The nine stages of reading "Sibling Rivalry" by Michael Byers

 Stage One: One sentence in, and I know "Sibling Rivalry" by Michael Byers is a sci-fi story. There's been a mention of "synths," which I assume are lab-made people. Since the opening sentence says they were created as a reaction to the one-child law, I'm guessing they made "synthetic" people to let humans scratch the itch to have multiple-child families. This doesn't bode well. Best American Short Stories almost never does a good job picking sci-fi on the rare occasions it includes it in the anthology. Literary fiction in general doesn't pick good science fiction. It's like white people trying to pick good rap just to prove they're hip, or old people throwing out to young people whatever random piece of pop culture they saw on the news, which to them still means the local news on cable. The only good science fiction I've ever seen in BASS was Ted Chiang's "The Great Silence." 

Stage Two: Oh, wait. This isn't terrible. At least it's not doing what T.C. Boyle's "Are We Not Men?" (BASS 2017) did by interjecting with a direct address to the audience full of exposition of the world. ("I suppose I should back up here a moment to give you an idea of where this was coming from.") We are actually learning about Byers' world through natural interactions between characters. After the opening paragraph, which does indulge in a little macro-exposition ("Ten years after the one-child law went into effect the synths were a common sight,"), we're following the Burkharts. The story drops generalized comments about the effect of a new technology (telling) in place of showing the effect through how the Burkharts live. 

Stage Three: The conflict seems to be about new vs. old. There's a tendency in society to paint those resistant to change as dinosaurs, to say change is inevitable. But if you say that every time a change comes around, then surely, at some point, you're going to allow bad change to come in. Resistance to some change is proper. Although there seems to be some prejudice to synth children, there's also a much larger social willingness to overlook the problem. "What else could she be but real?" the Burkharts tell themselves. Are they being reasonable, since synths seem quite human, or are they talking themselves into a bad idea?

Or maybe the conflict is about what makes someone "human." If a synthetic being is created well enough to feel and think and grow like a human, then isn't it human? This was the question that made Season One of Westworld interesting. As long as this doesn't become Season Two of Westworld, where the synthetic humans gain awareness and rebel, this could be interesting. But surely, this story won't do that. That would be too big and dumb a cliche to drop on what seems to be a smart story.

Stage Four:  I'm not sure I really like that sudden reference to "Supers," which I assume are enhanced synthetic human beings. For one thing, it comes in a passage that suddenly indulges again in broad-scale worldsplaining: "The Supers had been around for almost as long, although that was a different story." The story teases the Supers right after a really nice passage, in which father Peter, the POV character, considers the meaning of being parents in a different way from every parent in human history: "And of course to him and his wife and their friends this was all complicated and interesting, as it was to everyone their age, because all of it had come along when they were old enough for it to be new and strange. But they recognized too that it wouldn't be interesting for long, not in the same way, not even to them."

This thread of the story is the interesting one, the exploration of how humans make room inside themselves for the new. Maybe it's not that uncommon that we lose more than we gain when we force ourselves to accept change our hearts tell us to resist. That's a great conflict, and I hope it keeps getting developed. Just as long as we don't end up with the Supers, who were just teased, rising up, and the synths joining them. That would be so lame. 

I trust this story enough to believe it won't end up like every other robot-human story does.

Stage Five: Wait, there's another technology in this world we need to be introduced to and to consider: the cookie. And it's being introduced during a get-together with a lot of new people with a lot of names. So, wait, a minute, let me start writing this all down...we've got Carl, and Emma, and Jerry, and Max. Oh, wait, and Toni. and Julie. Oh, wait again. Julie is Peter's wife. Did I know that? They're talking about having sex with synths. Julie had sex with a super, apparently. She's such a free spirt. 

The cookie, from what I can gather--because unlike synths, there is no expositional phrase explaining exactly what it is and we have to intuit it from how characters interact with it--is like a smart phone but with the ability to read thoughts. Or if not read thoughts, at least give a very, very detailed read of what is happening with someone. If you have access to someone's cookie feed, you know pretty much everything about them. Parents use them to keep track of their kids, and different parents have different philosophies about how much they are willing to use them on their kids. 

At this point, I am wondering if the story can survive two disruptive technologies. Doesn't a story kind of need to focus on one technology, the way a science experiment needs to isolate for one variable in an experiment? The world of "Sibling Rivalry" is starting to feel like a novel or a Netflix series rather than a short story. 

