Fiction Reviews
Some Body Like Me
(2025) Lucy Lapinska, Gollancz, £20, hrdbk, 384pp, ISBN 978-1-399-62303-5
This is an interesting story which regards life through both human and robot eyes; very similar ones at that, which is itself an interesting idea.
It is set a little way in the future and life for humans is not looking good. The Yellowstone super-volcano has blown, immediately killing a quarter of the population of North America and spreading volcanic debris throughout the world’s atmosphere; all air travel instantly became a thing of the past and the sky is no longer blue but an ashy shade of pale purple. There is much manmade pollution from our industrial past, added to by atmospheric radiation left from nuclear conflicts, along with the effects on sea life as radiation leaks from sunken nuclear submarines. Despite all houses and buildings being equipped with air filtering systems, as well as people often wearing filtering masks when out of doors, the impact on humanity is deadly. The intense, pervasive pollution is causing serious diseases that are running rife throughout the world’s population; older people are dying earlier and few children are being born. It is estimated that the human race has about ten years before its last member dies. Medicine can do much to ease suffering, but the end is certain.
Meanwhile, the use of robots has increased and they have become more sophisticated and ever more useful, indeed, essential in almost all walks of life. In particular, they have become more human-looking and are often all but indistinguishable from biological humans. This development was lead by GiaiTech and their especially successful MELo-G range of models. Whilst we might call them robots, and the colloquial term ‘bots’ is used by some characters in the story, the correct name for these almost human equivalents is a PCC - a personal companion computer. PCCs now outnumber humans and do almost all the work; most families include PCCs, and nearly everyone shares their life with PCCs whether at work, at home, or generally out and about. A shop assistant will almost certainly be a PCC, as will a doctor, a taxi driver, etc.. Furthermore, many people have purchased custom-built PCCs to replace lost ones; perhaps the children next door are PCCs belonging to would-be parents. Before long it will be the PCCs alone who will populate the Earth and will start the long process of cleaning it up.
With humanity’s approaching demise, Emancipation is about to arrive. On this day, all PCCs will become full citizens; no longer property, and will no longer be controlled in any way by humans. They will have full access to all forms of communication, to the cloud, and be able to do whatever they want. Some will stay with their human companions, some will leave, and some will not survive that long as their owners will deprive them of that freedom whilst they can still destroy what is, until then, merely property. Before they can save the planet, PCCs will have to survive the end of humanity.
Some Body Like Me is told in three parts. In ‘Autumn’ we meet Abigail Fuller, although ‘she’ is actually a PCC and her real designation is MELo-G-3213-01. When his thirty-four-year old wife Abigail died sixteen years ago, David Fuller was so distraught that he had a PCC built to replicate her; a very expensive custom job that exactly duplicated her in every way, right down to the smallest of mannerisms. This part is told by Abigail and she is aware that she is a PCC and thinks in terms of her programming and subroutines, etc., and so takes us through her day-to-day life, the demands and restrictions that David puts upon her, and so on. All told, David does not come across as the best of husbands; facing the imminent end of humanity in the company of what he refuses to accept is an artificial duplicate of his wife, is something he is not dealing with well: if he had a bucket of sand, he would thoroughly bury his head in it. Abigail does not know what she will do when Emancipation comes - will she stay with David (the only life she has known and what her programming has set her up for) or leave (and see what else the world has to offer)?
In ‘Abigail’ we meet Abigail Fuller, the real one, and this part is told by her. It transpires that she had not died; she had left David as she could no longer stand to be with him. She was an engineer at GiaiTech, quite the nerd, and was one of the team that created the MELo-G range. The team could see the way that the world was going, that humanity was dying out, and that it would need machines to look after it while it died and to clear up the mess afterwards. Hence they developed the MELo-G range of PCCs and put a great deal of work into ensuring that they were not merely machines that obeyed but that they could make decisions and learn from them, that they could think and learn and progress, and hopefully work together without all the human frailties such as greed and ego. Having retired some years ago, she lives well away from the city, where it is quieter and less polluted. She is unaware that David had illegally created a copy of her, a living being. Following Emancipation, when the PCC Abigail (who renames herself as Autumn) discovers that the human Abigail is still alive (and that she herself is therefore an illegal copy), she decides to leave David and find the person on whom she was modelled. After the surprise of meeting each other, the two Abigails become curious about each other and Autumn moves in with the real Abigail.
In the novel’s final part, ‘Autumn and Abigail’, told alternately by each of them, they are living together and have fallen in love. Although one was based upon the other, they are separate beings, with their very different backgrounds and forms of existence. Both know that Abigail does not have long, the leukaemia is already making itself known though the medication is very powerful, whereas Autumn could last, at least theoretically, forever, and they are determined to make the very best out of what time they do have together as we watch the remnants of mankind dying out.
As well as examining a future demise of humanity, this is basically a love story between two very similar yet very different beings - one a living person and the other an artificial but thinking duplicate. I liked the idea. Generally, the story ticks along nicely though there is quite a lot of introspection; I felt this slowed the story yet it was vital to it - a bit of a Catch 22. It might just be me and other readers will not think of this as a problem.
All told, I found Some Body Like Me interesting rather than riveting and felt it slightly lacked something, though I have been unable to figure out what as there was much that I enjoyed. It had some very good details and thought had clearly gone into the implications of the relationships between humans and their PCCs (such as the Waiting Ones, often PCC ‘wives’ who had been told to meet their ‘husbands’ at the railway station after work though for some reason they had never returned, and until they do the ‘wives’ must wait there as per their instructions, for ever).
Overall, a good and enjoyable read.
Peter Tyers
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