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annathepiperHow much of your humanity can you retain if you replace huge swaths of your biological body with machinery? How about your brain? It's certainly a well-visited question all over SF, as is the related question of the rights one should give a truly sentient artificial intelligence. When you're telling a love story in SF trappings, you're inevitably also going to get this corollary: can I fall in love with a guy who's technically more machine than man?
In Catherine Asaro's hands, with Sunrise Alley, the question becomes whether our heroine du jour, Sam Bryton, can love Turner Pascal, the resurrected artificial intelligence version of a dead man. I admit, I'm a sucker for this scenario--I've toyed with it in my own fanfic. And I've read and enjoyed prior Asaro works The Veiled Web and The Phoenix Code.
But this time around it didn't quite gel for me, and three reasons come immediately to mind. One, her explanations for why her cybernetic hero could modify himself to look more machine-like but could not reverse the process made no logical sense to me whatsoever. Two, the surprise plot thread that came in at the end felt entirely unnecessary and ill-explained. Three, she had too much "As you know, Bob" going on with the made-up vocabulary terms she was using for her setting--such as throwing out the word 'holicon' as a term to describe a holographic icon and defining the term immediately in the prose for the benefit of the reader. Jarring, unfortunately, when you're in the point of view of someone who should already damn well know what that word means, and it was especially jarring after having seen Charles Stross do it so much better over in Glasshouse.
All that said, it was still a fun enough fluffy read, even with the obvious hints dropped to set up the sequel. Two stars.
In Catherine Asaro's hands, with Sunrise Alley, the question becomes whether our heroine du jour, Sam Bryton, can love Turner Pascal, the resurrected artificial intelligence version of a dead man. I admit, I'm a sucker for this scenario--I've toyed with it in my own fanfic. And I've read and enjoyed prior Asaro works The Veiled Web and The Phoenix Code.
But this time around it didn't quite gel for me, and three reasons come immediately to mind. One, her explanations for why her cybernetic hero could modify himself to look more machine-like but could not reverse the process made no logical sense to me whatsoever. Two, the surprise plot thread that came in at the end felt entirely unnecessary and ill-explained. Three, she had too much "As you know, Bob" going on with the made-up vocabulary terms she was using for her setting--such as throwing out the word 'holicon' as a term to describe a holographic icon and defining the term immediately in the prose for the benefit of the reader. Jarring, unfortunately, when you're in the point of view of someone who should already damn well know what that word means, and it was especially jarring after having seen Charles Stross do it so much better over in Glasshouse.
All that said, it was still a fun enough fluffy read, even with the obvious hints dropped to set up the sequel. Two stars.