Category: SPSFC5 (Page 1 of 4)

This is my second finalist round review for Team 1.21 Gigawatts for SPSFC#5. I’ve already reviewed two of the finalists in earlier rounds, and my team has reviewed all of the finalists. For more information about the team and our progress, please go to the team update page here.

The book is Artificial Selection by Marianne Pickles. The book is available from Amazon.

Blurb

HIGH TECH, HIGH WATER, AND THE HEAD OF AWKWARD QUESTIONS

A cozy sci-fi mystery from the winner of the Green Stories Prize!

The year is 2101, and half of England is underwater.

But society is recovering from the Melt, thanks to ArkTech, whose eco-friendly headquarters sit serenely above the newly formed Fenland Sea.

As ArkTech’s Head of Awkward Questions, Charlotte Vance is dedicated to helping Ben, the company’s quirky AI. Ben has a fondness for dad jokes, a knack for spotting anomalies, and happens to be Charlotte’s best friend.

Naturally, when Ben notices a geneticist vandalising pre-Melt books and a librarian looking the other way, he sends Charlotte to investigate.

What starts as a curious case of stolen blank pages and clandestine book clubs soon leaves Charlotte caught between the black-market operation she thought she’d left behind and the company she’s always trusted.

Set in a near future that is neither utopia nor wasteland, Artificial Selection is ideal for readers who enjoy character-driven whydunnits, or charming sci-fi with humour and heart – perfect for fans of Terry Pratchett, Martha Wells, and Becky Chambers.

My Review

This is a fun mystery adventure story set in a near-future utopian (or is it dystopian?) society created after a huge climate crisis raised sea level by 70 meters. There is a wide array of colorful characters, and the future world is interesting and rich, with plenty of cool social structure, subcultures, and future history to go around. This is a great addition and worthy member of the six finalists in this year’s competition.

Plot and Characters

We spend our entire time in this book, mostly in real time but occasionally with some flashbacks, with Charlotte Vance, a twenty-something woman who’s got a few strong relationships but who is otherwise a bit of a loner and a misfit in her rigorously structured society. Charlotte has the unique position of Head of Awkward Questions. Her society, which is a corporate-run climate-refuge utopia, is largely administered by a benevolent AI named Ben, and while Ben is good-natured, honest, and sincerely dedicated to his role, he has a tendency to get caught up pondering issues he doesn’t understand. If he gets too distracted, he will lose focus, turn to looping, and the systems he’s supposed to be running start to fail. Charlotte’s job, one Ben demanded be created but which is not much respected by her government, is to help him work his way through these distractions by researching and explaining them. This is a fun premise, one that provides both a ready hook for mysteries, of which we run into several spanning many different societal layers, and which also provides some narrative tension, because if Charlotte fails to placate Ben’s curiosity, her whole society could grind to a halt.

Charlotte and Ben are a fun team, and their banter is fresh and fun. Charlotte has a strong moral compass but one that doesn’t always line up with the laws of her society, which makes her a fun person to follow and to cheer for. Ben loves jokes, and his ever-present and omniscient nature are managed and limited well to avoid (for the most part) just having the know-it-all computer solve everything.

There are a bunch of other interesting and varied characters we encounter as Charlotte dives ever deeper into her assigned task, which starts out mundane but eventually reveals a surprising number of layers and connections to other parts of Charlotte’s life, and through which we learn about the history, dynamics, culture, and setting of this future world.

My Thoughts

If you like imaginative future stories that focus on mysteries and star plucky and damaged heroines (and who doesn’t?) then you’re in for a treat with this one. Charlotte’s voice and temperament make her a really engaging narrator, and her mutually-supportive and (platonic) loving relationship with Ben gave this book a buddy dynamic I wasn’t expecting but enjoyed a great deal. The mystery is well-devised – a crime nobody should really care about, with possibly innocent, possibly shady actors all around who only reveal a fraction of their motivations and secrets, and one which grows into a web of intrigue and crime, drawing in pieces of Charlotte’s past that she’d rather be rid of. Having all of that set against the backdrop of an interesting society and future (and future history) that are fun to discover and understand makes the book even more engaging.

The relatively narrow focus of the story sometimes means that we don’t see too many details of that society, and I was left with some questions about how it all works – how big it is, what most people do, and how the interesting class dynamics play out. Sometimes, we learn more of that stuff with some brief sections of exposition, where Pickles hits us with a couple paragraphs of details that are outside the main narrative but nonetheless interesting. It’s hard not to do that, and I’m sympathetic – one can only show-don’t-tell so far before it gets ridiculous. I think I might have preferred a lead character who was a little more skeptical about and realistic about the flaws in her society, but she accepts most of them as the way things have to be and supports the corporation, warts and all, sometimes even in the face of bad actors. Not that I don’t like a little idealism, and not that she doesn’t see what’s wrong, but I think it would be more realistic to chafe a bit more against it, even though she’s mostly happy with her life. I certainly wanted a certain supercilious twerp to get much more comeuppance than he did, and that may be most of my dissatisfaction here. If I’m allowed another nitpick, I think a couple of the side characters were painted with the more vibrant colors and emotions suitable for comics, with their over-the-top depictions, rather than realistic humans struggling to make things work in a society with a lot of drudgery.

