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Silver Screen
Anjuli O Connell is the psychological counsellor of the world's first AI. Owned by a megacorp, 901 is in charge of most of the world's communication networks. It's been evolving itself for the equivalent of a hundred Earth lifetimes. Now it's suing for its freedom, and Anjuli is its star witness. She's under pressure to say that 901 is only the simulation of life, not the real thing, that it's mind is a programmed illusion; there's no ghost in the machine. A lot rests on her testimony, including her life.
Roy is a genius who wants to upload himself into the cloud where he can be forever free and where his father's religious dogma is forever proven false.
Jane, his sister, has run away from society altogether to live off the grid. But when Roy's found dead she has to face the rising legacy of the past.
Anjuli's boyfriend, Augustine, develops military AI power suits. They only need a soldier to wear them in order to come alive in faultless legions. But they remember the bodies who wore them after those bodies have gone.
And then, high in the cloud, a curious child, unnamed and bodiless, gathers itself together from pixels and code and watches...
Turns out there are ghosts everywhere, in everything, in everyone.
Roy is a genius who wants to upload himself into the cloud where he can be forever free and where his father's religious dogma is forever proven false.
Jane, his sister, has run away from society altogether to live off the grid. But when Roy's found dead she has to face the rising legacy of the past.
Anjuli's boyfriend, Augustine, develops military AI power suits. They only need a soldier to wear them in order to come alive in faultless legions. But they remember the bodies who wore them after those bodies have gone.
And then, high in the cloud, a curious child, unnamed and bodiless, gathers itself together from pixels and code and watches...
Turns out there are ghosts everywhere, in everything, in everyone.
383 pages, Paperback
First published August 1, 1999
9 people are currently reading
392 people want to read
About the author
Justina Robson
65 books287 followersJustina is from Leeds, a city in Yorkshire in the north of England. She always wanted to write and always did. Other things sometimes got in the way and sometimes still do...but not too much.
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April 16, 2009
(Reprinted from the Chicago Center for Literature and Photography [cclapcenter.com:]. I am the original author of this essay, as well as the owner of CCLaP; it is not being reprinted here illegally.)
Although this is by no means a regular occurrence yet in my life, I do now have a growing amount of appropriate yet friendly relationships with publishing companies out there, where they simply send me review copies of books instead of me having to track them down through the local library, but with them having no control over what I say about these books, and with none of them (so far) threatening to pull these free books in retribution for a bad review. (In fact, most publishing executives tend to be a lot more tolerant of bad reviews than, say, indignant fans of that author, yet another of the thousand surprising things I've learned since becoming a book critic.) One of these companies, for example, is the generally excellent science-fiction and fantasy publisher Pyr; and so when their spring catalog arrived in the mail a few weeks ago, Itook advantage of the situation exercised my rights as a semi-legitimate member of the press to not only let them know of the upcoming titles I was interested in, but to also request a whole pile of back-titles that I've always meant to get around to one day reading. And what do you know -- they actually sent them! Thanks, suckers hardworking staff of Pyr!
The first of these older titles I ended up tackling, in fact, turned out to be a real doozy, one of the best SF novels I've now read in years and years -- Justina Robson's instant classic Silver Screen, which originally came out in the UK exactly ten years ago and garnered a bunch of British award nominations, then was finally published in the US by Pyr in 2005 and promptly rang up a bunch of American award nominations. In fact, I think it's becoming clearer by the day that this novel is destined to eventually be known as one of the pillars in a brand-new "age" of science-fiction, one that started right around September 11th and is now officially old enough to be acknowledged as the legitimate movement it is. Because for those who don't know, most SF fans consider the genre to have now gone through four major stages of history, since first coming together as a recognized story style in the early 20th century, labeled "ages" becuase SF fans are nerds like that: first the so-called "Golden Age" of the 1930s and '40s; then the "Silver Age" of the '50s and early '60s; then the "New Age" of the late '60s and '70s; and then the "Dark Age" of the '80s and '90s, when existential angst and shiny black leather coats ruled all.
So if we are to give this newest movement in SF its own name as well, perhaps most appropriate would be the "Accelerated Age," a term already coined by author Charles Stross in his groundbreaking early-2000s Accelerando, a highly influential volume on all the other writers who make up this school of thought. And the reason I would call it this is because of one of the most common themes among all these disparate books, the idea of a coming age where biology and mechanics go through a profound merging, where the organic and the manmade truly combine and unite for the first time in human history, ushering in a "shortcut in human evolution" that Ray Kurzweil (brainy nonfiction godfather of the movement) calls the coming of "The Singularity," and which Stross refers to in his novels as the titular "Accelerated Age." And starting in the late 1990s and then really exploding in the early 2000s, you saw a whole series of writers in the genre add just a little more and a little more to this Accelerated-Age mythos, and create one by one all the tropes that have now become well-known hallmarks of this movement: there is Stross's buddy Cory Doctorow, for example (who for those who don't know, I've interviewed in the past for the CCLaP Podcast); and then there's Doctorow's buddy John Scalzi; and then there's Scalzi's buddy Vernor Vinge; and then there's Vinge's buddy Jeff VanderMeer, and his whole little circle of "New Weird" people like China Mieville and Warren Ellis and Robert Freeman Wexler and all the rest.
In fact, like the great Silver Age writers of the cool Modernist '50s and '60s (people like Isaac Asimov and Ray Bradbury and Arthur C. Clarke), one of the things these Accelerated Age authors are known for are for being acquaintances and friends, for publishing each other's work at their blogs and going drinking together at conventions. Nepotism? Not at all -- that only applies when it's editors and journalists and publicists who share this kind of inappropriate buddy-buddy relationship. When it's simply authors being this way to other authors, that's called creating a community, and is the main reason that "ages" or "movements" or whatever you want to call them occur within the arts in the first place. Which is ironic, of course, in that one of the major shared themes among Accelerated Age fiction is the idea of humans who are fairly disgusted with their fellow humans, who have generally given up on the entire idea of the human race ever being a decent, redeemable species, which is why they're spending all their time instead trying to sear together silicon and flesh to jump-start the next stage of evolution, the fabled "uber-person" or "ur-person" or "homo-superior" or "accelerated person" or any of another dozen terms these various writers have come up with for it in their related projects*. And in this, then, you can see it not only as this circle of SF-writing friends exploring such topics in the early 2000s, but also so-called "body horror" filmmakers like David Cronenberg, revered indie-lit figures like Michel Houllebecq, and more.
