From Publishers Weekly
Near-future San Francisco, lashed by climate-change storms, shelters a strange variety of stereotypical beings in Palwick's inflated third exploration (after
Flying in Place and
The Necessary Beggar) of social, technological, religious and ecological themes. Palwick's central conflict, anti-AI Luddites versus big business AI producer MacroCorp, sputters and fizzles somewhere behind two lengthy narratives of the same story—the fate of Nicholas, a brain-damaged child survivor of an African pandemic virus and adopted son of Meredith Walford, the daughter of MacroCorp's leader, Preston Walford, who dies of the virus and is soon "translated" into virtually immortal cyberlife, where he tries to remake society. Meredith and Roberta Danton, who suffers from state-prohibited "excessive altruism," try to save Nicholas from brainwiping with the help of "Fred," a soothing AI neo-Mr. Rogers, who turns into a verbose high-tech house. Younger readers may best appreciate this sprawling book.
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From Booklist
On parole from her sentence for "excessive altruism," Roberta becomes tangled in Merideth Walford's life again. As children, both were placed in isolation with the Caravan Virus, whose worldwide victims included Berta's parents. Merry's father, Preston, also died but, as the test subject of his company's new translation software, became the first online human. He befriended Berta because Merry refused to speak to him, and he continues meddling in Berta's life. In Merry's ex-husband's intelligent house during a massive storm, Merry finally tells Berta her side of the story of child-care AI Fred and her son Nicky, who were both in the day-care facility at which Berta worked. Then the house overcomes its security programming to let in homeless Henry. Preston tells some of his own perspective to the house, while Henry discovers who he was before a state-administered controlled strain of CV emptied his mind in punishment for vagrancy violations. Palwick's haunting, often heart-wrenching, sf-tinged story presents the terrible things people will do for love, and those terrible things' consequences, played out by humanly multidimensional characters. Schroeder, Regina
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