Book Description
The year is 2050. In the teeth of a climate catastrophe, the world is left with a drastic solution: one global leader to steer it through the coming apocalypse.
The final two candidates are ex-US President Lockwood, and Solomon, the world’s first political artificial intelligence. As whispers of a global conspiracy emerge, investigative journalist Marcus Tully find himself at the centre of it – when Solomon’s creator turns up murdered.
Overnight, one investigation becomes two, and it’s not just the result of the election that’s at stake but the future of the species. Suddenly humanity must make an impossible choice – between salvation, or freedom.
My Review
Thanks to Anne for organising this tour and to Bantam for sending me a copy of this novel.
A small group of investigative journalists get mixed up in the biggest story of all time – it’s 2050 and humanity has decided to have a vote and find a ‘Protector’, someone to take control to sort out the climate chaos. The options are a former U.S. President with some potentially dodgy connections, and the first artilect – artificial intellect – called Solomon. Solomon is the creation of Martha Chandra, sister of Livia Chandra, who happens to be part of that little group of investigative journalists.
Chasing the story after they’re given some intelligence about a terrible weather event a decade before, Livia and her boss Tully head to visit Martha on the floating city of New Babylon. Martha doesn’t just create complex computer intelligences, she’s CEO of a major corporation and Solomon runs the floating island states, effectively making Martha one of the most important people in the world.
Then she gets murdered and it all goes to hell. Tully, driven by his need to find the truth and run from his grief, dives in to the investigation, working with Commander October, head of security. Livia driven by her grief for Martha and her own feelings of inadequacy, seeks answers in the legacy Martha has given her – her digital vault – and makes use of her unimaginable wealth to get there.
Just when they think they have the answer, Solomon pulls the rug out from under them. And then does it again to October. Secrets come out – there’s another artilect out there, in the secret Caliphate.
Everyone is manipulating everyone else and know one actually knows the truth.
I was about 27 pages in when I made a quick note, asking if the whistle blower that gives information to Tully about the U.S. candidate was actually Solomon providing damaging information about his rival. The answer is -possibly. It could be the Caliphate artilect, Djinn (originally Sulaiman – Martha’s preferred name) or it could be a third unknown entity. Whoever it is, the manipulations set off a cascade of responses and reactions that cause terrible consequences.
It was intricately plotted and the twists signalled throughout if you spot them. The murder was clever, although I don’t know if it would actually work. The chemicals involved were never named…
The characters of Tully, Livia, and October really take centre stage and they go through large and small journeys as they face new challenges and revelations. The character development is subtle but clearly there.
The world feels realistic and complex, a possible future. Not sure about the floating islands or the reality of a caliphate, but this is near future sci-fi, it’s expected. I don’t think we’ll be at the point of an ‘artilect’ in 24 years, quite frankly, the current ‘A.I.’ boom is a bubble, and the LLMs are little more than predictive text tools let loose on the internet to scrape data. It can’t do anything much, and they’re programmed to flatter and repeat your beliefs back to you. I’m not afraid an A.I. is going to take over, were not smart enough to get to general artificial intelligence in the next quarter century, and we’ll probably climate disaster ourselves into oblivion from the waste of water and power before we get there.
Sci-fi is never really about the future, it’s about the here and now. There are obvious parallels with political corruption and the use of wealth to insulate the wealthy from reality. The floating cities are cool, controlled and protected, while the rest of the world is burning and falling apart. Corrupt politicians committing crimes and getting away with it, media influencers spreading misinformation and disinformation, conspiracy theories manipulating people into acting irrationally, it’s all here, but put into an unfamiliar context. It highlights the bizarreness of these things by moving them into a bizarre setting.
I did like this story and I wouldn’t object to reading the next book; there’s a teaser at the end of this paperback edition that definitely interested me. I want to know who was doing all the manipulating and if Tully and October finally sort themselves out.
About the Author
Thomas R. Weaver writes stories about tomorrow to make sense of today. A
tech entrepreneur turned author, he holds a degree in Computer Science;
he founded a tech start-up, which was later acquired by Just Eat. Exiting in
2018–2019 left him with no more excuses not to pursue a long-held dream:
writing fiction.
Outside of spending time with his family, he loves to cook, draw, paint and
lose at online bullet chess. He loves a great movie or TV series, and collects
more books than time allows to read. He is based in Buckinghamshire.
Everything Is Better With Dragons 