Christine Brooke Rose and the Science of Fiction: Rethinking Conceptual Writing and Artificial Intelligence in Xorandor
ABSTRACT This article discusses how Christine Brooke Rose's 1984 novel Xorandor grew out of a conventional science fiction story intended for pseudonymous publication. Her distinct priorities as an experimental writer adopting grammatical and syntactical constraints manifest themselves in her revisionary appropriation of the science fiction genre. She decided to rewrite the draft of her novel entirely in dialogue, accepting SF characters as representative rather than individualized. The book's narrators are adolescent twins who uncover explanations for events in retrospect, when in traditional "hard SF" (stories that strictly adhere to invented scientific principles) exposition prefigures the narrative action. With this setup, Brooke Rose crafts a narrative about a silicon creature discovered on Earth that uses English and programming language to converse with humans. The young adult narrators interacting with a living computer stages a fascinating reflection on how we humanize technology and how artificial intelligences imperfectly imitate our ways of knowing and communicating.