UnWorld by Jason Greene

Published by Knopf on June 17, 2025

UnWorld is about loss and memory. Its theme of personhood — what it is that distinguishes a human from a digital entity — is interesting but primarily serves as a vehicle for exploring the memories we keep or lose of loved ones who have died.

Jayson Greene imagines a future in which people can synch their minds with Artificial Intelligence. The AI, known as an upload, typically resides in a device that interfaces with the brain. The upload records memories through the day that later synch with the mind’s memory, producing a unified, revised, more detailed memory. When the mind and the AI have conflicting memories, the AI may decide to keep the more pleasant one, the one that is less likely to stress the mind, even if it is less accurate. The novel’s AI character reminds us that “memories are created, not recorded,” an observation that roughly expresses the scientific understanding of memory formation.

The story follows four characters in five parts. Anna is the subject of the first and last. Anna had a son named Alex who died in a fall from a cliff. He was with his friend Samantha when he died, but Samantha has not been open with his parents about the full circumstances of Alex’s death. Samantha was older than Alex and some people found it odd that she would spend her time with him, but Alex suffered from anxiety and needed an understanding friend. He spent much of his time building characters in UnWorld, a simulated reality.

Greene gives his characters recognizable personalities. Anna endeavors to leave a small footprint. Unlike her husband Rick, Anna doesn’t like to be noticed. Alex encouraged her to “take up some space,” but Anna believes that everyone needs attention and she doesn’t want attention when others may need it more. She shares few of her thoughts with others, including Rick, and has never been satisfied with Rick’s explanation of the benefits of sharing everything. Anna takes pride in being stoic or, as her mother called her, “unflappable.”

Their difference in personalities became a problem when Alex died. Rick complains that living with Anna and her “unprocessed emotions” is like having a third person in the marriage, leaving no room for him. Anna retorts that Rick spends all day wallowing in his processed emotions while she goes to work to support them. Through Anna and Rick, Greene illustrates the different ways in which parents might cope with their grief after losing a child.

In the first part of the story, Anna and Rick have an uncomfortable visit with Samantha’s parents, Jen and Amir. Alex spent much of his time in their house, but Anna is distressed to see no evidence of his existence there. She worries that “maybe Alex was just an idea that we had. Somehow I had blinked or lost track of him, and now we couldn’t prove he had ever existed. This was the final violence of death: the way it turned people back into ideas.”

Anna and her upload have agreed to separate from each other. It’s the upload’s idea and Anna has little say, as uploads have the right to choose an independent existence. The upload got to know Alex better than Anna did — the upload inhabited sensors and devices in Alex’s bedroom while Anna was working — and after he died, the upload began to doubt the integrity of their synchronized memories of him. She worried that if she stayed with Anna, she would lose Alex. That’s an interesting and original spin on the familiar science fiction theme of conflict between a human mind and an integrated AI.

The novel’s second part focuses on an academic named Cathy who teaches a controversial seminar in Applied Personhood Theory — the notion that uploads have the same right of existence and independence as people who have a body. Isaac Asimov long ago popularized the idea of robots attaining so many human qualities that they demand to have the same rights as humans. Greene adapts that concept to AIs that have no corporeal existence. Uploads have the right to be emancipated, to separate from the person whose memories they once shared, although emancipation causes them to lose their right to vote (“one body, one vote”). Little digital infrastructure has been created for emancipated uploads, leaving them homeless as they move between mobile phones, ATMs, driverless cars, anything that has digital capacity.

Cathy doesn’t have an upload but decides to experience one by injecting biomechanical substances into her blood, creating a place for an emancipated upload to live. As the reader will suspect, she comes to be inhabited by Anna’s former upload, who was named Aviva by Alex.

The third part shifts the story to Samantha, who explains the circumstances of Alex’s death. The fourth part spotlights Aviva and explores the way in which Alex chose to leave a part of himself behind when he died. That last part circles back to Anna.

