Hands On

by Andrew Rosenheim

Frederick Madison is the hard-drinking Hemingway of the modern poetry world. His estranged son Robert -- once a Harvard Professor of Linguistics, now an Artificial Intelligence wizard for a multinational computer company -- has always felt overshadowed by the domineering grand old man of letters.

When Robert is sent to England to develop a special program in Oxford, he realizes he has the perfect opportunity to extract a spectacular filial revenge. Determined to teach a computer to write like an angel (or his father...), Robert enters a confusing world of 'authentic fakery', little foreseeing the consequences. Part satire, part love story, Hands On is a fast-paced story of high tech and low motives, by a novelist described by The New York Times as "approximating the savagery of Evelyn Waugh."

Andrew Rosenheim is the author of seven novels, most recently Fear Itself and The Informant. He worked for many years in publishing, at both Oxford University Press and Penguin, and was a pioneer in the early development of electronic publishing in the 1980s. A native of Chicago, he has lived in England for thirty-five years, and lives near Oxford with his wife and twin daughters.

240 pages, Kindle Edition

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.

He worked in electronic publishing and artificial intelligence for over fifteen years, and ran Amazon UK's Kindle Singles. He has also 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 trilogy Nessheim's War (The Accidental Agent; The Informant; Fear Itself), Without Prejudice, Holly Lester, and a memoir, The Secrets of Carriage H.

Reviews

[Derek Bridge · Rating 1 out of 5]

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.

[Anna · Rating 5 out of 5]

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

[Chris · Rating 5 out of 5]

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!