Growing up, I cut my video game teeth on Infocom's text-based games, and one that I was always fascinated by (even though I couldn't do well on it) was a game called Suspended. In Suspended, you played the part of a human trapped in suspended animation who could only see/interact with the world through a number of robots you controlled, each designed with a specific purpose. It was Suspendedthat I kept coming back to as I read The One Who Turned Them On, which explores an alien world through the eyes of the various robots which have been left behind to explore it - or, indeed, to conquer it, as some of them now believe. From a mining robot exploring tremors to a climate-studying computer fascinated by storms to an astrolabe calculating trajectories, O'Reilly does a remarkable job of filtering our perceptions through each of his machines and their own particular sensors, but more than that, he lets each perspective be colored by its purpose and its abilities, making their views of the world fascinatingly and revealingly different from each other. The story is relatively simple - a group of robots attempts to capture the one who activates fallen robots in an effort to understand who (or what) is controlling it - but O'Reilly uses it mainly as a throughline, and instead spends much of his time discussing the planet, or the relationships between the robots, or toying with power dynamics. Those looking for all the answers may be disappointed; O'Reilly leaves much up in the air, and closes with a brief moment that raises more questions than it answers. But that doesn't make the tale any less satisfying, and it's to O'Reilly's credit that he can take essentially single-purpose tools and give them such life, personality, and complexity, and use them to tell such an intriguing and even exciting tale. It's simple science-fiction, but it's satisfying stuff, and I'd be eager to find out what else happens in this strange, abandoned world.
- Josh Mauthe
- Josh Mauthe
