This is what I get for trusting Emily St John Mandel. From the blurb, the story sounded like exactly what I'm always searching for in novels about AI, but the delivery, ironically for a novel about memory and consciousness, was slow and forgettable. Laura Bow, introduced as a sort of Kevin the Teenager ('It's so UNFAIR!') in 1997, has created an artificial intelligence from her father's notes and her clunky PC - go on, disbelief officially suspended, I'll bite - which is to be a sort of companion/counsellor to the whining teen. She names her friend 'Organon', after the lyrics of a Kate Bush song, and 'he' becomes her life's work. Ten years later - the novel covers fifty years of Laura's life - she's working in San Francisco, at the tech company her father founded but which has now been taken over by his business partner. They launch SCION, another AI which has been designed like a spoiled child, to always win and fight back when threatened. (I love the concept of two opposing AIs with different programming, wonder why?) SCION decides to take over the world by releasing everybody's personal data, and Laura has to decide whether or not to release make Organon public to fight SCION's evil influence.

If James Smythe had just stuck to that concept, focusing on the AI and trimming a lot of the psychobabble, I would have enjoyed the book far more. But instead we get Laura and her father, who 'left' them when she was seven, Laura and Charlie from Charlie's perspective, Laura marrying Harris whose father has dementia. Too much of Laura pondering the nature of existence, basically. There's a lot of relatable observations, don't get me wrong, from the angst of teenage life (although not every teenager resorts to cutting themselves) to the pain of losing a loved one twice through dementia. But still. I lost the thread long before the tedious last chapters. With a lot of trimming, this would have worked far better as a YA novel, which the author has written previously. Disappointing, ( )

One of my favourite recent reads: a heart-ache and a balm in one.

Organon was written to be Laura's confidante when she needed a therapist; but her coding skills are greater than she knows. As Silicon Valley pushes the boundaries of natural language processing and artificial intelligence, Laura keeps her best friend to herself and focuses on teaching it compassion. When the data apocalypse finally breaks, Organon might be humanity's last best hope to save us from the disasters spawned by our digital and social hubris.

I still can't talk about I Still Dream without a disproportionately intense emotional response (I cry, okay?). I love this book because it both is and is not about the dangers of developing artificial intelligence. It paints the usual bleak picture of our arrogance and our unwillingness to grapple with whether we -should- do something when we -can- (with a particular and timely focus on techbros); but it undoes me because it refuses to give up hope. It looks at the difference between artificial intelligence and sentience, and questions whether there's any difference between the digital and the real - pushing the definitions of life itself.

Spanning a lifetime - glimpsed through an episode from each decade - it's got odd pacing, but I found it deeply satisfying.

Full review ( )

In 1997, between homework and phoning her friends and making mix tapes, seventeen-year-old Laura is still struggling to come to terms with the disappearance of her father several years earlier. Her mother took her to therapy but Laura thinks she can do better.

Building on the code her father, a computer programmer, left behind, she teaches herself to write a piece of artificial intelligence (AI) software called Organon (from the Kate Bush song Cloudbusting which Laura and her father both love). She tells Organon everything, and hopes that as Organon learns from her, it can respond to her needs. As Organon grows it begins to help her in ways she hadn’t anticipated.

The novel revisits Laura and Organon every decade, sometimes from Laura’s perspective, sometimes from the point of view of people close to her. We see how the world changes, how technology develops, the decisions made by corporations that control rival technologies.

I’ve read a couple of books recently which feature AI but this is very different. Usually the focus is on what humanity has created and what it reveals about who ‘we’ are, but this book looks at who is doing the creating and what drives them. Laura’s Organon is different from the alternatives, but why? The story has a lot to say both about the process of creating AI and the values underpinning it, and the questions those creators ask (or fail to ask) themselves.

The ten-year intervals between chapters mean much of what has happened, to both Laura and to society, is not explained. You are given tantalising glimpses, and the opportunity to question, imagine, infer.

Through it all, runs the story of Laura, her humour, her original perspective, her values. She both changes and retains her sense of self as Organon evolves with her. She is a remarkable character and I found the end of the book very poignant.

I finished this book a few days before I wrote this review and I found that my thoughts kept coming back to it. I Still Dream asks questions about consciousness, memory and identity, what we value, how we deal with loss. The more you ask of it, the more you learn.

I received a copy of I Still Dream from the publisher via Netgalley.
This review first appeared on my blog at https://katevane.com ( )