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When out-of-shape IT technician Roen Tan woke up and started hearing voices in his head, he naturally assumed he was losing it.

He wasn’t.

He now has a passenger in his brain – an ancient alien life-form called Tao, whose race crash-landed on Earth before the first fish crawled out of the oceans. Now split into two opposing factions – the peace-loving, but under-represented Prophus, and the savage, powerful Genjix – the aliens have been in a state of civil war for centuries. Both sides are searching for a way off-planet, and the Genjix will sacrifice the entire human race, if that’s what it takes.

Meanwhile, Roen is having to train to be the ultimate secret agent. Like that’s going to end up well…

One of my favourite TV shows in recent years was Chuck. For those of you unfamiliar with the show: Chuck is about a regular geeky guy who one day wakes up to an email from his long estranged roommate from Stanford and opens it. Once he does a video starts playing and the next thing he knows he’s lying on the floor of his bedroom with a huge headache. Little does he know he’s downloaded a super computer into his brain and he is now wanted as a valuable asset for the CIA and other TLA’s. Not only does the Intersect, the previously mentioned super computer, allow him access to amazing amounts of data, he also has sudden access to incredible fighting skills. The series is wildly entertaining and if you haven’t checked it out, you really should. But how does this relate to Lives of Tao in any way, shape, or form? Because if anything, Lives of Tao‘s protagonist Roen, reminds me of Chuck a lot. Only instead of the Intersect, Roen is possessed by a symbiotic alien called Tao.

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“Cat, this is Finn. He’s going to be your tutor.”

He looks and acts human, though he has no desire to be. He was programmed to assist his owners, and performs his duties to perfection. A billion-dollar construct, his primary task now is to tutor Cat. As she grows into a beautiful young woman, Finn is her guardian, her constant companion… and more.

But when the government grants rights to the ever-increasing robot population, however, Finn struggles to find his place in the world.

Last year I read – and loved – Cassandra Rose Clarke’s debut YA novel, The Assassin’s Curse. Having been struck by her writing and powerful voice, I was already looking forward to The Mad Scientist’s Daughter based on that alone, but the cover reveal and the cover copy sealed the deal. Because look at that cover; it’s completely glorious. And Clarke didn’t disappoint with her first novel for adults. The Mad Scientist’s Daughter is stunning. A gorgeous exploration of love, the ability to feel it and other emotions, and the lies we tell ourselves in order to attain happiness that probes the border between human and AI to see how far they stretch. Perhaps it has a little too much romance in it for those who think all SF should be hard, but for me it was a perfect blend.

While this is as much Finn’s story as it is Cat’s, the narrative is told strictly from Cat’s perspective. We follow her from the time she’s five years old and Finn is brought into her home to tutor her until she’s about thirty-six. During all this time Finn is an integral part of her life, even once she moves away from home and even when they don’t speak for years. Her voice is distinctive and Clarke isn’t afraid to let her be unsympathetic. Cat is very human, with very human flaws, and we see her making choices which are unwise and say and do things that are unkind out of self-interest or ignorance. Despite this, I never lost my connection to the character, even when she strives to confirm to what she believes her late mother would have wanted for her and tries to lead a ‘normal’ life and she takes some tremendously stupid decisions. Even if I was sitting there, going ‘no, no, no, don’t do it’ at her, Clarke so skilfully built her character that her decisions are plausible and I understood why she made them. She’s also quite conflicted and damaged by her inability to deal with her mother’s death. Despite this she’s strong, stronger than she thinks and you can’t help but root for her every step of the way.

Where Cat is all too human, Finn clearly isn’t and he won’t let us forget it. Every time Cat, and consequently the reader, starts to forget – dare we say even hope – that Finn isn’t as human as he seems, he’ll do or more often say something that reminds us he’s an android. Yet from the first, Finn seems more than this; if there is something as the unreliable narrated character Finn is it. Cat often says she can’t read Finn, due to his lack of emotion and facial expression, but from his words and his behaviour much can be distilled. The lies people tell themselves – and others – to be able to ignore an uncomfortable truth are large and Cat is an expert in telling them to herself. In fact at times I felt like reaching into the book and shaking her in hopes of getting her to wake up and see what was in front of her. Through Cat we also witness Finn’s growth and his way to achieve his own agency, which was fascinating.

The Mad Scientist’s Daughter is far more than a love story. Once Cat realises the truth about her feelings for Finn, she goes to find his origins and his history had just a hint of Frankenstein in it, which is subtle and yet not. If I hadn’t just read a YA retelling of the book and a blog post on its conception and themes I wouldn’t even have thought to make the connection. Finn’s past contained a ton of grief, madness and questions about what constitutes life. This last question is further reflected in the ADL (Automata Defence League) which advocates for the emancipation of sentient robots and androids. The ADL is the embodiment of one of the main questions Clarke poses with this narrative: when does something attain enough humanity to be treated with equal rights? It is an age-old question when it comes to robotics and AI and Clarke handles it in an interesting way. For example, to counterweight Finn and his less-advanced brethren, Richard, Cat’s husband works on creating sentient robots that don’t possess consciousness to circumvent the laws that protect AI’s. But people seem to like these less, exactly because they lack character. I really liked Clarke’s treatment, but I would have liked more details on what laws the ADL managed to get passed and what rights the androids get to protect them from abuse. I’d say for me that was the one weak point in an otherwise amazing novel.

