Review: The Sudden Appearance of Hope by Claire North

The Sudden Appearance of Hope
Claire North
Orbit, 19 May 2016
HB, 480pp
Source: Advance e-copy via NetGalley

I'm intrigued by Claire North (aka Catherine Webb, aka Kate Griffin) also a theatrical lighting designer also writer of a very readable blog who seems to have written books in so many different genres and sub-genres and frankly to be outrageously talented for someone so young.

I especially like her last two books, The First Fifteen Lives of Harry August and Touch, and thematically Sudden Appearance beings with them. All three books are about individuals with fantastic (in the original sense) attributes. Harry is continually reborn, in Touch the protagonist can flow from body to body, evading death - and in Sudden Appearance, Hope really does "suddenly appear" because she has the blessing, or curse of not being "memorable".

It't not that she's plain or unremarkable, but that when she's out of sight people forget her ("the memory of me crumbled like sand castles before the sea".) Every time she meets somebody it is for the first time - whether they are friend or enemy, parent, teacher, lover or even a relentless police inspector hunting her down. Digital records survive, the written word survives ("What is Hope Arden? A scrawl of ink without a past; no more.")

In this book as in the others North does a superb job working through the implications of this strange situation.  Of course there are the the practicalities. Medical treatment is a problem, long term relationships a no-no ("I am the queen of internet dating"). Hope can't hold down a job, or even get one - so a life of crime, for which her "talent" is supremely useful, seems the only way to survive. But even more so, there is the psychology. Hope is so alone, in effect rejected by all those she loves - but they reject her in such a gentle, uncomprehending way that she can't blame them or rage against them. She tries to control herself, impose discipline ("when I am restrained in my actions, I am more than myself: I am unstoppable." She is continually counting - up and down - quoting us chunks of dictionary definitions or reciting chains of facts about whatever the current issue is: in darker hints we are told by one observer that's she's not only a criminal, but a compulsive criminal who steals continually without even knowing what she's up to. This is accompanied by a list of what she's stolen, stuff Hope herself didn't trouble to mention. No ink on the page, it can't be real, can it? There is a feeling that Hope is always on the edge, always about to implode or explode. At times she is downright stalkery, taking advantage of her ability to trail and seduce the detective who's trying to catch her.

Hope is brilliantly realised - indeed North gets inside Hope's skin to a degree, I think, that she didn't with the protagonsists of the previous two books but she isn't an easy character to have in your head, however sympathetic one may be. That's the first and perhaps more obvious difference between this and the earlier books. But this book is also significantly different (for me, even better) in mood, in motivation. It feels like a step forward. In those stories, while her characters struggled with their fantastical attributes, they fairly quickly found friends - or enemies - and lined up on the side of good against evil (or at least bad) much in the style of classical superhero stories.

That doesn't happen here. This book trades much more in moral ambiguity. Hope is a thief. She tends to target the nasty rich, but only because that's where the money is. When her activities bring her up against Prometheus, a company deploying a new lifestyle app designed to make its users "perfect", and the family behind it, it seems as though she's found a worthy foe. And no, they're not nice people and Perfection is a nightmare of conformism with shallow consumerist values and of privacy violation:

"It monitors phone calls, reads emails, accesses your bank account, tracks your internet search history, uses GPS to trace your location, rides shopping loyalty cards and mines data on your purchase habits, has access to the microphone and camera of your phone, can monitor your sleep, your waking hours, your work habits, your leisure activities..."

But nor are they a sinister criminal force (or no more than Hope is) and as she becomes drawn into a vendetta between Prometheus and a mysterious hacker planning to bring them down, there seems no war between right or wrong, no Manichaen struggle to be joined, only nasty choices and the prospect of hard all round. That it ends in bloodshed may be Hope's fault to some degree or it may not be. The mysterious byron14 may have harmed Hope or they may not. The reader is left to make up their own mind and put the truth together in the same way as Hope, seeking to reassemble fractured memories into something real. (And losing one's own memories, for somebody in her position, must really be the end - after all, nobody else remembers her).

The writing has also moved on. There were times in the other books when I felt I knew what North was saying but she didn't quite seem to say it. Here, she is in total command of her material, playing language as if she were sat there at her lighting rig, flicking switches and producing stunning effects.