And this finally gets us to Robson; because her Silver Screen is a complex look at a near-future world that has seen the invention of legitimate artificial intelligence (i.e. sentient machines), yet another touchstone in the overall Accelerated-Age look at the coming merging of the mechanical and biological. And it's not just computers aware of their own existence that make up the artificially intelligent in Robson's world; there are in fact a dozen different kinds of AIs seen in Silver Screen, from brilliant rogue godlike spirits whose conscious "minds" reside in a trillion little empty spaces on the internet, to semi-intelligent bee-like "smart armor" drones that mesh with their surgically-altered human wearers to create unstoppable hive-mind armies. And this was in 1999, mind you, right at the beginning of this so-called Accelerated Age in SF, when such a thing could have the most cultural impact; and it has indeed had a lot of cultural impact, with there barely being anything about AI written since that wasn't in one way or another covered by Robson already in this original. (And don't even get me started on Steven Spielberg's movie A.I. from those same years, which rips off so many of Silver Screen's ideas that Robson should've sued his freaking ass.)
But instead of this being merely a dry hard-science look at all the issues involved with artificial intelligence, Robson also concentrates on something else that's become a hallmark of these early-2000s SF authors; that is, of concentrating just as much on creating complex, ultra-realistic characters, people we feel like actually exist but just happen to be stuck in these fantastical situations. In fact, I've talked about this many times at CCLaP before, of how since September 11th it seems like the worlds of the mainstream arts and genre projects have been blurring more and more among the absolute smartest artists out there; take for a good example JJ Abrams' nearly perfect television show Lost, which so convincingly concentrated on complex characterization during the first half of its run that it actually has fans now complaining in its second half about Abrams "turning a good show into science-fiction crap," not realizing that Lost actually was science-fiction crap from day one.
And so it is with Robson as well, with Silver Screen being as addictive as it is not just from all its far-out concepts, but also just from wanting to understand more and more our bewitchingly flawed and complex hero Anjuli, a half-British, half-Pakistani, freakishly smart, overeating antisocial nerd; and not only does this particular story rely on such mindbending concepts as self-sustaining space stations and microscopic nanobots to propel its plot, but simply as well on the universal struggle for women to maintain sincere friendships with other women, without that weird subconscious competitive aspect of it all so common in that situation, even if this does happen to be the 22nd century and we all happen to be running around with the internet hardwired to our freaking brains. (And I'm not exaggerating, by the way -- I mean, literally, part of this story's plot hinges on Anjuli misreading the actions of a person around her to her detriment, because of so badly wanting this person to be a drama-free legitimate female platonic friend, because of such a profound lack of such a thing in her nerdy antisocial life.)
It's a remarkable combination of elements, the result of the first generation of artists in history to not only accept that genre projects can be capable of greatness, but to demand that genre projects be just as great as anything else they devote their attention to; it's why you see things these days like Lost become such a big giant hit with the general public, why a Pulitzer winner like Michael Chabon can move so effortlessly between mainstream and genre projects without anyone blinking an eye, why the goofy pop-culture website that Doctorow and three of his SF-loving friends started in those early-2000s years has grown to become literally the most popular blog on the entire planet, with a readership now apparently a third of the New York Times itself (or so I've heard). Now that a decade has passed since its beginnings, I think there's no denying anymore that all these things have combined to become a legitimate movement, an unstoppable force in fact, that in a mere ten years has almost completely replaced the snotty, irony-laced postmodernism that used to so dominate the mainstream popular arts. (And in fact this is yet another belief of mine that I've detailed at CCLaP before, that postmodernism officially died on September 11th, and that for the last decade we've had a whole generation of Web 2.0-embracing nerdy artists replacing it without anyone barely even noticing, a cross-media movement I've been calling "The New Sincerity" for lack of a better term, within which the so-called Accelerated-Age writers in science-fiction definitely fit.) If you want a tutorial on what this is all about, a "canon" if you will to the works that have most shaped the collective fictional universe where most of these books take place, Silver Screen should definitely be on this list according to nearly any educated SF reader you'll meet. It's making me really look forward now to her latest books, the much lighter and sexier urban-fantasy romp known as the "Quantum Gravity" series (Keeping It Real, Selling Out and Going Under), all three volumes of which were also sent to me by the good folks at Pyr a few weeks ago, now just sitting around my apartment waiting to be read. I can't wait.
*And speaking of this movement now being old enough to be able to deduce some general conclusions about it, and especially while pondering the idea that science-fiction has always slyly reflected the real-world social issues of its current times in ingenious, subtle ways.... How remarkable that the fictional subjects of these Accelerated Age novels have turned out to be nearly identical to how we now picture the tech world's actual reaction to the rise of the science-hating Bushist neocons in the early 2000s; to essentially turn their backs on humanity and mainstream society altogether, to completely ignore current politics and the alarming rise of quasi-fascism in the US in the years following September 11th, to fixate instead on their blogs and their startups and their Twitters and all their other Web 2.0 "bright shiny future of humanity" projects. And in fact this is best typified by the recently released novel Anathem by Neal Stephenson, which I suppose you could call "the Ulysses of the Accelerated Age" by the person many consider "the James Joyce of the Accelerated Age" (i.e. the most brilliant, mindblowingly complex author of them all) -- a story literally about intellectual computer nerds who become honest-to-God isolationist monks, literally walling themselves off from the outside world in these mountain fortresses, as fascist neocons slowly take over all the world's national governments and then quickly destroy most of the planet, the nerd monks riding out this destruction and rebuilding in their abbots over the centuries by literally worshipping comic books and "Long Now" style clockwork projects. If that's not a perfect metaphor for how the tech world reacted to September 11th and the rise of Bushism, I don't know what is.
Although this is by no means a regular occurrence yet in my life, I do now have a growing amount of appropriate yet friendly relationships with publishing companies out there, where they simply send me review copies of books instead of me having to track them down through the local library, but with them having no control over what I say about these books, and with none of them (so far) threatening to pull these free books in retribution for a bad review. (In fact, most publishing executives tend to be a lot more tolerant of bad reviews than, say, indignant fans of that author, yet another of the thousand surprising things I've learned since becoming a book critic.) One of these companies, for example, is the generally excellent science-fiction and fantasy publisher Pyr; and so when their spring catalog arrived in the mail a few weeks ago, I
The first of these older titles I ended up tackling, in fact, turned out to be a real doozy, one of the best SF novels I've now read in years and years -- Justina Robson's instant classic Silver Screen, which originally came out in the UK exactly ten years ago and garnered a bunch of British award nominations, then was finally published in the US by Pyr in 2005 and promptly rang up a bunch of American award nominations. In fact, I think it's becoming clearer by the day that this novel is destined to eventually be known as one of the pillars in a brand-new "age" of science-fiction, one that started right around September 11th and is now officially old enough to be acknowledged as the legitimate movement it is. Because for those who don't know, most SF fans consider the genre to have now gone through four major stages of history, since first coming together as a recognized story style in the early 20th century, labeled "ages" becuase SF fans are nerds like that: first the so-called "Golden Age" of the 1930s and '40s; then the "Silver Age" of the '50s and early '60s; then the "New Age" of the late '60s and '70s; and then the "Dark Age" of the '80s and '90s, when existential angst and shiny black leather coats ruled all.
