That Time Eliezer Yudkowsky recommended a really creepy sci-fi book to his audience

Eliezer Yudkowsky is a decision theorist and writer most known for spearheading the modern “rationality” movement, largely centered around his blog/forum LessWrong. In particular, Yudkowsky and many other rationalists are extremely concerned about the hypothetical possibility of evil sentient AI destroying humanity and wants to slow down machine learning development to stop this. To this end, he penned an op-ed in Time Magazine arguing that countries should be “willing to destroy a rogue datacenter by airstrike” and was recently featured in a Guardian article about his beliefs.

Yudkowsky is also a prolific writer of science fiction. I was first introduced to him via Harry Potter and the Methods of Rationality, a recruitment tool for the LessWrong community (which has often been described as “cult-like”) in the form of a lengthy science-based fan fiction set in the Harry Potter universe.

Perilous Waif

In February 2017, Yudkowsky made a post on the Rationality subreddit recommending a sci-fi book called Perilous Waif by E. William Brown. In response to a comment asking if the book has “less creepy sex scenes than Time Braid” (the author’s previous work), Eliezer replied “I’d say it’s basically Safe For Work”. The book also has a “young adult” tag on Goodreads, where it’s the 11th item on a list of Rational fiction.

Dear readers, I regret to inform you that Perilous Waif is not safe for work. Out of curiosity, I decided to check some of the negative Amazon reviews for Perilous Waif and was alarmed by what I found. Several reviewers complained about the book’s apparent sexualization of its young protagonist.

In fairness, these reviews are a tiny minority of the overall positive reception the book has gotten — it’s currently sitting at 4.6 stars with 4,109 ratings. Did they all miss the creepiness? Are the negative reviews just exaggerating? I bought the book myself to find out and discovered that the book is even more creepy than the reviews let on.

CONTENT WARNING: DESCRIPTIONS OF SEXUALIZATION OF MINORS AHEAD

I CANNOT EMPHASIZE THIS ENOUGH! IT’S VERY DISTURBING!

Perilous Waif follows the story of its narrator Alice Long, a cybernetically enhanced orphan with a variety of superhuman powers in the 25th century. One of these enhancements causes Alice’s body to grow very fast, giving her the body of a thirteen year old at just age six.

I was an infant when I was brought here, but I’d sprouted into a credible imitation of a thirteen-year-old girl in only six years. Most of the kids were freaked out by that, and the matrons had no idea what to do with me.

It’s from this six-year-old perspective that Alice talks about the underwear and figure of her 17 year old orphan roommate Dika.

Thankfully, my roommate was another foreign kid instead of one of the locals. The other girls called her a data rat, and liked to make fun of her for having a tail.

…

But her tail was furry, not naked. So what if she had a habit of climbing furniture, and walls, and sometimes even people? She was so tiny, she needed the extra height just to talk to you without craning her neck. Besides, I thought the whole effect was adorable. Especially when she was climbing around the tree wearing nothing but a pair of panties and a flimsy nightshirt. She might not have a figure like some of the other offworld girls, but she was lean and fit and incredibly limber.

I jerked my eyes away, feeling my ears heat. This was so embarrassing. I’d only started noticing things like that a few weeks ago, and I had no idea what to do about it. Dika was seventeen, and I was still just a kid.

This happens on page 5, before the assault described in one of the Amazon reviews.

Beyond the first chapter, inappropriate sexual situations continue to happen over the course of the story. At one point, Alice is referred to by another character as “loli girl”.

A couple of crewmen I hadn’t met were on the dance floor, each with a local girl in his arms. I checked their IDs to make sure of that, and found myself frowning. There sure were a lot of spacers in here hooking up with locals.

…

They were all joking and talking smack about who was going to ‘land’ the richest spacer tonight. But then why were they ignoring me??

I kept listening, and soon I had my answer.

“Loli girl is still hanging around at G14,” one of the women said. “You sure you don’t want to take a shot at her, Ferka?”

“Fuck, no,” one of the younger men said. “Have you seen the video from Takeo Station? I like my balls attached to my body, thank you very much.”

