Robots are slowly becoming a part of everyday life in the United States. Initially used as a weapon of war, models have been repurposed to replace the labor force across many sectors. Eli Whitaker finds this distasteful and has created a militia in the hills of Appalachia to fight back against the tide. And he’s recently resorted to employing child soldiers. During a raid on one of his compounds, a child is killed by one of the police robots, sending the detectives on Whitaker’s trail into an existential spiral. It doesn’t hurt that the two leading the charge have their own history with Whitaker and his way of doing things. And somewhere else, a farm is slowly dying after being poisoned by a new GMO crop and pesticide combination and has to hire robot workers to mind the soil and care for the bodily ailments produced by the pesticide.
Mechanize My Hands To War, to say the least, is a strange and harrowing experience that grows only more so as it progresses. It has that distinct feeling of diving into the mundane but in a way that you have yet to truly experience. I don’t make a habit of calling back to other books I’ve read, but atmospherically (the geography certainly aids), it dances with These Prisoning Hills, by Christopher Lowe. There is a slow unreality to Wagner’s storytelling that is aided by the disjointed temporality. The character’s lives unfold in the ways that most people’s lives do, slowly until it’s all at once. The prose is straightforward, but in the way, some guy at a bar you just met matter-of-factly describes the journey that led him there. It’s harsh and filled with the rare insight that comes from recounting the things that have happened to you. The book is littered throughout with devastating passages that mimic the debris our choices and the choices of the systems that define us leave in their wake.
I know I haven’t really said all that much about the bones of the book, but honestly, this one is a bit of a tough one to really crack open for someone else, and I mean that in a good way. It’s the kind of story that you experience and pick apart in the moment as it’s happening. The non-linear vignettes break up the structure nicely, and I’m going to describe it the only way I truly know how, so bear with me. In the words of a wise green swamp dweller, Mechanize My Hands To War is like an onion, but instead of peeling back the layers, you burrow into the core and back out again. And in some ways this is metaphorical, but it feels deliberately designed to show you the same layer in a different light. Without spoiling too much, Mechanize tells similar events from different perspectives. Not necessarily a revelation in the world of storytelling, but Wagner captures something precious within this onion: the infinitude of a single moment.
There are a lot of stories about how one event expands out like a ripple on a still pond, touching the lives of every character. A lot of drama I’ve enjoyed follows such a flow. Mechanize focuses this structure on bringing the war home through the use of robot labor in both police and medical services. The book doesn’t just posit “what if,” and scaremonger about defects or the horrors of an alien intelligence making life-or-death decisions. Instead, it carefully digs into these ideas, showing the human story and then slowly shifting to the perspective of the robots themselves. The usual bias is placed at the forefront, followed by an examination of self-actualization on the side of the demonized. The robots in Mechanize walk the fine line of metaphor for marginalized and cheap labor and the disruption of technology on semi-established ways of doing things. They are complex beings that are governed by code and language. They do not have the “free will” to choose how to handle situations, but it does not stop them from observing and actualizing around the events they are involved in.
There are too many threads to pull on in this story, so a theme I want to highlight in Mechanize is its focus on children and the future we are creating for them. There are not a lot of books that really engage with children and their place in our world. Obviously, they are not totally left out of the conversation, but rarely do they feature so heavily in a story unless it’s specifically about them. Mechanize My Hands to War revolves around a single incident, the shooting of a child by a robot employed by the police. And this isn’t some teenager; it’s a prepubescent boy recruited by a local revolutionary who is raising a small army of child soldiers to oppose “them.” This singular event digs into the minds of the cops on the scene, the robots involved, the scientists studying the robots, the higher-ups within the force, and other children who were pulled into Eli’s orbit. It lays bare a central issue I have with most science fiction, especially dystopian science fiction. What happens to the kids? And why have we forgotten about them?
So many of the fears outlined in dystopian stories focus on how one as an individual is ground down by the bootheel of “the state” or an authoritarian collectivism that subjugates the individual to its nebulous and unachievable aims. How the individual must strive against this to save oneself(let’s be honest, often himself). Mechanize, instead of building a horrific new future, just extrapolates from our current hellscape and expands on it. “Technology” has already disrupted labor and social relations, but what if that technology started to understand itself and gain consciousness? What ability would it have to break from the systems that govern it? What chance do we have to break from the systems that govern us? What power does an individual have within those systems? And again, where do the children fit in? What hope do they have when their best option is to join a militia to fight for some form of intangible autonomy in a decayed and further decaying social structure? These are the questions Mechanize My Hands to War asks again and again. It’s a cycle that repeats with the narrative structure.
It may not be a story that wakes a reader up to these problems. But I hope it’s one people read and start to keep asking these questions of themselves. I want to explore these questions more myself as I read science fiction and highlight where stories really try to engage with it. In this age where so many tech billionaires are showing their concern for “demographics” and “birth rates,” it behooves us to think about the world we are supposed to bring these children into. Children in the modern era rarely have much say in their lives or really any say in how the world works. Our stories should investigate that. Mechanize My Hands to War does, and looks at it grimly. It’s a devastating tale that will forever influence how I look at science fiction. Pick it up, read it. Reflect on it. Talk about it.
Rating: Mechanize My Hands to War – Let loose the dogs
-Alex
An ARC was provided for an honest review. The thoughts expressed here are mine alone.