Uncanny

It’s such a cliche to say that the year is flying by.

I don’t know that I’m in the mood to write a story right now but I want to tell you instead about a story I’ve wanted to write for some time. I like the idea of a spy, so well embedded in the society they’re spying on, they don’t even realise they’re a spy themselves. Their cover is so flawlessly executed there reakky aren’t actually any clues as to their real nature. Instead it’s the absence of any clues at all that begins to make them feel a little uncomfortable. The notion being the total absence of clues is sometimes a clue.

Part of the thought is to explore the uncanny valley idea. This is a term that I’ve heard used in connection with people’s ability to recognise faces. We see faces in all sorts of things, a cloud, a piece of fruit, a circle with a semicircle inside of it. Oddly, if you draw a really crude 🙂 then we recognise it very easily as a 🙂 and we don’t feel uncomfortable noticing it either. But if you draw something very close to a face but not quite then we feel very uncomfortable. We don’t like to be almost convinced.

That’s why it’s called a valley. We like things that look like faces but if something looks almost like a face then there is a huge drop in how much we like it, once we are convinced it is real we go back to liking it, which is the other side of the valley.

So if you have a robot with a piece of paper googly eyes and a line for a face we can associate with it a little bit. If you draw a better face then we’ll like it a bit more. If you draw a perfect face we’ll absolutely love it unconditionally. But if you draw an almost perfect face and we then we feel a kind of revulsion as we fall into the valley.

That’s sort of the critical idea for the book. This person is an alien spy, they have been installed in an apartment in a city somewhere on the planet and everything about them is brilliant. These are smart aliens, they created a nearly perfect person. So nearly perfect that all of the human beings around the person don’t notice at all, they’re perfectly comfortable interacting with them. But this individual is around themselves enough to notice that something is not quite right. They alone are close enough to fall into the valley.

Their constant exposure to human culture in film, television, in the human beings around them, gradually alerts them to the idea they are not quite the same as the other people that they have met, as the people that they see portrayed in films, and books, and TV. Eventually they begin to feel a sense of revulsion directed to themselves, blank, aimless that’s sort of feeling that something is wrong, that something is not quite right, that the audience have all experienced because we’ve all experienced the uncanny valley we’ve all seen something uncanny.

I think part of the reason I’ve hesitated about actually trying to write it is because how do you translate this idea into something more practical. The TV series about the Moon Knight plays a little with this sort of thing.

One thought is about how the person puts their key into the lock of their apartment door. One day they notice their neighbour’s keyplate has scratches over it. And when they walk up to their own apartment door they can’t help but notice their own key plate doesn’t have any scratches on it. They have never missed putting the key into the lock.

This is where it gets fiddly, because there has to be plenty of doubt but the point is they’re just a little bit too careful. Not in a sort of superhuman manner, after all, anybody could put their key into the lock carefully, but they just never quite vary from a range of behaviour which is just so ever so slightly wrong.

The next day they miss putting the key into the lock on the first try and that’s when the story starts because they fall head first into the uncanny valley and realise there really is a problem. The story goes on to be an internal detective story with the spy trying to work out whether they are or not. Tought when all you have is a strong feeling that perhaps you’re not who you thought you might be..