Speak

This was my "Random" selection for the Women of Genre Fiction Challenge. I knew nothing about it going in other than that it involved artificial intelligence.

It's hard for me to articulate just why I enjoyed this book so much. It's not the hard scifi I expected, but more of a character study of a group of people involved in the development of AI through the past, present, and future. What unifies these characters so poignantly is their essential loneliness - they are each unable, for whatever reason, to establish the deep and intense relationship that their soul craves with another human being, and so they have to look elsewhere.

Another theme which I found fascinating in this book was the need for stories as essential for human life. Once the developers of the AI beings begin to tell them stories, as a means to develop their language skills, the interface between human and not-human begins to thin almost to nothingness.

This novel gave me a great deal to think about, and I'm very glad I read it.