I still dream was a very good speculative sci-fi and has confirmed my love of James Smythe (as if I needed it) even more.

 

When the book opens we meet Laura when she’s a teenager. She’s destroying the latest phone bill to have hit the mat before her mother and step-father discover it. The reason she’s racked up such a bill is because she’s using the internet (this was the time when the internet had just begun and you needed to dial in to use it) to create an A.I. She doesn’t want the A.I to be much more than a therapist, helping her navigate life and listen to her woes. The last thing she wants is some conglomerate getting its dirty mitts on her technology and possibly using it in a way other than intended.

 

Laura’s father left several years before the beginning of the book; he simply walked out never to return. He, too, was a programmer and a very proficient one.

 

The book works in alternate chapters. I finished it a while ago so I’m struggling to remember whose perspective these chapters were from, but I remember one was from a boyfriend.

 

Throughout the book we follow Laura as she grows and moves to North America to continue working on her A.I, as well as training to be a computer programmer. While the book is very much focused on relationships, such as Laura and her absent father, mother and eventual husband as well as his family, there is an undercurrent of mystery surrounding the A.I and what it might be capable of if it reaches the wrong hands.

I’ve found in the past that Smythe’s writing can at times feel clunky, but that wasn’t the case here. While the time jumps were ever so slightly jarring, they weren’t something I found hugely problematic.

 

The novel wasn’t only about Oreon, Laura’s A.I, but also issues tethered very much to reality, such as Dementia and as previously stated, relationships. Tackling weighty subjects sometimes felt a bit false, although it did play in extremely well with the notion of the A.I and really took shape at the end of the novel. It was also a little long and could have been trimmed down by about 50 pages. Lastly, the ending, while nice and tying up loose ends, felt a little forced. There could also have been a little more tension throughout, but I did thoroughly enjoy the first two-thirds. I just felt the last third a little needless.

 

By the way, this is tagged on GR AS YA, but it's not. Apart from the first 30 pages or so, it's firmly of the adult persuasion.

This has been a great book, but I think I know where the remainder of the story is going and I'm getting bored.

Yet another great read. I'm on a roll! Excellent speculative sci-fi concerning AI.

[I received a copy of this book from NetGalley.]

Although I didn’t adore this book, I found it to be an interesting take on artificial intelligence; on what contributes to developing an AI; on the trials and errors involved, and on how the best intentions can be tainted by poor execution, like what happens with SCION. Because, to paraphrase what Laura says about it in the novel, if you teach a child to fight and retaliate, what does it teach them about life and how to react to whatever comes their way?

The story had its ebb and flow, sometimes a little too slow to my liking, but always intriguing. I usually don’t mind when a story jumps from one time period to another, and/or doesn’t always rely on the same narrator, as long as I can follow it. And here, I didn’t have any trouble following, even when the first person narrator didn’t introduce themselves at first (like what happens with Charlie or Cesar). This approach lets the author play with more than just Laura’s take on both Organon and SCION—which was good, since it’s easily apparent that Organon is built upon all that Laura poured into it, and having only Laura’s POV would have felt, to me, slightly… constricting?

My opinion about the plot remains mixed, though, in that the novel seems to hover between being character-driven and being story-driven, while not fully achieving either. I liked the take on developing artificial intelligence—I don’t know much about coding, and I wouldn’t know how to even start about something so huge, and it felt plausible to me. On the other hand, I kept thinking that I wanted the character development part to go a little further than it did, because I felt that there remained some invisible barrier between me and the characters.

This said, I still got to see enough about Laura and the beings (whether the people or the AIs) surrounding her to get a fairly good idea of the characters, too, and of their struggles through life, especially when it came to dementia and similar memory- and recognition-related troubles. So, I definitely wouldn’t say either that the book was a failure in that regard.

Perhaps the one part that really disappointed me was the last chapter, which dragged on making the same point several times. I think it would’ve been more powerful had it been much shorter.

Nevertheless, I would still recommend the book, for the way it puts AI creation and destruction in parallel with the growing up and the decaying of human minds. (Also, listening to ‘Cloudbusting’ while reading it doesn’t hurt.)

Actual Rating 3.5

Hundreds of years ago, people fled a dying Earth in search of a new home. They never found one.

Everything the people on the spaceship Australia remember now is from the stories that were handed down, generation to generation; there is no permanent record of any of it. All the books have long since crumbled, and any scraps of use – be they fabric, metal scavenged from the ship itself, or items collected from the decomposing bodies in the pit at the bottom of the ship – have been recycled, many times over.

The only place they can get anything new or fresh is the arboretum, a greenhouse that hangs in the middle of their ship, where they can work to pick fruit and vegetables. Everything else is recycled and turned into food, water, or clothing.

Everything we wear is recycled, like the air, like the water, but how they get their materials is different. They scavenge. We’ve come to accept it: that they go to the Pit at the bottom of the ship, take what they need from the bodies and then clean it, dye it, re-cut it. They turn the scraps into something new and you’d never know where they originally came from. Rumour has it, even the dyes they use come from down there. Rumour has it that they harvest skin with tattoos and recycle the colour from them, draining it out of the dead skin, soaking it out and breaking it down. I don’t know if that’s true, but it feels like it could be.

The rest of this review can be found here!