WHEN TECH MOGULS ACT LIKE GALACTIC OVERLORDS Posted on : Aug 17 - 2019

The protagonist of Max Gladstone’s new novel Empress of Forever is Vivian Liao, a tech mogul in the vein of Steve Jobs or Elon Musk. As the story opens, Liao is working to oppose the misuse of big data by a dystopian near-future government.

“I think Viv really despises the people who have used many of those levers to gain control over the American political sphere,” Gladstone says in Episode 374 of the Geek’s Guide to the Galaxy podcast, “and she’s been fighting back using basically every tool available to her.”

Liao soon finds herself transported to the distant future, where things have only gotten worse. The galaxy is now ruled by an all-powerful Empress, who controls her subjects through her mastery of the Cloud, a ubiquitous hyperspace data network.

“In the future that Viv’s waking up in, most people are composed of smart matter, and have a projection of their consciousness—what they would call their soul—into the Cloud,” Gladstone says, “and they can move around, given the appropriate tools, by more or less ‘computing’ themselves across vast reaches of space.”

The Empress’ authoritarian rule will remind some readers of the capricious way that tech companies police their platforms, and this is no accident. The novel also uses the character of Grey, a sort of nanotech-powered genie, to explore the way that recommendation algorithms can foster extremism. “When the algorithm can figure out what you want—or what it thinks you want—better than you can, you can end up in one of these desire loops, where you always want the next thing that’s one step out of reach, and Grey was a great venue for exploring that,” Gladstone says.

He hopes that readers will enjoy Empress of Forever, but also that it makes them think about where our technology is heading.

“That’s one of the challenges that Empress engages with—or tries to—again and again, even through all the planet-smashing and post-human kung-fu battles and all, this question of who are we? What are we? And what kind of world are we trying to make? Let’s try to be really honest about that,” he says.

Listen to the complete interview with Max Gladstone in Episode 374 of Geek’s Guide to the Galaxy (above). And check out some highlights from the discussion below. View More