[Wolsak & Wynn; 2024]
Think about the last time you walked through a big city. Perhaps it was a grand European city graced by neoclassical mansions and broad boulevards, meticulously planned by Emperor’s architects and built by workers imported from the provinces. Or perhaps it was a midwestern American city with shopping centers, McMansions, four-lane highways, and overpasses. Either way, you’ll see carefully cultivated displays of organic life. The grand European city will be filled with lavish gardens dedicated to various princes and military generals, with manicured bushes and botanical collections. The midwestern city will have acres and acres of lawns, invasive status symbols maintained by cheap labor and millions of gallons of water. But if you look down at your feet, at the cobblestones or the cracks in the sidewalk, you’ll see these gardens gently—or not so gently—pushing back. Blades of grass grow in the crevices between buildings. Moss nestles into the gaps between the cobblestones. Trees planted by city planners take matters into their own branches, their roots cracking the concrete sidewalks and their limbs obstinately blocking street signs and scratching cars. The uncanny liveliness of organic life always creeps, like vines, over the walls of the city.
In her famous essay “A Cyborg Manifesto,” originally published in Socialist Review in 1985, feminist science studies scholar Donna Haraway speculated on the imaginative potential of the cyborg for radical thinkers. In the essay, Haraway attempted to reclaim the militarized image of the hybrid cyborg as an “ironic political myth” that could be useful to feminists and Marxists. Although the cyborg was a product of military cybernetic research, she suggested that its hybrid nature offered a means to resist the dichotomies and determinisms that undergird patriarchy, racism, and capitalism. The cyborg is a “creature of a postgender world,” one “committed to partiality, irony, intimacy, and perversity.” And unlike Adam or Eve, the cyborg is always already artificial and thus cannot dream of returning to the state of pure nature represented by the Biblical Garden of Eden. “The cyborg would not recognize the Garden of Eden,” she wrote,” it is not made of mud and cannot dream of returning to dust.”
Ben Berman Ghan’s debut novel opens with this passage from “A Cyborg Manifesto” and undertakes, in what follows, to prove Haraway wrong: not by showing that the cyborg is not artificial, but by suggesting that the garden has never been natural. The Years Shall Run Like Rabbits begins with a miracle: the blossoming of a new garden on the moon. Meticulously planted by a mysterious Gardener—the first of many instances of classic sci-fi capitalization—from the future, the Moon is transformed from a dead rock into a beautiful yet uncanny site of organic overabundance, of life that refuses to die:
Imagine history as a line that now spreads new branches. In the old one the moon is a dead, vacant pearl, and progress on Earth marches forward unmoved. Nature remains unchallenged; the dead die as they always did. People closed their eyes and dreamed nothing would change, and nothing did. But now? The Gardener plants its seeds, and that history falls away. Now, as we sleep, a new world blooms above us. Now, as we sleep, the future is changed.
New cities, new political tensions, and new dangers grow out of the garden on the Moon. In striking prose, Ghan carries his readers through centuries of apocalypse and rebirth, often focusing on events in his home city of Toronto. His narrators include a brave little toaster and a hologram, but the novel primarily follows Daisy, who is at various points a girl, a cyborg, a garden, and, finally, an entire world.
A writer and editor from Toronto, Ghan has published several short stories, poems, and novellas that experiment with speculative science fiction. The city of Toronto looms over his work; his 2019 short story collection What We See In the Smoke was also set in the Canadian metropolis. Ghan’s primary aim in The Years is to explore the relationship between organic life and artificial technology. What is the difference between a machine and an animal? Could computer programs ever develop consciousness? Are ecosystems or planetary systems “alive” in any sense? As in much recent writing, the possibility of sentient artificial intelligence is central to answering these questions. The recent explosion of generative AI like ChatGPT has elicited a flood of critical writing about AI. Tech developers often turn to science fiction for inspiration, while board members at Open AI worry about a “singularity event” in which AI becomes conscious and decides to destroy us all. Somehow this doesn’t seem to stop those same Silicon Valley executives from developing even more AI. But, luckily, Ghan’s exploration of AI is much more interesting than any conference sponsored by Google or OpenAI.
