2013 science fiction/romance. Finn is a robot who looks and acts
human; he arrives in young Cat Novak's life as her tutor, and stays as
the years pass.
There's a really fascinating story going on here, about prejudice
against AIs turning into grudging legal recognition of their
personhood, with a strong side note about the ethics of building
machines that are just not conscious enough to qualify as people, and
another one about ecological disaster averted. But we catch only
glimpses of each, because the story is told entirely from Cat's
viewpoint, and she's just not terribly interested.
The plot we actually get is a tragic and angst-ridden romance, and Cat
just isn't terribly sympathetic; she eventually comes to realise
that she isn't entirely perfect, but she's a user of people, barely
less so by the end of the book than at the beginning. She's incurious,
she goes with the flow rather than exert herself in the slightest, and
she casually sabotages her life by failing to think about the
consequences of what she's about to do. She does approximately two
things that show any sign of independent thought during the entire
book, which spans something like twenty-five years.
Mind you, this is apparently a world in which second-wave feminism
never happened (even though abortifacients are available on demand).
The only other female character is Cat's mother, and she's mostly
there to be an obstruction; she's undeveloped, like all the characters
except Cat really. Finn is at first entirely without feelings;
everyone else in the book has rather less excuse for acting like
robots with cosmetic personality overlays. Yeah, I'm glad that this is
a story about a young girl growing up rather than a young boy, since
we're already oversupplied with the latter sort of story and few of
them say anything new, but that isn't enough to sustain my interest as
things get slower and slower.
World-building seems to have been of secondary importance. To pick
just one example, I'm quite happy that legal "papers" are signed
electronically, and I can just barely accept that they might be sent
by courier rather than Internet though nobody ever mentions why; but I
can't bring myself to believe that the futuristic equivalent of a USB
stick will be called a "hard drive".
I found this rather a grind and, in the end, not really worth the
effort. It had nothing new to say about the AI rights that form one of
the ribs of the plot, and with only minor changes could have been set
in the 1850s-1860s in the southern USA with the white heroine falling
in love with a black man.
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