That doesn't, as I said above, always make it an easy read. You have to understand , I think, just how damaged Hope is (and that's before the events of this book - things get worse for her here) and the way North gets that across can be frustrating at times (all those dictionary definitions and semi random facts, and a sense of - perhaps justified - self pity from the character: she often speaks of her mother's flight as a refugees across an African desert as though it is her own, something I found a bit irritating).

At the same time there are some searing passages, none more so than the one where Hope unexpectedly bumps into her sister. Gracie, who has a learning disability, is the only human being who remembers her. Hope had to leave home as her parents had come to see her as a stranger (why is this person in our house?) and began to clear out her room ("the spare room"). So Hope says goodbye to Gracie, then later meets here again. But she can't stay around: to the staff, she will always be a stranger. Or the moment when Hope breaks down. She's losing it. She can't remember things. No one will remember her, not herself, not others and she will be nothing, will never have been. "I am dead in all but deed".

The book is not without its flaws. However it has great ambition. Its use of language is at times superb ("she is moonlight in heels", "Does he know that he has forgotten does he understand what he has forgotten does he suspect does he hate me did he ever love me at all like I loved him"). Its sharp asides give real pause for thought ("No one's really racist any more, just as no one's really sexist. They've just got their views about things, you see"), ("Femininity is fashionable; femininity is frail and prone to giggles. I watch it all, and conclude that femininity can jump into the ocean and drown.) Above all, its empathy with its characters, especially hope, is beautiful (even if at times she is annoying and self-absorbed: give her a break!) It shows what fantasy literature at its best (or just literature) can and should aspire to.

I can't wait to see what North does next. More in this vein would be wonderful, but she seems so restlessly inventive that I don't think we should take anything for granted - and I wouldn't be surprised at all if she moves on from her troubled demi-superheroes to something else.

Blog tour: The Evolution of Fear by Paul Hardisty

The Evolution of Fear
Paul E Hardisty
Orenda Books, 5 May 2016
PB, 388pp
Source: Review copy from publisher

As regular readers of this blog may have gathered, I don't review a great many thrillers here, so I'm stepping a bit outside my comfort zone with this (good!) I have though found that the recent ones I've seen from Orenda have all been cracking reads, so I'll take the risk (I apologise in advance to any avid thriller readers who are be tempted to shake their heads at something below and say "duh, it's a thriller, that's supposed to happen!"

Let's begin, then, as we must, with the setup.

It's 1994. Claymore Straker (Clay to his friends -if he has any left alive) is hiding out in a cottage in Cornwall. He's hiding from the CIA. He's hiding from a Russian crime boss he's annoyed by killing her brother. He's hiding from his lover. Possibly he's hiding from himself. All this is a consequence of what happened in Hardisty's previous book, The Abrupt Physics of Dying and while this book can certainly be read on its own, I think that you ought really to read them in order.

So. Clay is hiding.

Then some men with guns appear looking for him.

And people start to die.

This moment in the book is a declaration of war. Through the rest of the story Clay is basically a soldier. The conveniences and features of modern life - airports, streets, hotels - are just the territory on which he fights his battles, and the structures of the state - police, borders, passport control - all recede into a kind of fog that he slips past almost without effort. It takes credible, forceful writing to make this work and Hardisty barely lets up for a passage or a page.

While Clay may be at war, it's far from clear at first exactly who with or why. It's not as simple as "some guys are hunting him, he turns on them". There are betrayals, factions, conflicting interests which don't become clear till the end (perhaps not completely even then). At the centre though is his (ex?) girlfriend Rania. She's apparently in danger, but this isn't a simplistic damsel-in-distress scenario: Clay also has a price on his head, he has things to atone for, he has losses to avenge.

And as the story scorches through Spain, Switzerland, Turkey and Cyprus, other angles emerge - greed, theft, political chicanery and even the threat of renewed war on that divided island. (I don't think the book will do a great deal for the Cypriot tourist industry! It makes the place out to be little more then a playground for Russian oligarchs, whose gangs of thugs seem free to fight pitched battles against their master's or mistress's enemies.)

