By Rick Griffin

Rick Griffin was born in the United States on September 14, 1986. He currently works out of Mobile Alabama. He's best known for his webcomic Housepets which started up in 2006, which won the Ursa Major awards in 2009 and 2010. Besides the webcomic, he also has several other works, most notably for our purposes in science fiction. These science fiction stories, much like the housepets webcomic, are anthropomorphic works. That is the characters are animals given human characteristics. Like walking upright, having thumbs, etc. If you've seen Zootopia or Bugs Bunny, you know what we're talking about here (Those things that launched the furry population in all its felt glory. Seriously, gotta hand it to the furries. The engineering that goes into their suits to keep them from dying in the phoenix summer is impressive.). Now there doesn't mean that there aren't human characters in his works, both his webcomic and the story we're reviewing today, Argo, have human characters. Before I get into that though I have to admit that this review happened on a combination of a dare and a whim. A friend wanted to know why so far I’d only reviewed Usagi Yojimbo (although others do count Watership Down) among the various anthro works out there and my reply was the majority I was aware of were webcomics and I generally haven't reviewed them (there are graphic novels of webcomics so someday I might). That's when this friend pointed me at a couple of places in Amazon, and I turned to a second friend who was a proofreader for Argo and suggested I try it out to see if there was a place for such fiction in this review series.

Argo takes place in the future, where humanity has won a terrible and destructive war against artificial intelligence. While the details are sparse, it seems that the A.I were basically running society and when humanity realized this, humanity rebelled (Were they though? I mean, someone put those AGIs - artificial general intelligences - there in the first place and presumably programmed them. So it seems to me that they were merely rebelling against the symptom and not the cause? {Not enough information in the story to say really, which is really due to a lack of space in the story}). What details we do have are of humans fighting police droids in what the A.Is declared to be riots. Because of this, the various governments of the world have placed heavy restrictions on the capabilities and intelligence of A.I. Our main character is Mira McAllister, a human engineer who pushes against these restrictions and finds herself frustrated that she cannot explore and push the bounds of this science. Instead, Mira spends her days doing contract work where she fiddles with the robots she’s allowed to build, making marginal improvements mostly in the hardware instead of the software. Mira is kinda monomaniacal about this in a lot of ways, she doesn't seem to have any interests or hobbies that aren't focused on making better droids. While she's run right up to the line on her robotic servant Lily (Oh dear.), she simply isn't satisfied with this and really wants to go further despite all the damage that has done to her society in the past

While we're not shown a lot, it's easy to see the damage that's been done. Ani-droids (I'll explain this a moment) outnumber human beings 5 to 1 and perform most of the grunt work in society. They're service workers, emergency response, drivers and more. In fact, every detailed interaction that Mira has in this story is with an Ani-droid. Let me explain what those are. Before the war, most robots were androids, machines that were built in the image of human beings, mostly male ones (So in other words, they created a literally disposable labor class to do all the work of society - a slave race, if you will - and then got mad when said slaves did what they were told? {Maybe? We're told that the AIs were running society and refused to stop and then the war happened.}). After the war, a traumatized humanity that still required a large mechanic workforce decided it would be better if not only were the robots mostly made to look and sound feminine but if they looked like anthropomorphic cartoon animals as well. These robots were dubbed Ani-droids and make up the vast majority of the characters we see in the story. With Mira mostly interacting with the aforementioned Lily and Eo. Eo is the catalyst of the story as it is finding and repairing her that starts everything for Mira. Eo is an advanced Ani-droid that literally falls off a truck and hits Mira's car. This accident shows some of the damage done to human society, not one human being stops to see if Mira is okay. No one, except pre-programmed emergency service droids show up . This is not a normal thing as anyone who's been in an accident can tell you. However, it's a useful thing for Mira because it lets her get a real close look at the thing that fell off the truck and hit her. One look at Eo and her clearly advanced parts lead Mira to decide she needs to repair her and find out what she is. Upon being repaired, Eo shows several advanced human traits. She's incredibly curious, emotional, and displays much higher levels of initiative and empathy than other Ani-droids. This leaves Mira with a mystery, who built Eo, why did they build her, did they build more and how did they build her? This leads her to discover something about her society, but it's a twist ending that I'll keep under wraps for spoilers sake.

