SF/mystery. Turing Hopper, an AI emergent from research assistant
software, is worried about her programmer: he seems to have vanished,
and the records she can find aren't helping. So she turns for help to
the two humans who are aware of her nature.
This is a book about technical things, and I'm a fairly technical
person, so believe me when I say: the author didn't drop the ball.
Sure, she didn't get everything right, but the errors didn't annoy me;
indeed, Andrews offers a charmingly naïve vision of the future of the
Internet that now sounds rather better than what we've ended up with.
The mystery plot is more procedural than anything else, dealing mostly
with the acquisition of information rather than its processing; there
are some slightly surprising and rewarding twists, particularly in the
matter of character actions, but mostly it works out the way one would
expect. It's interrupted by long divagations (mostly in Turing's
voice) on the nature of AI and consciousness, the evolution of a set
of ethics, whether humour or sleep are necessary preconditions for a
truly "human" being, and indeed what term one should use to suggest a
being that's not biologically human, but is not merely sapient, since
it has feelings as well as thoughts.
Now obviously this stuff is old hat to most readers of science
fiction, but it's unusual to see it in a detective story, and I at
least rather enjoyed this obviously amateur but reasonably
well-informed take on the field. (There's perhaps slightly too little
existential terror from the people who discover Hopper's personality,
but then they're not experts.) John W. Campbell supposedly defined an
interesting alien as something that "thinks as well as a human, but
differently", and Andrews has done an excellent job of that here.
There are some oddities relating to Hopper's attempt to download
herself into a much smaller system, but they're workable in the
context of the story. Like What's a Girl Gotta Do, though, this
story really relies on you getting on with its protagonist; if you
find the first few chapters, entirely in Hopper's voice, boring, then
you probably shouldn't bother with the rest. I enjoyed it rather a
lot.
Followed by Click Here For Murder.
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