SciFi/Fantasy Book Review: The Sentient by Nadia Afifi: https://t.co/QUOyugFgC1
— Josh (garik16) (@garik16) October 15, 2020
Short Review: 6 out of 10
1/3
Short Review (cont): In a cyberpunk-esque novel, a young woman - an escapee from a religious cult and who uses a technology to read memories - finds herself caught in a conspiracy of cloning, mind alteration, and fundamentalists. An okay story but not much more
— Josh (garik16) (@garik16) October 15, 2020
2/3
The Sentient is a cyberpunk* thriller and debut novel by author Nadia Afifi. This is actually a rare novel for me - it's a novel I've picked up and read (from the library) on a whim - without having been prompted by hearing good things from other authors or sources on social media, or from seeing buzz from big press campaigns, etc. I saw this book on the list of new additions to my elibrary, thought the description and cover looked interesting, and decided to give it a try.
*The book isn't described on Amazon as Cyberpunk, but it's a future where people wear computers in their eyes, which can give them access to various places with the right permissions, and the main character specializes in using technology to examine people's minds, which is enough for me.*
The result is....fine, nothing particularly special, but a perfectly satisfying cyberpunk-ish scifi thriller with a solid stand-alone storyarc that may or may not be used to launch a sequel. The main character is fine but unexceptional and the mysteries that the plot brings up fairly quickly are intriguing enough to draw my attention and keep me going, but the answers to them are never really interesting enough to be more than mildly satisfying. It's a story dealing with questions/issues of consciousness, cloning, religion vs science, and mind reading, and if those concepts are interesting to you, this might be worth a read for you.
------------------------------------------------Plot Summary-------------------------------------------------------
Amira Valdez grew up in a religious cult, one of the major ones that has significant power in 23rd century America, in which she was expected to grow up, take a special drug, and become one of the elder's many wives. But since her escape, she has managed to become one of the best students at the Academy in Westport, Oregon, specializing in using a holomentic reader to dive into others' thoughts and dreams for the purpose of therapy. Amira's dream is to do well enough on the final exam to be assigned to one of the space stations, as far away from the nightmarish religious compounds of her childhood as possible.
But instead, Amira finds herself assigned to Pandora, a massively controversial science project with ambitions towards human cloning. The first two women test subjects had strange fatal breakdowns in the third trimesters of their pregnancies, and the response is suspected to be psychological - something that they hope Amira can prevent from happening with the third and last subject. But it soon becomes apparent to Amira that something strange is going on with Pandora: a Federal investigator is looking into the project and its connection to a mystery drug; a consultant on the project creeps her out and has no clear reason for being there; and worse, there seems to be more and more ties to more than one of the religious cults the more she looks into both the project and the mind of the last test subject.
Amira may not have wanted this assignment - but she will soon find it impossible to leave it be without getting answers, answers that could change everything about the future......and her own past.
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The Sentient is kind of an example of idea based science fiction - some of the characters do have a little depth (mainly Amira and the test subject Rozene), but really this is a book with a lot of ideas for both its main plot and its setting that it throws out there and tries to do something with. Readers of this blog will know I'm not the biggest lover of idea based SF/F and prefer my stories to be big on character depth. Still, The Sentient works well enough by following the model of a thriller, carrying the story for the first half by posing enough interesting questions to keep me guessing and wanting answers, and then following that up with a second half that finds our protagonist desperately trying to deal with threats both to her and to things she has grown to care about, up through the very end. This works fine enough and the book isn't long enough to ever really drag or make me feel like I wanted to put it down.
That said, none of the ideas really are pulled off well enough to be that interesting in the end, honestly. The book's strongest argument is one skeptical of faith, treating it as a coping mechanism for people at best and an instrument of those in power to lord over others, with it being used by hypocritical elders to lord over women, and in some cases, over those who don't confirm to a white supremacist vision. But it's so blatant an argument that it's hard to really take it too seriously honestly - the religious cults are all bad, yada yada, you get the point fairly quickly. You have issues of consciousness and going through one's mind also as a significant part of the plot, and well, the book doesn't really handle the ethical issues with this at all, instead using it as a foundation for mystery - in fact it ends in a place that suggests such ethical questions must be compromised upon or will be dealt with in a sequel novel. Then you have side issues of cloning, of people being replaced by robot companions, of patriarchal societies that reject science not for real justifiable reasons but solely to keep a sexist vision intact...all of this is there, but none of it really has much interesting done with it.
To be sure, none of the above is done poorly, so there never is a part where bad execution resulted in an idea being discussed in a way with offensive implications, as sometimes happens when a book overreaches like this (for comparison, see Emily Suvada's This Mortal Coil). And the ending, whether this is the end to a stand alone or the end of a first in a series, is a satisfying way of wrapping it all up - I didn't feel like I wasted my time reading this novel at all. At the same time, neither the characters nor ideas really land in a way to make a lasting impression, leaving it all just eh.
In short, The Sentient is fine cyberpunk fair, which might scratch an itch if that's what you're looking for, but won't really knock your socks off.
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