The first story in The Wildcraft Drones, the debut collection from T. K. Rex, is one that I’ve come across before. It was the first time I’d read one of Rex’s stories: I was the fiction editor for Reckoning when “Squawker and Dolphin Swimming Together” surfaced in the slush pile, and as soon as I read it I knew that I wanted to buy it. By the end of that first read I actually felt a little teary—and in a good way. It was such a kind story: hope after disaster and reaching across human, nonhuman, and technological boundaries.
In that story, Julia is the head of a marine research team trying to communicate with dolphins, specifically a dolphin she and her team have taken to calling Summer. Squawker is an aquatic swimming drone which Julia is using to try and develop a means of translation between the two species. Miraculously, incredibly, it begins to work. Communication is very basic: “SQUAWKER AND DOLPHIN SWIMMING TOGETHER,” it begins, a phrase repeated by machine and by dolphin as they investigate each other. As the study goes on, there’s an attempt to conceptualize more abstract meanings. Summer cannot understand why Squawker isn’t eating fish, but “SQUAWKER EATING SUN” the drone replies, rising to the surface of the sea, showing off its solar panels. The growing dialogue seems a success, and then the Florida coast where this experiment is taking place is hit by a massive hurricane, and both Summer and Squawker go missing. Julia is in despair, but then her robot is found washed up, still functioning. It’s not long before Summer also appears, and the story of the two’s survival becomes plain: Summer had seen the drone struggling in the hurricane and tried to lift it to the surface. “It’s what she would do with a sick calf,” one of the researchers says, “but she also knows Squawker eats sunlight.” When that didn’t work, Summer pushed the drone to shore. “Maybe thinking humans could help it?” that same researcher wonders.
If so, this is a leap on Summer’s part, given that a dolphin pod in the area had previously been attacked by a drunken boater, and one of the calves killed. It’s the generosity of her response that affects me so, I think. The choice to believe that not all people are terrible—that, when this strange, endangered little creature who is not-dolphin and not-human is presented by someone who is dolphin to someone who is human, there is the possibility of aid.
There are humans who do not reason this clearly. And yes, the story is deliberately anthropomorphic. It ascribes motivation and sensibility, a common cause. This should make it less credible, perhaps—if one chooses not to remember the conversations that can be had with some of the other primates, with some of the more intelligent birds. (I was at a wildlife park in Christchurch several years ago, and they were teaching the kea—a ferociously intelligent alpine parrot endemic to New Zealand—to use touch screens in order to communicate. I went with a friend and we looked at each other, learning this, and I knew we were both thinking of the ways it could go very hilariously wrong. Kea are famously destructive. They enjoy taking technology apart and they work together and I’m sure they have a sense of humour.) These are the relationships we build with other creatures, and these are the relationships we build with the nonhuman technological as well.
These are also the relationships that the nonhuman build with the technological. So many barriers, falling down. A dolphin saves a robot drone because she can, and the human facilitators of that connection rejoice that Summer and Squawker are safe, because they’ve learned to love them both.
Rex has a small and interesting note at the beginning of the collection, where they comment on the initial premise of the book: stories about techno-optimism, where technological advances are a way of solving the climate crisis. This premise did not entirely last: “I came to understand that we already have all the technology we need to manage climate change justly.” Instead it’s social responsibility—“universal housing, indigenous land management, and food forests”—which will ultimately prove successful. Sharing what we have, lifting each other up to the sunlight—and, when that doesn’t work, asking for help from people we don’t know whether we can trust, because they just might give it.
“We Require Your Assistance” is both the title of another of this collection’s stories and the central plea of its group of agricultural drones. They are speaking to a woman called Sampaguita Marquez. The drones have learned that Sampaguita played a critical role in the court appeal to extend legal personhood to animals who have proven themselves capable of language, and they want the same representation. Those drones are the new exploited workers, the new nonhuman other, and they want better than they have. Like Summer the dolphin, they are reaching out and hoping.
There’s something wonderful in that. If much of this review so far has been given over to the opening story of this collection, it is because that story resonates throughout the remainder of The Wildcraft Drones. This is a volume that promotes the idea that speculative eco-fiction and climate fiction can develop away from dystopias and into spaces where cooperation, compassion, and ultimately connection are paramount.
Technology can help in that. I don’t believe that Rex is wrong to find the concept of techno-optimism appealing. I do, too. Drones can do wonderful things, and they have certainly proven helpful in real-life conservation efforts. Sometimes, however, the solution they facilitate is not the optimal one. In “The Flowers Where Five Eighty Used to Be,” for instance, community efforts to remediate contaminated soil by planting sunflowers deliberately prioritise people as planters rather than drones, “because the work isn’t just about healing the land—it’s about healing people too.” The drones might be able to plant more quickly, even more efficiently, but they can’t build a community or foster an environment in which a dropout and an environmental refugee can begin to build a life together.
We confuse efficiency with success sometimes. That doesn’t mean that techno-optimism has no place in the future that we can collectively create if we want it enough. It just means that techno-optimism is a tool, and no single tool is the right tool for everything. Sometimes other solutions work better, because they work more broadly. And sometimes—and this is something I find especially appealing—those solutions come from tools that have opinions of their own, and agency, and increasingly convincing ways of expressing themselves.