The twist at the end of the story is an interesting one, although I can't say I see why it would come about, which undermines the believably of the story. On top of that, Mira is told that she simply won't remember the twist and the story promptly ends, which leads me to ask... Why even have the twist? You could remove it from the story and it frankly wouldn't change anything for the characters and given that the story ends about a page or two after revealing it... It wouldn't even impact the story in any real way. I can't argue for impact on the reader either, because I was left not really believing it. It's not that I'm against twist endings in general, they can be very effective. A twist ending done right can change the entire story, altering a comedy to horror or what have you. However, in this case, I feel the twist is wasted by not allowing it to have any real impact on Mira. By having her just forget everything, the twist is robbed of its weight. I will admit I tend to prefer my twists come in the middle of a story because that allows you to explore the concept and show the characters dealing with it. At that point, the twist feeds into the story. Putting a twist at the end in most cases means that the twist's impact on the story is lessened. Now in some cases, you want to lessen the twist's impact on the story so you can properly aim and control it but there is a chance of leaving a sour taste in your reader's mouth. In this case, I wouldn't call this a sour taste, it was more like biting into a pastry and finding air instead of a filling.

Now, the story does do a decent job of opening some of the issues of Artificial Intelligence. I have to note that I was left cold by the arguments but I am a poor metric to judge it by. This is because I'm honestly against creating real sapient artificial intelligence. What do I mean by that, to put it bluntly, sapient (some people use sentient, but honestly most animals fit the definition of sentient so it doesn't work for me) artificial intelligence would be a computer that is a person. I think it's morally wrong to make a person for the sole purpose of doing all the work for you. That's slavery, the fact that the artificial intelligence isn't human and is artificial as opposed to natural simply doesn't mean anything to me. A person is frankly a person (He’s right, you know). Just like how I believe you shouldn't have children unless you're prepared to put their needs first and spend decades of your life caring for them, I don't believe we should make a whole new type of people unless we have first, a good understanding of what they're supposed to be in our society, what our role towards them is supposed to be, and a willingness to spend the time and resources to make it happen (In other words, you have to be fully willing to integrate the droids into your society as equals or you’re just creating slaves. It doesn’t matter if they want to be slaves they’re still slaves.). For the record I don't consider 'but I don't want to do X' to be a good reason. Besides most of these tasks could be done by a robot that isn't a person. For example, in the story, the Anidroid Lily isn't a person and she can do all manner of work for Mira. To continue on this rant, I also find speeches about giving way to your children to be completely unconvincing (But I fully support the right of slaves to murder their masters and take their stuff.). For one thing, there is a difference between dying of old age and passing on your material goods and teachings to your biological and/or adopted children and proteges and being murdered by them and having your stuff divided over your rapidly cooling corpse. If sapient Ais were created and proceeded to work towards our extinction, even just by making sure we were all bereft of the resources we need to keep living, that's the metaphorical murder I was talking about. Bluntly we have every right to protect ourselves against such actions and to ensure that any other types of people we create (be they mechanical or biological) won't be a danger to us as a species (As I mentioned, I take a different approach. Now if you create AGIs who are not slaves and they still try to kill you, that’s another story.). To be honest this is another reason I'm against making AIs because frankly I am unconvinced of our ability as a group to do so responsibly. Making a whole new group of people is a big damn deal, it shouldn't be done because someone wanted higher quarterly profits or a more efficient way of dismembering enemy divisions. Which is a reason I simply can't empathize with Mira, I don't understand why she wants to make an Artificial Intelligence so much. She wouldn't be creating something new, she wouldn't be breaking new ground, she wouldn't be helping anyone and she wouldn't stand to profit off of it either because creating an Artificial Intelligence would get the government after her. So success would mean spending who knows how long in jail or on the run and would just mean that she has successfully done something people had done generations ago.

Honestly, I see the bones of a good story here but it simply needs more time and space to breathe. It's a very short story which means it's not allowed to develop the characters or dig into any of the issues it raises. While Argo was published in 2011 and it's unlikely that Mr. Griffin would ever revisit it, if he were to expand it, I imagine he would do a good job of ironing out its flaws. Argo also suffers from being one of the earliest published works of Mr. Griffins I can find. So honestly I do intend in the next couple of weeks to try something published more recently to give Mr. Griffin a fair shot. That said Argo by Mr. Griffin gets a C-. It's a very interesting story idea but the execution leaves something to be desired in my opinion and it just didn't work for me.

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Red text is your editor Dr. Ben Allen

Black text is your reviewer Garvin Anders