Halfway home! That puts us right on schedule (as far as you know) to reach 100 books this year. I've crunched the page counts and assuming I keep up a schedule of 100 pages a day, I'm about ten days behind where I need to be. But that also doesn't take into account that a lot of books have introductions and prefaces and a lot of junk pages...so I'm still hopeful that this little experiment is all going to go off without a hitch.
SPEAKING OF EXPERIMENTS (nice segue, eh?) today we're going to be talking about a Red Adept classic where the grand experiment (see what I did there?) of artificial intelligence runs amok: ARTIFICIAL ABSOLUTES by Mary Fan. So, now, without further ado, let's do this thing:
ARTIFICIAL ABSOLUTES is like BLADE RUNNER meets VERONICA MARS.
Hey, that was pretty good! Somebody should pay me to do these tagline things.
Aaaaaanyway, AA is kind of a big deal, at least in the circles I run in* because it's sorta kinda been shoehorned in to the up-and-coming category of NA. If you don't know what that means, or if you said "Not Applicable? What the fuck is Not Applicable category?" then congratulations, you don't run in the circles I run in**. If, however, you ruefully shook your head and said, "Ah, yes, this much vaunted New Adult I've been hearing so much about," then, congratulations, you're probably some kind of industry*** insider.
If, at this point in the blogpost, you're saying, "What the fuck, Steve? You haven't said a word about the book you're purporting to spotlight" then you would be correct and not alone. ARTIFICIAL ABSOLUTES is a rick-rollicking sci-fi space adventure which deals with the heady issues of identity, humanity, and the role of automation in our society and the loss of privacy that can ensue. It's actually pretty satirical, and some of the things that happen to the characters will make you slap your head and say, "Wow, we're about a week's technological development or one bad congressional vote away from that happening here."
But, as I alluded to above, it's also NA, the sticky, squishy, hard-to-pin down category that's just a little past coming-of-age but not quite as far as old-man-looks-back-on-his-life-with-regret. (That's not a thing; I just couldn't think of anything other than "coming-of-age.") Jane Colt, the heroine, is in her early twenties and is trying to come to terms with who she is in terms of family, society, work, dating, and even and maybe most especially religion. (SPOILER ALERT****)
Anyway, definitely check it out. Oh, and I'm also proud to inform you all that I apparently knew something the author didn't: she named Dr. Kron after Kronos, King of the Titans. You're welcome, society.
Here's the blurb.
Aaaaand an excerpt.
And buy your very own copy at any of these fine retailers.
*E.T. cosplay conventions
**REMAINS OF THE DAY LARPing society
***furry costume dry-cleaning industry
****the answer is robosexual
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