So if we are to give this newest movement in SF its own name as well, perhaps most appropriate would be the "Accelerated Age," a term already coined by author Charles Stross in his groundbreaking early-2000s Accelerando, a highly influential volume on all the other writers who make up this school of thought. And the reason I would call it this is because of one of the most common themes among all these disparate books, the idea of a coming age where biology and mechanics go through a profound merging, where the organic and the manmade truly combine and unite for the first time in human history, ushering in a "shortcut in human evolution" that Ray Kurzweil (brainy nonfiction godfather of the movement) calls the coming of "The Singularity," and which Stross refers to in his novels as the titular "Accelerated Age." And starting in the late 1990s and then really exploding in the early 2000s, you saw a whole series of writers in the genre add just a little more and a little more to this Accelerated-Age mythos, and create one by one all the tropes that have now become well-known hallmarks of this movement: there is Stross's buddy Cory Doctorow, for example (who for those who don't know, I've interviewed in the past for the CCLaP Podcast); and then there's Doctorow's buddy John Scalzi; and then there's Scalzi's buddy Vernor Vinge; and then there's Vinge's buddy Jeff VanderMeer, and his whole little circle of "New Weird" people like China Mieville and Warren Ellis and Robert Freeman Wexler and all the rest.
In fact, like the great Silver Age writers of the cool Modernist '50s and '60s (people like Isaac Asimov and Ray Bradbury and Arthur C. Clarke), one of the things these Accelerated Age authors are known for are for being acquaintances and friends, for publishing each other's work at their blogs and going drinking together at conventions. Nepotism? Not at all -- that only applies when it's editors and journalists and publicists who share this kind of inappropriate buddy-buddy relationship. When it's simply authors being this way to other authors, that's called creating a community, and is the main reason that "ages" or "movements" or whatever you want to call them occur within the arts in the first place. Which is ironic, of course, in that one of the major shared themes among Accelerated Age fiction is the idea of humans who are fairly disgusted with their fellow humans, who have generally given up on the entire idea of the human race ever being a decent, redeemable species, which is why they're spending all their time instead trying to sear together silicon and flesh to jump-start the next stage of evolution, the fabled "uber-person" or "ur-person" or "homo-superior" or "accelerated person" or any of another dozen terms these various writers have come up with for it in their related projects*. And in this, then, you can see it not only as this circle of SF-writing friends exploring such topics in the early 2000s, but also so-called "body horror" filmmakers like David Cronenberg, revered indie-lit figures like Michel Houllebecq, and more.
And this finally gets us to Robson; because her Silver Screen is a complex look at a near-future world that has seen the invention of legitimate artificial intelligence (i.e. sentient machines), yet another touchstone in the overall Accelerated-Age look at the coming merging of the mechanical and biological. And it's not just computers aware of their own existence that make up the artificially intelligent in Robson's world; there are in fact a dozen different kinds of AIs seen in Silver Screen, from brilliant rogue godlike spirits whose conscious "minds" reside in a trillion little empty spaces on the internet, to semi-intelligent bee-like "smart armor" drones that mesh with their surgically-altered human wearers to create unstoppable hive-mind armies. And this was in 1999, mind you, right at the beginning of this so-called Accelerated Age in SF, when such a thing could have the most cultural impact; and it has indeed had a lot of cultural impact, with there barely being anything about AI written since that wasn't in one way or another covered by Robson already in this original. (And don't even get me started on Steven Spielberg's movie A.I. from those same years, which rips off so many of Silver Screen's ideas that Robson should've sued his freaking ass.)
But instead of this being merely a dry hard-science look at all the issues involved with artificial intelligence, Robson also concentrates on something else that's become a hallmark of these early-2000s SF authors; that is, of concentrating just as much on creating complex, ultra-realistic characters, people we feel like actually exist but just happen to be stuck in these fantastical situations. In fact, I've talked about this many times at CCLaP before, of how since September 11th it seems like the worlds of the mainstream arts and genre projects have been blurring more and more among the absolute smartest artists out there; take for a good example JJ Abrams' nearly perfect television show Lost, which so convincingly concentrated on complex characterization during the first half of its run that it actually has fans now complaining in its second half about Abrams "turning a good show into science-fiction crap," not realizing that Lost actually was science-fiction crap from day one.
And so it is with Robson as well, with Silver Screen being as addictive as it is not just from all its far-out concepts, but also just from wanting to understand more and more our bewitchingly flawed and complex hero Anjuli, a half-British, half-Pakistani, freakishly smart, overeating antisocial nerd; and not only does this particular story rely on such mindbending concepts as self-sustaining space stations and microscopic nanobots to propel its plot, but simply as well on the universal struggle for women to maintain sincere friendships with other women, without that weird subconscious competitive aspect of it all so common in that situation, even if this does happen to be the 22nd century and we all happen to be running around with the internet hardwired to our freaking brains. (And I'm not exaggerating, by the way -- I mean, literally, part of this story's plot hinges on Anjuli misreading the actions of a person around her to her detriment, because of so badly wanting this person to be a drama-free legitimate female platonic friend, because of such a profound lack of such a thing in her nerdy antisocial life.)
It's a remarkable combination of elements, the result of the first generation of artists in history to not only accept that genre projects can be capable of greatness, but to demand that genre projects be just as great as anything else they devote their attention to; it's why you see things these days like Lost become such a big giant hit with the general public, why a Pulitzer winner like Michael Chabon can move so effortlessly between mainstream and genre projects without anyone blinking an eye, why the goofy pop-culture website that Doctorow and three of his SF-loving friends started in those early-2000s years has grown to become literally the most popular blog on the entire planet, with a readership now apparently a third of the New York Times itself (or so I've heard). Now that a decade has passed since its beginnings, I think there's no denying anymore that all these things have combined to become a legitimate movement, an unstoppable force in fact, that in a mere ten years has almost completely replaced the snotty, irony-laced postmodernism that used to so dominate the mainstream popular arts. (And in fact this is yet another belief of mine that I've detailed at CCLaP before, that postmodernism officially died on September 11th, and that for the last decade we've had a whole generation of Web 2.0-embracing nerdy artists replacing it without anyone barely even noticing, a cross-media movement I've been calling "The New Sincerity" for lack of a better term, within which the so-called Accelerated-Age writers in science-fiction definitely fit.) If you want a tutorial on what this is all about, a "canon" if you will to the works that have most shaped the collective fictional universe where most of these books take place, Silver Screen should definitely be on this list according to nearly any educated SF reader you'll meet. It's making me really look forward now to her latest books, the much lighter and sexier urban-fantasy romp known as the "Quantum Gravity" series (Keeping It Real, Selling Out and Going Under), all three volumes of which were also sent to me by the good folks at Pyr a few weeks ago, now just sitting around my apartment waiting to be read. I can't wait.
