vN The First Machine Dynasty (Audible Audio Edition) Madeline Ashby Christina Traister Angry Robot on Brilliance Audio Books
Download As PDF : vN The First Machine Dynasty (Audible Audio Edition) Madeline Ashby Christina Traister Angry Robot on Brilliance Audio Books
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 them, young Amy wastes no time she eats her alive.
Now she's on the run, carrying her malfunctioning granny as a partition on her memory drive. She's growing quickly, and learning too. Like the fact that in her, and her alone, the failsafe that stops all robots from harming humans has stopped working... Which means that everyone wants a piece of her, some to use her as a weapon, others to destroy her.
vN The First Machine Dynasty (Audible Audio Edition) Madeline Ashby Christina Traister Angry Robot on Brilliance Audio Books
A pedophile preacher successfully develops a race of sentient humanoid robots, ostensibly built in order to aid and comfort the wicked people left behind after the coming Rapture. What could possibly go wrong?Robots in Madeline Ashby's near-future world are called "vN" after John von Neumann, the Jewish-Hungarian-American mathematician, physicist, and all-around genius who, among other things, laid the groundwork for virtually all computers in use today (they're called "von Neumann machines" for a reason) and also developed a theory of self-replicating machines, which, by the way, the vN are. Self-replicating, that is. Given enough "food" -- plastic, iron, and other minerals -- they not only grow like organic beings, they also reproduce through a form of asexual budding. It's a cool idea, though Ashby never explains how or whether the vN's self-replication mechanism is based on von Neumann's theory.
Once the vN technology goes to market, vNs appear everywhere in roles such as laborer, servitor, and, inevitably, prostitute. But vNs are smart, self-aware, learning machines with the capacity to detect, understand, and even feel -- or at least simulate -- human emotion. They become girlfriends and boyfriends and husbands and wives of humans, and, when vNs "iterate" (reproduce), their "children" become family members. The children can even look like human children as long as they're kept on a near-starvation diet. One of those children is Amy, a kindergartner whose vN mother and human father struggle to give a normal, suburban, middle-class, human upbringing.
This does not turn out as well as hoped. Something does go very wrong when an out-of-control robot kills a human child. All vN are equipped with a "failsafe" that prevents them from harming humans and, consistent with Asimov's famous three laws (I, Robot), requires them to protect humans from harm. When this killer robot turns out to be Amy's grandmother, and when humans begin to suspect that Amy and her mother may share grandma's flaw, things do not look good for Amy.
But, as Ashby continually reminds us -- without directly saying so -- what's really wrong is not that there's a robot -- or even a few robots -- out there who can defy humans, it's rather that humans are so *inhumane* in their views and their treatment of these sentient beings that live and work among them. Some reviewers have suggested that Asby uses vN as a stand-in for racial/ethnic minorities or other marginalized groups. I don't think that's the case; the kind of exploitation and maltreatment that concerns Ashby is universal.
So ... This is not a book for kids; there's too much ugly violence, especially (implied) sexual violence. It's not laugh-out-loud funny. It's not really a thriller, although there are some chases, escapes, and close encounters with death. Perhaps it's a mystery, but the mystery is mostly whether or not humans can love robots, robots can love humans, robots can love robots, or anybody can love themselves (in a non-narcissistic way), whether sex is (only) about selfish pleasure, and whether we can have non-exploitative relationships with others, especially those who are not quite like us.
Others have complained about deficiencies in the novel -- which is, after all, a first novel. There are some puzzling moments, and when you step back you have to ask "But why did it happen this way?" or "Why didn't that happen?" It's also a bit annoying that Ashby makes so many references that will be obscure to many readers; e.g., if you haven't read Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? you're going to be clueless about why the vN restaurant chain is called "Electric Sheep," and if you haven't seen Blade Runner, you're not going to know why it features a drink called "Tears in Rain." I think these are minor problems, and while they bugged me a little during my read, I found reading vN well worth the time and effort. Recommended.
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vN The First Machine Dynasty (Audible Audio Edition) Madeline Ashby Christina Traister Angry Robot on Brilliance Audio Books Reviews
Synopsis vN is a science fiction novel written by Madeline Ashby and is the first book in her series The Machine Dynasty. I initially received a free copy of this book for review purposes through the Angry Robot Army but eventually bought a copy even before reading the review book.
In this near future world, self-replicating, intelligent robots known as von Neumann machines are a regular part of life. They were the weird result of a religious group's preparations for the Rapture and now they're everywhere. But they aren't out to take over the world since each is programmed with the Fail Safe that prevents them from even just witnessing a human coming into bodily harm.
Amy Peterson is a young robot who is fed very little in order to keep her growth at the same pace of a normal child as part of a happy little family. Her father is human while her mother is another android of the same Clade or model and they get along well enough. But things change drastically when her grandmother re-enters their life in a most violent way and Amy ends up consuming her completely in order to protect her mother. Now her grandmother's personality has been absorbed into her own thoughts and she has also discovered that the Fail Safe does not seem to work for her.
