The Genesis of Ada's Children
How the video game Horizon Zero Dawn inspired my novel
Welcome back to Glass Half Full. It’s Tuesday, which is the day I post Ramblings, background on my novels, thoughts on writing, climate change, nature, and more. Today, it’s more background on my post-post-apocalyptic* novel, Ada’s Children, which I launched last week. Here’s a little preview of that:
These Ramblings posts will always be free, but from now on the chapters from the novel will be behind a paywall. I imagine it will get annoying if you only want to read the free posts but then also get emails with the beginnings of the paywalled chapters. Or maybe you’re a paid subscriber and you don’t want to receive the free Tuesday posts.
To avoid these frustrations, I’ve created two separate sections, Glass Half Full for the free stuff and Ada’s Children for the novel. Here are the instructions for how to subscribe to particular sections on a stack. (I haven’t tried it out and they seem a little confusing, so I’m keeping my fingers crossed that it works for you.)
With that out of the way, here’s the story of how Ada’s Children got its start.
Earth, the far future. Nature has reclaimed the ruins of our forgotten civilization, but humanity lives on in primitive tribes.
—Horizon Zero Dawn loading screen epigraph
Ada’s Children had its origins in the many hours I spent playing Horizon Zero Dawn. (I’ll get into the reason for those many hours in an upcoming post about solastalgia, loss of a sense of place, and more.) One reason I loved Zero Dawn was the game’s gorgeous rendering of the spectacular landscapes of the American West. Having moved from California to Michigan some years before the game came out, I could visit the landscapes I missed in a relatively cheap and carbon-free way. Virtual reality FTW!
But what was so compelling about the game that it inspired me to model a novel after it? The poignancy of looking back on a lost civilization — in this case, our own.
If you’re not familiar with the game, the premise involves post-apocalyptic tribal people battling robot dinosaurs. I know — weird, right? When my son told me about the game, I was skeptical. Unlike peanut butter and chocolate, these seemed like two great tastes that couldn’t possibly go great together. I wouldn’t even call the idea of robot dinosaurs all that great. And if society has been pushed back to the Stone Age, what are robots doing there? None of it made any sense.
In this new wilderness, they fight for survival against the machines, fearsome mechanical creatures of unknown origin.
The game quickly set out to answer my questions. My skepticism evaporated — probably by the end of the opening cut scene, and definitely after the first bit of gameplay, where we get the first clues about what happened to the old world. In fact, the question of why primitive peoples coexist with robot dinosaurs becomes the central mystery that you unravel as you go through the game. I found that mystery gripping, not to mention the way the writers dropped a trail of clues to pull me along. (Kudos to narrative director John Gonzalez!)
The story focuses on Aloy, an orphan and an outcast of the Nora tribe, raised by another outcast, Rost. No one will tell her why she is shunned, or who her parents were. As she pursues those mysteries, she finds they’re entwined with larger ones: what happened to the Metal World? (That’s the Nora name for our own civilization.) Who or what creates the omnipresent animal-inspired robots, modeled after not just dinosaurs like velociraptors and T-Rexes, but also horses, cows, bighorn sheep, crocodiles, hawks, eagles, bears, and more? What are these machines for? Why have they become more aggressive and dangerous in recent years (starting around the time of Aloy’s birth)? When Aloy discovers an image of a woman from the ancient past who looks exactly like her, and then realizes that this resemblance has made her a target for assassination by a group of machine-worshipping religious zealots, the mysteries only deepen.
As Aloy travels the landscape of the game, at first a compressed and gorgeous representation of the Colorado Rockies and ruined Front Range cities, the player is bound to notice the remains of the Old World — skyscrapers decayed into lattices of rusted steel, crumbling statues, fragments of freeway overpasses. All this adds to the picturesque feel of the game, like a Greek ruin in a pastoral landscape painting. But very early on, we’re also confronted with the remains of robotic machines that are far different from the mechanical creatures that always attack Aloy if she gets too near. One is a bus-sized box with piston-like legs. Another looks something like a giant scorpion. And the largest is a gigantic monstrosity with multiple tentacle-like arms that engulfs All Mother Mountain. It gradually becomes clear that the apocalypse was of the killer robot variety.
But more compelling for me than all the battles with machines (both new and old) were the little tidbits from the ancient world. These data points are sometimes hologram or video messages, but more often just text messages or articles showing how technology developed from our own time to the time of the robot apocalypse (2064-66). Sometimes they’re cute, like the messages between one partner at home struggling with a food printer spraying goop all over the kitchen, while the other partner is late getting home because their auto-bot keeps taking weird routes. One wonders how the robots were able to destroy everything if this was the state of AI and robotics just a few years before the apocalypse.
The most compelling of these data points are the letters home from soldiers fighting against the machine plague. Or the snippets of conversation between soldiers engaged in a battle they know they’re going to lose. Or the very first messages you come across in an underground bunker: audio journals from people on the brink of committing suicide before the killer robots arrived. Soon, every time I came across a carcass of one of those ancient machines, I was filled with horror and dread, mixed with pity for the people who had to face them.