Stage Six: The word "normal" comes up a lot in this story. Ten times, according to my word search in Kindle. If the story's main theme has to do with what "normal" really means and the ways in which humans both resist changes to socially defined notions of normalcy but also at the same time engage in convoluted self-justifications of changes to normal, maybe it needs a whole lot of challenges to the "normal" the reader in 2020 knows of. And the cookie is effective, because unlike synths, it has an analogue for a 2020 reader. We've all seen the disruption to "normal" life smart phones have brought in the last decade. This tension between the longing for psychological stasis needed for peace and tranquility in competition with the spirit of curiosity and experimentation humans need to scratch their "pursuit of happiness" itch is the core of the story. It's a compelling core. As long as the Supers don't reappear to attack humans, this is going to be a really good story.

Stage Seven: Oh, crap. The Burkharts have a parent-teacher conference where they learn their synth daughter Melissa has a bit of an overdeveloped sense of fairness. The robots are totally going to rise up. 

Stage Eight: Wow, this is the best passage of the whole story. The Burkharts, rather than deciding to increase their monitoring of their kids after learning of Melissa's brutal take-down of a bully at school, go the other way. They turn off the cookie monitoring altogether. They realize they're taking a risk, but Peter wants them to let their kids have the birthright of any human being--the right to be left alone. 

"So in the end it was not so much a decision as a willingness to experiment--at least as they described it to themselves. Of course parenting overall could be considered, really, a haphazard, screwy, make-it-up-as-you-go experiment, done without controls, the sort of exercise that would get your funding revoked and get you called up before your departmental Internal Review Board in a second. And your experimental subject? Helpless captives!"

It reminded me of Elizabeth McCracken's "Thunderstruck," one of my favorite stories from BASS in the eight years I've been reading it. McCracken's parents "couldn't decide when to punish and when to indulge, when a child was testing the boundaries and needed discipline, and when she was demanding, in the brutish way of children, more love. In this way, their life had been pasted together with marshmallow topping and hot fudge. Shut her in her room. Buy her a banana split. Do both: see where it gets you." 

Carl Sagan used to talk about how folk wisdom always offered you conflicting advice. Do I "wake up early to get the worm" or do I "stop to smell the roses"? The Burkharts are similarly caught between two human impulses, both of which have validity. On the one hand, people have done in the the past the things that have become tradition because they worked, and today's generation ought to think twice before changing things around too much, believing we are smarter than all of human history. On the other hand, some changes really are necessary. Synth prejudice in Byers' work feels an awful lot like prejudice against people of color in desegregating neighborhoods in the last century. Surely that was a necessary change to the status quo.  

The hell of parenting is that there is no guidebook telling you how to navigate when two heuristics seem to be in conflict with one another. Parenting is a much more perilous project than we like to admit. I have a feeling it's going to end badly for the Burkarts, which is fine, as long as it doesn't end with the robots rising up. But that will never happen, right? I mean, Melissa, the synth dauther, asks kind of pointedly about what happened to the Supers while taking her bath, but this story isn't going to go down that path, right?

Stage Nine: Ah, shit. The robots rise up. 

Actually, I don't hate this story in spite of that. I guess if I had stopped watching Westworld at the end of Season One at the beginning of the robot revolution and not gone on from there, I'd have thought it was a good show. "Sibling Rivalry" ends at the beginning of the revolution. And how we got to the revolution is worth thinking about. The Burkharts followed the wrong intuition. They got the experiment wrong, which is always a possibility with every new thing society tries. They trusted one new thing, the synths, too much, while rejecting another new thing, the cookie, too quickly. 

I'm willing to forgive the story because it's so good at presenting what the question is, although I'm a little bit ambivalent about how it answers that question. Any time a science fiction story warns its audience that radical change will bring destruction, when a Promethean cautionary tale says that "life finds a way" or whatever, it's kind of easy to duck out after that, having offered only a kind of pat thesis that a little change can be good but too much too fast is dangerous. That's too easy.

Still, at least "Sibling Rivalry" does its job of describing the difficulty of answering the question extremely well. It doesn't lapse into cliches like greedy capitalists or mad scientists ruining us all with their technology. The logic that made the Burkharts raise Rosemary's Baby is logic many modern parents might buy into. Robots rising up is a cliche, but then again, a cliche is nothing but a kind of linguistic normalcy, and, like social norms, maybe it becomes so normal for a reason. 

Other readings of this story: Jim Harris at Auxiliary Memory

Karen Carlson at A Just Recompense.