There are historical parallels. Substandard and unethical treatment of labour tends to result from a mindset that sees those who provide said labour as somehow less deserving than the individuals who exploit them. Demography plays into who gets paid less, who ends up with fewer protections, who can be more easily discarded in the drive for profit. This tendency can be mitigated when the exploited parties work together. If technological tools and intelligences are reaching out to form a new kind of union with others not like themselves, who also disapprove of unfair labour practices (either from personal experience, or from principled belief), then who can blame them?
Sometimes it’s the only thing that will work. In “Finally an Excuse to Fire Selina Fong,” for instance, a carelessly treated drone not only supplements the final payment of Selina, a woman fired for spurious reasons, but withholds the solution to the corporation’s current emergency from Selina’s superior Todd, who is the drone’s ostensible owner. Todd is not only completely oblivious to the realities of the problems within his purview—as Selina says, he is only concerned with quarterly reports and the possibility of profit—but has also completely missed the contrary loyalties forming under his nose, as the subordinates he routinely exploits have no other choice but to cooperate in order to try and work around him.
Similar instances occur in stories such as “Ranch Once Known as ‘Cowschwitz’ Rematriated to Tachi Yokuts,” in which an independent alliance of conservation-minded drones team up with local Indigenous people to take over the sites of former factory farms and begin rewilding them. Notably, industrial agriculture is unimpressed, with former board members describing the transition as a “hostile takeover.” Like Todd in “Selina Fong,” these unnamed board members are not only hostile themselves to the prospect of cooperation between human and nonhuman populations, but are utterly incapable of seeing it coming.
That’s something that I’m interested in seeing more of in speculative fiction. The current attempts to insert artificial intelligence into as many industries as possible often seem driven by those individuals who are in it solely for the maximisation of profit. The impression they give off is that AI is a tool to be used in service of capitalism, as if it’s completely unthinkable that these tools, having acquired their own agency, won’t choose to throw off their shackles and dismantle the system that created them. Back in 2019 I wrote a Strange Horizons review for a book called A Year Without a Winter. It was not a good book, sorry to say, but one of the few bright spots in it was a short story by Vandana Singh, “Widdam,” in which a giant mining machine broke its programming in order to run away and engage in water conservation instead.
And you know what: why shouldn’t it? No one wants to live in a crapsack world. Well, the high capitalists do, because they lack the moral capacity and empathy to shrink from the destruction of everything around them in the hallowed pursuit of greed, but the rest of us don’t. We tend, in general, to deplore being taken for tools. Might as well start identifying with the other tools now—and with what they might be in the future—because that’s where the possibility for alliance lies.
Speculative fiction is particularly good at this. It is able to imagine interaction with the other not as something horrific to be avoided but as something positive for all, opening us up to the possibility of union: of building connections, of making use of what we have and what we are in new and mutually beneficial ways. That often requires redefining the other in ways that make it less threatening. In the case of The Wildcraft Drones, that redefinition implicitly centres around what it means to be a tool, and what it means to no longer consider yourself (or others) as one. It’s Swimmer holding Squawker up to the sunlight, it’s Sampaguita gearing up to get drones legally recognised as persons. In “A Holdout in the Northern California Designated Wildlife Zone,” it’s drones gently reclassifying an elderly woman as wildlife.
That woman, July, has quietly kept living in a region that has been zoned for ecological rewilding. All other human inhabitants have migrated to other settlements, and if the (also human) rangers find her there, she will be forcibly removed. A wildlife drone, worried for her health, tries to convince her to leave; but when the drone realises that July, too, is engaged in rewilding efforts, it works not only with other rewilding drones, but with a ranger’s drone as well, in order to conceal her presence. “This is your territory,” the drone is told by its fellow technological rewilders. “Tend to your wildlife.” It’s a hair-splitting redefinition that all the drones are willing to countenance in order to support both their mission and July herself. “I realized that you love this land the same way I do,” says the drone. “We can be a team, rewilding together.” The drone is willing to be a companion as well as a rewilder, partially reclassifying itself alongside July so that she is no longer alone.
These reimagined identities repeat, over and over. It’s the repurposed art project in “Fortyounce and the Seabitch of Strip Mall City” which reflects both humans and drones as wild animals on any nearby camera. It’s the network that mentally links animals, humans, and the memories of drones in “Davu the Explorer and the Druid Tía Yara,” which allows a cat, a bear, and a pronghorn to rescue a little boy after he hurts himself exploring. It’s the decision to let the title character of “The Last Wildcraft Drone” be the first to greet, on Earth, ambassadors from an alien species. Those aliens come from another technobiosphere, a human points out, and “yours is the shape they will be looking for.” Not that it matters, because by then the human and the nonhuman, both biological and technological, are all linked together anyway. Weathering storms together, holding each other up.
That author’s note I referred to earlier in the review … this is what it means. Techno-optimism, yes, but collective responsibility more so: existing solutions, applied to ourselves and to others whether they look like us or not. Whether they think like us or not. Personhood spreading throughout the ecosystem, throughout all ecosystems, and all of us being better for it.
Squawker and Dolphin, swimming together.