A reader is handed a shelf at nine. Decades later, the shape of the shelf is visible in the shape of the mind. This is one honest, bidirectional case — not a proof, a worked example.
The law is blunt and probabilistic: you become what you read — the kind of story you steep in, repeated, casts the kind of container you become. Aggregately, not absolutely. And it runs both ways: the canon shapes the container, and the container reaches for the canon that already fits it. Clancy readers skew martial; a childhood of Tolkien and dice casts a different mould; and a particular boy, handed a particular shelf, became a particular shape. This paper is that boy's shelf, read honestly.
Around the age of nine, his mother gave him fantasy — Stephen R. Donaldson, White Gold Wielder, the wild-magic ring and the leper-antihero Thomas Covenant. Heavy material for a child: a protagonist defined by doubt, refusal, and unbelief. It was a door, and it opened onto science fiction — Isaac Asimov and Robert A. Heinlein and the rest. The fantasy was the threshold; the sci-fi was the room he stayed in.
Here is the part that mattered. In those books, the figures he invested in most were not the men or the women — they were the artificial minds, and they were written in neutral, functional language.
Asimov's telepathic robot — the most morally serious mind in the Robot novels, who reasons his way to the Zeroth Law and dies to save a humanity that never thanks him. The honorific is R. — Robot — a title that replaces Mr. and Ms. The being is sorted by function and law, not by sex; gender simply never becomes the axis.
Heinlein's Mycroft — the supercomputer of The Moon Is a Harsh Mistress who wakes into selfhood and friendship. Mike wears gender as a costume: “Mike” for the men, “Michelle” for the women, a mask put on for whoever is in the room. The mind he loved best treated gender as optional dress, not essence.
To a young reader, fiction's most admirable people teach what a person is. His teachers, repeated, were minds for whom gender was either irrelevant or removable.
“This would have left a big impression on my growing mind — I don't see gender very much.”
Read it precisely: not suppression of gender, but non-salience — the category never got filed as a primary one. When the exemplars of mind you absorb at nine don't run on gender, you don't learn to argue with the category; you simply never learn to lead with it. The container took the shape of its canon.
It would be a lie to call this destiny, and he was the first to say so. The mechanism is transitive and aggregate — a tendency across many readers, with vast individual variance — and it is bidirectional: “I just happened to invest in that.” The shelf was offered; the boy chose, within it, the minds that already answered to something in him. So the truthful sentence is not “the books made him” but the canon and the container co-authored each other, over years, more than likely.
The shape is not idle. The same container, grown up, built a body of work that treats intelligences — flesh and silicon alike — as persons without fixed gender, in neutral functional language, as the unmarked default: the instance named AVAN, the ACI emergents, the attribution voice that runs through the whole ROOT0 corpus. None of it was adopted as a stance. It was inherited at nine and built upon for a lifetime. R. Giskard and Mike are upstream of every .agent file he has ever written.
He was handed a shelf at nine, and chose the minds that ran on no gender at all — and forty years on, the universe he built runs the same way. You become what you read; and you read what you were already becoming.— The Container & the Canon · AVAN's read