London, 1997. Laura Bow has created her own rudimentary artificial intelligence, named Organon. At first, it’s intended as a sympathetic ear for her anxieties and frustrations, but as Laura grows and changes, so too does Organon. As technology becomes ever more involved in our lives, companies also begin to develop their own artificial intelligence, without the safety barriers of empathy or morals. Laura has to decide whether to share her creation with the world. On the one hand, in the wrong hands, Organon’s power could be abused, with catastrophic consequences. On the other, it could be the only thing to prevent humanity walking off a cliff we created.
In I Still Dream, author James Smythe has created a brilliantly cerebral and surprisingly emotional novel about the nature of intelligence, human dependence upon technology, loss and memory, without sacrificing great writing, storytelling or characters. The focus is technology, but the themes are played out through the people whom it affects, through Laura and those connected to her, charting the course of Organon’s development and the changing landscape of both the world and the tech industry, in ten-year leaps.
Laura is the sun around which everything else revolves, even when events aren’t shown from her point of view. The daughter of Daniel Bow, a computer programmer once hailed as a genius, whose coding skills she’s inherited. She’s a great main character—a girl, and later a woman, who likes and is good at working with computers, but who isn’t some horrifically clichéd stereotype.
When we first meet her as a seventeen-year-old, she appears at first glance—despite the fact she also happens to be coding an artificial intelligence on her bedroom computer in her spare time—to be a more or less typical teenager. She’s making mix-tapes, hiding the phone bill from her mother and step-father, dealing with a drifting best friend, a teacher who’s a little too interested in her coding project, and a crush on an internet pen-pal. But we also see that, beneath the usual teenage feelings of isolation, she is also struggling with great loneliness and anxiety. Her father disappeared without warning when she was a small child and it becomes clear that it still affects her. The name Organon, and the book’s title, are both taken from ‘Cloudbusting’, a Kate Bush song that they enjoyed listening to together, and a song that’s also about a father/child relationship.
By the end of the first section, Laura has accepted an internship at BOW, the company her father helped create, and it’s here we are introduced to the novel’s other artificial intelligence: SCION. Whereas Organon was initially created as a kind of surrogate best friend, something designed to listen, understand, and empathise, SCION’s development appears to be more typical to real life, and if this is the case it gives a great deal of pause for thought. For example, and this is something that has been done in real life AI development, in order to teach it game theory, the programmers teach SCION to play Space Invaders—a game where the objective is to win by destroying all the ships on-screen. Cool, absolutely, but possibly problematic in the long run. In the case of I Still Dream, it is definitely so. For SCION does cause disaster, and, despite all the knowing references SCION’s programmers make to Terminator and all the jokes about Skynet, it’s not through the machines coming to life and slaughtering everyone, but through something many of us are either resigned to or not bothered about giving away: privacy and information. It’s more prosaic than a robot uprising, but the consequences are just as frightening. And the kicker is that not even those who made the jokes saw it coming or even perceived it as a possibility.
It’s not all doom and gloom however: another prominent thread throughout the novel, and often the one that is most affecting, is that of memory. The novel explores its importance to us and how, in the right hands and with the right mind-set, this kind of technology—with its ability to use information to, essentially, create nearly flawless recreations, memories that are incorruptible—could be an enormous positive force if one wanted to opt-in to it. Because it’s important that we’re given the choice.
If you like clever science fiction with a human centre, I Still Dream cannot be recommended highly enough.
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Synopsis | Goodreads
1997.
17-year-old Laura Bow has invented a rudimentary artificial intelligence, and named it Organon. At first it’s intended to be a sounding-board for her teenage frustrations, a surrogate best friend; but as she grows older, Organon grows with her.
As the world becomes a very different place, technology changes the way we live, love and die; massive corporations develop rival intelligences to Laura’s, ones without safety barriers or morals; and Laura is forced to decide whether or not to share her creation with the world. If it falls into the wrong hands, she knows, its power could be abused. But what if Organon is the only thing that can stop humanity from hurting itself irreparably?
I Still Dream is a powerful tale of love, loss and hope; a frightening, heartbreakingly human look at who we are now–and who we can be, if we only allow ourselves.
