Echo boy

I enjoyed this book immensely and based off of this and "The Humans", I think Haig has a bright future in SF. There are some problems that need to be addressed though.

Like being told that the protagonist, Audrey is smart enough to be going to Oxford two years early, but yet she's so daft that it takes her the better part of the book to figure out that which is obvious to the reader less than a quarter way in.

And how can the android character being able to feel pain be indicative of a "soul" or "consciousness" or what have you? Feeling pain is only indicative of a working nervous system. There are honest to goodness humans with disorders that make it so that they don't feel pain. It does not make them automatons.

Then there were the two tired old android tropes trotted out in the novel that I hope that I never see again in my life. The first is the resurrection center and the discarded echos that work there. The scene from "A.I." with the Chris Rockbot should have put this one in the ground. No more Island of Misfit Toys in my android books!

Second, is the compulsory gender and heterosexuality of androids. Why did Daniel even have sexual attraction? If Rosella had programmed him with it, then that should've been mentioned. Android sexuality is such fertile ground ripe for experimentation. But yet every time Data gets busy with someone, it's always a woman. Granted, that was 80s network tv. But this is a genre that shouldn't shy from playing with this concept in new and interesting ways, rather than the old boy bot meets human girl storyline.

But otherwise, solid writing, great world building. This was a book that I looked forward to picking up every time until I finished it and I'll definitely read the sequels, assuming there are any.

Audrey’s world is full of technology which is at the extremes of where we’re heading now. I can see where a lot of it has coming from logically, but there is so much change from now, it doesn’t feel like Earth. I did like how southern Europe has become arid and Spain was a blistering desert, with remote warehouses supporting the new industry but not much else. Also, the Resurrection Zone was somewhat relatable to London Zoo (it helps it’s in Regent’s Park). I felt the scenes in the zoo were some of the most thought-provoking and powerful.

For the most part, the narrative is Audrey’s but there are a few chapters from Daniel’s point of view, which felt a bit more contemplative. Audrey’s suffering from grief at the start of the book and uses patches to numb the pain. There is a fair amount of time devoted to this, which reflects Matt Haig’s experiences with depression. Even Daniel, could be described to have had depression at one point if you project his thoughts onto a human mind.

This might well be better received by those that haven’t read much robot science fiction. Somewhere in my head I was expecting another The Mad Scientist’s Daughter and emotionally this fell a bit short. Younger readers who can become enamoured with the future tech and action will undoubtedly enjoy it. But in a book about robots, I need some ethical dilemmas or moral ambiguity. The people who mistreated robots were horrible people and I think they enjoyed it no matter if they were sentient or not. We already anthropomorphise our technology and it doesn’t look like us (I feel I have to be polite to my boyfriend’s car otherwise the door won’t open). A robot that is nearly identical to us, would be a hard thing to act cruel towards, even if was an unfeeling machine. I think it needed more conflicted characters.

Actually I’m not sure what the Echoes really are. They are introduced as androids but seem to be mostly biological. I wanted a bit more on their history rather than the other tech in their world. There seemed a lot to fit in and the pace was a bit on the slow side because of this.

I think delayed instalove is becoming a thing. Just because it doesn’t happen at the start of the story, doesn’t mean it doesn’t feel like instalove when there’s no real emotional build up. There needs to be a believable like going on before love. It’s especially hard to believe when it’s an otherwise awkward coupling.

Review copy provided by publisher.