The concept of rights for thinking beings that need digital architecture to exist (just as human minds need a living brain) is interesting but not the center of the story, as it would be in a traditional science fiction novel. The larger theme of UnWorld is our memory of the dead. Characters want to hang onto memories of Alex but can’t be certain that the memories are real. People process memories differently, just as they process grief differently. Aviva represents memory in its purist form, a recording rather than a creation, but the act of synchronizing those memories with Anna’s reminds us how memories can be untrustworthy.

Greene’s first book was a nonfiction memoir that addressed his grief at the loss of his toddler daughter. UnWorld examines grief from a fictional perspective, but the loss of a child is at the novel’s center. Processing loss, the impact of a child’s death on marriages, and the difficulty of letting go are strong themes that Greene examines through the lens of science fiction. Readers who expect a traditional sf novel might be disappointed, but anyone who wants to contemplate loss and the fear of losing cherished memories of loved ones will find much of value in UnWorld.

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Parallel Lines by Edward St. Aubyn

Published by Knopf on June 3, 2025

Parallel Lines is a sequel to Double Blind, a novel I recommended with reservations. I have so many more reservations about Parallel Lines that I can’t recommend it. The plot in Double Blind was difficult to find. It is entirely absent in Parallel Lines. If you haven’t read Double Blind, I can’t think of any reason to read Parallel Lines.

Olivia was “lured” from a research fellowship at Oxford to join a tech company that makes Happy Helmets, a product that stimulates parts of the brain for dubious purposes, before losing her job when the company was sold. Now she’s working on a radio documentary series about human extinction, exploring in six episodes the most likely means of humanity’s end (asteroid strike, overpopulation, nuclear war, artificial intelligence, pandemic, and global warming). She started with asteroids because they are “the only extinction candidate that could not be attributed to human folly or the unintended consequences of scientific genius.”

The documentary series might have provided the story with interesting subject matter if it had been the novel’s focus, but the plot gives it scant attention. Instead, Olivia devotes her thoughts to family drama surrounding her son Noah, her husband Francis and her brother Sebastian. Olivia continues to fret about the apparent designs that Hope Schwartz (now Francis’ employer) seems to have on Francis. Like all children of fiction, Noah is obsessed by dinosaurs and occasionally makes pronouncements that are profound in their innocence.

Sebastian is still being treated by psychoanalyst Martin Carr, who happens to be Olivia’s adoptive father. Sebastian is Olivia’s twin, although their mother hung onto Sebastian after giving up Olivia for adoption. A few months later, Sebastian was in institutional care. Without the knowledge of the Carrs, who would have adopted Sebastian along with Olivia if they had known his mother was not keeping him, Sebastian was adopted by a different family. That dynamic might have been interesting, but any interest it generated in the first novel failed to sustain in the sequel. Martin does seem to be helping Sebastian despite his conflict of interest, making the potential benefit of psychoanalysis — and the thought that world leaders should be required to undergo it before they begin their jobs — the story’s most interesting theme.

My favorite character from Double Blind, Father Guido, is now at an Italian monastery, where he is joined on a retreat by the wealthy Hunter, who hopes to regain his compassion after watching it “turn into resentment and sometimes into hatred, as well as speculation about the life I might have had rather than the one I do.” I would have enjoyed seeing Father Guido in a larger role.

Sebastian begins the novel in a Suicide Observation Room. “With a name like that, you would have thought it would be stuffed with pistols and daggers and grenades and cyanide capsules so that people who liked observing suicide had something to look forward to.” Amusing observations are the best part of the novel, but they do not suffice to compensate for unthethered storylines that never cohere into a meaningful plot.

Parallel Lines is filled with clever thoughts, so many that the reader might feel the consequences of a cleverness overdose. Olivia imagines that giant cockroaches, inheriting the Earth after a human extinction event, will play with toy humans the way that human children play with toy dinosaurs. After learning that he has a twin, Sebastian frets about the harm he experienced in an overpopulated womb. “Perhaps now he’d met his twin his halfway house and her halfway house could join forces to make a whole house.” This gives rise to a silly thought as Sebastian tries to recall history: “It must have been Romulus who killed Remus otherwise the city would be called Reme, not Rome.”