Reading The Mad Scientist’s Daughter became a tug of war between wanting to devour the story as quickly as I could, because it was so good, and wanting to parse it out, because I didn’t want it to end and leave Cat and Finn behind. And at no point did I cry… that was all dust in my eye. With this second book, Clarke has cemented her status as a must-read author. The Mad Scientist’s Daughter is really something special and I look forward with anticipation to what Clarke produces next, because she is definitely a talent to watch closely and it’s bound to be good. The Mad Scientist’s Daughter will be available in the UK on February 7th and in US and the rest of the world on January 29th.

This book was provided for review by the publisher.

Mankind gets an upgrade

In the near future, the experimental nano-drug Nexus can link human together, mind to mind. There are some who want to improve it. There are some who want to eradicate it. And there are others who just want to exploit it.

When a young scientist is caught improving Nexus, he’s thrust over his head into a world of danger and international espionage – for there is far more at stake than anyone realizes.

In the past year and a half I’ve come to realise that I can appreciate more than just Military SF, which I always thought was the only kind I’d get. I’ve actually discovered I also like space opera, but even more I like near future SF; I like the concept of it, the fact that the tech is often extrapolated from a still recognisable technology we already use or is a concept which is made possible by such an extrapolation. In Peter F. Hamilton’s Misspent Youth, for example, almost all of the advances that have been made, have been made possible by the invention by the main character of a new way to store data which allows for vast quantities of data to be stored in smaller, cheaper and more quickly accessible manner. Nexus is based on a similar familiar but taken to the next level technology: brain computer interface technology. Yeah, that made me go Huh too, but to give the example that made me go aha, it’s what makes cochlear implants (a device that allows deaf people to hear) possible. Naam gives quite a succinct and interesting explanation of the technology he worked from in an essay in the Extras section to the book, which was quite helpful even for someone who isn’t as well-versed in maths, physics and all the other science disciplines. I found this a really interesting technology to start from and reading the cover copy made me even more interesting to read the book. And while there were a few debut novel flaws in there, Nexus was a riveting read, one I didn’t want to end and which surprised me in a few places too.

While Naam is a previously published author – he published a non-fiction title More Than Human: Embracing the Promise of Biological Enhancement in 2005 – Nexus is his debut novel and in some places it shows. This was mostly in some of the places where technical discussions were very dense. For example, Kade – our protagonist – attends a scientific conference in Thailand and we get to follow him along around the conference floor a few times. We learn what talks he attends and when we got a look at the tittles for these sessions my eyes just about glazed over. There are a few other places where the information the reader needs to assimilate is rather technical and I had to really concentrate to get what was explained, which made it feel a little bit info dumpy. But the caveat about my non-beta-sciency mind also applies here and this sense of info dumping might be felt less by those with a more natural aptitude for the sciences. In addition there were also some shifts made in the narrative from viewpoint to viewpoint that felt a little clunky, but those were mainly minor niggles.

Beyond those reservations, Nexus was a fantastic debut with a plot that had a few twists and turns which were not just interesting, but very surprising as well. Most of these were due to the unexpected choices the characters make and only one of those was illogical and out-of-character, which can be a concern with big twists. Central to the story is Kaden Lane, a brilliant PhD-student in brain-computer communication. He is young, idealistic, a little naive, and believes that the technology behind Nexus should be freely available to everyone, not just a lucky few who regulate its use and use it for their own advantage. This is an illegal view, however, and inevitably he gets caught. This starts him on a path that has him question everything he believes in and also makes him unsure of whom to trust. Through Kade Naam lets the reader ponder some fairly heavy ethical dilemmas, such as “if my invention can be used to harm others as well as benefit them, do I set it free into the world?” and “When does humanity end and trans/post humanity begin and do we have the right to take their rights away?” I found these quite thought-provoking and Naam very carefully never gives us the answers, he gives us what Kade believes to be right, but he doesn’t know it, rather he knows to do the opposite is wrong. Perhaps this is because there are no easy answers to this and people need to make up their own minds on where they stand. By the end of Nexus, Kade’s naiveté has largely evaporated, to be replaced by a healthy scepticism of the motivations of most of the players, though by then the sides have become less opaque than they are for most of the narrative. At about midway through the book it’s hard to see who the good guys in the book are, beyond Kade, and it’s only after the explosive final chapters that it becomes at least a little clearer; perhaps we don’t discover the good guys, but Kade finds the least-of-all-evil sides, so to speak.

The character we spend the most time with beyond Kade is Sam, a US government agent, who is charged to be his handler. Naam skilfully plays with her convictions, giving us ample and heart-breaking reasons to understand her vehement opposition to any and all Nexus-like substances, yet also letting Sam discover some cracks in her beliefs. I loved her tough-minded, practical attitude, although it’s unfortunate that this seems to just be a cover for her softer side. Sam is another female character that has abuse in her background to motivate her choices in the present. The actual abuse made a horrific situation even more horrific, it wasn’t necessary to include it to make her motivations ring true. Despite this, she’s an interesting and quite sympathetic character, who I rooted for almost as much as I did for Kade.

Despite my reservations, Nexus was a fabulous read. The plot was riveting and this near future SF thriller was not just exciting because of its action scenes, but also because of the questions it poses the reader. It’s a compelling, intelligent and, above all, fun story that will keep you reading for far longer than you intended. I really want to know what happens next and what the consequences of Kade’s choices will be. It’ll be interesting to see how Naam answers some of the questions he poses in Nexus in the next book, Crux. Meanwhile, if you want to start your SF-nal year off right, go pick up a copy of Nexus and read it as soon as you can.

This book was provided for review by the publisher.