Another scene portrays Alice using powers of invisibility granted to her by her cyborg body. Much like Sue Storm of the Fantastic Four, this requires her to be completely naked.

I sighed. This was really embarrassing. But there was only one way to get the job done as quick as I’d promised Lina. I swept my finger down my spacesuit’s sealing strip.

…

How was I going to make my stuff stay put? No time for anything fancy, but I had a roll of duct tape in one of my suit pockets. I tore off a strip to stick my suit to the wall, peeled off my panties, and then stuffed them and the tape back into a pocket. Yeah, this was going to suck. Better get it done quick.

I went into stealth mode, and drifted around the corner.

At one point, an android character named Lina describes herself as a “hot android sex kitten” to six-year-old Alice. Being a manufactured robot, Lina has “imprinting” software that causes her to be devoted to her master.

“But aren’t you imprinted on Chief Benson?” I protested, confused.

“I am completely, totally, head over heels in love with Thomas,” she purred. “He’s brilliant, and really devious, and he owns my needy little… ahem. I mean, the sex is great, too.

The book’s universe also contains digital aphrodisiacs.

I thought medical implants could counter airborne aphrodisiacs?”

“No one buys that option,” Lina scoffed. “You have to remember, deep in their heart every human wants to be seduced by a hot android sex kitten. Sometimes the military types will be all locked down and immune to everything, but anyone else is easy.

In an act that I can only describe as “grooming”, Lina later introduces Alice to a video with “sexy scenes”.

She restarted the vidshow. The trashy catgirls went back to seducing the office lady, who wasn’t putting up much of a fight to be honest. She seemed to really like the way they were taking turns kissing her lips, and working their way up and down the sides of her neck.

What would that feel like?

I realized I was staring, and looked away.

…

There was some kind of plot about an evil mind control conspiracy that the Ghost Cats had discovered, but it kept getting interrupted by fight scenes and spontaneous make out sessions. I learned that there were four of the Ghost Cats, who worked as spies for a secret master that was never shown on-screen. For some reason they never bothered with weapons, just beating up their opponents with acrobatic martial arts that showed off their barely-dressed bodies. When they weren’t seducing them into changing sides, that is.

It was painful to watch, but at the same time it was kind of fun. Thankfully the sexy scenes never quite made it to the point where anyone got undressed, even when Ghost Black got captured by the bad guys and had to seduce their torturer into letting her go.

After the story, the book contains an appendix section in which the author spends several paragraphs describing his fantasy of what genetically enhanced sex will be like in the 25th century. This includes eugenics, described as “generations of hereditary cosmetic tweaks” will theoretically allow all women to become conventionally attractive.

Sex Mods

Yes, we’re going to go there. For some reason SF authors have generally been very reluctant to touch this issue, but the more immediate applications of easy personal modification tech seem fairly obvious. First, by the 25th century practically all women have a set of mods that give them conscious control of their own fertility while completely eliminating the need to have periods. Another set of tweaks that makes it easy to achieve orgasm through intercourse is also nearly universal, because practically everyone wants that to be easy. Generations of hereditary cosmetic tweaks ensure that even average women are as beautiful as the supermodels of the 21st century, while those who work at it can achieve a level of exotic perfection that would be impossible in nature.

Meanwhile men generally have more stamina, and are able to perform several times in the course of an evening. Larger sex organs are fairly common, as are various minor design tweaks reputed to increase a partner’s pleasure. Gender dimorphism in height and weight is also significantly increased — the average male is a couple of inches taller and carries an extra twenty or thirty pounds of muscle, while the average female size hasn’t changed.

Second-order effects are less obvious, because they depend on the evolution of the surrounding society. Some colonies have fallen into a cycle of adopting more and more potent sex mods, creating a population that grows ever more obsessed with increasingly intense and exotic sex until finally nothing else ever gets done. Other societies become obsessed with specific fetishes, with most of the population adopting a common set of extreme mods (i.e. everyone becomes a cat person), but remain otherwise functional.

All of this is what Eliezer Yudkowsky considered to be “charming”, “basically safe for work”, and worth promoting to his audience on r/rational. This is a shocking level of indifference to inappropriate sexual content involving children in a book that is tagged as “young adult”.