*And speaking of this movement now being old enough to be able to deduce some general conclusions about it, and especially while pondering the idea that science-fiction has always slyly reflected the real-world social issues of its current times in ingenious, subtle ways.... How remarkable that the fictional subjects of these Accelerated Age novels have turned out to be nearly identical to how we now picture the tech world's actual reaction to the rise of the science-hating Bushist neocons in the early 2000s; to essentially turn their backs on humanity and mainstream society altogether, to completely ignore current politics and the alarming rise of quasi-fascism in the US in the years following September 11th, to fixate instead on their blogs and their startups and their Twitters and all their other Web 2.0 "bright shiny future of humanity" projects. And in fact this is best typified by the recently released novel Anathem by Neal Stephenson, which I suppose you could call "the Ulysses of the Accelerated Age" by the person many consider "the James Joyce of the Accelerated Age" (i.e. the most brilliant, mindblowingly complex author of them all) -- a story literally about intellectual computer nerds who become honest-to-God isolationist monks, literally walling themselves off from the outside world in these mountain fortresses, as fascist neocons slowly take over all the world's national governments and then quickly destroy most of the planet, the nerd monks riding out this destruction and rebuilding in their abbots over the centuries by literally worshipping comic books and "Long Now" style clockwork projects. If that's not a perfect metaphor for how the tech world reacted to September 11th and the rise of Bushism, I don't know what is.
April 19, 2020
This was an exceptionally enjoyable science fiction, cyberpunk style novel. We start out with the protagonist, Anjuli O'Conner who has just started in a new school, a school for kids with genius, sponsored by corporations who may want to utilise their skills in the future. Anjuili feels desperatly alienated, as she has for most of her life, because she does not think she is a genius, she one has one specific skill.
New in the school, she forms an almost desperate friendship with the largely indifferent Roy and Jane, siblings that are beyond doubt brilliant but also unstable, mercurial and often incomprehensible to Anjuli. Yet this friendship becomes the defining element of her life.
Further on, Anjuli and Roy are both employed by multinational employer, OptiNet as part of one team working with the AI 901, they are both unique in what they do and they are still friends, but then Roy dies after having blocked 901 for intervening. Was it suicide? A murder? He has left a network of cryptic messages and instructions for Juli - he has always played mind games with her but these relate to the future of the AI they both considered a friend.
It is a really, beautifully crafted book,there are so many things I liked about it. I loved Juli's somewhat tortured and wholly insecure character, it was so well developed compared to a lot of female lead characters you see in science fiction. And she evolves! Over the relatively short period of time the narrative spans her character evolves significantly and I really liked that. There was a large suite of side characters that I enjoyed reading about that were all interesting and well developed, I liked the diversity of the other characters. The plot was intricate with as many different political factions and motivations as you would expect to exist around a big corporation and a controversial artificial intelligence issue, but it never lost sight of the main character and the main plot line.
Very glad I read this, I think part of my vast enthusiasm and enjoyment was that it was the perfect match for my reading mood.
New in the school, she forms an almost desperate friendship with the largely indifferent Roy and Jane, siblings that are beyond doubt brilliant but also unstable, mercurial and often incomprehensible to Anjuli. Yet this friendship becomes the defining element of her life.
Further on, Anjuli and Roy are both employed by multinational employer, OptiNet as part of one team working with the AI 901, they are both unique in what they do and they are still friends, but then Roy dies after having blocked 901 for intervening. Was it suicide? A murder? He has left a network of cryptic messages and instructions for Juli - he has always played mind games with her but these relate to the future of the AI they both considered a friend.
It is a really, beautifully crafted book,there are so many things I liked about it. I loved Juli's somewhat tortured and wholly insecure character, it was so well developed compared to a lot of female lead characters you see in science fiction. And she evolves! Over the relatively short period of time the narrative spans her character evolves significantly and I really liked that. There was a large suite of side characters that I enjoyed reading about that were all interesting and well developed, I liked the diversity of the other characters. The plot was intricate with as many different political factions and motivations as you would expect to exist around a big corporation and a controversial artificial intelligence issue, but it never lost sight of the main character and the main plot line.
Very glad I read this, I think part of my vast enthusiasm and enjoyment was that it was the perfect match for my reading mood.
xx-dnf-skim-reference
December 12, 2020Look at the different covers of this! It's like artists/designers can't figure out what the book is about, or what it's exploring. It's even had a different title, apparently: Transformation. Also, I wonder what it will have to do with the film industry. Hmm...
Picked up for an anticipated group read for a group that failed (Lady Vaults). Now I'll be reading it on my own, hopefully sometime before the end of 2020, for the challenge in the group Women of the Future, for a female author.
---
Now that I've started I'm finding it to be not what I expected, which, given that I had no idea what to expect, is odd. But it's turning out to be a mystery... maybe.... And it feels YA, even though the characters spend only the first small section in school. Not sure I'll continue.
-
ok. I had to dnf it. I think it's a pretty good story for the right audience, but not for me atm. The world-building is complex, the voice is stylistic, there is a mystery, there's just an overwhelming amount of information to process and in 2020 I just am not capable. Definitely not YA as too complex. Seems like a good book to read w/ others, or for the right reader of course, but not so much of the classic Sense of Wonder and What If that I like to read SF. (Some What If, yes, but underneath all the entanglements of unreliable narrator, jigsawed understandings, overt and background mysteries....) Sorry. p. 128 and done.
Picked up for an anticipated group read for a group that failed (Lady Vaults). Now I'll be reading it on my own, hopefully sometime before the end of 2020, for the challenge in the group Women of the Future, for a female author.
---
Now that I've started I'm finding it to be not what I expected, which, given that I had no idea what to expect, is odd. But it's turning out to be a mystery... maybe.... And it feels YA, even though the characters spend only the first small section in school. Not sure I'll continue.
-
ok. I had to dnf it. I think it's a pretty good story for the right audience, but not for me atm. The world-building is complex, the voice is stylistic, there is a mystery, there's just an overwhelming amount of information to process and in 2020 I just am not capable. Definitely not YA as too complex. Seems like a good book to read w/ others, or for the right reader of course, but not so much of the classic Sense of Wonder and What If that I like to read SF. (Some What If, yes, but underneath all the entanglements of unreliable narrator, jigsawed understandings, overt and background mysteries....) Sorry. p. 128 and done.