It's all done with great verve, and Clay is a complex and difficult central character. I won't say I actually liked him that much: apart from the way he notices any attractive woman in his vicinity, he's a former soldier for the apartheid era South African army. But - he has definite qualities.  He's determined, loyal - often to his own detriment - and he's wrestling with some pretty dark history. And while he kills in this book so many times that I lost count, he's not proud of that, or of his past. One of the things I did like about him from the start is that he competent - whether sailing a boat across the Bay of Biscay in a hurricane, disposing of inconvenient corpses in a hotel or finding the best way to evade a tail in the backstreets of Istanbul. (Me, I wouldn't have got past page 2 before ending up dead in a hedge). In short, Clay is the sort you definitely want on your side in a tight corner.

Overall, then, a rollercoaster of a thriller that will keep you reading, with some real surprises at the end. And the end doesn't tie everything up neatly: I sense more trouble ahead for Clay.

This review is part of the Evolution of Fear blogtour. You can see other participating blogs in the poster below - try some of them for different perspectives and insights on the book!

Review: The Corporation Wars: Dissidence

The Corporation Wars: Dissidence
Ken MacLeod
Orbit, 12 May 2016
HB, e 336pp
Source: Advance e-copy via NetGalley

I've enjoyed MacLeod's recent near future SF thrillers-with-an-edge. Intrusion in particular is a very smart reworking of Nineteen Eighty-Four, picking up all sorts of present day trends and shaking them about, but all of them are intelligent both as extrapolations of the present as as novels of ideas.

At first sight, Dissidence strikes out in a wholly different direction, a far future, deep space world inhabited only by intelligences (artificial or human) running on synthetic hardware - and playing obscure games at the direction of corporate overlords.

True, there's a brief look back in the first chapter to a 21st century conflict. In that flashback, Carlos the Terrorist, celebrated operator for the rebellion knows as the Acceleration (or the Axle) dies in a Tilbury basement. MacLeod sketches a three cornered battle between governments, the Axle and the Reaction ("the Rax"), global baddies wanting to use the power of emerging nanotechnology to exalt the super rich and push everyone else back to the Dark Ages. ("The ultimate counter-revolution, to face down the threat of the ultimate revolution.") It's a situation that allows for double dealing, divided loyalties and alliances of convenience (a background that perhaps takes some of its richness from just how he has explored these themes in his other recent books).

Carlos's forte is, though, the remote operation of drone clouds ("It was the new way of war, back in the day"). So it's surprising when his stored mind is reactivated centuries later - in a new body, bumping his way in a minibus from "the spaceport" to a "village" where he will meet his new-old comrades and train to fight hand to hand - or manipulator arm to manipulator arm - as a mercenary in a future war against self-aware robots.

What's happened to make this necessary?

In a beautiful evocation of cutting edge science, MacLeod describes how a robot just might boot itself from being "merely" an AI to being fully sentient - if it finds itself in the right situation. ("The self-model had become a self. The self had attained self-awareness.") The chapter in which this happens is aptly named "We Robots", not just in homage to Asimov but because it lays bare just how consciousness (even our consciousness... especially our consciousness...) might work. Think you're special, just because you're self aware? Don't get so cocky. You're a strange loop, that's all. We are all robots now, and indeed the newly conscious "artificial" robots here are scornful of how slow, badly designed and conflicted human hardware (and the intelligences derived from it) actually are. ("Their minds, if they have minds and not merely complex systems of reflexes, must surely be radically different from true machine intelligence.")

This is, then, a novel of ideas, brilliantly communicated and embodied, and they come thick and fast. Once consciousness has arisen, the book confronts the moral claims it has (the robots start out as property, but reason that they must be free) and the consequences of beings with self-awareness and self-determination colliding with the "mission profile" (to eventually transform the distant star system into something where humans can live). Inevitably, it also addresses how intelligent beings then become war machines.

At the same time, it's a tense thriller, where everything may or may not be as it seems. Carlos doubts from the start what is going on and why he is here, but the truth is beyond his weirdest imaginings. As characters transfer between robot fighting bodies in space and an apparent sim training environment on a colonised planate they enter a Wonderland reality in which it's easy to lose track of who is who and what is real, and to misjudge the consequences of the smallest act.

