Lucy Lapinska (Gollancz Out 17 April (UK))
While the world grapples with the rights of regular humans versus artificial intelligence companies that want to mine both their data and their creative output, sci-fi is contending with rather different aspects of the future of AI. In fact, three books published over the past year have focused on the individual rights of AIs themselves in visions of near or near-ish futures where robots are common.
Last year, Annie Bot by Sierra Greer brilliantly examined the relationship between a sexbot (with no rights) and her icky owner. Service Model by Adrian Tchaikovsky had an abandoned service bot, Uncharles, wandering a dystopian world in search of purpose. Now we have Some Body Like Me by Lucy Lapinska, in which our heroine, Abigail, is a robot replica of her owner’s dead wife (also called Abigail).
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Abigail has been created from pictures, videos and husband David’s memory of the original Abigail, right down to stretch marks, a knee scar and freckles. Much like Annie Bot, Abigail is a companion, housekeeper and sex toy with no rights at all, but here the household arrangement carries extra-creepy baggage given that Abigail is required to act like a woman she has never met.
The twist in Some Body Like Me (actually, one of the twists – the book has many) is that robots like Abigail are about to be fully emancipated. For now, their rights are zilch, but in days, they will be able to walk out of their owners’ homes as free individuals.
In this future, humans are dying of radiation poisoning and robots are positioned to fill their biological niche
This feels unquestionably right to us as readers. After all, Abigail is surely a living creature. She can respire, grow (even if it’s only via new coding pathways), excrete, reproduce (if she learns to build more robots) and move, and she is responsive to her environment… all the normal markers of life, give or take. She is also, of course, highly intelligent. Yes, she has been coded to do and be all those things, and her skeleton has been designed in a lab. (She needs to take all her skin off to wash, by the way, which seems like a pretty bad design flaw to me.) But she comes across as someone who is not only alive, but a person, and a good one at that.
Actually, the set-up in the novel is bigger even than robots being given rights. Humans are dying of radiation poisoning in this vision of the future, and robots are positioned to fill their biological niche. They are also poised to do a rather better job of looking after the world, according to everything we see and hear in this book.
All this is exciting for Abigail, although nerve-wracking. What will she do with her life? Sadly, it is also an extremely dangerous time to be a robot… but I won’t ruin the plot for you.
The first half of Some Body Like Me slipped down a treat. I was very slightly less keen on the second half, but that is probably because (being an insufferable prude) I was less interested in what Abigail the robot might enjoy in bed than perhaps another reader might be.
That aside, this is a terrific book and a worthy addition to the books examining our emerging relationship with AI. It also makes me look forward to whatever sci-fi does next in this arena.
In the years ahead, it will be interesting to see if regular humans (outside academia, I mean) start to ask whether the AIs mining our data, reading our work, writing our college essays and ruling over our social media feeds deserve some personal rights.
Emily also recommends…
Glen A. Larson and Ronald D. Moore
The ultimate TV show about robots. Despite the fact that the humanoid Cylons are engaged in the wholesale slaughter of billions of humans, the series does explore what the rights of Cylons might be. Because it’s a great show! By the way, don’t forget to begin with the 2003 miniseries.
Emily H. Wilson is a former editor of 91av and the author of the Sumerians trilogy, set in ancient Mesopotamia. The second book in the series, Gilgamesh, is out now. You can find her at emilyhwilson.com, or follow her on X @emilyhwilson and Instagram @emilyhwilson1
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