Rating: 3/5
Review:
A bit of a struggle
I struggled a bit with I Still Dream. James Smythe is
a very fine writer and I thought that The Machine was an outstanding
book. This didn't feel nearly as original or interesting to me.
The narrative begins in 1997 when Laura Bow is seventeen and a computer genius like her late father. She begins to create Organon, a form of Artificial Intelligence which can learn and which she tries to imbue with her own human values. Meanwhile, others have appropriated her father's work on SCION, a similar program but which has been "raised" very differently. The narrative jumps a decade at a time and changes narrators as we see the way in which the two programs develop and each has a profound influence on the world, eventually ending up in an undisclosed year in the far future. Smythe deals with important issues like the uses and abuses of data, the meaning of sentience and humanity and so on, but in spite of some very good writing and some interesting takes on human and artificial memory, it dragged very badly for quite long periods.
The narrative begins in 1997 when Laura Bow is seventeen and a computer genius like her late father. She begins to create Organon, a form of Artificial Intelligence which can learn and which she tries to imbue with her own human values. Meanwhile, others have appropriated her father's work on SCION, a similar program but which has been "raised" very differently. The narrative jumps a decade at a time and changes narrators as we see the way in which the two programs develop and each has a profound influence on the world, eventually ending up in an undisclosed year in the far future. Smythe deals with important issues like the uses and abuses of data, the meaning of sentience and humanity and so on, but in spite of some very good writing and some interesting takes on human and artificial memory, it dragged very badly for quite long periods.
The book is too long, for one thing and sometimes felt more
like a lecture on the potential of AI than a novel. The characters and human
aspects of the story weren't really strong enough to carry the book and – surprisingly
to me – it all felt a little familiar from other novels and programmes like
Black Mirror. It's readable enough, but
I wasn't sure it was worth it in the end and I can only give I Still Dream a very
qualified recommendation.
(My thanks to HarperCollins for an ARC via NetGalley.)
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