Accidental Intelligence is another one of the semifinalists in this year's Self Published Science Fiction Competition (#SPSFC4) and is one of the six books in my team's judging panel. The novel is a Sci-Fi Noir, featuring a private investigator Mason Truman as its protagonist as he investigates a case of a missing young man...one whose case clearly has ties to the AIs and Corporate interests who run the world. I wouldn't necessarily call myself a big fan of noir, but the noir atmosphere and writing style does tend to draw me in, so I very quickly read through this book over two days on my commute.
Unfortunately, Accidental Intelligence doesn't quite reward the reader for sticking with it. The story's main characters are paper thin, with its protagonist having seemingly no motivation or life outside of plot itself, and while the book's plot promises a fight against a dangerous conspiracy, that conspiracy turns out to be laughably simple and uninteresting. And it all ends up in a conclusion that is really unsatisfying, as events needed to solve matters just occur out of nowhere and the bad guy is defeated with way too much ease...and then the book throws an epilogue in that I guess (I was confused) attempts to set up a sequel but instead just makes it even more frustrating?
More specifics after the jump. Note that the plot summary of this book on Amazon and Goodreads spoils like 80% of the book - I'll try to be less spoilery below.
Plot Summary:
Mason Truman is a Private Investigator who specializes in mundane matters - looking into whether husbands are cheating on their wives or whether someone has stolen from their corporate employer. He's an old dying-out breed, particularly in his disdain for matters that touch on those virtually living in the Omninet, which in the year 2139 is basically half of humanity. And he works alone, other than his factotum Sam (the virtual almost but not quite AI helper who lives in his implant). So when a woman named Carla Newman comes to him with a job to find her missing brother Nathan, who has disappeared after spending some time in the Omninet, his first instinct his to turn her down. But when Mason's police friend Felix tries to warn him off that same job, Mason can't help but take the case - even though Nathan's disappearance seems all too obviously tied to the dangerous state security forces controlled by the Corporate and AI entities that rule the world.
Sure enough, running down the leads in Nathan's disappearance, and entering uncomfortably into the more odd parts of the Omninet, bring Mason to the attention of those security forces. But it also leads him to Miranda, a fledgling AI who suggests she can see flashes of the future...flashes that suggest Mason is the key to stopping a great catastrophe. And as Mason investigates further, with the help of Miranda as well as his cousin and his Omninet-loving friend Peanut, he finds himself chasing and being chased by a conspiracy...one whose deadly plans are very near fruition....
Other than in the prologue chapter, which is told from the perspective of Mason's military brother Andrew, Accidental Intelligence is told like a classic noir story from Mason's perspective, showcasing his internal thoughts as he deciphers the mystery and conspiracy in front of him. It's not a noir in the sense of him talking to himself - and there's not really a femme fatale (there's sort of that figure in Mason's ex, who also is Andrew's ex, but she's barely relevant to be honest) - but Mason's internal thoughts and dialogue with Sam, his Factotum, works in that same fashion. If you do like Noir narratives, Accidental Intelligence is largely written in a decent way so as to appeal to you and to keep you fully immersed in the narrative.
Unfortunately, that narrative is revealed to be quite shallow, starting with its characters. Mason for example is our main character, but the only personal things we ever find out about him really are that he likes coffee (alas he can only enjoy artificial stuff as the real stuff is practically impossible to get) and that he harbors anger still over his ex-girlfriend Meredith (who then married and then later divorced his cousin Andrew). Mason is a PI who feels a pathological need to see truth firsthand, but we never get any explanation of how he got that way or why he went into being a PI. We never really get to know anything other than he's the grizzled PI who protests way too much about getting involved in something he knows is a problem but still goes along with it anyway. Oh and there's one really random moment late in the book where Mason is apparently in the virtual equivalent of a brothel to get some sex out of completely nowhere which threw me completely out of the narrative. None of the other characters get much development either (the closest is probably Peanut, Mason's tech/Omninet guy/friend, who doesn't trust physical space).
This extends unfortunately, to the conspiracy that Mason and the story hones in on. In an noir story, inevitably we find out the villains have some scheme that the heroes have to discover and stop. Here, we just discover that the villains for pretty cartoonish reasons want to destroy humanity. The AI villains really get no depth whatsoever, and even our most well known good guy AI, Miranda, is kind of ridiculous as a baby AI who just apparently can see the future or past but can't control the power (which makes kind of no sense). Heck, we don't even discover really HOW the bad guys want to enact their evil plot - the story concludes with sort of a deus ex machina and one super all powerful AI just....acting really dumb and chasing the main character for....reasons.
Again, it's all a real shame because the writing in noir style is generally pretty good and a lot of aspects of the setting - the AI/Corporate shared government, the interplay between real world and the sim life, the way factotum's work, and even the interstellar military action - all are interesting, even if the plot relies on a bunch of infodumps to convey them. But generally speaking, Accidental Intelligence doesn't know how to actually use this noir style or cyberpunk setting to tell a story with interesting plots, ideas, or characters, which makes this one a miss.
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