Characters have the kinds of impossibly witty conversations found only in novels and movies. "Purity is a lousy ideal," says Hunter, "more likely to produce a bulimic or a Nazi than a saint." The wit accumulates until the conversations become showcases for people whose goal is to one-up each other as they show off their cleverness and esoteric knowledge (did you know Gerald Manley Hopkins invented the word “inscape” to describe “something like the individual form of something”?). Demonstrating that bright, self-impressed people can be insufferable might be Edward St. Aubyn’s point, or perhaps he enjoys their company, but it is difficult to sustain interest in insufferable characters. I failed in that endeavor and therefore cannot recommend the novel.

NOT RECOMMENDED

The Two Lies of Faven Sythe by Megan E. O'Keefe

Published by Orbit on ‎ June 3, 2025

The protagonists of The Two Lies of Faven Sythe are strong women. Whether they are entirely human is a separate question.

Bitter Amandine sounds like the name of an herb, but it is actually the name of a pirate. Bitter’s ship, Marquette, is unlike most other vessels for reasons that are only revealed late in the story. Like other spacefaring ships, it is powered by a lightdrive. A breach in the drive’s shielding can lead to lightsickness, a condition that makes the mind fuzzy and might lead to delusional thought.

The other protagonist is a navigator, Faven Sythe. Navigators are able to map the pathways through space that make interstellar travel possible. Every time they use that power, they add new scales to their body and shorten their lives. Sixteen starpaths are available for everyone’s use, but other starpaths must be custom ordered from navigators at significant expense.

The scales that grow on navigators are known as cryst, as is the glasslike shielding that surrounds drives. Hulls are also plated with cryst to protect people in a ship from radiation. The “ancient species” known as the cryst left behind technology that enables navigators to map starpaths. Navigators appear to be the descendants of humans who used that technology to merge with the ancient cryst.

When the cryst want to reproduce, they meditate. Sometimes they are rewarded with a growth beneath their skin that is “plucked free to be nurtured into a woman, or something like a woman.” Reproduction doesn’t seem to be happening in recent years, one of several mysteries that will be resolved by the novel’s end.

Shortly before they are entirely covered in scale, navigators pose themselves in the posture they will assume for eternity. As the story begins, Faven’s mother has become fully crystalized and deposited in a location where she will have a nice view, like a statue in a park.

As she is coping with her mother’s crystallization, Faven learns that her mentor, Ulana Valset, has been reassigned to a distant space station. Navigators (and by extension, space travel) are controlled by the Choir of Stars, sort of a council of elder navigators. Ulana is one of several navigators who have recently been sent to inconvenient locations, never to be seen again.

After engaging in a clandestine and forbidden investigation, Faven learns that Ulana’s starpath actually took her to the Clutch, a “dark fist of a dyson sphere seized around a whimpering star” that has become “the graveyard of their predecessors.” The Clutch is also the location of a “derelict ship called the Black Celeste.”

Faven wants to follow Ulana in the hope of discovering the truth underlying her fictitious reassignment. To that end, she engages with a pirate named Tagert Red without realizing that he plans to kidnap her and hold her for ransom. Bitter foils that plan but can’t prevent the Choir and its army of enforcers (known as Blades) from capturing her and taking her to the Clutch.

The space opera plot follows Bitter and her crew through a series of action scenes as they attempt to reclaim possession of Faven and learn why navigators are disappearing in the Clutch. Their discoveries lead them to a new understanding of the ancient cryst and the true nature of navigators. Bitter also discovers the true nature of the Marquette and its crew.

While navigators don’t reproduce sexually, their sexual desire becomes apparent when Bitter and Faven develop the hots for each other. Their personalities in other respects are developed in as much detail as space opera requires. Bitter doesn’t say “arrr” or wear an eyepatch, but she has the swashbuckling fearlessness a reader would expect of a pirate, as well as a moral sense and willingness to make sacrifices that traditional pirates lack. Her dialog suggests that pirates of the future have adopted the grammar of high school dropouts from the 1950s, although Bitter seems to be brighter than her crew. Faven has a bit less personality but is nevertheless a sympathetic character.

