Skip to main content

Set My Heart to Five - Simon Stephenson ****

This is a very clever novel, which owes a lot to the classic Flowers for Algernon by Daniel Keyes. In Flowers for Algernon, the main character is an adult with the mind of a young child, who takes part in experimental treatment that enables him to become a genius before the gradual decline of his faculties back to his original condition sets in. The central character enables us to see the realities of human life from an initially childlike but increasingly sophisticated viewpoint. Set My Heart to Five has a similar approach, where a bot (here meaning an android, rather than a robot) starts to discover feelings and move from a mechanical view of life to a human-like one, exposing as he does so many of the oddities of human existence.

The extra twist to Simon Stephenson's well-crafted work is that it also incorporates a lot from the world and theory of film. It seemed a little forced initially that Stephenson deals with a number of significant events in Jared's (the central character's) life in the format of a film script, but this is multiply relevant both because movies will be central to Jared discovering his feelings and also because Jared both writes a film script and lives through a story that is painstakingly constructed in the format of one of the script-writing guides making it a classic Hero's Journey. The blurb accompanying the book proudly proclaims it has been signed up as a 'major motion picture' - and it would almost be bizarre if it wasn't, because there's nothing filmmakers like more than films about film-making.

The way that Jared gradually develops feelings - even love - is elegantly handled, and the storyline has all the requisite twists and turns, including all the classic movie sequences you could imagine. The road trip section near the end becomes truly page-turning as our hero makes a last-ditch attempt for survival, with the reader always aware of the omens suggested by Jared's discovery of how a film should play out for maximum effect. I also loved the way that one of the big influences on his life was Blade Runner.

There were some irritations. The narration Stephenson gives to Jared grates, as he can barely produce a paragraph without an exclamation mark. And the science here is so far-fetched as to make this closer to fantasy than SF. This is a post apocalyptic world, where the apocalypse was everyone being locked out of the internet, causing, for example, every plane to drop out of the sky. (Why?) Elon Musk has destroyed the Moon by incinerating it, which suggests Stephenson doesn't really know what the Moon is (or what destroying it would do to the Earth). And bots are basically humans who have been genetically modified to have a 'biological computer' instead of a brain (though they also, for some reason, need hard drives) - totally missing the point that the only 'biological computer' of any sophistication likely to be possible is a brain. 

I think it's better to simply go with the flow and ignore the science (or lack of it). It's a strong story, there's delightful interlacing with the history and language of film, and while I think some have over-emphasised the insights to be gained into the human condition here, it certainly gives Stephenson an opportunity to observe the absurdity of humanity's behaviour when seen from an outside (cinematic) viewpoint. One of the most interesting novels of 2020.

Hardback:

Kindle:  
Using these links earns us commission at no cost to you
Review by Brian Clegg
Labels:

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

The Decline and Fall of the Human Empire - Henry Gee ****

In his last book, Henry Gee impressed with his A (Very) Short History of Life on Earth - this time he zooms in on one very specific aspect of life on Earth - humans - and gives us not just a history, but a prediction of the future - our extinction. The book starts with an entertaining prologue, to an extent bemoaning our obsession with dinosaurs, a story that leads, inexorably towards extinction. This is a fate, Gee points out, that will occur for every species, including our own. We then cover three potential stages of the rise and fall of humanity (the book's title is purposely modelled on Gibbon) - Rise, Fall and Escape. Gee's speciality is palaeontology and in the first section he takes us back to explore as much as we can know from the extremely patchy fossil record of the origins of the human family, the genus Homo and the eventual dominance of Homo sapiens , pushing out any remaining members of other closely related species. As we move onto the Fall section, Gee gives ...
Post a Comment
Read more

The Autobiography – Charles Darwin ****

I have to confess to putting off reading this book until the last moment, as I expected it to be a typical piece of Victorian sentimental unreadable stodge. I was wrong. Darwin’s little book (only 150 small pages with appendices) was originally written for his own children, and displays a very personal style of writing – though, as son Francis comments, his style was always more populist than was common then: “In writing he sometimes showed the same strong tendency to strong expressions that he did in conversation. Thus in the Origin, p440, there is a description of a larvel [sic] cirripede ‘with six pairs of beautifully constructed natatory legs, a pair of magnificent compound eyes and extremely complex antennae’. We used to laugh at him for this sentence, which we compared to an advertisement.” The main book is delightful because it demonstrates Darwin’s self-depreciating modesty, and the fascinating path he took from enthusiastic shooter of game, to amateur geologist (still his...
Post a Comment
Read more

The Premonitions Bureau - Sam Knight ****

Not everyone would class this as popular science, but it concerns an attempt to take a scientific approach to paranormal abilities - notably premonitions (aka clairvoyance) and as such, it fits the category. Writing in the typical dramatic storytelling style of a US magazine, Sam Knight brings to life the remarkable tale of the work of two British figures from the 1960s. The central one is psychiatrist John Barker, with a supporting role given to newspaper and TV science reporter Peter Fairley. Barker had a long interest in extra sensory phenomena - the story takes off when he was inspired by a number of people claiming to have foreseen the Aberfan disaster (which terrible tragedy Knight covers movingly). As a result of the Aberfan premonitions, the pair were responsible for London's Evening Standard newspaper setting up a long-running experiment in the form of 'The Premonitions Bureau.' Aware that the Aberfan predictions were only reported after the event, and hence flawe...
Post a Comment
Read more