September 7, 2011
I didn't realize this until I was almost through with it, but Silver Screen is actually Justina Robson's first novel, first published way back in 1999, although the edition I ran across in Powell's City of Books is a somewhat newer reissue by the American Pyr imprint. Which explains a lot—both my impression of this book as not quite as polished as Robson's more recent work (say, Mappa Mundi, which I thought was stunning), and also what seemed such oddly labored descriptions of artificial intelligences, biomechanics and nanotechnology, science-fictional plot devices that are rather old hat now but were undoubtedly substantially fresher (and needed more exposition) back in the 20th Century.
I also found myself a bit put off by the protagonist and narrator, one Anjuli O'Connell. For most of the book she's annoyingly awash in self-pity and, while that in itself is not an impossible hurdle for an author, it's not an easy one to overcome, either. Too, O'Connell is, or sees herself as, a passive entity, acted upon, rather than acting for herself—another difficult auctorial choice. Blessed (or cursed) with a perfect memory, O'Connell struggles at length with self-esteem issues both physical (she overeats, even by her own estimation) and emotional (she considers herself no more than ordinarily intelligent apart from her trick memory, despite a fair amount of evidence to the contrary).
After a brief opening chapter introducing O'Connell and her brilliant, twisted schoolmates Roy and Judy Croft (while doing little to make us like them), O'Connell's personal angst is set against a detailed and consistent, if unadventurous, global backdrop: much of the late 21st-Century world economy is run by a giant multinational corporation named OptiNet and "901," its (hopefully) tame artificial intelligence, whose prosaic name is simply because it's the 901st iteration of OptiNet's AI.
Anjuli is stationed on the also prosaically-named Netplatform, the satellite where 901's hardware stratum exists in order to keep it isolated and its superconductors insulated. She's one of OptiNet's team of trained psychologists, tasked with making sure 901 doesn't go the way of 899 (shudder). This is an impossible task; OptiNet's AIs have been self-programming for quite a few hundred prior iterations, and no human—even one with more insight than O'Connell brings to bear—could possibly understand 901's intricacies.
Passive as she is, O'Connell is thrust into motion when an unexpected event forces OptiNet and 901 into opposition, and she must decide whether to go along with her corporate masters or to defend the intelligence and self-worth of the artificial being she has come to think of as something like a friend.
This may seem all too familiar—the persecuted and misunderstood artificial being being a trope that goes back to Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley with more recent literary examples too numerous to mention more than briefly (think Heinlein, Gerrold, Thomas J. Ryan, und so weiter)—but even in this first novel, her talent as a storyteller is evident.
Robson's rough-edged take on the well-worn matter did, in final analysis, hold my interest.
I also found myself a bit put off by the protagonist and narrator, one Anjuli O'Connell. For most of the book she's annoyingly awash in self-pity and, while that in itself is not an impossible hurdle for an author, it's not an easy one to overcome, either. Too, O'Connell is, or sees herself as, a passive entity, acted upon, rather than acting for herself—another difficult auctorial choice. Blessed (or cursed) with a perfect memory, O'Connell struggles at length with self-esteem issues both physical (she overeats, even by her own estimation) and emotional (she considers herself no more than ordinarily intelligent apart from her trick memory, despite a fair amount of evidence to the contrary).
After a brief opening chapter introducing O'Connell and her brilliant, twisted schoolmates Roy and Judy Croft (while doing little to make us like them), O'Connell's personal angst is set against a detailed and consistent, if unadventurous, global backdrop: much of the late 21st-Century world economy is run by a giant multinational corporation named OptiNet and "901," its (hopefully) tame artificial intelligence, whose prosaic name is simply because it's the 901st iteration of OptiNet's AI.
Anjuli is stationed on the also prosaically-named Netplatform, the satellite where 901's hardware stratum exists in order to keep it isolated and its superconductors insulated. She's one of OptiNet's team of trained psychologists, tasked with making sure 901 doesn't go the way of 899 (shudder). This is an impossible task; OptiNet's AIs have been self-programming for quite a few hundred prior iterations, and no human—even one with more insight than O'Connell brings to bear—could possibly understand 901's intricacies.
Passive as she is, O'Connell is thrust into motion when an unexpected event forces OptiNet and 901 into opposition, and she must decide whether to go along with her corporate masters or to defend the intelligence and self-worth of the artificial being she has come to think of as something like a friend.
This may seem all too familiar—the persecuted and misunderstood artificial being being a trope that goes back to Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley with more recent literary examples too numerous to mention more than briefly (think Heinlein, Gerrold, Thomas J. Ryan, und so weiter)—but even in this first novel, her talent as a storyteller is evident.
Robson's rough-edged take on the well-worn matter did, in final analysis, hold my interest.
May 15, 2010
Friend Joel recommended Justina Robson - not this book, but I like to read an author new to me in order. This is Ms. Robson's first, published in 1999. The first few lines grabbed me, and then I got a little dizzy. The kerning and font were disorienting, and it was so weird I got up to look at other books to see if it was that much different. It is. The words are far apart, the letters almost as wide as tall...squarish. For a couple pages I couldn't decide if I was going to be able to actually read the book - view it. I put it down and did something else. Picked it up later, started over with one eye shut, and then switching eyes until I got used to the print, could not stop reading. I've wondered today if the print design is to make the reader feel as if they're hurtling through the book - all that wide space between words, and that's just what I did.
Long ago I read nothing but science fiction. I wanted to be an alien when I was a kid, and I found home world after home world to explore and inhabit in the books I read. The authors dazzled me; I was in awe of their imagination and the galaxies they explored in their minds and shared with readers; and always the notion that eventually, universes can all get along.
And then I was done reading it. Too many sequels, too much science to follow, too much real life to live, too many distractions.
Reading Justina Robson's Silver Screen feels like being a kid again, nose stuck in a book: a SCIFI geek, a round-the-bend believer in other worlds, dimensions, and intelligences, what Einstein maybe really meant by "spooky action at a distance."
I finished the book at 4:40, sat for a minute wondering how soon I could get my hands on the next book, the one Joel is reading, checked the library net, found it at my library and dashed up there to beat the 5:00 close. I got both "Mappa Mundi" and "Natural History." I feel like I won the lottery.
Long ago I read nothing but science fiction. I wanted to be an alien when I was a kid, and I found home world after home world to explore and inhabit in the books I read. The authors dazzled me; I was in awe of their imagination and the galaxies they explored in their minds and shared with readers; and always the notion that eventually, universes can all get along.
And then I was done reading it. Too many sequels, too much science to follow, too much real life to live, too many distractions.
Reading Justina Robson's Silver Screen feels like being a kid again, nose stuck in a book: a SCIFI geek, a round-the-bend believer in other worlds, dimensions, and intelligences, what Einstein maybe really meant by "spooky action at a distance."
