It’s taken me a while to write a proper review of this novelette because I really felt it in a deep and personal place that I’m not really sure how to talk about it. Sorry in advance if this gets treacly, or treaclier than usual, anyway.
The city of Emit exists somewhere in the future, full of technologically advanced marvels and flashy wealth. But that’s not where this story takes place. Ai(who has the same name as the book’s author but is not the same person, I don’t think) lives just outside of the city with all of the other poor people who sell their artistic labor cheaply to keep Emit’s marketing mechanisms spinning. Ai’s parents were victims of corporate skullduggery and her neighbors are barely holding on. She’s resorted to selling bits of herself off, slowly becoming more machine than woman in order to keep up with the punishing demands of her freelance work, in which she pretends to be an artificial intelligence language model, churning out thousands of meaningless corporate words just to keep her battery barely charged.
Overwork kills slowly, but first it wraps you in loneliness to keep you from noticing. I was a content writer for a while. It seemed like freedom until I realized I was regularly putting in 60-hour weeks, still barely scraping by, and slowly running my limited batteries down.
And for what, really? I’m still not sure. All I know is that this book fit into the burnt-out space in my mind hollowed out by hustling, then made me really think about how to do better. The working-class community that uplift and annoy Ai made me smile and miss the days when I had a similar community. This book made me grateful that I made some strong choices this summer to reclaim my humanity from the American hamster wheel. And it did something else that not enough sci-fi is currently doing–it leaves us on a note of hope and healing. Sure, things can suck–in both the present and in the dystopic future Jiang has built to metaphorize it–but they can get better. It takes human connection and strong choices–but they can.
And people say that sci-fi is too far out to connect to real life and emotion. Pffft.
A full power charge and more art to I Am AI.
Thank you to Ai Jiang for sending over a review copy of this book. Apologies that it took me so long to post this, and congratulations on your awesome writing year!
(Fellow readers, beautiful people, countrymen in the land of bookworm bliss! Thanks for reading, as always. If you want to read more sci-fi from diverse writers, take a nosy around the Equal Opportunity Bookshop. We have an affiliate relationship with that site and earn a commission from each book you buy there, which we use to buy more books, of course. Now, go and read something good! Peace!)
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