Tag: technology

Blurb Book Review: Hum by Helen Phillips (spoilers ahead)

~ Robin James ~ Leave a comment

Cover image from Goodreads.com

May, recently unemployed, chooses to undergo a procedure to subtly alter her face so it wouldn’t be recognizable by AI. The compensation she receives is enough for her to purchase a three night stay in the Botanical Garden, the only greenery in the city, for her family. But while luxuriating in the glory of a forested area, her children go missing.

I tore through this novel and read it in two sittings.

Technology is presented beautifully, as both helpful and harmful. Children have bunnies attached to their wrists that monitor their heartbeats and location while also providing them with access to the internet. People have woombs, large egg-shaped structures where they can sit inside and be surrounded by whatever images suit them. Hums are robots, designed to be helpful to humans. Ads are constant and invasive.

Near the beginning, May takes the bunnies off her children’s wrists as a way of forcing them to exist in the real world and experiencing all that Botanical Gardens has to offer. She demands that she and her husband Jem leave their phones behind as well. But without this tech, they have to use a paper map to navigate the area and are out of touch with the world.

This becomes a problem when Jem and May fall asleep while the kids run up and down a waterfall area. With no bunnies, her children cannot be located easily by a helpful hum. Instead, the hum must access public feeds to locate the children. In doing so, the hum records May’s reaction to everything, which becomes a viral video.

Child Services gets involved, with a hum sent to observe the family. May panics, of course, that her children will be taken from her.

It’s easy to identify with May and her choice to remove the kids’ bunnies, many parents don’t want their children immersed in the internet all the time, but also the fallout and misunderstanding of peoples’ reactions to the viral video. In it, May is presented as anti-bunny, which she’s not, and parents everywhere condemn her.

The ending confused me, though. The hum tells May that the investigation concluded and her children would stay with her. Then the hum tells her to go to her woom to see the portrait it made for her, a portrait that absolved her of the investigation. Inside her woom, she saw herself undergoing the procedure to change her face, which, it turned out, was to train AI on distinguishing the differences not become unrecognizable as advertised. But how did this portrait absolve her?

Despite that, I enjoyed the book and its look into a dystopian, near-future world where capitalism has run rampant.

Blurb Book Review: Zero Days by Ruth Ware (spoilers ahead)

~ Robin James ~ Leave a comment

Cover image from Goodreads.com

This author is really good at writing exhausted characters, this novel is no different.

Jack is a pen tester – penetration tester; someone who breaks into a facility at the request of the owner/CEO – and is caught just as she’s leaving her latest job. After explaining everything to the police, going back to retrieve her car, then driving home, she arrives to find her husband has been murdered at his desk. At first she’s questioned as a grieving spouse, but much too quickly, the evidence points to Jack ordering a hit on him.

The moment she realizes she’s a suspect she leaves the police station to try to find evidence of who actually killed her husband. In the process, she injures herself badly enough to cause an infection. Now she has to race against time to find the evidence before the infection takes over, all while dodging CCTV cameras and not using anything to digitally ping her location.

The novel is paced exceptionally well. As a reader I felt Jack’s exhaustion and desperation to find the killer. All the crumbs are in place for the reader to follow and figure out who was responsible for the death, and Jack not figuring it out quickly enough is believable because of the high-stress situation, lack of food, and growing infection.

My only nitpick is that a fair bit of information is repeated unnecessarily in the last quarter of the book. By the fourth mention of not having any bandages left, I was frustrated and wanted to tell the author to trust the reader to remember. That and other repetitive bits made the last few chapters a bit tedious. Otherwise, this novel is just as engrossing as the author’s previous work.

Blurb Book Review: The Future by Naomi Alderman (spoilers ahead)

~ Robin James ~ Leave a comment

Cover image from Goodreads.com

Imagine if technology could inform billionaires about an impending apocalypse. Imagine if that technology could give those billionaires advanced notice so they may flee to luxurious bunkers to wait out the apocalypse.

In this novel, Lai Zhen is given access to this technology as a gift from her lover Martha Einkorn. Zhen, a coding genius, wants to know how this program works, so she takes it to a good friend where the two of them take their time untangling the code. When Zhen discovers the program has been shut off remotely, she goes to one of the billionaire’s bunkers to reactivate it.

The program informs her of an impending apocalypse and helps her flee to a lush island stocked with every supply imaginable. Three billionaires also occupy the island; their plane went down on its way to a luxury bunker.

Without the billionaires in charge of their companies, Martha and her three compatriots move to change the world.

This novel was a bit of a slog. There are excerpts from a fictional chatroom/message board for survivalists. The posts in the novel relate back to the Bible and what, exactly, ownership means. I felt, fully and truly, that these message boards could have been cut from the novel without losing anything of value. By the end of the novel, I felt like the author was a bit heavy-handed in the constant rabbit/fox stories presented.

The narrative style flowed well enough and the characters were wonderfully distinct throughout. The novel begins with the program pinging a billionaire, then dives into the life of another billionaire. They have their orders: to flee quickly and quietly. Then the novel falls into backstory. Sometimes backstory within backstory.

The information was good and relevant, but I was wondering when we were going to get back to the billionaires getting the message to leave. What prompted the message? Why are they leaving? What apocalypse has befallen the Earth? These questions are answered, but I got impatient waiting for it.

I was tempted to stop reading partway through because of this impatience, but the characters were well enough written that I kept on reading. The payoff was absolutely worth it. There isn’t a twist, not exactly, but there’s a double reveal that made the slog worth it.

The cover is particularly well done. It represents the message of the book beautifully. The image of the fox being prominent over the rabbit is apt, as is the use of gold, silver, and cream.

As a side note, I’m pretty sure we could take Musk, Zuckerberg, and Bezos and insert them into the three billionaires featured in the novel. The biggest question is; would things work out the same if we removed these three from their companies? I doubt we’ll ever know for sure.