Author: Vadim Babenko
Publisher: Ergo Sum Publishing
Rating: WARTY!
DISCLOSURE: Unlike the majority of reviews in this blog, I've neither bought this book nor borrowed it from the library. This is a "galley" copy ebook, supplied by Net Galley. I'm not receiving (nor will I expect to receive or accept) remuneration of any kind for this review. Since this is a new novel, this review is shorter so as not to rob the writer of their story, but even so, it will probably still be more detailed than you'll typically find elsewhere!
I could not get into this novel at all. I know Babenko is a seasoned and respected writer, but I wonder if that's because he's "foreign" rather than because he has anything worthy to tell. Whatever the explanation, his seasoning was written off as far as I'm concerned. The blurb fooled me into believing it was going to be something interesting about AIs and technology and the human condition, but I saw very little AI and technology, very little human condition, and a lot of somewhat abusive adolescent sexual fantasy, which puts this novel right in the same boat as The Prelude as far as I'm concerned. The only strong feeling I got from it was that it ought to have been titled 50 Shades of A(I).
After plowing through the overwhelmingly massive info-dump of the first five chapters, I had pretty much lost all interest and found myself skimming the remaining chapters, glancing them over, reading a paragraph here and there because that was all I could bring myself to do. This tale felt much more like it should have been a short-story rather than a novel, and the endless description of obsession with women, and the notable absence of decent conversation was really wearing. There was far too much telling, and no showing to speak of.
The story is of Bogdan Bogdanovich, who creates an AI he calls Semmant. I have no idea why this name was chosen when 'Pedant' would have served just as well for a title. I must have missed that bit. Semmant is designed to beat the financial markets and does so very well. How this translates into it learning of Bogdan's 'human condition' I have no idea, because once Semmant is created, we pretty much bid it farewell, and descend into Bogdan's juvenile, somewhat cruel, and very shallow sexual fantasies and obsessions with one woman or another, all of which depended very little on technology or intelligence, artificial or otherwise. I have no interest in Bogdan or his women. I don’t care about his spoiled-rotten life or how it all comes crashing down around him or where he ends up. I really don’t. I tried to, but I had any reason to care sucked right out of me by the juvenile sex-obsession. I could neither sympathize nor empathize, nor even understand what it was Bogdan thought he was after, nor why he couldn’t find it, so I can't rate this novel as at all worthy, not even a little bit.