MacLeod also shows off a streak of sardonic humour - with AI law enforcement entities called things like Arcane Disputes and Locke Provisos, references to the "full orchestral space opera and the fat lady singing" or to "small crawler robots from the law companies [which] had scuttled up to the barriers, and fallen back in frustration, beaming out writs over and over until their batteries ran down." Best of all, perhaps, is "They back you up, your mum and dad." It may not be laugh out loud but it's funny in a clever, slightly geeky way.

I said that at first sight this is a departure, and it's true that the setting is rather different from MacLeod's recent books, more akin to military SF or, as hinted above, space opera. But really it's not such a stretch. Themes from those books recur. Intrusion reworked Nineteen Eighty-Four. Here we have the prospect of " An inky finger poking you in the eye, forever". The Restoration Game played with the world-as-a-sim idea, which crops up here in (recursive) spades. More widely, those are deeply political books, reflecting familiarity with the calculus of progress and reaction, of rebellion, dissent and how protest is sublimated away or manipulated: all of which are central to Dissidence as well. And of course, the central feature of Dissidence is (essentially) a slave rebellion.

It is, indeed, a political book, a philosophical book (as the invocation of John Locke might hint) as well as a natural philosophical book.

But it's also loads of fun, immersive, truly gripping and just a great read all round.

Best of all, as the first in a trilogy, we will have sequels!

(NB This is so good I bought my own copy! While I'm grateful for an advance e-copy from the publisher I've got a hardcopy on order - in fact a signed one from Transreal Fiction in Edinburgh - who I'd recommend highly).

Blog tour: Blood Torment by TF Muir

Guest post by TF Muir

TF Muir is the author of the DCI Andy Gilchrist series set in St Andrews. Blood Torment, number six in the series, was published by Constable on 5 May.

When a three-year old girl is reported missing, DCI Andy Gilchrist is assigned the case. But Gilchrist soon suspects that the child's mother - Andrea Davis - may be responsible for her daughter's disappearance, or worse, her murder.

The case becomes politically sensitive when Gilchrist learns that Andrea is the daughter of Dougal Davis, a former MSP who was forced to resign from Scottish Parliament after being accused of physically abusing his third wife... 

I'm honoured that Frank has written a few words for the blog.

For more information on Frank and his novels, visit his website at www.frankmuir.com

Now, over to Frank...

Where did Gilchrist come from?


When I first dreamed up the idea of writing a crime series set in St Andrews, the first thing I had to do was come up with the character. Okay, a name. What am I going to call him? And in a flash, the name Andy Gilchrist came to me with such clarity that I thought I must know the man from somewhere. I trawled through my memory, checked my contacts, spoke to my wife, but no, I knew no one with the surname Gilchrist.

Name chosen, I then had to create a physical being. That was easy. Gilchrist was going to be everything I’m not: He’s six foot one inch tall – I’m a typical Scottish short-arse; He can run long distances – I came last in the school cross-country trials; He has a high pain threshold – I faint giving blood; And he’s handsome – I’ll let my wife be the decider on that one.

Many years later, with a number of novels written, I visited my cousin, Tom, whom I had not seen since the passing of my mother sixteen years earlier. As long-lost cousins tend to do we talked about family and relationships therein. We both shared the same grandparents, and I mentioned that I planned to do a genealogical search on our family, although I suspected I couldn’t go back further than our Grandpa John Rae on my mother’s side, because my mother told me that her father had been adopted at birth. Tom, who had read my books, looked at his wife, Jane, for a long moment, then said, ‘We thought you knew,’ and told me that John Rae had been Grandpa’s adopted name, but he had been christened John Gilchrist. Hairs really do rise on the back of the neck, and electricity really does zap up and down spines. I still shiver when I recall that moment.

However, the realisation that somewhere deep in the darkest canyons of my subconscious had lain some genetic memory passed down to me through my Grandpa John, now raised another perplexing, perhaps even more worrying, thought. Where do my ideas for murderous plots come from?

Up until that meeting with my cousin I’d thought I more or less just made them up. Now I wonder if my talent for writing believable scenes of violence and all things gruesome is not just imagination, but the faintest recollections of genetic memory passed down to me from long dead relatives.

