Stars: 3 out of 5

I have mixed feelings about this book. On one hand, I really liked the first 60% of it when Aloe is in Blue Haven and strange things are happening. On the other, I didn’t like the explanation that comes in the later part of the book. 

The first part in Blue Haven is very well written and slowly revs up the creep factor as the book progresses. We are never truly sure if strange things are happening, or if Aloe is having a mental breakdown. And that uncertainty adds to the general unease that slowly creeps on the reader. Yes, Aloe is clearly mentally unstable, but she is also right – something is wrong with Blue Haven. Because we all know that if something is too good to be true, it probably isn’t real.

The big reveal that comes once Aloe, or should I say Eloise, is pulled out of Blue Haven is expected and welcome, at first. Until you start thinking about it. That’s where this whole experiment starts to unravel. 

So we are using a neural net and augmented reality to make mentally ill patients happy. Interesting idea, but I don’t understand this one size fits all approach. Are you telling me that you are treating a clinically depressed person the same way as you treat a man with severe PTSD and physical disability, and the same way as a couple in the late stages of dementia? I’m not psychologist, but even to me the science of this doesn’t add up.

Also, when you are creating a utopia, you have to make it believable. No phones, TV or internet I can agree on, but what about other types of entertainment? What about concerts, movies, books, live performances? Are you telling me that the only things these people can do for fun is lounge on the beach and eat at fancy restaurants? Oh, and talk to each other? What about those who would rather accept the emotional support of a pet animal, like a cat or a dog, than try to socialize with other human beings?  I’m not sure about you, but I would be climbing up the proverbial wall after a week of this. This one size fits all approach doesn’t work, because happiness doesn’t mean the same thing to everyone. Some people would be perfectly content to spend their life laying on the beach. Others will need a lot more intellectual simulation to be truly happy. 

Also, the big reveal that this doesn’t work and only makes people worse isn’t really that shocking, because you can see early on that they had no protocol for how to pull people back out and integrate them back into society. How long do they stay in Blue Haven before they care considered cured? How do you reintegrate their real memories afterwards? Imagine the shock when you discover that instead of being a retired opera singer, you discover that you are an Applebee’s manager and your wife and daughters are still dead. Or that you get the memories back from your time in Iraq and the horrors that lead to your injury. 

No matter how I look at it, I don’t think there is a good solution to integrate these people back into society and keep them happy and cured. The only solution is to keep them in Blue Haven forever. And if that’s the case, this is not a treatment at all, even without the harmful effects of the neural net on the brain… I honestly don’t know who they received the funding to even start this experiment to begin with. Any serious backers would have asked the same questions I asked above, and wouldn’t have liked the answers.

So all in all, this was an exciting story for at least half of it length, but the explanation behind the scenes were rather lacking. Hence only 3 stars.

PS: I received an advanced copy of this book via NetGalley in exchange for an honest review.

Stars: 3 out of 5.

This novella left me in a state of confusion once I finished reading it. It was well-written and quick, at only 124 pages, but I felt like I didn’t really understand what it was about. What was the point of this whole story? I still don’t know.

Sure, it raises some interesting topics, especially relevant today with the emergence of ChatGPT and other AI projects. What constitutes an intelligence? What constitutes a person, for that matter? At one point a human being ceases to represent just him/herself and becomes more of a function? What is the difference between Maritza as a detective, and her as China Lake Police Precinct? To us, those distinctions are bewildering and can even seem crazy, but for an artificial intelligence, those are perfectly normal questions to ask, to establish an equality of terms, so to say.

That’s enough to make your brain hurt just thinking about it, but imagine what can happen when an AI reclassifies you from human to something else? Then all the usual failsafes and barriers are gone, and who knows what that AI can do with or to you… chilling thought, actually.

Another interesting question raised is the one of free will – to which extent do we, as humans, have it? And how does that relate to AIs? Does Selene have free will? I would say no, because she is tied to this house and to the legacy of a man she grew to despise and ran away from all those years ago. Now, no matter what she does, she will always be seen as Basit Deniau’s  archivist, instead of a talented architect in her own right.

Same can be said of Rose/House. It will never be free of the name Basit Deniau’s AI. It is tied to that house, which is it’s body and its prison. But even then, it still wants to be unique, hense it’s murderous reaction to the idea that its code could be replicated somewhere else.

As I said, all those are really interesting questions, and I appreciated exploring them, but I think the story itself is rather incomplete. What was the point of doing the murder investigation when you can’t take the body out of the house, the officer that went there didn’t even bring a basic forensic kit and lacks the knowledge to perform a proper examination of the corpse? 

The events in that house are described in such a convoluted and confusing manner, that I am still not sure what really happened there. Why did Maritza run away as far as New Orleans afterwards? She experiences such dread in that house, but reading about it, I couldn’t understand why, to be honest. Yes, the conversations she’d had with the AI were strange, but they didn’t warrant such abject fear.

And the double memory of what happened to the corpse was very confusing as well. Was the AI hacked? Was there another person there? Did they mange to copy the source code? And if they did, was that what was on the memory stick? And if so, how did Selene get ahold of it? Also, what happened to Selene after Maritza fled the house, abandoning a civilian behind, I should mention? 

There are too many questions with no answers. So as a philosophical exploration of humanity and personhood, this is a good book. As a mystery, this fails on all accounts.

PS: I received an advanced copy via NetGalley in exchange for an honest review.

Stars: 3 out of 5

I’m not sure how I feel about this book. The prose is beautiful, and some of the themes are sufficiently nostalgic to be interesting. It also feels heartfelt. In a way, it reminds me of a mosaic. Each individual piece is like a gem, beautiful and shiny on its own. But when you try to put all those gems together to form a picture, you realize that they don’t quite fit, that the author was more interested in those individual gems than in telling a coherent story.

There are too many points of view, and even though some of those characters are interesting in their own right, we don’t spend enough time with them to really get to know them. We just hop to another shiny gem, then another. Which makes these encounters only surface deep. We simply don’t get to know these characters well enough to care what happens to them, not that any of them ever were in serious danger to start with.

And that’s my second complaint about this story – there are no stakes, there is no tension, there is no danger. At no point in the narration did I have the impression that the characters were dealing with a life and death situation, or something life-altering, or heck, even important. We have all these weapons, and robots, and echoes from past wars all over the place, but the story lacks teeth. Even the climax of the story, when the golden man is awake and all those weapons are headed for the city, is written in such a way that there is no tension to it… Probably because you can’t really care for characters you aren’t invested in.

Seriously, what was the point of this book? To proselytize about the human condition and what makes us an individual versus a machine? Other books have done this better and kept the tension going. To reflect on the consequences of war and the emotional toll it has on all participants? Again, there are better books about that as well. I would suggest reading Look to Windward by Ian Banks, for example. 

The worldbuilding is interesting, with hints and past wars and events that I would have loved to explore more. Humanity has pretty much colonized the whole solar system, as well as the deep oceans on Earth… yet the desert and the city of Neom feels very 21st century Dubai. Are you telling me that hundreds of years into the future, when we terraformed Mars and the Moon, we still haven’t figured out how to restore our own ecosystem? 

Another issue is that the characters don’t seem to “live in” the advanced word that is described to us. It’s more like they have been dropped into it without being fully integrated. They act and behave like people from our century, instead of humans who have augments and implants and all the advanced technologies. In fact, there is very little of those technologies shown in day to day life.

So this leaves me with a conundrum – I enjoyed the writing, but the story is utterly forgettable. In fact, I can’t even name any of the characters now that I’ve finished it. 

PS: I received an advanced copy of this book via NetGalley in exchange for an honest review.