2003 SF/mystery. Turing Hopper, an AI emergent from research assistant
software, has just lost a friend and employee: he's been murdered. The
police reckon it was random drug-related violence; she tries to find
out more.
There's much less setup and speculation on the nature of AI here
than in You've Got Murder, and much more detection. Which is a bit
of a shame, because I can get detection from lots of authors, but
interesting philosophy is rarer. However, this is clearly a series
entry rather than a first book (and definitely not a good place to
start).
Perhaps with an eye to a standard mystery audience, RPGs (on-line,
pencil and paper, and LARP) and paintballing need to be explained in
detail. (EverQuest had been running for four years by 2003, and when I
went paintballing some years earlier nobody seemed to need to explain
it.) There's a certain amount of "RPGs are for losers" moralising,
though it's kept largely in check.
Characters continue to be interesting if lightly sketched.
KingFischer's promised evolution at the end of the first book is
effectively ignored, the principal humans Tim and Maude go on much as
before though Maude gets the better of the writing and more character
development (Tim has an ongoing crisis of confidence which doesn't
make him any more interesting to read about), and Turing herself is
rather too busy with the business at hand to deal with any larger
implications. The villains don't entirely work for me, being a bit too
simplistic, and the ending is something of a cliffhanger. Overall,
it's weaker than the first book but still rewarding.
Followed by Access Denied.
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