josselin

a dragonfly
unable to settle
on the grass
     -1690

Translation by Jane Reichhold.

( 俳句 )

One of those thrillers that splits the narrative between two women—both twenty years old, working at the same grubby motel and living in the same apartment, one in 1982 and the other in 2017 trying to solve the mystery of the first one's disappearance—and their stories run so parallel they're basically interchangeable and you start wondering if maybe the author should have only told the story once. It certainly would have cut down on the amount of clunky exposition and awkward dialogue.

The thrills were not thrilling, but the mystery might have been interesting if we weren't getting it from both ends. As it is, not worth the time.

Contains: References to rape, domestic abuse, and child death; descriptions of dead bodies; ghosts.

I will read anything Adrian Tchaikovsky writes, and I read this, where a robot valet makes a decision his programming can't account for and is then thrust out of the safety and predictability of his manor home and into the chaos of the unknown, but it's a book that can't seem to commit to a perspective or tone. I mean:

Inside his decision-making software there were two subroutines in the shape of wolves, and one insisted that he stay, and the other insisted that he could not stay.

Is this robot valet on Tumblr? Nothing in the text justifies such a distracting choice.

This is not a page turner. At one point, I swear to god, Libby predicted it would take me 23 years to finish reading it. But it's Tchaikovsky, and so finish it I did. Even when dealing almost entirely with robots, his science fiction is humanist, concerned with individual choices, with no one person or group being the big bad. Instead the friction comes where systems overlap without comprehension.

Charles, House said at last. We are only following instructions.

This book is a world-building slow burn that examines the overlap of automation and humanity, and comes to a dire—but logical—conclusion.

There's also a short story set before this book that you can read at Reactor: Human Resources by Adrian Tchaikovsky.

Contains: the collapse of human civilization, robot harm and death.