Machines of Consent is the debut novel of Kiwi author Sophia Turner, and brings us an excellent combination of cyberpunk and sexytimes. Starring two transfem leads, with all the attendant joy, trauma, hope, despair, and love that goes along with that, Turner’s debut shows a lot of quality, a lot of promise, and hopefully presages a long and productive writing career.
Dr. Jess Stockton is a scientist with high goals and even higher ambitions. Through her efforts, she has created a device based around consent which has revolutionized society and drawn no small amount of attention both good and bad.
Roh is a freerunning messenger for the underground with the solitary goal of survival. When tested in the lab for the consent device, she displays a very odd set of biometrics which should be impossible in humans.
Machines of Consent follows two trans lesbians in a sci-fi adventure as they find each other and try to escape an oppressive force bent to use them for nefarious ends. Both cyberpunk and spicy blockbuster, it’s a thrill ride from start to finish.
As is my usual approach to reviews, I tend to look at some existing reviews, positive and negative, to see what the general reception of a work is, since I sometimes find it easier to focus my thoughts if they’re at least somewhat in conversation with the zeitgeist. And yes if you’re reading this close to publication that includes the review that became a discourse de jour, but also several others. So for clarity, despite some references that make it clear I read that review, this is neither targeted at nor even specifically directed towards that review. There were just some fairly large critiques in it, among others, that I don’t personally agree with and so they get mentioned so I can address them.
First, the cyberpunk elements of the setting. A lot of it felt much more near-future than the old 20XX stuff from the 1980s did. It feels like a natural extension of writing in the genre that was started when almost nobody had a computer in their home, let alone in their pocket. In the same way that it was a challenge for the writers of Star Trek Enterprise to create a setting in our future, that was still older than The Original Series when we had already surpassed some of the technology in ToS, trying to write something in our future while accounting for the state of tech in Neuromancer feels like a losing proposition. Turner, it feels, found a good balance of just taking many of the already dystopian elements of our present-day society and just sliding them a couple notches forward in time. Cyberpunk doesn’t need to be baldly futuristic to be cyberpunk.
Blending of corporate and political power? Check. Focus on surveillance and control of the populace? Check. Thriving criminal underbelly that both opposes and supports those corporate/political interests? Check. Elements of technology-based transhumanism? Check. It’s Cyberpunk.
I’ve also seen criticism of the ‘lack of worldbuilding’ which I take to mean a lack of exposition dumps about the rise of the ‘somebody’s last name’ corporation here in New Old Neo City. And I just…for one, tying the story to a specific place then obliges you to do a bunch of needless work to make sure people who know the actual place as it exists now can see it was accurately portrayed. For two, using existing places and people is fraught because you end up making statements about existing places and people that might be problematic, or might not age well. And most importantly third, ‘the organization’ is exactly as meaningful to you as some made-up name that has no bearing on an already existing thing, so what’s the problem?
It shouldn’t be considered a failing of a book in an established genre with established genre tropes to rely on the reader’s knowledge of those tropes when establishing a setting. A valid criticism of Machines of Consent might be that it won’t serve as a very good on-boarding book to somebody who isn’t already familiar with Cyberpunk as a genre, but it never claimed it was one.
[Plot Spoilers from here on out]
Next, the plot has come under some fire for various reasons, some of which are tied to its interaction with the issues around the setting discussed above, but also some criticism of character choices especially in the context of the focus on consent in the story, and the existence and function of the Bonobo device.
It’s claimed towards the end of the book that there’s currently a 1 in 6 rate of device ownership, which is a little under 17% of the population, which feels low in the context of the transformative effect on society it’s described as having had. But you also have to consider how much of the population would want something like that. Looking at my country (Canada) 18%-19% gets you everybody from 20-34. Assume generally that it’s not for kids, less so for the more potentially tech-averse elderly, less so for monogamously married couples, more so used by women than men etc. and it’s not like it’s barely effecting ANYBODY in the primary demographics for being the victims of sexual assault. And the number is rising fast. In the same sentence where the 17% figure is quoted, they estimate 25% by the end of that year.
