Books I'm Excited About (2)

It's been a while. I've been super busy with work that I haven't been able to update. Reviews are coming soon though! Here's just a quick post-- some books I really want to read.

The Child Thief by Brom. I love retellings of fairytales and classic stories so this dark and twisted update of Peter Pan piqued my interest immediately. The author previously worked as an illustrator, and apparently his own artwork is featured in the book (and I believe the cover is done by him as well).

Days by James Lovegrove. A science fiction surrounding a large department store called "Days", where anything can be bought as long as you have the right amount of credit. I wonder if happiness is on sale there?

Wraeththu by Storm Constantine. According to a member of Goodreads, this book is about "gay hermaphrodites with magical powers" and they have some sort of magical sex. Sounds like a really bad yaoi manga. ...I'm sold!

Movie Adaptations I'd Love to See

I just recently came across a post by the bloggers over at Big Books Tiny Voices with a list of over 60 YA/MG book-to-movie adaptations that have been optioned or are already in the making. You'll have to pop over to their blog to see the full list and not all of these may actually be made into films, but I picked out 5 that I'd most love to watch on the big screen:

Daughter of Smoke and Bone by Laini Taylor. Laini Taylor really has a way with words. Her unique, mellifluous writing style caught the attention of many readers, myself included. The book follows a fairly typical YA paranormal storyline but Taylor's lyrical and whimsical writing brought new life to an old plot. I really want to see the designs for the demon characters in the book; Taylor's writing is quite descriptive but seeing the characters would be a different experience.

Delirium by Lauren Oliver. I actually have this book out from the library right now and will be starting it soon. It's a YA dystopian that takes place in a world where love is a disease that must be eradicated, and before she has a chance to undergo treatment to prevent her from ever succumbing to the disease, the main character Lena falls in love. It's such an intriguing concept and I'm curious to see how the story plays out both in the book and on the movie screen.

The Giver by Lois Lowry. I actually played the Giver in a short film made by my friends and I in middle school as part of a class project, so there is a lot of nostalgia connected to this book for me. It was a lot of fun and nobody minded that a tiny Asian girl played the role of an old man... hahaha! Apparently Jeff Bridges has already been cast as the Giver... we'll see how his performance stacks up against mine! LOL

The Hobbit by J.R.R. Tolkien. After the breathtakingly awesome Lord of the Rings film trilogy, I'm sure a Hobbit adaptation will be equally stunning. Maybe this time I'll finally buck down and read through the book as well.

The Immortal Rules by Julie Kagawa. Although the book left some things to be desired (here's my review of it), I think it'll translate well as a movie; I've always thought that many of the scenes in the book have a very cinematic quality to them. Also, I have another reason for wanting to see this as a movie: I want to see an Asian actress playing the lead. Hollywood rarely makes movies with Asian protagonists, and if when they do, it tends to be with stereotypical characterizations. Allison, the main character of The Immortal Rules doesn't really fit into the typical Asian female stereotypes though, so I'm really interested in seeing what Hollywood does. Being of Asian heritage myself, I'm particularly invested in this.

[BOOK REVIEW] vN by Madeline Ashby

vN
By Madeline Ashby
Published by Angry Robot; July 31, 2012
Paperback, 448 pages

Amy Peterson is a self-replicating humanoid robot.

For the past five years, she has been grown slowly as part of a mixed organic/synthetic family. She knows very little about her android mother’s past, so when her grandmother arrives and attacks her mother, little Amy wastes no time: she eats her alive.

Now she carries her malfunctioning granny as a partition on her memory drive, and she’s learning impossible things about her clade’s history – like the fact that the failsafe that stops all robots from harming humans has failed… Which means that everyone wants a piece of her, some to use her as a weapon, others to destroy her. (from Goodreads)

Review:

In the future, anticipating the End of Days, a megachurch pours money into artificial intelligence to develop von Neumann machines ("vN"), a series of self-replicating humanoids meant as companions for those who don't make it into Heaven. When Judgement Day fails to arrive, these human-like robots are left on Earth to live among human beings. They are programmed with a "failsafe"-- a mechanism that makes them unable to withstand seeing a human being hurt, in order to ensure that they will never harm a human.

