Fiction Reviews
Some Body Like Me
(2026) Lucy Lapinska, Gollancz, £10.99, pbk, 387pp, ISBN 978-1-399-62304-9
I’ve seen a lot of android in the home stories lately, not least in the current BBC comedy series Ann Droid (where the joke wears thin very quickly), but I haven’t seen any good ones, so I guess my expectations were lowered. I’m pleased to say, though, that this book came as a pleasant surprise.
The end of the world is rapidly approaching in this novel (as it is in most new science fiction it seems) in all the usual predictable ways with the added (but credible) twist of a massive volcanic eruption in Yellowstone coating the planet in ash. The remaining humans are either increasingly sterile or choosing not to bring children into the hot, polluted, radioactive hellhole Earth has become so the population is rapidly shrinking, and there are probably ten years to go before the planet becomes completely toxic to human life and the age of humanity will be effectively over.
Left behind will be the bots – sentient androids acting as companions, carers, lovers and helpers, increasingly indispensable and increasingly populous as humanity declines. They become viewed as having rights and agency of their own, and their transition from machines to people comes with an Emancipation Act which enables the ‘Personal Companion Computers’ (PCCs) to act according to their own free will.
This isn’t The Terminator – the PCCs continue to help and support humans even when they don’t have to, because it’s in their programming – and this isn’t a story about Artificial Intelligence taking over the world. In this nightmare vision of the future they will take over, but only by default and not by design or intent. With their power to download from the cloud when new bodies are needed, they, potentially, can live on until the heat death of the universe and long outlast their creators.
But this story isn’t interested in that. At its core is the relationship between Abigail and the PCC that was illegally created by her ex-husband to look just like her. Love at the end of the world, the marketing promises, and this story is a tender bittersweet and very human story. The PCC renames herself Autumn when she can and as the novel progresses her real humanity becomes evident. What is humanity, anyway? Some of the humans in this story don’t show much of it but Abigail does, and that, of course, comes with a price.
The capacity for love here is very uplifting, and the characters are well realised and very engaging, but I found myself depressed at our descendants’ apparent defeatism. The planet is ruined and life as it was increasingly difficult, but the human race is grumpily settling into a slow extinction. There seems to be no drive to create more hospitable environments, to roll back the causes of the climate catastrophe or to escape and start again. Or maybe there was and the book chose to look elsewhere. Or maybe, in the future, we continue to sleepwalk into disaster, not concerned about the plight of future generations until, eventually, there will be no future generations to come and the opportunity for change has gone.
Some Body Like Me was Waterstone’s Debut Fiction prize winner and gained a BSFA Award nomination, one of New Scientist’s Best Fiction books and a Best New SF award from The Guardian. All deserved – and I would highly recommend this book.
Mark Bilsborough
See also Peter's review of Smoebody Like Me.
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