In 2011, 35% of Americans owned a smartphone. PDAs had been in circulation since the mid 1990s, T-Mobile had a smartphone in the US in 2002, Blackberry in 2006, the first iPhone was 2007, and it was still 5 more years after that before they reached 35% saturation. Going from 17% to 25% in under a year implies a pretty rapid adoption rate. So I don’t think that’s unrealistic to think it would already be having an effect on society. And in terms of its effect on reducing sexual assaults, it’s very explicitly stated that there are systems in place to directly report violations of consent levels to the authorities, which you then have to assume given what the book tells you, that the empirical data results in much higher prosecution and conviction rates, by removing the element of subjectivity in terms of what the attacker claims to have believed to be the case. Add in that there is widespread knowledge that there IS such a reporting system, and that it works, and I think you would see a substantial reduction even if not everybody wants/can afford that reporting service.
Another thing I’ve seen talked about that I want to mention is the scene where Roh and Jess flee to the organization, and Jess ends up signing up to work for them. The specific element that was called out was Roh being asked to sign Jess’s contract and thinking internally about the ‘reality of signing Jess’s life away’ before signing as the ‘Established Guarantor’. Now, I feel I’m pretty clear on what happened. Yes, Roh brings Jess there while Jess is not conscious of what’s happening. But Jess wakes up, is aware, asks Roh questions about where they are and what they’re doing, and presumably -reads and signs the contract herself- because that’s how contracts work. While she might not have had as much information as Roh did about the organization and what they do, she knew they were in the criminal underworld, and on the run, and in danger etc. It feels like maybe not everybody knows what a guarantor is/does, but Roh is not signing over Jess’s life literally by signing that contract. What she’s actually doing is signing her OWN life over in assurance of Jess’s fulfilling of the contract that Jess signed on her own. Roh is accepting, legally, responsibility for any of Jess’s breaches of the contract. It’s sort of the opposite of Roh signing over Jess.
In a more general sense, by bringing her there and putting it to her that this contract was their only way out, you could put blame on Roh for doing that, but Jess has also very explicitly NOT made it clear to Roh who she is, what resources she truly has, and whether she’s willing to use them in their defense. Given what Roh knew, I think she made, if not a good choice, a perfectly understandable one that would have made sense to her at the time. There’s no violation of consent there except that maybe Jess didn’t know what Roh was giving up by being her guarantor. Roh even considers before signing that they still have the ability to walk away and take their chances, which is when Jess could have brought up the fact that she’s actually fabulously wealthy and not just richer than Roh.
In the end, they end up in the grasp of the shadowy group that turns out to be responsible for the whole shebang, and there’s also criticism of the degree to which they just seem to go ‘welp’ and go along with them into captivity. But it wasn’t like they were in a position to opt to fight, when the way they knew the gig was up was having one of Jess’s closest friends basically walk up with sniper scope lights all over her (figuratively) and say ‘you need to come or I’m dead’. Yeah, you go under those circumstances. Beth didn’t ask for this, and you don’t want her to die. ‘Oh no, they have somebody I can’t let come to harm, I have to cooperate’ is a very common trope for a reason.
Lastly, and a first for me in reviews (despite the fact that I do read quite a lot of smut, romance and erotica in my SFF) the smut, romance and erotica.
I do not understand how anybody could say that none of the sex scenes were in service of the plot. A major portion of the plot hung on the fact that they were pair-bonding. Steps undertaken to try and destroy that bond, and the fact that the bond existed being the means by which they got out of there alive and unenslaved, meant that the story had to earn the depth of that bond before we could buy the way it played out. Showing us the bond forming, and how close they were emotionally, sexually and physically was necessary. That alone justifies every single sex scene in the book, but just as importantly, it also justifies every scene of them cuddling, or them cooking breakfast together. All of it together is what sells us on their closeness being enough for Jess to overcome conditioning bordering on outright mind control.
From the way the sex was being talked about, I expected it to be quite a lot more explicit than it was also. Not that it was fade-to-black or anything. Ladies fuck and you know they’re fucking. But nothing about it is porn-brained, needlessly gratuitous, or poorly written. Somebody making a bad sex joke is somebody making a bad sex joke, it’s not undercutting the quality of the actual sex that happens in the story.
Altogether, I really liked Machines of Consent a lot. It’s definitely a debut novel, and has some of the issues that are common to debuts. But they’re common to debuts, that’s not a mark against it either. I think in terms of being ‘cyberpunk, spicy lesbian sff/romance’ Turner got it exactly dead on. It’s neither a cyberpunk novel that happens to have some sex, nor erotica that happens to have some shadowy oppressive governments, but actually a fairly equal melding of both which is very much to her credit. I’m not much of a short story person, so I’m not likely to end up picking up From the Inside, also by Turner, but I’ll definitely be on the lookout for her next novel, and can’t wait to see where she goes from here.