I kept those feelings in mind when I turned to writing my own post-post-apocalyptic novel. The question was, could I develop that same sense of mystery about what happened to destroy our civilization? (Hint: it’s not specifically a robopocalypse, at least not the kind where robots set out to destroy all of humanity.) Could I parcel out the clues to the fate of that civilization in as elegant and tantalizing a manner as the writers of Zero Dawn had? I hope I’ve succeeded, but you’ll have to be the judge of that as you read it.
Another goal was to depict a future tribal society as favorably, or more favorably, than Zero Dawn had. One of the drawbacks of the game for me is that it can easily promote a culturally superior viewpoint toward “primitive” people. The prime example is Aloy herself. Because she was shunned by the Nora for no good reason, she has little patience for any tribe’s superstitions, taking the role of an atheist or rationalist. This cultural superiority is reflected in players’ comments in fan forums, where there’s an implicit ranking of the different tribes in terms of how technological they are.
But the game itself is actually more subtle than that, giving each tribe pluses and minuses, some areas where they have accurate interpretations of the ancient ones and others where they’re way off base. The Nora, for instance, combine what actually happened in the past (people relying on machines for more and more of daily life until the machines turned against them) with myth (the goddess All Mother defeating the Metal Devil at All Mother Mountain). Plus, their society seems much more admirable, on the whole, than many of the other tribes, especially the more literate and technologically advanced Carja, who have only recently given up slavery and human sacrifice.
Riding around the Nora lands, hunting the abundant game, not having to worry about predators (except those pesky machines), it all seems pretty idyllic. This is a mostly egalitarian matriarchal society, with men and women participating equally in the Proving to become “braves” (a term whose etymology is explained at the end of the game). It’s a diverse world in which racism as we know it doesn’t exist, only tribal animosity. Political power accrues based on age, not wealth, strength, heredity, popularity, or other even more arbitrary features.
With my future people, I also tried to create an idyllic setting with a mostly egalitarian matriarchy living in an abundant landscape. Like the Nora, they’re hunter-gatherers. The reasons for that abundance, and the fact that these people never face starvation or overpopulation, are explained as the novel goes on. Instead of All Mother, their goddess is named Ada. Mysterious beings known only as Ada’s Helpers aid in childbirth, the risks of which are one of the greatest drawbacks to life without modern medicine.
But every Eden has to have its thorns. I gave it some serious drawbacks, so that my main characters, Sila and Jun, would have something to struggle against and a reason to discover what lies beyond the circumscribed landscape they call home. (In doing so, I probably relied too heavily on largely discredited hunter-gatherer stereotypes, but that’s the subject of another essay.) And of course I had to make Sila a kickass female hero, to match Aloy in the game.
My people are completely cut off from any knowledge of the old world, except for a rumor passed along by a weird old hermit. No electronic datapoints in this place! That being the case, how could I give the reader that glimpse of what happened to destroy the previous civilization?
I opted for a separate, interwoven timeline beginning in 2040, following the fortunes of Carol, an English professor put out of work by AIs. This timeline opens with Carol and two friends on election night, watching in horror as a worse-than-Trump candidate wins the presidential race. Always an activist, Carol struggles in various ways against the creation of racial homelands, the ongoing climate crisis, and the impending nuclear war between Russia, China, and the US over the ice-free Arctic. When an AI takes control to rescue the planet from humans, and humans from themselves, she thinks it’s probably a good idea. But humans being humans, they resist, leading to ever-increasing draconian measures by this new AI overlord. Finally, Carol is pushed into an impossible choice, one that helps create the future world that Sila and Jun inhabit.
I said at the outset that I was going for poignant. One of my beta readers was moved to tears by these later sections, so maybe I’ve succeeded. I’m hoping many of you will have the same reaction! (I know, sadistic authors, what’s to be done with us?)
The big question Horizon Zero Dawn asks is, to what lengths should one go to save not just humanity, but life on Earth? Without spoilers, I’ll just say the lengths presented in the game are extreme, and inhumane. But as a subset of that, it also asks, is human civilization worth saving? And the implicit answer is, yes!
I’m also asking that kind of question in Ada’s Children. Looking around at everything humans are doing right now, both to each other and to the planet, it’s tempting to feel we’d be better off if an extinction-level asteroid put us out of our misery. Life on the planet would probably carry on fine without us. There’s also a strain in climate activism that views collapse of modern civilization as inevitable, and maybe even desirable. How such a collapse would work without millions of people dying, along with even more of the natural world, I can’t imagine.
I used to think that way, too, maybe because that kind of calamity seemed so far in the future, and therefore the grim details appeared so foggy. Or maybe because I have adult children who will have to live with whatever consequences are coming down the pike far longer than I will. So my answer these days is, yes, let’s save as much of civilization and life on this planet as we can. That’s what the AI in Ada’s Children sets out to do.
Thanks for reading! If you enjoyed this post, I hope you’ll consider giving it a like, a share, or even a subscription. Coming on Friday is Chapter 4 of Ada’s Children. And next Tuesday’s free post will take on solastalgia, my family’s move from California to Michigan, why I spent so much time playing this video game, and more.
*If you’re not familiar with the term, it’s used to distinguish this type of story from those immediately after the apocalypse, like The Last of Us or The Road. A post-post-apocalyptic story is set farther in the future, when most of the horrible stuff is over and some sort of new society has come into being.