Despite Ghan’s visible engagement with recent eco-feminist and queer critics, the book I found myself thinking of most often as I read The Years was Dan Simmons’s Hyperion (1989), a novel belonging to a more traditional school of epic science fiction. Both novels explore futures in which AI has evolved on a theological scale. Both are deeply invested in British literary history and the particularities of the city of London in replicated worlds. Both involve a future race of humans sending something terrifying and beautiful back from the future into the past in the hope of changing the course of history. The Years Shall Run Like Rabbits is perhaps what Hyperion could have been if Simmons had been reading Haraway’s “Cyborg Manifesto” rather than Norbert Wiener’s Cybernetics. Ghan’s experimental prose lacks the immediacy of Simmons’s more accessible writing. But like Hyperion, The Years exemplifies the power of science fiction to explore of the edges of experience where the artificial, the natural, and the sacred come together. In The Years Shall Run Like Rabbits, Ghan succeeds in transforming the nightmare of the present into a future that, however strange, extends a promise of new creation.
Throughout The Years, Ghan experiments with the city and the garden as two distinct models of “artificial” intelligence. Since antiquity, the city has been imagined as a self-organizing system, capable of great intelligence within its walls and great cruelty to those without. Popular sites for theorizing the city include the ancient democracy of Athens, the city states of the Renaissance, and New York, the city that never sleeps. For Ghan, it is Toronto, now controlled by a “Mother” AI, defending those within and cruelly torturing those without. Her primary directive—“Be the city. Prevent chaos within the city, protect human life within the city”—inevitably means creating chaos and suffering outside the city. Morgan, Daisy’s once-girlfriend, helps build a virtual reality program called “the City Below” that replicates the real Toronto. Morgan’s virtual world opens up the possibility of alternate universes, of images that can become sentient, of a refuge from cruelty in the city above. Imagined as a resource for rehabilitation and creativity, it is unsurprisingly repurposed by the Mother AI for catastrophic scenario testing.
Meanwhile, the new garden on the Moon is described by its creators as an “organic machine.” In this speculative future, gardens have become the key to post-extinction and terraforming:
Each century, one Ivory Watcher, one post-human of the future, enters that garden, where no others of its kind would go. With delicate fingers, it plucks the fruits from fragile branches, and with no mouth to consume, slowly crushes the red fruit between its hands, letting glimmering seeds fall to the earthy floor of the garden, letting black juices from within the fruit stain its white hardened flesh, mixing, fusing, changing and infusing that one individual with the protocols that the collective refers to as the “post-extinction machine” ready to be fired at a new planet, to populate it with endless human matter.
Ghan weaves together technical jargon and strikingly erotic organic language to depict the cyborg post-human as it goes forth and multiplies. This is one of several passages that evokes the Biblical Garden of Eden, as Ghan insists on the affinity between the cyborg and the garden. Even outside of speculative fiction, gardens are always cultivated cooperations between humans, plants, animals, machines, insects, microbes, and climate systems. Rather than an old-fashioned remnant of a patriarchal system to be left behind, the garden offers a new paradigm for thinking about human life on earth.
The city, too, occupies a liminal space between the natural and the artificial, shaped by human hands but often evolving beyond our direct control. But if both are cyborg intelligences, the differences between the city with its borders and the garden with its irrepressible growth bring conflict to the novel. The “Mother” AI of Toronto sends her cyborg daughter Daisy to destroy the new form of life in the Moon’s garden, yet eventually the Gardener takes up residence within Daisy herself. Many scenes are set in a place called “Arrival,” Toronto’s island airport transformed into an ironically-named prison for refugees from the moon. “Arrival” gives Ghan the opportunity to highlight the immanent fascist potential of political borders and boundaries. Still, the characters return again and again to the city as a space of opportunity and community. Though the political theory of the city tends toward xenophobia, even Earth’s alien visitors seem drawn to the streets of Toronto.