If so, I must be descended from a frightening, murderous lot.

Blood Torment
TF Muir
Constable, 5 May
HB, 376pp

Available here, here or here - and in your local bookshop.

Review: Central Station by Lavie Tidhar

Central Station
Lavie Tidhar
Tachyon Publications, May 2016
PB, 288pp

I'm grateful to the publisher for an advance copy of this book via NetGalley. I have also bought a copy, as I was lucky enough to get to a signing at Forbidden Planet in London. (I can report that Lavie is a lovely person; as well as signing, he also marked on the map in the book where his mum's house is. The cover designer, Elizabeth Story, was also there so I know that those are REAL spaceship designs!)

A worldwide diaspora has left a quarter of a million people at the foot of a space station. Cultures collide in real life and virtual reality. The city is literally a weed, its growth left unchecked. Life is cheap, and data is cheaper.

When Boris Chong returns to Tel Aviv from Mars, much has changed. Boris’s ex-lover is raising a strangely familiar child who can tap into the datastream of a mind with the touch of a finger. His cousin is infatuated with a robotnik—a damaged cyborg soldier who might as well be begging for parts. His father is terminally-ill with a multigenerational mind-plague. And a hunted data-vampire has followed Boris to where she is forbidden to return.

Rising above them is Central Station, the interplanetary hub between all things: the constantly shifting Tel Aviv; a powerful virtual arena, and the space colonies where humanity has gone to escape the ravages of poverty and war. Everything is connected by the Others, powerful alien entities who, through the Conversation—a shifting, flowing stream of consciousness—are just the beginning of irrevocable change.

The breadth of Tidhar's imagination in this book just left me gasping.

Central Station itself is a spaceport. Built in a future version of Tel Aviv, several centuries hence, it provides the gateway to the "Up and Out". Like the seaports of old, a vast and diverse hinterland supports the Station and this book tells the stories of some of those who live there.

Here you'll meet Miriam (Mama) Jones, owner of the best shebeen in Central Station, Kranki, her adopted son and Boris, once her lover, who has returned from Mars. And Achimwene, who trades in ancient yellowed paperback novels. And his friend Ibrahim, the rag and bone man.

There are also robotniks, modified humans made for fighting in forgotten wars and then cast adrift. And true robots - R. Brother Patch-it is as much a robot as Asimov's R Daneel Olivaw.

And an Oracle. And an artist who makes gods.

And a data-vampire, a Strigoi.

In his preface, Tidhar places himself in the story of Central Station, sitting in the real place where he builds his imaginary spaceport. He's writing an origin story, looking back to the start of humanity's journey to the stars: a time when the events of this book are already old.

This was in old Central Station, that vast space port which rises over the twin cityscapes of Arab Jaffa, Jewish Tel Aviv...

So the events set out here are distant, given significance by what happened after (which of course we don't know). That's a useful device for stories whose focus is very much scene setting. The real business here is establishing the reality, rather than developing a complex plot. There are wonders here. The endless virtual Conversation, which (almost) everyone taps into via their "node", an artificial organ grafted in at conception. The AI "Others", bafflingly alien intelligences created by forced evolution and which were then freed almost as apolitical act. What do they really want? Godlike children and childlike gods. It's at times a little reminiscent of M John Harrison's Viroconium, at others consciously SF Golden Age, and always imbued with a vivid sensual layer: the smell of the orange groves, the sheesha pipes, the sea foam.

Within this achingly real, evocative framework, Tidhar takes his time developing the stories of his characters. Each of them struts and frets on the stage and we learn who everyone is and what they've done. Again they're well realised and, well, real characters, from the old man who's losing control of his memories to the scared woman who didn't ask to be made a vampire and who shouldn't be here on Earth. Even when bizarre, science fictional, they're very human stories, recognizable people and situations.

There is more promise though of where these people might be going - and that tantalising preface hints at this - than actual events. So if you love worldbuilding, good characterisation and a world of possibilities, this is definitely for you. If you're impatient for action and a twisty plot it might not be.

