Under the eye of the big bird by Hiromi Kawakami, translated from Japanese and published in the UK by Granta on the 16 January, is a disconcerting read. The book picks up and runs with many of the issues faced by ecosocialists, and traces through some of the logics of an “anthropocene” age in which technology, which seems to provide solutions to the destruction of nature as a set of tools wielded by human beings to protect themselves, actually ends up the master.

Here, then, there are themes of environmental catastrophe over long time, something which is often the stuff of technologically-obsessed “hard sci-fi,” but these themes are combined with current anxieties about what the difference is between human intelligence and artificially algorithm-driven mechanisms.

Nature

You are landed in the middle of different kinds of weird community, with sentient beings doing all kinds of puzzling and strange things to each other, but bit by bit the apparently separate stories are neatly knitted together – perhaps a little too neatly – and along the way we are treated to images of the world that enable you to take a distance from the way things are now. This, after all, is one of the gifts of good science fiction writing, something which marks it out from the cliché-ridden pop sci-fi yarns which tend merely to ideologically confirm what we think we are and what we are capable of.

Good sci-fi challenges rather than confirms present-day images of what “human nature” is under capitalism, challenges the idea that is drummed into us, that human beings are “naturally” and inevitably competitive, as if “man is wolf to man” and women are the ever-present immediate victims of such wired-in aggression. Science fiction should take us somewhere completely different, help us to step back, imagine another world, at least imagine that another world is possible.

That does not mean that this kind of fiction should reassure us, lull us into the idea that everything is going to be ok, that we will be harmoniously at one with nature, but instead to tease out what some of the difficulties are of engaging with nature, “metabolising” it as Marx once described this kind of engagement.

Under the eye of the big bird reflects in an innovative way on the fear of and sometimes even hostility to nature, an aspect of the “metabolic rift” that is opened up under capitalism, a political-economic system that tells that we should exploit the earth just as we exploit each other. The different interwoven stories show us different ways of “metabolising” nature, and also show us some of the kinds of anxiety and anger that is provoked among those who cannot deal with difference, with what it is to live with difference, with different kinds of being.

Technology

The “science” aspect of this kind of writing often invites the crassest appeal to technological fixes for human-caused problems. That is one of the intriguing things about Under the eye of the big bird. Technology in these future worlds is embedded in different ways in the life-worlds of those who are making use of it. We are given an insight into how technology is not necessarily an alienating “reified” (thing-like) force that is set against us, but is created by us and reflects our present-day concerns.

Not to give things away, for it is the puzzling and linking together of the stories that is part of the joy of the book – you will spend much of the time gasping, “what!” – but these are different worlds that are, it becomes clear, extensions, elaborations of our own. And, as a consequence, there are some lessons about where we are headed if we do not try, as part of our ecosocialist politics, to begin to prefiguratively heal that metabolic rift, come to terms with what we are as beings that can make technology work for us instead of against us.

This novel is as much about what is “artificial” about AI as it is about what is “natural” about it. Under the eye of the big bird is a useful counterpoint and perhaps complement to arguments that artificial intelligence must operate as “the eye of the master,” as it does indeed under capitalism now.

One of the nice things about the book is how interwoven together the lives and technologies of these beings are, as if Kawakami has taken to heart Marx’s argument that the human being is always linked to other, always social, that we are, as Marx puts it, but an “ensemble of social relations.” This is not an explicitly ecosocialist book as such, but it is a place to lose yourself and think in a different way about what politics we need.

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