I would like to thank Bloomsbury for a copy of this novel in exchange for a fair and honest review
Publisher - Bloomsbury
Published - Out Now
Price - £18.99 hardback £12.26 ebook
Meet Julia Flang, a twenty-something former professional gamer, living with her retired uncle, and working two jobs she doesn't like. Out of the blue, her estranged mother, a CFO for one of the world's largest tech companies, offers her a temp job with a payday Julia can't refuse. One sham interview later, she's offered the job: to chaperone a man in a vegetative state from California to the East Coast. But he's not dead dead: he has an AI mind implanted in his head . . .
Meet a middle-aged man who wakes within a disorienting hellscape filled with monstrous grotesqueries. Worse than the fluid, morphing reality in which he's trapped, he has no memory of who he is. He certainly doesn't remember getting the rabbit tattoo on his arm. He only knows that he must find a certain person.
Who? He can't remember.
Anger can create an impressive power to a story. In Small Gods Pratchett throws scorn on those who don’t practise what they preach. Butler throws down indignation at what Regan politics meant for the world in the Parables duology. Take the troubles of today and an author can rail against injustice and make clear and powerful points to make a lasting impression on a leader. But sometimes justifiable anger can eclipse everything else and get in the way of making us think. Sadly Paul Tremblay’s satirical thriller Dead But Dreaming of Electric Sheep wants to discuss AI but fails to really land its punches.
In theory it’s a thriller but the tone is quite arch. Our main characters is the young Julia Flang daughter of a powerful who gets asked to transport a dead man but the catch is he is not dead more comatose and his body contains cutting edge technology that allows an operator to move him. Julia is a pilot and he’s things get more sinister from there….in theory.
I was unimpressed with this. Young characters who seem to only know the reference points of older generations feel weak and while I can see why Tremblay wanted to make allusions to Weekend At Bernie’s I think you have to be my age to remember what is mainly now an internet meme and most people who where there recall a terrible film. Julia is a plot device and I never found her that believable or to be honest as sympathetic having happily sat on her family wealth for some time.
The plot is glacial after multiple characters explain the plot again and again by half way she has hardly moved. And very little actually happens which for a thriller (even an apparently satirical one) is a problem. All of this is really just a chance for Tremblay to explain AI, its injustices, its moral cowardice and yet the angry interludes don’t really work when the wider story is so uninteresting and weak. The overall feeling was as a novel it just doesn’t work and really a tighter short story or novella would have delivered more and this at around 300 pages should not feel as bloated a tale. Overall I feel while the heart is in the right place very little else is and I can’t recommend it.
