Title: Sunrise Alley
Author: Catherine Asaro
Publisher: Baen Books
Publication Date: August 2006
Paperback: 448 pages
Genre: Science Fiction
Reviewed by Emily
Rating: 8/10
BAEN Summary:
SHE WAS RUNNING FROM A RUTHLESS CRIMINAL ACCOMPANIED BY SOMEONE MORE THAN HUMAN… When the shipwrecked stranger washed up, nearly drowned, on the beach near research scientist Samantha Bryton’s home, she was unaware that he was something more than human: an experiment conducted by Charon, a notorious criminal and practitioner of illegal robotics and android research. The man said his name was Turner Pascal—but Pascal was dead, killed in a car wreck. Then she found that Charon was experimenting with copying the minds of humans into android brains, implanted in human bodies to escape detection, planning to make his own army of slaves that will follow his orders without question.
Samantha and Turner quickly found themselves on the run across the country, pursued by the most ruthless criminal of the twenty-first century. In desperation, Samantha decided to seek help from Sunrise Alley, an underground organization of AIs that had gone rogue. But these cybernetic outlaws were rumored to have their own hidden agenda, not necessarily congruent with humanity’s welfare, and Samantha feared that her only hope would prove forlorn…
Review:
Sunrise Alley attempts to answer two questions: what happens when Artificial Intelligences become sentient? And if you take a man, kill him, then rebuild him and implant a sentient AI – which Asaro calls an EI – is he still a human being?
The heartbeat of the novel is Sam’s relationship with Turner. Is he even a man? ‘OMG, I just had sex with an EI constructed of cables and plastic and is apparently powered by something akin to a nuclear reactor!’ And let us not forget, ‘I am falling in love with a…what?’(Please forgive my terrible sense of humor).
Asaro managed to characterize EIs with their own, individual personalities, and Turner’s is by turns distinctly human (and male!) and strikingly alien. Very, very cool, that.
If there is one thing I have to criticize about Sunrise Alley, I have to say it would be the ending. It’s somewhat rushed, though in service to tying all ends up together in a fairytale sort of way, where hardly anybody dies and everybody’s happy.
Verdict:
Sunrise Alley is a novel that used to be on my reread pile — my print copy miraculously survived being dropped in a bathtub twice. It is very rare that I find a book that can survive being reread this many times, though this is also not Asaro’s best work.
Keeping in mind that it remains perhaps the most accessible work of its kind – by that I mean touching on AIs etc. – it certainly remains a book worth reading.
6 Comments
An interesting concept for a novel. Great review!!
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There are lots of books exploring the question when/where does humanity begin/end.
There's always Philip K. Dick's Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? But I found Asaro's Sunrise Alley to be more…humane if one considers it an acceptable word to describe a novel and more accessible.
(I've never read a Dick title that has appealed to me, so your mileage may vary.)
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Since it's a theme that's been done many times, I guess it would have to be really unique to stand out in the crowd.
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I'm so glad to find another person who likes this book as much as I do. It's a great story, and I know a lot of romance fans look at the cover and say YUCK, but truly, it's one of the best science fiction romances I've read. I wish more fans would give it a chance.
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Alex, unique in its treatment, though maybe not its concept.
Rebecca, haha. It is awful, isn't it?
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A romantic version of Blade runner
. I know this is off topic but if you are into machines becoming sentients and a quick tour on philosophy and being human, you may want to try watching the Ghost in the Shell.
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