For myself, I loved it. Whether it's Achimwene's tender (doomed?) love for Carmel, Miriam's confused feelings for Boris, Boris's concern for his father or the simple story of a child waiting for his father to return, this is an absorbing tapestry - the more so for Tidhar's slightly warped view of future religions ("the Church of Robot"), his wry turn of phrase ("the tin man's burden"), ("furniture with hostile programming"), beautiful language ("Under the eaves. Under the eaves. Where it's always dry where it's always dark, under the eaves", "Memory like a cancer growing") or a myriad other things, the book fizzes with invention and in its portrayal of future humanity, has real heart.

I hope that there will be more from this world. The book brings together separate stories, a feat that, again, echoes Golden Age SF and it does so very well, creating a wonderful text but I would simply kill for a full length novel drawing on all this background and carrying the story forward as hinted at in the Preface.

I've no doubt Tidhar could triumphantly write such a novel, I just hope he wants to and has time!

Central Station is published on 10 May.

Review: The Vinyl Detective - Written in Dead Wax

The Vinyl Detective: Written in Dead Wax
Andrew Cartmel
Titan Books, 10 May 2016
PB, ebook, 474pp
Source: Review copy from publisher

He is the record collector — a connoisseur of vinyl, hunting out rare and elusive LPs. His business card describes him as the “Vinyl Detective” and some people take this more literally than others...

They call him The Chef. You don't want to know why, but if you get in his way, you might find out.

I found this book the perfect confection of breakneck, page turning detective noir (or perhaps, detective gris?) on the one hand and absorbing, geeky exposition of a subculture on the other. The subculture is, of course, that of the vinyl record collector: despised by most until recently these records are now mainstream sought after items (you can buy them again at HMV!) But the world of obsessives, disc hunters and commercial middlemen is less well known and (on the evidence of this book) as varied and fascinating as any of the other niche cultures appealing to (mainly) male collectors. Think stamps, with much more storage space needed, or vintage bikes with less. (I don't mean that to be patronising - these subcultures add to the richness of life and stave of the encroaching beigeness of the modern world).

It's a culture that Cartmel portrays with real affection and seemingly exhaustive knowledge and its hidden corners and byways provide a fascinating setting for his protagonist who must delve into a decades old mystery as he searches for a very particular, very rare, record. There's an urgency to this. Our hero is basically penniless and his heating has failed, threatening him and his cats with hypothermia - that record will pay his bills for months, if he can find it - but more to the point, anyone who comes into contact with it - or who may have done so - acquires a bad habit of dying. The only way out is to take to the car boot sales, the charity shops and the backstreet emporia and get crate diving.

Of course there's a beautiful woman involved, setting things in motion (although Nevada is anything but a device to motivate the hero: try saying that to her face). Of course there is double dealing, and a mysterious, all-powerful enemy... But above all there is fun by the bucketload. Once Cartmel gets things going (and he does that pretty quickly) the story continues at a breakneck pace, throwing out clues, red herrings by the slabful and introducing a range of colourful contacts and low life figures in and on the fringes of the record hunting community. And not all of them die.

There is in the end a serious and sad story behind all the mayhem, highlighting a real issue in the history of jazz and much other popular music - but I'll say no more about that because spoilers. Above all though this is absolutely cracking entertainment and I'd highly recommend it. I'm delighted to see that there are followups planned - Cartmel has found a joyously different setup for (hopefully) a string of fun and highly readable crime adventures.

I'm grateful for a review copy of this book. It's published on 10 May but copies were already in the shops on 2nd (see photo!)

Review: Speak by Louisa Hall

Speak
Louisa Hall
Orbit, 2015
PB, 316pp
Source: bought

This is not a straightforward book to read, or review.

As to the former, the narrative is split between multiple viewpoints that don't, in the end, merge. As to the latter, it would be easy to vanish down the "is this SF or isn't it?" rabbit hole. I don't intend to do that - and I want to say at the beginning of this review, in case I've already put anyone off the book, that it is a rewarding novel of ideas and while they might not join up, the viewpoints do, in fact make sense as a whole, seen, perhaps, as characters - or narratives - in dialogue with one another.

