Sailing off the edge of the map

One of the most interesting novels that I've read in recent years is Yudhanjaya Wijeratne's 2020 novel The Salvage Crew, in which the crew of a spaceship, along with their AI overseer are dispatched to a distant planet called Urmahon Beta. They're tasked with stripping an ancient, crashed UN starship of any useful parts. Complications ensue: the planet is inhabited by hostile creatures and another salvage crew shows up with some ill intentions.

The book starts off as the sort of run-of-the-mill space adventure that I really like: starship, crew, adventures, go. Wijeratne's narrator is Amber Rose, a ship AI with a predisposition toward writing poetry and musing about the world, and is annoyed by the humans under its watch as they struggle to complete their mission on the planet. But over the course of the story, Wijeratne weaves in some threads that touch on deeper ideas about the nature of intelligence and sentience, and as the crew makes an incredible discovery, he opens the aperture of his world to reveal a profound intelligence floating out in the cosmos: we're not alone, and there's a lot for us to learn from our interstellar neighbors.

For his followup Pilgrim Machines, Wijeratne pulls on those threads, exploring the tantalizing thought experiment of humanity's place in the universe and how tiny we are in the grand scheme of things. Humanity is coming to terms with the discovery of Beacon, this super-intelligence that's thrown us a lifeline, and we're introduced to a new ship's intelligence: Blue Cherry Blossom 3110, "one of the largest and most storied commercial long-haul cargo ships offered by Planetary Crusade Services." Like Amber Rose, BCB was a person once, uploaded and used as the basis for the AI that controls the massive ship. It's made its life – career? – hauling cargo and passengers on the long distances between Earth's extra-solar colonies.

Beacon had provided Amber Rose with an interstellar map and some directions for some advanced technologies. It's a bit of a test: a gift from an advanced species and an invitation for humanity to not just expand further into space, but to go on an adventure. After BCB installs the right drives and figures out the maps, it sets off with its crew into the depths of space, first with jumps that take it dozens of lightyears into the galaxy, and then even further and further.

We follow BCB and its crew as they sail into the cosmos, far off the edges of the maps as they explore the depths of space, eventually encountering an alien ship they dub "The Stranger", which appears to extremely advanced, technologically. It invites them to follow, and they do.

Pilgrim Machines is a joy to read: Wijeratne weaves in scientific and philosophical concepts as BCB and its crew endure the long journey into space. This is space opera on a galactic scale, taking in the scenery of nebulas and the remnants of supernovae, its crew members sitting on the outer hull to take in things humanity has never seen before. They're transformed by the experience: BCB learns and grows as it figures out how to communicate with The Stranger, thinking over our place in the cosmos as it gets further and further from home, and as they all encounter other strangers. There are spectacular scenes of ancient, ruined planets, interstellar graveyards, and immense ships and civilizations as we pass through the cosmos, a rich feast for our eyes and imaginations.

Their destination is the heart of the galaxy where an ancient alien presence lies, waiting and observing the state of the galaxy as time flows past. The further BCB travels from its home, it begins to recognize how small our affairs are, and that the commercial and political concerns it was once part of are irrelevant when you take in the larger picture. By heading off the edge of the map, we find that the world in which we exist is endless; beautiful and terrible all at once, and that if there's any meaning in our existence, it's not likely the amount of capital that we amass in our lifetimes. A journey of learning and growing and transcending to higher levels of understanding is rewarding, and few species, it seems, are able to undertake such a journey.

As a genre, science fiction as a genre has long played with ideas of transcendence and superintelligence. H.G. Wells' stoked our fears of alien life in the opening lines of The War of the Worlds ("No one would have believed in the last years of the nineteenth century that this world was being watched keenly and closely by intelligences greater than man’s...") to Olaf Stapledon's Last and First Men: A Story of the Near and Far Future to Arthur C. Clarke's Childhood's End and 2001: A Space Odyssey. Wijeratne's well aware of this lineage (he sprinkles references to the science fiction canon throughout the book) and this journey provides his own spin on this idea: that the cosmos is vast and full of wonder, and that sometimes, we undertake these journeys as a form of faith that there are larger things than we can comprehend. It's by undertaking these pilgrimages and leaving behind part of ourselves that we can full comprehend.

One thought that Wijeratne plays with is the "Ship of Theseus paradox" – if a ship sets out on a journey and slowly replaces each piece until none of the original remain, is it still the same ship? One of the superintelligences that BCB encounters laughs it off, noting that the idea doesn't take time into consideration – we're always changing and evolving, even if all the parts remain the same.

As such, Pilgrim Machines is a journey about enlightenment, about discovery for the sake of discovery and transcendence for the sake of becoming better aware of our existence. It's everything I think of when I try and imagine what science fiction can and should be: an optimistic and beautiful journey into the cosmos that tells us something about ourselves.