What I Liked Like a lot of hard science fiction books out there, the novel tackles a lot of complex ideas starting with these pretty much sentient robots and all the usual questions of self, identity and other good stuff. As much as we have a character on the run for her life, we often have her examining her own thoughts and trying to understand her place in the world. And some characters that she meets along the way, particularly Javier, have similar problems as fellow machines trying to figure out if they deserve lives apart from the humans they were programmed to respect and need to support.
It takes a while to get all the ideas on the table so one can truly understand what's going on and how things generally work. But once you get all those ideas covered, things can be pretty fulfilling as we get through the rest of the story. The ending was a little unexpected but I think the outcome still makes sense and nicely sets the stage for the future.
What Could Have Been Better Pacing is awkward at times and there are a lot of starts and stops in the feeling of progressing through the plot depending on where you are in the book. We have blissful moments when Amy and Javier are clear of all human interference and then you have faster, more stressful periods when they're being pursued or have once again been captured. And that adds to some of the difficulty of reading the book on top of needing to learn things on your feet about how things work in this version of the near future.
And as much as Amy was raised by a human father and is programmed to emulate humanity, the story being told from her perspective felt very human indeed. Not that I know how the story could have sounded were it more machine-like as it was still written by a person and I can only interpret it as a human being as well. Minor conundrum.
TL;DR vN is a surprisingly ambitious title with some big ideas about machine life that it tries to tackle. This all largely sets up the stage for things and it's clear there are even bigger ideas that the author wants to tackle in the next few books and I look forward to reading what she has to say.
A pedophile preacher successfully develops a race of sentient humanoid robots, ostensibly built in order to aid and comfort the wicked people left behind after the coming Rapture. What could possibly go wrong?
Robots in Madeline Ashby's near-future world are called "vN" after John von Neumann, the Jewish-Hungarian-American mathematician, physicist, and all-around genius who, among other things, laid the groundwork for virtually all computers in use today (they're called "von Neumann machines" for a reason) and also developed a theory of self-replicating machines, which, by the way, the vN are. Self-replicating, that is. Given enough "food" -- plastic, iron, and other minerals -- they not only grow like organic beings, they also reproduce through a form of asexual budding. It's a cool idea, though Ashby never explains how or whether the vN's self-replication mechanism is based on von Neumann's theory.
Once the vN technology goes to market, vNs appear everywhere in roles such as laborer, servitor, and, inevitably, prostitute. But vNs are smart, self-aware, learning machines with the capacity to detect, understand, and even feel -- or at least simulate -- human emotion. They become girlfriends and boyfriends and husbands and wives of humans, and, when vNs "iterate" (reproduce), their "children" become family members. The children can even look like human children as long as they're kept on a near-starvation diet. One of those children is Amy, a kindergartner whose vN mother and human father struggle to give a normal, suburban, middle-class, human upbringing.
This does not turn out as well as hoped. Something does go very wrong when an out-of-control robot kills a human child. All vN are equipped with a "failsafe" that prevents them from harming humans and, consistent with Asimov's famous three laws (I, Robot), requires them to protect humans from harm. When this killer robot turns out to be Amy's grandmother, and when humans begin to suspect that Amy and her mother may share grandma's flaw, things do not look good for Amy.
But, as Ashby continually reminds us -- without directly saying so -- what's really wrong is not that there's a robot -- or even a few robots -- out there who can defy humans, it's rather that humans are so *inhumane* in their views and their treatment of these sentient beings that live and work among them. Some reviewers have suggested that Asby uses vN as a stand-in for racial/ethnic minorities or other marginalized groups. I don't think that's the case; the kind of exploitation and maltreatment that concerns Ashby is universal.
So ... This is not a book for kids; there's too much ugly violence, especially (implied) sexual violence. It's not laugh-out-loud funny. It's not really a thriller, although there are some chases, escapes, and close encounters with death. Perhaps it's a mystery, but the mystery is mostly whether or not humans can love robots, robots can love humans, robots can love robots, or anybody can love themselves (in a non-narcissistic way), whether sex is (only) about selfish pleasure, and whether we can have non-exploitative relationships with others, especially those who are not quite like us.
Others have complained about deficiencies in the novel -- which is, after all, a first novel. There are some puzzling moments, and when you step back you have to ask "But why did it happen this way?" or "Why didn't that happen?" It's also a bit annoying that Ashby makes so many references that will be obscure to many readers; e.g., if you haven't read Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? you're going to be clueless about why the vN restaurant chain is called "Electric Sheep," and if you haven't seen Blade Runner, you're not going to know why it features a drink called "Tears in Rain." I think these are minor problems, and while they bugged me a little during my read, I found reading vN well worth the time and effort. Recommended.
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