Sci-fi/fantasy reads: AI as our saviour, a genetically engineered space crew, and navigating a world designed for giants

Irish Times

6 days ago

Artificial Intelligence as the planet's saviour is the unexpected premise behind Lucy Lapinska's
Some Body Like Me
(Gollancz, £20), which is narrated by Abigail, a 'personal companion computer' commissioned from the GaiaTech company by her abusive human 'husband' David.
'We have no legal right to life or function,' Abigail tells us, but that is about to change: as the novel begins, emancipation for artificial life is five weeks away. Abigail is 'less than human, more than machine': Lapinska gifts her a consciousness, courtesy of a phenomenal adaptive learning protocol that allows Abigail to understand the parallels with historical slavery, but also to look to a future in which the devastated Earth can begin to heal: 'Perhaps that is why humans created us in the first place. As an apology that will outlast them.'
A philosophically and emotionally absorbing novel, Some Body Like Me is a sophisticated contribution to the hysterical narrative surrounding AI.
Set in an alternative England in which the various tribes – Saxon, Celt and Pict – coexist under a cloud of mutual suspicion, James Alistair Henry's
Pagans
(Moonflower Books, £16.99) opens with the London-based Saxon police detective Aedith investigating the gruesome crucifixion of a Celtic diplomat in advance of the latest Unification Summit.
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Unhappy when a Celtic detective is foisted upon her unit, Aedith is further unimpressed to learn that Drustan's role lies 'somewhere between a poet and a lawyer' – but when more crucified bodies are discovered, the pair declare a truce and collaborate to discover why the victims, all of whom bear a tattoo of a fish, are being persecuted for their novel new faith in a god of 'forgiveness, charity, a better world after this one'.
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Blackly comic, Pagans blends satirical alt-future history into an unconventional police procedural, to striking effect.
Ishmael A Soledad's
Diathesis
(Temple Dark Books, £20.99) is an ambitious attempt to use 'hard' science to frame Project Ismud, aka 'humanity's first mission to the stars'. The ensemble cast of characters includes a Chilean bioelectrical neuroscientist working on the neuro-electrical suspension that will replace the conventional cryogenic hibernation of astronauts, a Japanese creator of 'non-biologic intelligence', and a genetically engineered human crew.
The first book in a proposed hexalogy, Diathesis effectively functions as a launchpad for the series, setting in train a number of fascinating themes that parallel our contemporary concerns.
A radical shift in setting and storytelling from last year's space-bound Floating Hotel, Grace Curtis's
Idolfire
(Hodderscape, £20) opens with the aspiring warrior Kirby setting out from the dying community of Wall's End, determined to restore the goddess Iona to her rightful place and thus revitalise her people's hopes (Idolfire, we're told, is 'pure faith set alight').
Simultaneously, Ayela, the thwarted heir to the grand old city of Ash, embarks on a quest to establish her credentials as a future ruler by returning to Ash with a unique token of her worth. Gradually, their respective quests find them converging on the ancient metropolis of Nivela, a city-state that once perfected 'the art of prising miracles from plundered gods'.
Curtis's world-building is deftly done as Ayela and Kirby wander, Odysseus-like, from one strange new quasi-medieval country to another, their initial bickering and mutual incomprehension gradually giving way to deeper, more tender feelings, but it's her characters – funny, smart and authentic – that are this novel's real treasure.
A Bafta-winning and Oscar-nominated writer, director, illustrator and animator, Mikey Please publishes
The Expanded Earth
(Corsair, £22), which opens with Giles, out for a quiet ramble in rural England with his aged father, feeling something of a seismic shudder beneath his feet: 'Then the sky brightened, and with little to no ceremony, the entire human race shrank to one-tenth of its previous height.'
The catastrophe 'became known as 'The Descent – the day we were sent scrabbling from our thrones down to the bottom of the food chain". Meanwhile, Professor Elizabeth Goodwin is putting the final touches to an experiment that will allow her to 'speak to God' – Elizabeth, as the reader may already suspect, very likely had something to do with the human race's extraordinary plight.
Please has a lot of fun with his incredibly shrinking species, and largely because 'it seemed that the same thing but bigger was not the same thing at all'. Joining forces with fellow survivors, battling with dogs, polecats and the exhausting business of navigating a world designed for giants, Giles sets out on an epic journey to be reunited with his estranged daughters, hopeful that the newly miniaturised world order might result in his previous failings as a father being overlooked, and that 'what mattered now was what you could build'.
By turns comic and horrific, The Expanded Earth is a wonderfully sustained celebration of human ingenuity.
Declan Burke is an author and journalist. His current novel is The Lammisters (No Alibis Press).