Skip to main content

Luminous (SF) - Silvia Park ****

It feels as if there have been way too many SF books about humanoid robots with artificial general intelligence set in the near future, because it just isn’t going to happen any time soon. The human form is very difficult to reproduce mechanically, while current AI is a long way from having human-like general intelligence (even if it's quite good at faking it). But, despite that proviso, I enjoyed Silvia Park's novel featuring... humanoid robots with artificial intelligence in the nearish future.

One of the reasons the book is striking is the setting. We are in a post-reunification Korea (after a vicious war), to a degree modelled on Germany in the way that the old communist part is looked down on by the rest. This is a world where human-like robots are commonplace, and what Park does well is explore the interface and boundary between human and artificial, with several of her characters effectively cyborgs to the extent we're not even certain to begin with if one character, Yoyo, is human or robot.

This world is explored in three threads. The first features a group of misfit children, playing and interacting in a robot graveyard, where they encounter the mysterious Yoyo. The second focuses on a police officer, severely wounded in the war, who specialises in robot crime. And the third involves a robot designer for one of the 'big three' robotics companies. These threads are eventually linked together by family ties, bringing together the struggles of a disabled child Ruijie, the hunt for a missing (child) robot and the design of a new child robot. This emphasis on robots as children, ranging from being something close to pets to much darker uses is something that Park deploys impressively to make us think about the nature of robot-human relations - and for that matter current human relations in general. (Having said that, the child-character threads aren't as engaging as the adult ones.)

I did have some issues with the book. It is very slow paced, and over-long. I appreciate it has a 'rich, layered story' as one comment has it, and does so without the pretentiousness that tends to accompany literary novels - but there were times I just wanted the author to get on with the narrative. There are also some odd glitches in the science content. Park assumes robots would have brains in their heads, which has been clearly not a sensible thing to do since Asimov's day. We are told of Ruijie that 'she was going to study astrology... and become the first bionic astronaut.' Astrology? And we are told the head of the linking family 'used to be for neurorobotics what Karl Schwarzschild was for quantum physics.' I assume that means he wasn't of much importance, given Schwarzschild's claim to fame is in general relativity, and had little to do with quantum theory.

As mentioned above, there have been quite a few of these robot books recently, often from the more literary end of fiction. Compared, for example, with Kazuro Ishiguro's Klara and the Sun, Luminous gives us a significantly better and more interesting exploration of the human implications of this complex technological concept.

Hardback:   
Kindle:  
Using these links earns us commission at no cost to you
These articles will always be free - but if you'd like to support my online work, consider buying a virtual coffee:
Review by Brian Clegg - See all Brian's online articles or subscribe to a weekly email free here
Labels:

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Why Nobody Understands Quantum Physics - Frank Verstraete and Céline Broeckaert **

It's with a heavy heart that I have to say that I could not get on with this book. The structure is all over the place, while the content veers from childish remarks to unexplained jargon. Frank Versraete is a highly regarded physicist and knows what he’s talking about - but unfortunately, physics professors are not always the best people to explain physics to a general audience and, possibly contributed to by this being a translation, I thought this book simply doesn’t work. A small issue is that there are few historical inaccuracies, but that’s often the case when scientists write history of science, and that’s not the main part of the book so I would have overlooked it. As an example, we are told that Newton's apple story originated with Voltaire. Yet Newton himself mentioned the apple story to William Stukeley in 1726. He may have made it up - but he certainly originated it, not Voltaire. We are also told that ‘Galileo discovered the counterintuitive law behind a swinging o...
Post a Comment
Read more

On Time - Jim Al-Khalili *****

By a small margin Jim Al-Khalili's The World According to Physics is my favourite of his books, both because the 'three pillars' concept at its heart works so well - but also because it's short. On Time is somewhat heavier, but thankfully not a wrist-buster. It might seem at first sight odd that a book on a subset of physics is considerably longer than one covering the whole thing, but time is one of those subjects that inevitably involves considerable complexities and needs depth. As Al-Khalili establishes, it's hard to think of any other scientific concept where our perception of it - what he refers to as manifest time or psychological time - is so different from the view from physics. Some physicists go so far as to suggest that time doesn't exist at all. In the book, Al-Khalili sets out (to my mind quite successfully) both to explain why they think this is the case, but also why it's not the best interpretation of time. I'd certainly note that I...
Post a Comment
Read more

When Everyone Knows That Everyone Knows: Steven Pinker *****

In the past I've found Steven Pinker's books hypnotic - I drift along enjoying the words and feeling I'm getting something deep from it without anything much sinking in. This one was different - it was sometimes a little harder to get your head around the underlying concept, descending as it tends to into infinite regression, but overall I did feel I'd gained a lot.  Pinker's focus here is 'common knowledge' which is when not only do we both/all know something, but we know that the other(s) know as well and the implications this has for human interactions. One entertaining thing to emerge from this is the ability to get into infinite loops of the 'I know that you know that I know that...' variety. Although we aren't mentally equipped to deal with more than a handful of iterations, we are told that a simple but limited interaction like a text exchange strictly needs the full infinite set to be definitive. For example, if you and a friend are tryin...
Post a Comment
Read more