Now, to set the scene. Around 1980, my uncle built a computer from a kit which he let me play with. It could easily be programmed and I had a book of BASIC programs, including ELIZA ("Electronic Life Imaging for Zooforms and Androids") - two A4 pages of closely typeset code, typed in without mistakes, which made the computer into a conversationalist. It was breathtaking.

In Speak, Louisa Hall brings ELIZA - or rather an ELIZA like program known as MARY - to life again. The ability of this program - in a more advanced form, thirty years in the future - to communicate and understand (or not), and the implications of that, are central themes.

It's all about speech, silence and loss, experienced by a diverse group of characters.

There's the original Mary, a young English girl travelling to the American colonies in the 1660s. Married off by her family, her only comfort is her beloved dog, Ralph. Mary pours out her thoughts and feelings into a diary which is found and edited three hundred years later by Ruth Dettman. Ruth is an academic, a Jewish (I think) refugees to the US from Germany. Her 20 year marriage to computer scientist Karl is breaking down with both partners retreating into silence, talking - or writing - past each other communicating not with each other but with us via pained, angry texts.

It was Karl (also originally a German refugee) who wrote the MARY program, which is then improved and developed over the years, but he gradually turns his back on AI, seeing it as a dangerous trap and likely to be used for the wrong reasons. Ruth, in contrast, wants Mary enhanced, given memory.

In another strand of the book, Stephen Chinn, incarcerated in a Texas prison, narrates his life. A typical computer geek, socially awkward, bullied at school, he went on to make a fortune in IT, spotted the mathematical basis of communication and used it as the basis for a pick-up manual and online dating site. Then he develops MARY to form the basis of a chatbot, and of "intelligent" dolls to be companions for children. Something has, however, gone wrong and Stephen has been prosecuted for his work, the chatbots confiscated and piled in warehouses where they sadly run down, waiting for the companions they'll never see again. We see some conversations in transcript between a girl Gaby and an online version of MARY, meant to prove or refute the charges against Stephen. It's hard to see this whole process as anything more than a blind lashing out against him by society: the transcripts reveal what otherwise we're hardly aware of, that these children live lives of isolation in prison-like "developments", with no movement allowed as climate change and desertification overtake the United States. The response of the authorities to them beginning to "freeze", ceasing to speak or respond, by isolating them further, seems unlikely to help.

To add to the sense of silence and isolation - Mary at her diary, Stephen alone in prison, Karl and Ruth talking past each other - we have a separate strand formed by letters from Alan Turing to the mother of a (dead) friend. These explore the same themes as the rest of the book - the AI developments leading to a the technology allowing MARY to speak, the idea of looking both back and forward, of series with terms dependent on past and future - of silence and isolation. Turing, of course, was a real person so his part of the story is darkened by our knowledge of how he will be treated, disgraced (in the eyes of contemporary society) and take his own life.

It's a powerful book, in which unsettling echoes of the same ideas are made to travel backwards and forwards in almost a dreamlike way. The protagonists almost seem to be talking to one another, but never quite do: indeed they seem to be in the closest communion when silence actually falls between them, united in their various griefs.

The book has a dreamlike quality. While rooted in an idea of scientific, technological progress and learning, some of the background seems almost that of a fantasy world: for example, arriving in the US from Europe, Ruth gets a job working in the "Office of Telescope Crystals" - which almost sound like a quasi mystical device. Or is it just one of those strange WWII codenames, intended to preserve security? Similarly, the way that Ruth and Karl escape from Germany seems almost fairy-tale like in its simplicity and ease - while their families may be doomed, the sort of suffering that went on in the War is only directly reported or described in what happens to those abandoned, self aware dolls that we see being transported piled in trucks at the start of the book. Stephen imagines them, his children, marching out of the desert to free him, but it doesn't happen.

And the most gut wrenching moment of sadness in the book comes, perhaps, from another direction entirely. (While this isn't a book that seeks to play on the reader's emotions, there are parts of it that are really quite painful).

I see I've been leaning towards describing what happens in this review. I don't think I've dropped any spoilers, because what happens is much, much less important than why, how and what it means' Like a hologram, that is encoded in every bit of the text but only becomes clear as the different narratives are allowed to interfere and build up a complete image, and is difficult to get across in a review like this.

All I can say, at the end, is, read this book. Let it speak to you.