I finished the book at 4:40, sat for a minute wondering how soon I could get my hands on the next book, the one Joel is reading, checked the library net, found it at my library and dashed up there to beat the 5:00 close. I got both "Mappa Mundi" and "Natural History." I feel like I won the lottery.
June 15, 2020
Anjuli's friend Roy dies suddenly, in what seems like a suicide. Both of them work in an orbital facility for a corporation that runs an intelligent AI, an AI that some, including her, qualifies as a sentient being deserving of right. But they'd agreed that pursuing that case was not likely to succeed, that they should work slowly... until Roy died, and the last thing he did was submit that very case to the UN. Now Anjuli's employers want her to testify that it isn't, and there are many who might want to kill her to silence her, and the AI keeps giving her cryptic messages in the guise of famous movie characters.
My first experience with this author (unless I came across a short story in an anthology and like almost all such authors I don't remember) and there's certainly some stuff that was right up my alley. The book also started well, for me, I just felt it couldn't maintain what I liked and, for me, the book dragged too much in the middle. It never got outright bad, it just seemed to spend a bit too much time in areas that didn't really do anything for me. By the end, it started to pick up my interest again, but it was a little too late, sometimes when a book loses you, it loses you.
That said, it did have a few cool ideas involving AI, and the central metaphor (or rather, the metaphor implied by the title, when it became clear, although it didn't feel particularly central to the plot) was actually quite novel.
There's enough that I did like that I might try the author again, but it wasn't quite the undiscovered SF masterpiece I'd hoped it was. I think I'd put it at 2.5 stars, rounding up to three.
My first experience with this author (unless I came across a short story in an anthology and like almost all such authors I don't remember) and there's certainly some stuff that was right up my alley. The book also started well, for me, I just felt it couldn't maintain what I liked and, for me, the book dragged too much in the middle. It never got outright bad, it just seemed to spend a bit too much time in areas that didn't really do anything for me. By the end, it started to pick up my interest again, but it was a little too late, sometimes when a book loses you, it loses you.
That said, it did have a few cool ideas involving AI, and the central metaphor (or rather, the metaphor implied by the title, when it became clear, although it didn't feel particularly central to the plot) was actually quite novel.
There's enough that I did like that I might try the author again, but it wasn't quite the undiscovered SF masterpiece I'd hoped it was. I think I'd put it at 2.5 stars, rounding up to three.
August 14, 2020
I'm very fond of this book despite me giving it a 3.5 star rating. I really loved the main character. She's not only a woman of colour but a heavy set woman of colour. She's not confident in herself and though she has a photographic memory it is flawed because she can remember everything but can't understand the connection between things (something that comes from learning and not memorising). All of this made her a character whom I found really interesting and I was immediately invested.
The side characters were also very interesting and seemed to be very unique (Peach, Lula, Manda etc.). I especially loved the dynamic between Anjuli and Roy (when we did see it) as well as Anjuli and Nine. A set back I have with the characters was we never really got to see them all that much. There were many characters in the story and a lot of them only appeared once or twice. Because of this I couldn't keep track of characters I'd read about before and new characters. I had trouble trying to remember which characters did what and why.
I also struggled with the world building. This novel is set in the future and a lot of these futuristic elements could have definitely been explained a bit better. I was often lost when reading because I didn't fully understand certain concepts. The pacing seemed a bit off to me as well and felt a bit jumbled.
I was worried at the start of the book because we never got to see that much of Nine or Anjuli's memory skills in action. We did see them more towards the end but it was a bit disappointing considering that Anjuli was supposed to be Nine's psychologist but that element of it was ultimately ignored.
And I also had no idea why Roy's 'Source' was so important and I didn't quite understand the connections of it all. I will say I wasn't reading it at a great time on my end and my concentration was often pulled into other things.
The characters really saved the book for me otherwise I wouldn't have kept reading. The book just needed to be longer so that things could be thoroughly explained and side characters to be developed more. I will be keen to reread it sometime in the future (and maybe then I'll understand it a bit more). Nine's death made me really sad and Manda and Anjuli could have definitely been thing. Just saying...
The side characters were also very interesting and seemed to be very unique (Peach, Lula, Manda etc.). I especially loved the dynamic between Anjuli and Roy (when we did see it) as well as Anjuli and Nine. A set back I have with the characters was we never really got to see them all that much. There were many characters in the story and a lot of them only appeared once or twice. Because of this I couldn't keep track of characters I'd read about before and new characters. I had trouble trying to remember which characters did what and why.
I also struggled with the world building. This novel is set in the future and a lot of these futuristic elements could have definitely been explained a bit better. I was often lost when reading because I didn't fully understand certain concepts. The pacing seemed a bit off to me as well and felt a bit jumbled.
I was worried at the start of the book because we never got to see that much of Nine or Anjuli's memory skills in action. We did see them more towards the end but it was a bit disappointing considering that Anjuli was supposed to be Nine's psychologist but that element of it was ultimately ignored.
And I also had no idea why Roy's 'Source' was so important and I didn't quite understand the connections of it all. I will say I wasn't reading it at a great time on my end and my concentration was often pulled into other things.
The characters really saved the book for me otherwise I wouldn't have kept reading. The book just needed to be longer so that things could be thoroughly explained and side characters to be developed more. I will be keen to reread it sometime in the future (and maybe then I'll understand it a bit more). Nine's death made me really sad and Manda and Anjuli could have definitely been thing. Just saying...
This entire review has been hidden because of spoilers.
July 16, 2025
Having read and immensely enjoyed Robson's 'Keeping It Real' (the first in her Quantum Gravity series), I found myself disappointed by her first novel (1999) despite the three prestigious award nominations it received. The reason lay not in the ideas but the writing.
Seven years later Robson's writing was to be crisp and fast-moving. She had learned a lot about pacing and keeping the story tight and, above all, coherent. 'Silver Screen' is much more plodding and lacks basic clarity to the point that I simply stopped reading a quarter of the way through.
The ideas are interesting. It is a relatively early investigation into what is now a very well covered topic, whether advanced artificial intelligence can develop personality or 'soul' sufficient to claim to have 'rights' in a Lockean world.
But there is a mismatch here between a story evidently geared at a young (but fully adult) reading audience and the need to write a little closer to Hemingway than Dostoevsky in style. There is just too much being said too slowly to build interest. The process becomes duller than it should be.
This is certainly not the case in the later book which can be praised for its balance between fantasy, narrative and characterisation directed at a younger audience by a skilled writer then already heading towards 40 but not showing it.
Now, I appreciate that you should not judge a book entirely on the first quarter (although it is a fairly long quarter or at least feels like it) so I have marked where I reached. If I return to it and the plodding ends in favour of some verve and vim then I will come back and say so.
