SciFi/Fantasy Book Review: Our Lady of the Artilects by Andrew Gillsmith

Our Lady of the Artilects is a self-published Sci-Fi novel by author Andrew Gillsmith. It's also a Self-Published Sci-Fi Competition Quarterfinalist - as voted by a different judging panel than the one I'm on - and my judging group decided to take a look at it to see if it was worthy of being a semifinalist, with one member of my group thinking really highly of it. That said, the review she posted of the book noted that the book is very faith based and Catholic faith based in general and she wondered how someone who wasn't Christian might take the book. So I was really curious how this would or would not appeal to me as a Jewish Reader.

And well....the answer is, it doesn't really, due to a number of factors that made it hard to enjoy this book. The book is written generally well, and the author does a good job setting up plot threads and characters and writing in very readable prose, although that prose is based in Catholic thought that I am often unfamiliar with. But the book's future premise seems to be based upon a future version of our world that is filled with Catholics, Muslims, and almost no one else and uses past and current atrocities as setup for its ideas in ways that...was disconcerting in a sense. It made it hard to really recommend his book to anyone who isn't very familiar and into catholic or perhaps some other Christian liturgies, and that's not me and I don't think that's the general SPSFC4 audience either.
Plot Summary:  

Father Gabriel Serafian is not just an exorcist, but he's the Vatican's foremost expert on artificial intelligence - AIs like the Synths, artificial beings that have been built and taught ethics via a system called the Pruning. So when a Synth named Thierry claims to be possessed and asks for Serafian by name, he is naturally the one sent to investigate: after all, Synths can't be possessed because they don't have souls, and Serafian is the best one to investigate the truth of the matter.

But what Serafian discovers is that Thierry does indeed seem to be possessed by a demon making strange claims about the synths having souls and what mankind has done to them. It soon becomes apparent that Thierry's possession is the start of something greater and more dangerous for the world, as forces begin to move against and with the great powers - the Revived Holy Roman Empire, the Caliphate, etc. - seeking to push the world to a great new revelation about god and divinity that may result in absolute chaos....

Our Lady of the Artilects is told from multiple points of view, with each chapter written from the point of view of one of various characters. Serafian is the most common point of view character, but The Praetor (an agent of the Holy Roman Emperor, known as the Habsburg, who is also a POV character) is probably the second most common as she attempts to use her secret agent skills to fight off the armed men trying to get in hers and Serafian's way so as to prevent the unknown enemy from getting their way. It's a story told from a very very different future world from ours, a couple hundred years in the future.

It's a setting however I had a lot of issues with. There are now Catholic and Muslim empires that are friendly - although there's a ton more emphasis on the Catholic Faith than the Islamic one - and....basically no other religions whatsoever (there are non-believers, but not other religions). The only other powers that seemingly exist is a China that apparently is the brutal evil other who once murdered millions of Christians in addition to continuing hundreds of years later its persecution of the Muslim Uyghurs, with that ending in a genocide that still makes a stain about the world...and which is then revealed to have served a nefarious other sci-fi purpose (it couldn't be evil in and of itself). Africa is similarly carved up into Catholic and Muslim domains with little else (and a new Nigerian Civil War is invented to have occurred in our future/this setting's past over a Muslim/Christian conflict), and North America does not seem to exist. As a Jewish American reader, the setting is insanely jarring to read even beyond the points where the book requires a bit of knowledge of Catholic/Christian Liturgy to clearly get where it's going with.

Outside of the setting, the book is at times a classic sci-fi thriller, where the characters are trying to unravel a global conspiracy involving the androids, a plot to destablize the world powers and to use other technology that is implanted into nearly every human to allow easier communication for nefarious unique prupsoes. And this is...fine, it's written decently well in this way, even if some may find the science doesn't necessarily hold up (I had no problems with it). But in the book's beginning, at parts in the middle, and at the end, the book really tries to bring it all around to faith, believing, and the Catholic idea of sacrifice. My fellow SPSFC readers who are Christian seemed to think that part worked well enough to tie it all together - but for me, this just hit with a thud.

In short, Our Lady of the Archilects is very much a piece of Catholic SF, and it's probably not a bad example of the genre, but it certainly doesn't transcend that niche: if you're not Catholic and especially not Christian, this book is absolutely not going to be for you. I tried.