4thace@books.theunseen.city reviewed Dual Memory by Sue Burke
A novel that ventures into new areas of science fiction
4 stars
This book feels a lot different from the author's other works. The majority of the story is told by Antonio Moro, an illiterate laborer who fled his home country at an early age and is first seen working as a worker on a recycling ship which is attacked by raiders. This is a piratical organization that takes what it can from places with insufficient military force to defend themselves. He is injured and left on the share of Thule island, an engineered community in the cold North Atlantic. While convalescing at the hospital he gets to know the social structure there while secretly watching for raider infiltration, the last order his captain had given him. The social order requires all to have employment so he takes a contract as an artist for a wealthy couple. Their wealth and social status depend on how well he can do in an art …
This book feels a lot different from the author's other works. The majority of the story is told by Antonio Moro, an illiterate laborer who fled his home country at an early age and is first seen working as a worker on a recycling ship which is attacked by raiders. This is a piratical organization that takes what it can from places with insufficient military force to defend themselves. He is injured and left on the share of Thule island, an engineered community in the cold North Atlantic. While convalescing at the hospital he gets to know the social structure there while secretly watching for raider infiltration, the last order his captain had given him. The social order requires all to have employment so he takes a contract as an artist for a wealthy couple. Their wealth and social status depend on how well he can do in an art project for a competition.
The other chapters take the point of view of machine intelligence Par Augustus which has somehow achieved a level of self-awareness and autonomy only a very few other machine minds have attained. Far from unemotional, Par has ambitions and biases, a brassy attitude, and ambiguous motives. Before long it links up with Moro and is able to feed him information using an inner ear implant. They become friends and conspirators as the raider problem butts up against certain aspects of Thule society in ways neither one likes. Towards the end of the novel, the raiders come to Thule, there is bloodshed and subterfuge, and Moro is at the center of everything.
The story was entertaining if I could suspend a certain amount of disbelief regarding some of the story elements. Late in the book a long-lost relation of Moro's turns up to confuse things in a way that felt somewhat forced. It was pretty clear who the reader was to sympathize with and who was outright evil, with not much nuance among the major players. These were machines and people, and I thought the former were the more intriguing actors by quite a bit. As long as these entities were the focus I had little trouble sustaining my interest. I felt that the Antonio Moro character was not as compelling a personality as I would have liked, but it may be that he has a strong role to play in a future story set in this story universe.