The Annotated Blake’s 7 - Is Orac Behind Everything?/Series A Farewell

A crazy fan theory from a crazy fan

Orac and the future

As AI becomes more and more a part of our lives in the real world, the depiction of it in twentieth century sci-fi becomes more and more quaint. The heroes of Blake’s 7 are surrounded by such ‘assistants’, but they never use them for the things we do. And the assistants themselves don’t behave like ours.

Picture it - the Liberator is under attack from Federation pursuit ships. Volleys of plasma bolts are slamming into the straining force wall. Suddenly Zen pipes up - ‘Kerr Avon. Three months ago you purchased LEATHER TROUSERS MEDIUM. How many stars would you give this item?’

Similarly, Soolin never snaps, ‘Slave, play ‘Yes Sir I Can Boogie’ by Baccara’. Tarrant doesn’t ever make the request, ‘Orac, set the timer on the air fryer for ten minutes’. (To be fair to Chris Boucher, Box in Star Cops does some of this sort of thing, reserving tables in restaurants, providing weather forecasts, etc.)

Before I get into the specifics of our new Liberator crew member, a little thought about computers in the fictional world of the series. Our heroes are not fazed in the slightest when they meet Zen for the first time, suggesting that talking AI is a common enough thing for them, and something you’d expect to find on a spaceship. But such machines are very rare in the Federation (there’s one at Travis’s court martial, but other than that I can’t think of one). For all its reliance on ‘computer control’ the Federation is staffed by humans (or mutoids) reading off displays and imparting information to their superiors. Does Servalan, for example, ever use an AI, across four series? I can’t think of an instance.

There is an abundance of human staff in the Federation, doing things computers can surely do. Is this make-work for otherwise idle human hands? Slave and Gambit are both high-end products of run-of-the-mill Federation technology; but such handy, time-saving devices are not seen in general. The entire point of ‘The Harvest Of Kairos’ is a critique of the Federation’s reliance on computers. But they are offscreen.

Now, for Orac.

Is Orac bad luck?

Orac should be the answer to all the 7’s prayers, but his arrival is when things start to fall apart for them. (Some might argue the same goes for the Tardis crew after they acquire the Time-Space Visualiser in Terry’s 1965 story ‘The Chase’, which similarly seems like jolly domestic fun until it drops extremely doomy news.)

Unboxing video

Orac is literally oracular, ie ‘a thing that gives authoritative or cryptic advice’. His name is likely Ensor’s little joke. But this means Ensor was well aware of Orac’s nature, the double-edged gift horse/monkey’s paw/gypsy’s curse side of him. There’s a catch of irony to almost all predictions in myth, for obvious storytelling reasons.

Dayna and Avon will later share the reflection that the most irritating thing about Orac is that ‘he’s too useful to destroy’. But is he more trouble than he’s worth?