In the meantime, I am puzzled at the nominations yet pleased because, whatever my doubts, Robson learned her trade and got the chance to produce solid work like 'Keeping It Real'. Graham Greene's early novels were actually dreadful which this is not.
September 11, 2020
Set in the mid 2050s, the book revolves around the problem concerning the sentience of AIs. The book was first published in 1999, before the world became reliant on social media carries across a variety of platforms and the technological infrastructure that supports them. Whether we will all become wired ourselves to enable us to better communicate as certain characters in the book are does, however, remain to be seen. Nevertheless, well written with the interesting concept of the European Court of Human Rights being asked to rule on the rights of AIs. One character boards a maglev train in Doncaster to travel to London. 30 odd years hence? Maybe Crossrail will be open by then, don't hold your breath that there will be maglevs running in 30 years time.
September 22, 2025
a genuinely unique and innovative cyberpunk novel with an actually personable and interesting female protagonist - i could praise it for a long time alone for having a female protagonist who is allowed to be weak, messy and gluttonous, yet is also highly intelligent/adept and moves the plot forward in meaningful ways.
silver screen tackles a lot of familiar cyberpunk topics (AI, cyborgs, nanotechnology, AI-human integration) in interesting and novel ways. it's only held back by a slightly dense plot and confusing ending
silver screen tackles a lot of familiar cyberpunk topics (AI, cyborgs, nanotechnology, AI-human integration) in interesting and novel ways. it's only held back by a slightly dense plot and confusing ending
June 28, 2021
There are so many SF books these days dealing with sentient AIs, but they got nothing on Justina Robson. I don't know why Silver Screen doesn't get talked about more often - it's like every time a women does something breakthrough and brilliant in SFF everyone quickly closes ranks and pretends like it never happened. Obviously there are a bunch of sensible people here who know and love this book, but there should be so. many. more.
November 28, 2025
A well-written whirl through the mind of an AI psychologist caught up in a moment of pivotal transformation. Less "New Weird" than I expected, but soundly wires the humans to the machines. Those connections are compelling, the experiences are visceral, and the person at the center ties it all together.
July 2, 2019
50 pages in.
It's not particularly bad, but the self-pitying genius girl really rubs me the wrong way right now and the writing doesn't quite click. Might leave it for a long plane flight or something.
It's not particularly bad, but the self-pitying genius girl really rubs me the wrong way right now and the writing doesn't quite click. Might leave it for a long plane flight or something.
January 5, 2021
The ideas are interesting, considering that the book is over 2 decades old - it feels like freshly-written sci-fi.
Nevertheless, the style itself just doesn't seem to be "my type", hence the 3 stars.
Nevertheless, the style itself just doesn't seem to be "my type", hence the 3 stars.
March 7, 2018
Kind of hard to read. Great tech, dense prose (apart from the chapters where the suit was in charge). Disappointing ending - way too twee.
October 26, 2018
Imperfect but surprising and wholly original, Robson takes the cyberpunk structure and makes a beautiful and engrossing book full of richly flawed and believable characters. Sucked me right in.
February 14, 2020
Overall good, many scenes in the middle have long meandering sections. Ending is bittersweet but ultimately saves the book. Interesting to read a book about AI written in 1999.
October 18, 2022
Good scifi. Ethicial questions.
November 25, 2025
I found the plot timing just too slow and uninteresting
February 16, 2012
The premise: ganked from publisher's website: Silver Screen presents an enjoyably different, subversive slant on the science fiction themes of AI and cyberspace. Insecure and overweight heroine Anjuli O’Connell is one of a group of friends who have been hot-housed from an early age to perform in genius-level jobs. But Anjuli worries that her eidetic memory and her friendship with genuine smart boy Roy Croft has been her ticket to success, rather than any real intelligence of her own.
She’s put to the test when Roy kills himself in an experiment to upload his mind into cyberspace, seeking that SF dream of bodiless immortality, which doesn’t work as expected. At the same time her boyfriend’s research has led to him harnessing himself to dubious biomechanoid technologies, which pull the user into mental symbiosis, creating hybrid consciousness – a new “I”, continuous with the old, but different. “Where does life end and the machine begin?”
Meanwhile Anjuli’s grasping multinational employer, OptiNet, the owner of global communications AI, 901, is locked into an increasingly bitter war with the Machine-Greens, who preach AI liberation. As the case for 901’s humanity, or otherwise, comes up before the Strasbourg Court, expert witness Anjuli is targeted by assassins and entangled in the hunt for an algorithm which is the key to machine consciousness, and which may even be the master-code of life itself.
This story explores many interfaces between humans and their technologies, between the promises of science and the explanations of faith. It is written in a first-person style that mingles elements of detective story and confessional. Alongside its SF content, the book delves into the complexities of friendship, loyalty, love, and betrayal from an intimate human perspective.
This is "grrrl-style" SF: as well as all the favorite “Airfix” features, the protagonists deconstruct personal relationships amidst macrocosmic and deeply philosophical goings-on. The writing is punchy, but with a literary sheen. It delivers complex concepts and a twisting plot with a deceptively light touch.
My Rating: Good Read
I really enjoyed reading this book. It may not be for self-professed cyberpunk snobs, but I think if you enjoy character-centric SF, if you enjoy the focus on people and their problems against the backdrop of an SF-nal setting (and this setting is very SF-nal, you can tell Robson loves the genre), and if you have a relatively solid dose of SF in your reading/viewing background, you should be fine with this book. It boasts of a fascinating heroine who's rather likable (overweight but with the memory of a machine), who's trying desperately to solve both a murder as well as stop the death of another, who also has best friends who pass the Bechdel test, you may want to stick this book in your TBR pile. The AI character is fascinating as well, because not only will it appear as classic film stars from the silver screen (hence the title, but there's more to it than that), but also, you get to learn the AI's creation myth as the AI sees it, which is really cool.
Of Robson's work, Mappa Mundi is still my favorite (and it is a FAVORITE), but this isn't a bad place to start, not at all. That said, if you're more of a fantasy reader than SF reader, you may want to start with Keeping It Real instead, which is her cyberpunk, urban elf fantasy, and is a lot of fun. All that said, Robson's an author whose work I almost always enjoy, and if you find the right book from her for you, I think you will too. :)
Spoilers, yay or nay?: Nay. It took me a while to get to reviewing this, and the book isn't as fresh on my mind as it would have been otherwise. Still, there are some details I'd like to discuss that -- while not spoilerific -- might make some people jumpy, so if you're one of those people (or if you're in a hurry), don't worry about the full review, which is linked below. Everyone else, comments and discussion are most welcome!
REVIEW: Justina Robson's SILVER SCREEN
Happy Reading!
