I love a story about machine intelligences getting all up in their feelings, especially when it’s approached seriously. And this book is as serious as the extinction of all human life. Sad, weird, often dizzyingly confusing, this books made me feel things and think deeply about uncomfortable but important questions. I have never read anything quite like this before and if this sounds at all like something you’d want to read, run to go get it.
"An intelligent, defiant novel, akin to any of Annalee Newitz's writings while also brushing shoulders with some of the great questions of identity and consciousness brought up in the works of William Gibson." -San Francisco Chronicle
A groundbreaking debut that follows the story of an Artificial Intelligence tasked with writing a novel-only for it to fall in love with the novel's subject, Sen, the last human on Earth.
Faced with uncontrolled and accelerating environmental collapse, humanity asks an artificial intelligence to find a solution. Its answer is simple: remove humans from the ecosystem.
Another book about machine intelligences and their feelings, and while this one is more fun it’s just as deep and crunchy. Set in a far future after humanity and our AI pals have encountered an alien species that provided us the keys to jump-start our technologies, this is an expansive wild ride into the cosmos. The second book in the series which began with The Salvage Crew, this can easily be read as a standalone (though the first book is also great).
Just to mix it up, there are no machine intelligences here, but there are time spies and romance. After finding a time portal, the British government does the obvious thing: kidnap folks from the past to see how time travel affects people, and set up a bureaucracy to handle it. While the description feels like a romp, there’s more to it as the book deals deftly with issues of identity, selfhood, racism, and the past — and future — being foreign countries.
A time travel romance, a spy thriller, a workplace comedy, and an ingenious exploration of the nature of power and the potential for love to change it all: Welcome to The Ministry of Time, the exhilarating debut novel by Kaliane Bradley.
In the near future, a civil servant is offered the salary of her dreams and is, shortly afterward, told what project she’ll be working on. A recently established government ministry is gathering “expats” from across history to establish whether time travel is feasible—for the body, but also for the fabric of space-time.
Elsinore Robotics is on the cusp of a breakthrough—the company is poised to create the first humanoid androids powered by true artificial intelligence. Their only rival, Norwegian Technologies, lost a publicly streamed contest between their flagship model, Fortinbras, and Elsinore’s HAM(let) v.1.
But when the first Hamlet model is found irreparably deactivated, the apparent victim of wild malware, the field of consumer cybernetics is thrown wide open. However, Hamlet v.1’s memories were not entirely lost in the accident.
Hamlet v.2 swears to avenge his progenitor, but is plagued by the aftereffects of integrating Old Hamlet’s backup into his own neural matrix. Beset by doubts about whether his feelings are truly his own, he worries his love for his boyfriend, Horatio, is an illusion, all the while driven by a consuming need for revenge. While he has a method, there is a madness in it, and Hamlet’s actions will leave no corner of Elsinore unscathed.
A beat-by-beat retelling of the Shakespeare classic, Hamlet, Prince of Robots grapples with conscience, ambition, and pain, and what it means to be, or not to be, human.
