Review: Our Lady of the Artilects

Our Lady of the Artilects by Andrew Gillsmith
My rating: 3 of 5 stars

This one didn't really work for me, and I stopped at about the 48% mark.

Part of the problem was that I was reading an ARC from Netgalley, and the manuscript was very rough in such things as basic punctuation accuracy (questions missing their question marks; quotation marks missing at the beginning or end of dialog; quotation marks doubled up, single where they should be double or double where they should be single; missing periods at the ends of sentences; mispunctuated dialog tags). I'm sure at least most of this will be fixed before publication, though even a good proofreader will probably miss a few out of so many, but as is often the case, it broke my immersion so that I noticed how other things, story-level or craft things, weren't quite working either.

The setting is an unspecified (as far as I read) time in the future, but at least a couple of centuries away. Some time long past in the narrative, but in our future, civil war broke out in Nigeria between Christians and Muslims, and a couple of European countries came in on the Christians' side. This somehow led to the European Union failing and being replaced by a revived Holy Roman Empire, and the formation of an Islamic Caliphate across North Africa, the Middle East and Central Asia, with a capital in Kashmir. But now, a couple of centuries (?) later, the Holy Roman Emperor (a Habsburg who is also Filipino) has the Caliph as his closest friend and ally - and the Christian part of Nigeria is one of several African provinces of the Holy Roman Empire, apparently having been recolonized.

None of this strikes me as particularly plausible. Sure, it's possible that the HRE and the Caliph become friends and allies; Britain and France were allies a century after Napoleon, and Germany and France are allies less than a century after WW II. But it doesn't seem highly likely, given the origin of their respective empires as it's described. And that origin itself seems to me highly unlikely. The Holy Roman Empire has been gone for over 200 years; I suspect most people today couldn't tell you what it was, that most of those who could nevertheless rarely think about it, and that practically nobody thinks that reviving it (and a monarchical/aristocratic system) would be a good idea. Even today's head of the House of Habsburg doesn't seem to think that.

Sure, this is science fiction, and contrafactuals are expected. But I also expect them to be made plausible, and for me this wasn't.

So, to the story. Essentially, androids (called "artilects") have attained humanlike consciousness, thanks to some new techniques which are well thought through and make sense. A number of artilects have experienced a vision which links up with the Fatima visions from the early 20th century (the content of which the author fudges a bit, not always consistently, to support the story). Also, now that they have souls, one artilect has been possessed by a demon; the Vatican has sent a priest who, conveniently, happens to be both an exorcist and an expert on AI to deal with this, and he becomes a main character in the story. This brings what might be called a cosmic dimension into the SF, which gave me strong That Hideous Strength vibes, not least because a shadowy, centuries-long conspiracy led by one of the key AI developers is attempting to do something involving the overthrow of conventional religion and morality using Trojans built into the technology which runs both the artilects and the technological enhancements used by about three-quarters of humans.

It's ambitious as a premise, and for me, at the point where I stopped reading, the author wasn't managing to pull it off. The several viewpoint characters hadn't achieved the depth I was looking for, and the whole conspiracy with its cosmic aspects and the philosophical/religious/moral/ethical arguments about that (involving Christians, Muslims, and characters who were neither) had too many moving parts that didn't quite come together. Nor am I a fan of sinister centuries-old conspiracies as a story element in the first place.

Overall, I felt the author's reach had exceeded his grasp; that he'd attempted something he didn't have the skill to achieve. Others may well feel differently.

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