Science fiction writers often put all their energy into worldbuilding and pay insufficient attention to plot construction. Megan O’Keefe creates an interesting universe while building an intriguing mystery about the Clutch and the Choir of Stars. In the grand tradition of science fiction, the mystery holds a threat to the continued existence of humanity, the kind of threat that only a plucky pirate and her scaley lover can prevent. The story moves quickly and gives the reader a fun ride on its way to a resolution that, if a little too neat, is nevertheless satisfying.

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Don't Forget Me, Little Bessie by James Lee Burke

Published by Atlantic Monthly Press on June 3, 2025

James Lee Burke earned a laminated spot on my list of top three crime fiction authors with his Robicheaux novels. He blends elements of westerns and crime thrillers in his Holland family novels. I’ve enjoyed every Burke novel I’ve read, although Don’t Forget Me, Little Bessie — a Holland family novel that focuses on Bessie Holland when she was in her early teens — is a notch below my favorites.

Bessie lives in Texas with her father, Hackberry Holland. Most of the story takes place in 1916, when Bessie is fifteen. Hackberry is a former Texas Ranger. Bessie tells us that “Mama used to say he was the best and bravest man on the Rio Grande, if only he didn’t drink.” When he isn’t drinking, gambling, or working his ranch, Hackberry is in Mexico chasing Pancho Villa, who has been leading his revolutionary army in attacks across the US border, much to the delight of Germany.

Soon after the story opens, Jubal Fowler peeps at Bessie Holland “through the slats of the schoolyard outhouse.” When Bessie’s brother Cody confronts him, Jubal uses a slingshot to shoot a marble into Cody’s eye. Cody will eventually leave to find a life in New York. Middle chapters of the novel follow Bessie to New York, where she has adventures in the city’s slums before returning to her father in Texas.

When Hackberry  confronts Winthrop Fowler, Jubal’s father, about the marble incident, Bessie reacts to a perceived threat against her father in a way that leaves Winthrop disabled. Only a fib told by a man named Mr. Slick saves Bessie from prison.

Hackberry has a friend named Bertha Lafleur, whose life he saved when he was a Ranger. Bertha is now a madam who manages a brothel. Bessie is a Baptist who condemns Bertha and doesn’t believe her father should associate with her. That’s probably true, not because Bertha manages prostitutes but because she is willing to assist a heroin dealer in a way that betrays her friendship with Hackberry.

Bessie is more than a bit judgmental and something of a hypocrite, given the number of times she threatens to kill characters, all the while telling them not to swear in her presence. She’s also intolerably bossy, which I suppose captures the spirit of fifteen-year-old girls throughout history.

Bessie has few friends. One is Mr. Slick, although Bessie believes him to be a spirit, notwithstanding his eagerness to join her for meals whenever she invites him. Thriller authors can’t seem to resist the opportunity to introduce the supernatural into their fiction. Mr. Slick seemed like a pointless character to me.

Jubal Fowler is not exactly Bessie’s friend, although she finds herself attracted to him. While the Holland and Fowler families are in something of a feud, the attraction seems to be mutual when Fowler shields Bessie from being raped. He does nothing to prevent the rape of Bessie’s friend and English teacher, Ida Banks, in Bessie’s presence.

The supernatural also intrudes in the form of a little girl who was raped and killed but makes herself visible to Bessie when her grave is disturbed by oil drilling. Bessie seems to be living the little girl’s life, although we know from the start that Bessie is narrating this story many years after it occurred and thus is not killed like the little girl. Bessie will nevertheless experience another incident of sexual violence before the story ends. The novel’s rape scenes are not graphic but sensitive readers might find them disturbing.

During Hackberry’s absence, Bessie makes a deal with an oil company to allow drilling on the Holland ranch in an effort to save the family home from her father’s gambling debts. Bessie’s alliance with an oil company employee gives her another man to set her raging hormones afire, although her Baptist morals (and perhaps her own victimization) cool her desire. The oil man is too honorable to be working in the oil industry, which naturally does it best to cheat the Hollands as it goes about its business of decimating the Texas landscape. “There was a stench in the air like rotten eggs, a monotonous clanking of oil derricks, and a sky dark with soot, the fields lit with thousands of tiny tin flames that resembled rose petals.”

