RW: It reminded me a little bit of debates we have about technology. It’s like a Schrodinger’s cat experiment of catastrophe. For most of the book, we’re not sure which it is. If you’ve ever seen Ronin … it’s all about all these people trying to get hold of this briefcase and nobody actually knows what’s in it, but everybody wants it… The Grand Mechanism is the engine that drives the plot because there’s one faction that wants to open it to see what’s inside, and there’s the other faction who thinks that could be a really, really bad idea. Powell: The Grand Mechanism is the mystery at the heart of the novel. Rob Wolf: What do we know about the Grand Mechanism? And that’s what’s basically happening on a massive scale in this story with this ancient machine that nobody knows what it does, but they want to poke it and see what happens.” You find something you don’t understand, you poke it and try and break it and see what it can do. It’s a process of just poking stuff to see what happens. “It’s like any scientific experiment, any scientific knowledge that sentient beings see. “I got a bit satirical with the way the faction is appealing to nationalism to get the power they need to open this thing by promising sunlit uplands and making Jzat great again,” Powell says. The system is home to a humanoid, multi-armed species known as the Jzat, who are divided among those who want to crack open the Grand Mechanism, believing it contains a wormhole to connect them with a more advanced Jzat civilization, and those who want to leave the mechanism alone, fearing it contains a black hole or other existential danger. The Bristol author’s new novel centers around a mysterious machine called the Grand Mechanism, an impenetrable black sphere, which, about two thousand years ago, replaced a star in a binary system. technology suggests Powell’s imagined future-in which the minds of humans and A.I.s are symbiotically enmeshed-is just around the corner. Powell’s Descendant Machine is set about 200 years in the future, and yet the recent explosion in A.I.

Complicate Me by M. Robinson