There were so many, many things about this book that totally irritated me! First of all, it is set in the year 2096, so (currently) 80 years into our future. The author created a world where the power structure and living conditions were marginally different than now; but there will probably be more technological advances in the next six months than were displayed in the novel.
Probably the single most irritating part of the narrative, was that the main character, Deever, used hippie speak throughout the entire work. It was, like, so totally annoying, dude. How he could even pick up 130-year-old vernacular enough to make it part of his speech pattern is beyond me.
Deever supposedly creates all of these brilliant inventions that can do amazing things, but he has totally inane names for them, like “the Wiggler.” Also, the book goes into rather exhaustive detail about some of the technical aspects of various science related happenings. But on the topic of the creation of the main character – Jennifer – it is basically mum. Of course, you wouldn’t expect a writer to be able to explain how a more advanced species than humans is actually created, but something more of an attempt at it would have been appreciated.
If you could get past some of those negative aspects, the story itself and the main premises of this novel were very intriguing. There were a lot of twists and turns that I did not at all see coming. The juxtaposition between Artificial Intelligence (AI) and human free will, what is right and what is wrong, and who gets to decide, were all very intriguing. The take-away-the-grape philosophy was quite brilliant.
Overall, I’d recommend this book as a good read for all, especially those interested in AI and sci-fi in general, not to mention exploration of how to interface those technologies with our human society. Just for me personally though, the negative aspects were almost too overwhelming for what would otherwise be a rather brilliant story.
As I nominated this book in Kindle Scout, when it was chosen as a winner, I was provided a free eBook copy, with the request to provide an honest review.
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