Emily Hart

This novella was certainly... weird. Like one of those technocrat dystopia stories mixed with some odd message about body perfection. I don't know what to think about it.

So our story features a 30-something middle-class British woman named Anya who has a stable job and marriage but isn't 100% happy about her life. Mostly Anya's problem is that she hates being overweight and dreams about publishing her own books. It seems like this world is controlled by 3 technocrat oligarchies, and everyone gets free money to do nothing for a living. Since Anya has a paid mortgage and no children, I don't understand why she doesn't just quit her job and spend the rest of her life getting paid by the government to get the creative writing degree she always wanted. Along the way (since this service is paid for by the government), she could get the medical care she needs to lose weight more easily.

I am scratching my head, wondering why Anya thinks it is a logical idea to request the government to create a fake biological human that doesn't even have her own DNA to get a forced implant of her memories. All in the hopes the fake human gets the college degree and job she always wanted. And what is even weirder, she hopes this copy, that is physically younger and much more attractive than her, doesn't try to marry her husband or demand to inherit her belongings.

This story gets even weirder as it advances. It stipulates that a lot of the social inequality that existed in our time is no longer there in the future. At the same time, our fake copy humans are created, kicked into the curb with a minimum wage dowry and no legal assistance in the case they would like to inherit their original's stuff. If I were a copy and thought, geesh, I'd really like to go back to the home I remember buying and shag my husband, shouldn't I get the legal right to all of this?

It's like these humans are like Tamagotchi toys created by mysterious lab goo so that the owner gets to have fun with them for 5 minutes and then throws them out into the trash once they get tired of them. If this book had been purposely written with a premise where the fake copy hates their situation and wants to run away or outlaw the practice, the worldbuilding concept is actually quite brilliant.

Really gives me a lot of vibes from that movie The island with Ewan McGregor, but where the copy is made with no real purpose. Getting back to the issue of Anya wanting to become a writer, why does she enjoy watching AI sludge tv shows in her free time? Wouldn't an aspiring writer with economic means prefer to spend more money reading uhh... human-made books? Oh, and hard to believe 1000 years into the future, England, Germany, France, and the USA are still there. And the buildings have not really changed much, and the same oligarch tech companies of our time not only still exist, but they also own pretty much everything.

This book has certainly been one, if not the weirdest and most mind-boggling confusing books I have read this year so far. Still, even though it didn't make much sense to me, I enjoyed reading it.… (más)