Squires, Susan - Body Electric

[oyceter]

In the not-too-distant future, Victoria Barnhardt is a former-hacker-turned-software-engineer for Visimorph, a ham-handed satire of Microsoft. In her spare time, she tries to create a conscious AI.

I am not sure this is a romance at all. In fact, I am not sure what it is, period. There seems to be too much suspense and running around and whatnot for a genre romance, and the worldbuilding is so shoddy that it hardly seems to be SF either.

This is all extremely unfortunate, as Vic is damaged, hates her own femininity, and still must somehow teach her now-sentient AI Jodie how to be human when she seems much more inclined to abandon humanity for computers. Jodie is sweet and innocent, given his status as a newly-sentient intelligence. By all rights, this would be an awesome, boundary-breaking book. Instead, it's quite a mess.

The main plot to steal Jodie from Vic is horrible even by bad suspense romance novel standards; the villains are patently cardboard, I can think of no motivation whatsoever for one of the characters, and another is somehow doing this out of love/obsession for Vic. The computer science is execrable. I found the means by which Jodie gets a human body to be morally and ethically shady, to say the very least, and the process by which this is done is unbelievable even for the usual AI-turns-human plot. And this is just stuff that has to do with the plot that I don't even care about!

Furthermore, although there are many really cool questions about gender, sexuality, and identity in the book, they are only thrown out there and then dealt with in the most summarily dismissive of fashions. Jodie decides he is a male program because he is logical and not emotional. Despite her railing at the sexism of the computer industry and her dislike of stereotypical femininity, Vic does not at all question that emotion and cooperation are biologically female traits, and from what I remember, what she teaches Jodie about gender and sexuality is cisgendered, heterosexual, and lines up neatly with all gender stereotypes. It is so frustrating! It could have been meta-commentary on how embedded these "default" notions about gender and sexuality are, even to those who hate the "default" framework, but instead, Squires doesn't even seem to think about the fact that she is bolstering the kyriarchy.

There are glimmers of neat things in the book, particularly Vic teaching the naive Jodie about basically everything, and although I found Squires' attempt to reconcile a human-computer romance somewhat silly, it was also charming ("I created you, but now you're too smart for me!") and would have been an actual conflict had the writing been better.

But there's just so much to dig through for that. In conclusion: extremely interesting premise, terrible, terrible execution.

Links:
- coffeeandink's write up

Comments

[starlady]

It sounds a little like Galatea 2.0--the computer scientist in that book is male, the creation female. It's been too long since I read it, though, to say whether that book addresses any of the questions this one sounds like it avoids.

[coffeeandink]

I remember thinking Galatea 2.0 was frustrating in very different ways, but I don't remember what they were. The computer science was a lot better, and the prose remarkable (I am a big fan of Richard Powers), but I hated the ending.

[starlady]

What I remember is "Picture yourself on a train heading south" (I'd agree about Powers' prose), but not even the ending.

[oyceter]

Huh, interesting! Although I did think one of the interesting things about this book was flipping the genders of the creator/created, since you don't get to see very many female inventors and/or computer scientists in fiction!

[starlady]

Yeah, exactly. We need more of that, I think. *shakes first at patriarchal myths and their retellings*

[yhlee]

Jodie decides he is a male program because he is logical and not emotional. Despite her railing at the sexism of the computer industry and her dislike of stereotypical femininity, Vic does not at all question that emotion and cooperation are biologically female traits, and from what I remember, what she teaches Jodie about gender and sexuality is cisgendered, heterosexual, and lines up neatly with all gender stereotypes.
BARF. Add this to the list of things I never touch.

[oyceter]

Yeah I don't think this is your thing at all! Even if there hadn't been skanky gender issues, I think the computer skience alone would have made you sporky!

[oracne]

I think this idea would benefit more from being an sf novel.

Did you ever read Amy Thomson's VIRTUAL GIRL? I read it so long ago I can't remember details. But I'm pretty sure it was more thought-out than what you just described.

[oyceter]

I think this idea would benefit more from being an sf novel.

ME TOO. In fact, it didn't read very much like romance to me at all and felt more like SF, even though the SFnal elements were terrible.

I haven't read that, but it sounds interesting, thanks!