Wow! What a debut this is, in my mind this story is an instant sci-fi classic, fantastic characters with compelling stories made me fall for this one in a very short number of pages. Sylv.ie is a robot, built to carry out any pleasure her husband (the person who first switches her on) demands…she is anatomically correct so it is pretty obvious what her main roll is gonna be. She lives in a room on the top floor and her world is what she can see out of the window and the time she spends with her Husband. She has a lot of time on her own with her thoughts and one day her Husband gives her a diary to write in, not a smart move as she starts to recognise patterns and that her trips to the hospital are not all that they seem…Sylv.ie starts to question her programming.

This is a sort of coming of age adventure for a robot in a future where the human woman has lost their place in the world, a world where robots have sentience but aren’t classed as alive and possibly it could be a world where even a sex robot could find love. The detail on the technology was brilliant, Sylv.ie being able to count the blades of grass or even seeing the gaps in a plane of glass was well written, you don’t get swamped down with technical details, you get just enough to say “coooooool”. The exploration of how men treat women and sex reveals some quite shocking facts, mostly about how much I could identify as being just like real life, emotionally we are not that far removed from this future, it does make things feel bleak and that we truly can be an awful species. Sylv.ie’s battles with her programming are heart wrenching, I was urging her on all the time and getting right angry at those who did her wrong…I possibly got a little too much involved with this book.

This reminded me of the Bicentennial Man and also The Handmaid’s tale, so if you are a fan of those then you’ll love this. The book really needs to be made into a series, just so all those out there who haven’t read it can see what they’re missing. I am looking forward to what Anderson produces next…this reader is hoping for a sequel.

Blog review: felcherman.wordpress.com/2021/10/03/the-hierarchies-by-ros-anderson/