I Still Dream

James Smythe deserves a little bit more of our attention. He is a brilliant writer and quite prolific, actually. He has written science-fiction that engage with technology (I loved The Machine), how it impacts society and how it affects us, humans.

I Still Dream is a fascinating book about Artificial Intelligence. It is also a timely book. Of course, when James Smythe wrote this book, couldn’t have known this whole Facebook/Cambridge Analytica data breach and hacking affair, and although the data breach in the book is deeper and more far-extended, it is fascinating and terrified the same time to see what happens when the rules of privacy are broken and data is taken from the people and shared.

This is only part of what I Still Dream is about. While this is a book about technology and AI and its impact on society, Smythe is also tells a personal story. The story of Laura Bow, who, when her father disappeared when she was still very young, develops a piece of software, a kind of therapist, to help her deal with depression and the loss of her father. Her software is taken by a vulpine technology company and developed without her to oversight, into a sophisticated and aggressive system that is been used extensively in all kind of devices by individuals, corporations, organisations, etc, all over the world. Until the disaster hit.

The structure of the book is quite clever and interesting. The story starts in 1997 when Laura is seventeen years old and moves forward in ten-year increments giving us a snapshot of Laura’s life but also a snapshot of the how technology and the world are changing. I Still Dream is also a book about loss and grief, family and memory. It’s about what makes us what we are. There is a lot of stuff in this thought-provoking book.

Finally, as a huge admirer of Kate Bush, I particularly enjoyed the reference to her music. Also, I should definitely mention the beautiful cover design of this book. The dust jacket is amazing and the silver foiling of code on the boards is just brilliant.

Laura needed someone to talk to after her father disappeared, so she made Organon. It's more than just software to her, it's her friend and therapist. The year is 1997 and AI has a long way to go, but someone sees promise in her work, setting Laura, AI and the world towards their future.

I Still Dream is a story for my generation, and I don't just mean Millennials but more the older end that is usually lumped in but doesn't quite fit in either it or the previous generation. We grew up as digital technology grew up. Nineties Laura talks to her friends for hour on the landline and runs up bills on the dial-up internet. She makes mix tapes and listens to the same music I listened to. She forms a relationship with a stranger online, with no thought to the possible perils. I usually skim over music stuff in books but for once I got it. Laura could be me.

The story is structured by decades, each section jumping forward ten years. It's Laura's lifetime, with all the road bumps of adulthood along the way. It revisits the past and takes us into a possible future, and manages to capture the zeitgeist whilst doing so. With giant corporations holding so much data on us, we're starting to see the danger of that and are questioning what they are doing with it. What if we'd handed our lives over to something even more wide-reaching and insidious than Facebook?

James Smythe explores the ideas of artificial intelligence in a much more realistic way than most science fiction. Despite Organon's original purpose, Laura never stops thinking of it as code, doesn't forget that it is shaped by people and how it learns is up to us. I loved the contrast between Laura's AI and that of Silicon Valley, highlighting the concerns that we have today about who is exactly creating the rules. Laura's AI has empathy of a sort, it had to in order to be what she needed. Silicon Valley's is taught how to play games. The dangers of developing in a monoculture are very real.

The book also revisits the themes of The Machine. Now we're living longer Alzheimer's is a huge concern, whether we fear losing our own memories or having to deal with the slow decline of a parent. Memories make us who we are, and they also allow an AI to learn. Yet our memories are fallible, we shape them to suit us or focus on the bad things. The nostalgia of the early chapters also feed in to the theme of memory, what else is it than warm fuzzies brought on by old memories?

Considering the bleakness of his previous books, I Still Dream left me feeling hopeful. I mean there's sadness, of course; you cannot go through a lifetime without loss. I'm finding it hard to write what the ending meant to me without giving too much away, but it resonated with me as an atheist. Emotional, thought-provoking and a book I could connect with at every level, I loved it.

It's set in the same reality as The Machine and No Harm Can Come to a Good Man, although they are all completely standalone. The references are just a nod and you might not even notice them if you had read the other books. There's a TV adaption in the pipeline too and I can just imagine it with a Halt and Catch Fire vibe.

Review copy provided by publisher.