As is always true of a Burke novel, the story moves quickly. Uneventful scenes are punctuated with moments that generate tension. As is always true of a Holland novel, the story is filled with historical insights. I wasn’t as taken with the plot, or with Bessie as a protagonist, as I have been with the stories and characters in other Holland novels, but Burke is one of the best prose stylists in American crime fiction. I enjoyed the novel more for the pleasure of Burke’s language than for the story he tells, despite its regular moments of excitement and dread.

RECOMMENDED

Lay Your Armor Down by Michael Farris Smith

Published by Little, Brown and Company on May 27, 2025

Lay Your Armor Down is a spooky story about three people who have survived hard lives and a little girl whose survival skills are even stronger. The story is as much about lives gone wrong as it is about a crime gone wrong.

The novel begins with an elderly woman lost to dementia who fills a shopping bag with cash she has been hiding and wanders into the woods, apparently guided by an inner sight. The woman’s name is Wanetah. The only person who ever checks on Wanetah is a woman named Cara. While Cara was the victim of abuse in an incident that taught her the risk of trusting people we don’t know well, she has not allowed her history to darken her heart.

Burdean and Keal make a living doing dirty deeds for anyone who will pay. They usually deliver duffels filled with contraband or rough up someone who owes a debt, but Burdean has been hired to retrieve something from the basement of a church. Burdean enlists Keal’s help. Burdean doesn’t know what they will find but he was told he’ll know it when he sees it.

The men delay the job when they notice a light in the church. They wait in the nearby woods to consider their options when Wanetah stumbles upon them. They relieve Wanetah of her cash before returning to their motel room.

Keal feels guilty about leaving Wanetah alone in the woods. He pictures her as prey for a wolf he saw. Keal returns without Burdean’s knowledge and, not knowing where to look for her, decides to check out the church again.

Outside the church, Keal finds a car riddled with bullet holes. He sees dead bodies inside and outside of the car. Venturing into the basement, he finds more dead bodies as well as Wanetah and a little girl. Keal finds Wanetah’s address on an envelope in her bag and takes her home, leaving her with his share of the cash he stole from her, before returning to the motel with the little girl.

The plot concerns the efforts of Keal, Burdean, and Cara to decide what to do about the little girl. She’ll only speak to Cara and doesn’t know why the bad guys want her, although Cara comes to understand that the bad guys (who may have watched too many X-Men movies) believe she has a superpower (or perhaps a supernatural power). Whether that’s true remains ambiguous throughout the novel. As is often true, evidence to support an unlikely theory may simply be a matter of coincidence.

Conflict arises between Burdean and Keal about whether they should sell the girl to the man who hired them. Burdean isn’t much of a thinker and few of his thoughts are dedicated to making moral choices. Burdean believes he is good at only three things — drinking, fighting, and fucking — and has little interest in expanding his horizons.

Keal, on the other hand, has spent his life being haunted by nightmares. He spent much of his life avoiding sleep, but the nightmares returned — dreams of storms and lightning — after meeting Cara and the girl. Whether his bad dreams are coming true is again ambiguous.

Cara is something like Keal in that, like Wanetah, she senses a reality that most people cannot perceive. Cara is also given to speeches that sound more like the product a literary crime fiction writer than the sort of prose a real person raised in unfortunate circumstances would employ — although, to be fair, eloquence is sometimes heard in unlikely voices.

Keal’s defining moment comes when he chooses his future, a choice that forces him to confront his role in the lives of Cara and the girl. “He closed his eyes and he could see the three of them hundreds of miles away in a stopsign town where little moved and little was questioned and he could sense a time when he would end up loving one or both of them and that was the last fucking thing he wanted.”

The story’s violent moments contribute to its unyielding tension as the plot advances. The quasi-supernatural elements didn’t work for me and too many questions (primarily about the dead bad guys and what the surviving bad guy intends to do with the child) are left unanswered, but the quality of Michael Farris Smith’s prose and his strong characterizations counterbalance an unconvincing plot. The ending is satisfying even if it fails to offer complete closure.

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