The Years Shall Run Like Rabbits is overflowing with ideas and formal experiments. Its prose veers between technical precision and surrealist dissociation. Several chapters are composed in romantic verse. Others dabble in graphic body horror, mostly detailing dissolution and mutilation of Daisy’s body. As suggested by the title (pulled from a W. H. Auden poem), the story’s temporal scope is vast, stretching from the recent past to the end of time. Following the nonlinear time of the garden, the narrative is scattered. Certain events only make sense a hundred pages after they happen. Frankly, I struggled with this book when I first read it. But I’ve found myself returning to it again and again, flipping through the pages in search of new details, rereading passages that once mystified me. It is a novel that rewards a second read with a much deeper appreciation of its complexity.
Occasionally, Ghan’s prose is overwhelmed by his theoretical commitments. Already, his interlocutors are highlighted through the numerous epigraphs in the book, with references to Donna Haraway, Jacques Derrida, Frank Herbert, Jeff VanderMeer, Gaston Bachelard, Giorgio Agamben, Timothy Morton, and others. Some passages seem designed to signal the influence of a certain theorist, to impose a particular theoretical framework on the story. The novel’s named characters often read as ciphers; they are laboratories for thought experiments, vehicles that drive the plot through the centuries, but not necessarily sympathetic figures. Ironically, it is Made, the robot companion Morgan makes for herself in orbital isolation, that evoked the most visceral emotional response from me.
Still, the final reunion between our star-crossed lovers, Daisy and Morgan, is a powerful moment of intimacy amid the book’s technical prose. After centuries of cyborg modifications, the two women briefly rediscover an older sort of distributed consciousness:
. . . and then our bodies are locked together, and their hands of old mechanics are pulling me into them, and for a moment we are two bodies kissing beneath the memory of pomegranate seeds, bathing each other in the Earthlight. We fall into each other, and join, and lose track of the strict boundaries between different beings. I was wrong when I strode through Toronto, as I so often have been. There was one more fusion waiting for me.
Throughout the book, characters repeat to us, “Death is not the end.” Humans die and return transformed in the Garden world. Cyborgs are built and rebuilt. Just out of frame, millions die in various nuclear disasters on the Earth and its Moon, but their ghosts return to haunt Toronto. The city’s old Mother AI was, in a sinister way, beyond death: “She does not dream of life or death. She dreams of functions and forms, and what belongs, and what does not, what is within, and what is without.” But if Daisy the Gardener has eaten the fruit of life, she also comes to know the inevitability of death in the final pages. The “body of Toronto, that complicated mesh of machine mind and queered ecology, could no longer hold me in its grasp,” she realizes. It has outgrown her. Relinquishing her role as the Gardener, Daisy death brings new life:
The garden is breathing again. The garden is in relief as I let it go, disentangling my vast consciousness from its roots. No longer constrained by my identity, I can feel wildness creeping back, can feel the garden unspooling into the beginnings of a jungle, with life new and undesigned pooling in the fresh ground, and I know I am doing the right thing. . . . There will no longer be gods to control the designs of nature, no human influence on what cannot be influenced. There will be only gardens, and no Gardeners. There will be only wildness.
Ghan offers us an unsettling ending: it is an end to the human, a turn from the cultivation of the garden to the wilderness of the jungle. The nurturing containers of the Gardener and the Mother AI must die to allow wildness to return to the world. There is perhaps an undercurrent of anti-humanism here; the repressed dream of purified nature returns. But maybe this is all we can hope for in an Anthropocene world and a dying universe: rebirth, the ache of love, the thrill of creation, and the inevitable release of death.
Libby O’Neil is a writer and historian from Kansas City. She is currently a PhD candidate in the History of Science and Medicine at Yale writing a dissertation about scientific holism in the twentieth century.
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