Hands On

by Andrew Rosenheim

Part satire, part love story, this is an account of the world of new technology seen through sceptical, humanist eyes. Set alternately in America and the UK, it is a story of high tech and low motives, passionate conviction and comedy. By the author of "The Tormenting of Lafayette Jackson".

240 pages, Paperback

First published September 1, 1993

About the author

Andrew Rosenheim was born in Chicago and came to England as a Rhodes Scholar in 1977. He has lived near Oxford ever since. Rosenheim worked in electronic publishing and artificial intelligence for over fifteen years, and ran Amazon UK's Kindle Singles. He has written for the TLS, The Spectator, The Times, The Guardian, The Independent, The Daily Telegraph, The Tablet, The New York Times Book Review, among other publications. Rosenheim is the author of nine novels, including Hands On (1993), a satirical novel featuring a precursor to ChatGPT, the Nessheim trilogy (The Accidental Agent; The Informant; Fear Itself), Without Prejudice, Holly Lester, and a memoir, The Secrets of Carriage H.

Reviews

[Derek Bridge]

This was the second novel I read this year, written some time ago (this one 1993) but featuring AI (natural language generation in this one), long before the current hype. But really this is a supposedly comic novel, with the banalities of corporate life in its sights. Trouble is that I can't help feeling that the target was more than corporatism: I see borderline racist undertones too.

[Luca Facchini]

Fun satire written with Waugh-like wit. It remains one of the earliest novels tackling machine writing that I can find.

[Chris]

I chanced on this book on kindle and ended up really enjoying it. It features a sort of early ChatGPT, which generates ‘authentic fakery’, or AI poetry, to spite the protagonist’s famous poet father. A rather prescient novel from the nineties!