The Laughing Robot (SF) - Julia Ross ***

This is an odd one. I'm reviewing it because it's science fiction, but while it is very weak as an SF novel, if you totally ignore the technology bits, underlying them is a really interesting book about ageing. There's also a third aspect which verges into over-the-top satire... but we'll get onto that.

Let's do the good bit first. Julia Ross has been a nurse, social worker and Director of Social Services, not unlike her sixty-something protagonist Anna. Although the main thread of the story is decidedly slow, it does explore well some of the difficulties we face with an ageing population and younger age-groups who perhaps feel hard done by baby boomers. Ross addresses, for example, the difficulties of getting care and mechanisms such as lasting powers of attorney, designed to help the elderly who can no longer cope but which have the potential for misuse. 

Anna and her loving-but-user children provide a really good way to think about these issues many of us may face in the future. Ross also takes on the appalling use of Electro-Convulsive Therapy, an outdated treatment for depression that has no scientific basis and ought to have been banned years ago.

That over-the-top satire aspect is that Ross imagines the UK government taking over the Isle of Wight as a kind of vast retirement village where the elderly will be involuntarily sent for assessment and either allowed back home if able to support themselves or forced to stay in dubious conditions. This kind of thing only really works if it's funny, which it certainly isn't here.

But the real problem for a science fiction reviewer is the portrayal of future technology. (The framing is particularly odd as the novel seems to be set a couple of years ago, immediately after the Covid pandemic.) According to her bio, the author 'worked for several years in the digital world, learning about AI and predictive analytics' - unfortunately this doesn't come through at all in the writing.

Sometimes Ross seems to pick up a random technology concept and insert it with no obvious relation to what the concept actually refers to, notably the singularity, which is referenced several times without any real reflection of it in the storyline. But the worst thing is the portrayal of robots and autonomous vehicles. Over the course of a couple of years in the book, care robots go from something basic that is just about imaginable in the next few years to having sufficient autonomy to organise an escape from the Isle of Wight on behalf of their elderly owners. This is extremely anachronistic.

But the treatment of robots (which don't have the central role implied by the book's title in large swathes of it) pales in comparison to the way autonomous vehicles are represented. The Isle of Wight has self-driving vehicles called Notcars that force Anna off the road on her bicycle. When she complains, she is told 'The early Notcars aren’t fitted with sensors as a matter of course but they will be in the future.’ So they find their way around psychically? This is like a conventional car manufacturer saying 'Our cars aren't fitted with windscreens as a matter of course, but they will be in the future.'

A distinct oddity, then. I was impressed by the core storyline about ageing and care, but it was sadly let down by the science and technology.

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Review by Brian Clegg - See all Brian's online articles or subscribe to a weekly email free here