2005 SF/mystery. Turing Hopper, an AI emergent from research assistant
software, looks into the affairs of a techie who's been hit by a car
and is now in intensive care. Was it an accident?
Where the first book in the series was clearly set in a divergent
future, later volumes have been closer to the real world apart from
the presence of AIs, and this one turns up the technobabble (albeit
mostly accurate technobabble) in an apparent attempt to hide its lack
of meaty plot. There are some good bits, in particular an audacious
impersonation, but mostly it's just rolling along in a predictable
way. It's basically a private-investigator story where one of the team
is an AI, and distracting subplots don't hide the problem that the AI
isn't entirely necessary to the story. Yes, the characters do their
things, but they seem to be even more sanded-down than before (apart
from a good moment in hospital for Tim); even Claudia's starting to
feel a little blah. KingFischer turns up just to act rather out of
character, and there's plenty of moralising (all the human good guys
automatically regard porn sites as Evil, rather more so than they do
spamming – even legal porn, insofar as that's a meaningful concept to
them). And everybody's ready to look down on the badly-injured fellow
who was so sloppy as to ask his friends to act as backup sysadmins for
his no-budget private server farm when he was away, rather than
employing someone.
It's another series entry, and while the call to action at the end may
be welcome it should have happened two books earlier. As this seems
likely to have been the final book in the series, it's particularly
disappointing that the big running plot (at least since Click Here
for Murder) didn't get materially closer to resolution.
I can see why Andrews dropped this series to concentrate on Meg
Lanslow, even without knowing the sales figures; this book feels as
though it's floundering, and that it was hard work to write.
Concentrating on the AI plots would alienate the mystery readers; the
SF readers had probably already dropped the series when the SF content
got toned down. Even so, if Andrews ever publishes another I'll
certainly read it.
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