Amy Peterson is a vN living in a mixed human-vN family. She is a replica (an "iteration") of her vN mother, Charlotte. While normally vN mature to adulthood in a year, Amy's human father has kept her on a strict diet that stunts her growth, keeping her maturation at a human rate. At 5 years old, Amy is highly unusual for a vN, with a child's appearance when most others her age have reached adulthood long ago. While trying to protect her mother from her grandmother Portia, Amy eats her grandma, integrating Portia's synthetic body into her own, which causes an instantaneous growth spurt, pushing her into her adult form. At the same time, Portia's consciousness is absorbed into Amy's own memory banks and Amy discovers her failsafe has failed as well. With her grandmother inside her head, Amy goes on the run as the police and government officials try to track her down.

There is plenty to think about in vN. In terms of scientific and technological progress, author Madeline Ashby is exploring how artificial intelligence might fit (or not fit) into human society. vN are treated as foreign entities by humans, tolerated but not quite accepted with human reactions toward them ranging from the sympathetic to disgust. An interlude in the middle of the book has Amy working at a cosplay restaurant where all the workers are vN and the customers are human. As a waitress, Amy has to wear different outfits (eg. nurse, cowgirl) and is essentially part of the restaurant's entertainment, play-acting a role for humans. I think this is meant to show how, despite their sentience, vN have difficulty finding a place in a human society where many people want to see them as merely robots and machines, placing them in an uncomfortable position between person and object.

Also explored is the relationship between parent and child. At its core, vN is really about family, growing up and belonging, and Ashby draws parallels between the parent-child relationship with the vN ability to self-replicate. A number of vN characters are compared to their "mothers" or "fathers", the vN that they are replicated from, questioning if children can transcend their hereditary influences. Amy's father Jack also serves as an example of how parents can sometimes decide things for their children, in order to ensure a good life for their child, but in reality, this decision can be damaging. By restricting Amy's food so she can grow up at the same rate as a human child, Jack hopes that it will help her intergrate better into human society, but it also hints of child abuse, since while Amy feels no pain at the lack of nourishment, she does mention feeling a constant hunger and emptiness. It is also this hunger that drives her to eat her grandma.

In terms of the plotline, vN is a fairly typical on-the-run/road trip story. The writing is somewhat disjointed, most noticeably in the first half of the book and during action scenes. There are not enough explanations or descriptions for the background and setting so the book is difficult to get into. I would have liked more information on how the world in vN came to be the way it is. A lot of scientific- and technical-sounding terminology is used without only vague allusions to their real meaning and never get fully explained until well into the story. In the second half of the book, the writing flowed more smoothly and the narrative turns toward uncovering Portia's and Charlotte's past, and the book takes on a more typical hero-looking-for-answers storyline. It was enjoyable to follow Amy through her journey as she discovers her own special qualities as a vN and learns the truth about the antagonistic relationship between her mother and grandmother. However, the plot becomes predictable at this point and while vN offers plenty of food for thought, it stays within conventional tropes and plotlines rather than going into more subversive territory. It doesn't challenge the idea of what a robot story is.

Still, there is plenty to like about this book and science fiction fans should definitely check it out. vN is full of fresh and interesting ideas and the steady pace of the plot as well as the many likeable characters will keep readers' attentions. The writing could use some polishing up, but I like that Ashby is well versed in contemporary pop culture, seamlessly weaving references to science fiction, anime and online culture into the narrative. It seems that a sequel will be coming out as well, and I know I will definitely be looking out for that.

3 stars out of 5

I received this book from the publisher via Netgalley.com in exchange for an honest review.