Reviews

An Unnatural Life by Erin K. Wagner

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cadoca's review against another edition

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dark sad tense fast-paced

Plot- or character-driven? Character
Strong character development? It's complicated
Loveable characters? Yes
Diverse cast of characters? It's complicated
Flaws of characters a main focus? It's complicated

3.25

joletson's review

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4.0

3.5 ⭐️

maeverose's review

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2.0

TL;DR: A very surface level look on racism that I’m not sure accomplished anything it was trying to say, hardly anything actually happens, absolutely hated the ending.

I was so disappointed with this book :/ The synopsis sounded interesting and I really wanted to love it but it did not deliver. The only things I liked about it was what little world building we got, and the overall concept, as I love stories about sentient AI. Unfortunately those things were hardly in the book.

Plot / Meaning of the story

First off let’s make it clear that this book is using the mistreatment of robots as an allegory for racism. Reading the other reviews made me realize that apparently some people didn’t get that. It’s literally compared to ‘to kill a mockingbird’ in the synopsis…. Anyway, you can tell this was written by a white author. To me, the fact that she wrote a book about racism but made it about androids instead of actual people of color feels like she was trying to make it more ‘palatable’ to a white audience. It’s very surface-level and I don’t think it was written very well. The stance the book seems to take on AI makes the message of the story confusing to me. The robotnici are seen as lesser than humans by everyone, even the main character (more on that later). That makes sense given what the book is trying to set up, but the problem is it’s never really refuted in the story at any point, almost like it’s leaving it up to interpretation? Which wouldn’t make sense as an allegory to racism. And with how it ends, I’m just left very confused.

Most of this book (literally about 80%) is spent on Aiya meeting with 812-3 in prison and trying to get an appeal for him. This isn’t a murder mystery, but there are no clues or slow reveals about what happened, 812-3 just tells Aiya what happened, kind of out of nowhere. I feel like it could’ve benefited from more of an investigation. The appeal isn’t until the last 20%, and the actual trial doesn’t even happen in the book. Major spoiler:

We never get to see the outcome of his trial, because he’s killed right after the trial gets approved. And then it ends. I’m not opposed to sad endings, that’s not the problem. It’s the fact that nothing is resolved in the end. It makes the entire book feel pointless.

There is also a very minor side-plot following an unnamed person’s journal entries. The entries needed to be longer or not there at all. They were each only one sentence and very vague. They didn’t have anything to do with the main plot, but personally I was interested in what they were gonna find so I wanted more from those entries. I was almost more interested in that storyline than the main one.

Characters

None of the characters feel fully developed, and theres really only two characters with any importance to the story, save for the murder victim (who we also know nothing about. Oh and btw, he’s the only character explicitly described as a person of color in the entire book.)

The main character, Aiya, is very contradictory in her views on AI. She’s trying to help 812-3 and seems to be the only one on this entire moon who cares about AI. But throughout the entire book she’s shown to be racist towards 812-3, constantly thinking how unhuman and creepy she thinks he is and clearly feeling threatened and nervous around him. I found it very annoying. It’s never clear why she decides to help him. She doesn’t seem to like him. There’s no discussion of her overcoming her internalized racism, there’s never a point where she sees him as her equal, not even at the end. She just comes across as very conflicted. Maybe that was intentional? There’s also a moment where when another character brings up the possibility of aliens discovering the human settlers on this moon, she responds with: ‘ “you forget that is our planet now.” Aiya pointed to the flags on the domes, the logos on the doors of the elevator. “They’d be trespassing.” ‘ It was unclear to me if she was being satirical or serious. Besides that, we get none of her backstory, other than her reasoning for moving to this moon which in itself is vague and confusing. She wanted to find something more than human? She wanted to escape humans? I don’t understand what that was getting at.

As for 812-3, outside of what’s relevant to the case, we know absolutely nothing about him. His entire purpose in the story is to be a prop to the discussion on racism. I wanted to know more about him. Especially given he’s such a central character I feel like we should know more. (We don’t even know his pronouns, Aiya just decides they’re he/him because he looks masculine apparently. I know it’s not that deep but as a genderqueer person this bothered me, she could’ve easily asked, but I guess that would require her to actually consider him a person).

Other little nit pics

I know it wasn’t the focus, but I wanted more worldbuilding. I was a bit lost in the beginning and had a lot of questions, even 60 pages in. I think the chapter that starts on page 119 shouldve been the prologue, that wouldve at least helped. I also wanted to know more about the robotniks’ history in general as well. When were they made? Were they sentient from the beginning or did they become sentient at some later point? We weren’t given any of that. Side note: the fact that the androids are called ‘robotniks’ was a bit distracting because I just kept thinking of eggman. That bothered me less as the book went on though.

The little notes at the start of every chapter are pretty pointless. They don’t really add anything to the story.

I didn’t understand what was being said in pages 142-144. I don’t know if I was missing something or if those pages actually didn’t make sense.

Content Warnings

storyphoria's review

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3.0

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The concept of debating the “rights” of robots equipped with sentient levels of artificial intelligence, to the point where they are only lacking the ability for emotion but in all other ways are completely identical to humans, isn’t a NEW concept in sci-fi.

At the end of the day I was surprised by how much this felt so much more like a John Grisham legal thriller that happens to be set in a sci-fi setting than it felt like a cool sci-fi story with some legal thriller aspects serving as a side note to add depth to the story delivery vehicle. If you love legal/court-room thrillers where the “hero” is facing a battle in the courtroom while also facing very real and dangerous threats outside of the courtroom due to their stance in the court case they have taken on, you’ll likely really enjoy this one. For me, that’s not a genre I’m a huge fan of and as such it turned into a well used story premise being ground down to fairly boring territory pretty quickly. Mildly enjoyable and for the reader that enjoys legal thrillers more than I do.

amydavid's review

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4.0

Got this as a free Tor download along with Scalzi and Chambers. Quick read that raises some familiar issues with AI and sentience of machines, but also benefits a lot from being in a collection with the other two.

thestarman's review

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4.0

VERDICT: 3.8 stars, rounded up to 4.

Better than expected. Good main human protagonist. Interesting robot/AI. Very similar to some older Asimov tales with same basic plot (Is This Robot a Murderer--and if so, WHY?), but I liked it anyway.
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Spoiler

It made no sense that a certain robot character (with "military" specs, etc.) was taken down in so easily in the given manner. And surely their actual 'brain' was not damaged by a stab to a certain point, so why didn't anyone think to save them? Or maybe our human protagonist knew that would be an impossible battle to fight, given all the opposition?