Charlotte has a complicated backstory, and we learn more of that as we go, with some pretty cool twists sometimes revealed in flashback. They help explain how she got where she is now, and they provide a necessary and tasty depth to her that I’m glad was added. Both Ben and Charlotte use more present-day language and slang and make more 20th-century references, often in service of puns, than I think they might do in 2073, but that’s just a nitpick. Ben’s love of jokes and insistence on literally and frequently explaining his non-human nature is mostly cute and fun, but there are times where I found it a little too much. But Ben is mostly a solid companion to Charlotte, one who (perhaps surprisingly for an AI) grows and develops as the book goes on, and who is much more than just a simple administrative algorithm. I’d love to have had his development and new perspectives taken just a few steps further – the opportunities and dangers are big, and recognized by Charlotte, but Ben’s growth and evolution has more potential than payoff, at least in this book. There may be more of this in the sequel, and I hope there is.

Summation

This was a fun book, very successful at what it set out to do, and I really enjoyed my time with it. The writing and world-building are solid and engaging, and the characters and banter are a lot of fun. The mystery is interesting, complex, and well-crafted, and its gradual reveal feels natural and compelling, especially when accompanied by strong character work as the two leads, Charlotte and Ben, figure themselves out and strengthen their bond. Nicely done, and I recommend it highly.

This is my first finalist round review for Team 1.21 Gigawatts for SPSFC#5. I’ve already reviewed two of the finalists in earlier rounds, and my team has reviewed all of the finalists. For more information about the team and our progress, please go to the team update page here.

The book is Our Simulated Selves by Nikki Null. The book is available from Amazon.

Blurb

Black Mirror meets The Matrix in Our Simulated Selves, a mind-bending queer sci-fi novel about two people in an inexplicably cozy apocalypse, unaware of the disgruntled programmer controlling their world.

When the pastel punk programmer Jeanne told her coworker she wouldn’t date him if he were the last man on Earth, she hadn’t intended it as a challenge. But he uploaded his brain into a supercomputer to find out if that was true.

The simulated Ren, unknowingly inserted into that ill-conceived dating simulation by his real world counterpart, has unspecified issues he thinks only a brainscanner can diagnose.He conspires with Jeanne to steal a brainscanner from her former employer, but before he can use it, everyone in the world, save for Ren and Jeanne, is abruptly deleted.

In the newly empty world, Ren and Jeanne must work together to survive and to unravel the truth about their baffling new reality. But in order to defy the Controller’s plans for them, Ren must outsmart that alternate self by finally confronting fundamental truths that even the all-powerful Controller could not compute…

My Review

This is a fascinating book with a complex, engaging plot and tremendously interesting characters you grow to care a great deal about. I saw some of the twists coming, but they were still highly rewarding, and there were further developments beyond those that were both absolutely necessary and completely surprising. This book absolutely deserves to be a finalist, and at this point, it is tied for first in my personal ranking of the finalists.

Plot and Characters

There are two main characters we spend a lot of time with in the book – a flawed, unhappy man named Ren, who serves as the POV character nearly all the way through, and a free-spirit punk programmer, Jeanne, who befriends Ren and assists him in his subterfuge. The subterfuge is self-serving but noble; Ren knows there is something deeply wrong with him, but he’s been unable to identify or fix it through traditional treatments. He wants to borrow time on the quantum supercomputer where he works to do a brainscan and run some highly complex simulations to see if he can figure out how to set himself right. Jeanne helps him steal the hardware he needs, and in turn, he gets her a job, bringing them ever more into each other’s life. This scares Ren a little, but he’s also fascinated by Jeanne and develops an awkward crush on her, one that she doesn’t reciprocate, although she seems more than happy to have him as a friend and companion.

From this point, which is established in the early going, things get progressively weirder and more complex. There’s a hidden narrator commenting on the story as it goes, and Ren gradually puts some important pieces together as he navigates the world he’s thrust into. I’ll say no more to avoid spoilers, but the book does a very good job navigating its complexity in believable ways, withholding very little information but still maintaining lots of mystery to unravel.

My Thoughts

This is a book about finding yourself, something Ren desperately wants to do but can’t seem to accomplish. It’s also a bit of love story that plays out in a delightful and unexpected way. It’s also a kick-ass near-future cyberpunkish story of technologies, layers, and realities both real and virtual. And finally, and maybe most importantly, it’s a glorious window on a a voyage of human experience, woven into a journey of self-discovery, with heartbreak, community, damage, loss, and inspiration. I have not read many books like this, but I loved this one, and I probably should read more. It is clear the topics and the characters are pulled from the vibrant heart of the author’s lived experience, and I can only describe this story as a profound and moving gift she gives us, no doubt at significant personal cost. That it comes in the framework of a complicated, sassy, ultra-cool sci fi story only makes it all the more remarkable.

It’s hard to talk about the best parts of the story without spoiling them, so I think I’ll leave those for readers to discover on their own. I will say I got a little confused at times, particularly towards the end of the story, as to how it all worked and fit together, but I was happy enough to let that go and just enjoy the ride.

Summation

This is a great book. The writing style is fresh and fun, the characters damaged and sometimes cringey but hugely entertaining, always believable, and utterly sympathetic. The world created here is familiar but with some interesting speculative departures from our reality. And the mystery (because the book really is an unconventional mystery at heart) is ably and carefully revealed, with each detail painted with a full palette and with love.