Love in the age of Mechanical Reproduction

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Call Number: Adult Book / Fiction / Science Fiction / General / Trichter, Judd
On Shelf At: Westgate Branch

Location & Checkout Length	Call Number	Checkout Length	Item Status
Westgate Adult Books 4-week checkout	Adult Book / Fiction / Science Fiction / General / Trichter, Judd	4-week checkout	On Shelf

"Bad luck for Eliot Lazar, he fell in love with an android, a beautiful C-900 named Iris Matsuo. That's the kind of thing that can get you killed in late 21th century Los Angeles or anywhere else for that matter - anywhere except the man-made island of Atlantis, far out in the Pacific, which is where Eliot and Iris are headed once they get their hands on a boat. But then one night Eliot knocks on Iris's door only to find she was kidnapped, chopped up, sold for parts. Unable to move on and unwilling to settle for a woman with a heartbeat, Eliot vows to find the parts to put Iris back together again--and to find the sonofabitch who did this to her and get his revenge. With a determined LAPD detective on his trail and time running out in a city where machines and men battle for control, Eliot Lazar embarks on a bloody journey that will take him to edge of a moral precipice from which he can never return, from which mankind can never return. In the vein of Blade Runner, Love in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction is a scifi love story that asks the question, how far will you go to save someone you love?"-- Provided by publisher.

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Illogical plotting trumps great world-building. submitted by eknapp on April 20, 2015, 10:39pm A few decades into the future, the mass production of androids has revolutionized the world. They do manual labor, creative work, pretty much everything short of management. They have virtually no rights. Bot/human tensions are high; bot/human relationships tend to be a death sentence for both parties. Against this backdrop an android is kidnapped, dismembered, and sold as spare parts. Her human boyfriend scours the state for her components in a longshot attempt at reconstituting her.

The world and history Trichter has assembled was fascinating, the high point of the book. In short, the android revolution came about suddenly; a massive recession results from the abundance of cheap labor; the predictably brutal exploitation of that labor leads to great social unrest; tribalism and systematic dehumanization provoke a cataclysmic "race" war between bots and people.

The characters were fairly well drawn. The hero is a limp, drug-addicted corporate salesman, driven by love to greater acts of clumsy courage than he'd normally capable of. He compares himself repeatedly to Orpheus (and if you're a book that wants to get on my good side, DO incorporate Greek mythology; yum). His bluff blowhard brother rings true. They're pursued by an exhausted, dying detective who's somehow both an idealist and a realist. He pulls it off.

That's where the good stuff ends. While the historical events hold together well, internal logic and plausibility take a holiday for the duration of the protagonist's story.

[SPOILERS]
The action bits are routinely awful. In one instance, the overmatched hero defeats an evil-doer by yanking a power cord, causing a circular saw to jump through a window, fly across a room, and neatly sever said evil-doer's gun-brandishing arm. The book takes no notice of how stupidly unlikely each step of that sequence is.

The protagonist keeps finding himself stuck with potentially interesting moral dilemmas (his girlfriend's eyes are in the adorable face of a cheerful, innocent little girlbot) only to be saved by lucky happenstance (a train crash kills her but leaves her eyes undamaged and accessible; it'd be a gosh-darned sin to let them go to waste...)
[END SPOILERS]

Trichter contrives a succession of situations that allow him to shine a light on aspects of systematic oppression. There's an android recycling plant where the need for profit drives horrific working conditions. An anti-bot activist making an android torture/snuff film. A blind, sexless bot model driven by her prospects to suicide. Wretched, bottom-rung android prostitution. Bot coyotes who take advantage of the desperate "spinners" who come to them for help. If he had anything original to say it might be interesting but it came off as clumsy and simple.

And in creating a world full of deconstructible racial injustice, the author makes up whatever rules of law or physiology or psychology are convenient to his immediate point. Limbs that are sawn off can be easily reattached, though at other times reattachment requires ports and tools and locking mechanisms. Androids are almost universally sexual--and in pretty vanilla human fashion--even though they don't get pregnant or worry about STDs. They have no childhood or altricial period, their parts (even heads?!) are interchangeable and easily removeable, and instead of being motivated by survival and reproduction they're simply driven to stay powered up. Yet in the book they're virtually identical to humans, psychologically and behaviorally. They love, fear, hope, get high, get laid; they're brave, cowardly, short-sighted, visionary, enraged by social injustice, indifferent to social injustice. It's senseless. Trichter missed a huge opportunity to imagine a culture that would necessarily be vastly different from those of humans.

in submitted by smr on August 8, 2022, 1:46pm love in the ege