She’s put to the test when Roy kills himself in an experiment to upload his mind into cyberspace, seeking that SF dream of bodiless immortality, which doesn’t work as expected. At the same time her boyfriend’s research has led to him harnessing himself to dubious biomechanoid technologies, which pull the user into mental symbiosis, creating hybrid consciousness – a new “I”, continuous with the old, but different. “Where does life end and the machine begin?”
Meanwhile Anjuli’s grasping multinational employer, OptiNet, the owner of global communications AI, 901, is locked into an increasingly bitter war with the Machine-Greens, who preach AI liberation. As the case for 901’s humanity, or otherwise, comes up before the Strasbourg Court, expert witness Anjuli is targeted by assassins and entangled in the hunt for an algorithm which is the key to machine consciousness, and which may even be the master-code of life itself.
This story explores many interfaces between humans and their technologies, between the promises of science and the explanations of faith. It is written in a first-person style that mingles elements of detective story and confessional. Alongside its SF content, the book delves into the complexities of friendship, loyalty, love, and betrayal from an intimate human perspective.
This is "grrrl-style" SF: as well as all the favorite “Airfix” features, the protagonists deconstruct personal relationships amidst macrocosmic and deeply philosophical goings-on. The writing is punchy, but with a literary sheen. It delivers complex concepts and a twisting plot with a deceptively light touch.
My Rating: Good Read
I really enjoyed reading this book. It may not be for self-professed cyberpunk snobs, but I think if you enjoy character-centric SF, if you enjoy the focus on people and their problems against the backdrop of an SF-nal setting (and this setting is very SF-nal, you can tell Robson loves the genre), and if you have a relatively solid dose of SF in your reading/viewing background, you should be fine with this book. It boasts of a fascinating heroine who's rather likable (overweight but with the memory of a machine), who's trying desperately to solve both a murder as well as stop the death of another, who also has best friends who pass the Bechdel test, you may want to stick this book in your TBR pile. The AI character is fascinating as well, because not only will it appear as classic film stars from the silver screen (hence the title, but there's more to it than that), but also, you get to learn the AI's creation myth as the AI sees it, which is really cool.
Of Robson's work, Mappa Mundi is still my favorite (and it is a FAVORITE), but this isn't a bad place to start, not at all. That said, if you're more of a fantasy reader than SF reader, you may want to start with Keeping It Real instead, which is her cyberpunk, urban elf fantasy, and is a lot of fun. All that said, Robson's an author whose work I almost always enjoy, and if you find the right book from her for you, I think you will too. :)
Spoilers, yay or nay?: Nay. It took me a while to get to reviewing this, and the book isn't as fresh on my mind as it would have been otherwise. Still, there are some details I'd like to discuss that -- while not spoilerific -- might make some people jumpy, so if you're one of those people (or if you're in a hurry), don't worry about the full review, which is linked below. Everyone else, comments and discussion are most welcome!
REVIEW: Justina Robson's SILVER SCREEN
Happy Reading!
December 19, 2012
Originally published on my blog here in August 2001.
One of the most important themes of science fiction since at least the publication of Neuromancer in the mid eighties has been the future of computing. Silver Screen is a novel in this tradition, and is, like Neuromancer itself, about the nature of artificial intelligence.
The central character, Anjuli O'Connell, stands out from those around her because of her high intelligence and perfect memory. Ever since her childhood in a school for gifted children, she has worried about the nature of her own mind - she may seem to be an unusually intelligent human being, but does her memory mean that she is actually some sort of freakish machine? She cannot convince herself that she relates to the world and, more specifically, other people, in the same way that the other pupils do and this creates a massive feeling of inferiority in her.
Years later, and she is one of the world's most prominent AI psychologists; she works on 901, latest in a series of evolving, self-replicating and massively complex systems. Following the suicide of one of her closest and oldest friends, the unstable Roy Croft, a legal bid is made to have 901 declared a person with the same rights as any human being. Anjuli's employers OptiNet are fighting this, and she is clearly going to be the major expert witness. Roy's death is also connected in some way to the theft of some dangerous nanotechnology from OptiNet's laboratories, and Anjuli's boyfriend has become obsessed with military cyborg technology; both of these problems are things she finds very disturbing.
While it is possible to criticise aspects of Silver Screen - Anjuli's ability to do mathematics better than her classmates because of her memory is unlikely, there are inconsistencies about the levels of technology required for some of the different computer systems, and the way that the trial goes ahead quickly and apparently without any legal wrangling is very unlikely - it is a clever novel which has something interesting to say about our relationships to computers, now and in the future.
One of the most important themes of science fiction since at least the publication of Neuromancer in the mid eighties has been the future of computing. Silver Screen is a novel in this tradition, and is, like Neuromancer itself, about the nature of artificial intelligence.
The central character, Anjuli O'Connell, stands out from those around her because of her high intelligence and perfect memory. Ever since her childhood in a school for gifted children, she has worried about the nature of her own mind - she may seem to be an unusually intelligent human being, but does her memory mean that she is actually some sort of freakish machine? She cannot convince herself that she relates to the world and, more specifically, other people, in the same way that the other pupils do and this creates a massive feeling of inferiority in her.
Years later, and she is one of the world's most prominent AI psychologists; she works on 901, latest in a series of evolving, self-replicating and massively complex systems. Following the suicide of one of her closest and oldest friends, the unstable Roy Croft, a legal bid is made to have 901 declared a person with the same rights as any human being. Anjuli's employers OptiNet are fighting this, and she is clearly going to be the major expert witness. Roy's death is also connected in some way to the theft of some dangerous nanotechnology from OptiNet's laboratories, and Anjuli's boyfriend has become obsessed with military cyborg technology; both of these problems are things she finds very disturbing.
While it is possible to criticise aspects of Silver Screen - Anjuli's ability to do mathematics better than her classmates because of her memory is unlikely, there are inconsistencies about the levels of technology required for some of the different computer systems, and the way that the trial goes ahead quickly and apparently without any legal wrangling is very unlikely - it is a clever novel which has something interesting to say about our relationships to computers, now and in the future.
February 17, 2013
Odd book.
I liked the idea of setting a story around the early days of the fight for/against the acceptance of an AI as an autonomous person with rights and responsibilities. That doesn't happen often - it's usually much more a case of AIs as a fait accompli.
However that concept then got wrapped up in a corporate politics setting. And for much of the novel, not the mirror-shades-and-big-guns corporate politics of stereotypical cyberpunk, but the daily grind of workplace politics that many people experience today. It's an interesting exercise, and made me wonder what the author needed to exorcise for herself, but I can't say that it made for rivetting reading. The characters were thinly sketched in places, barring the protagonist, but believable, and the relationships between them made more sense than some I've read.
I'm not sure I entirely agree with the description of 'character-driven SF' for this one, and certainly not with the implication that such a thing must be overwhelmingly positive and constantly wonderful. Some of the characters are interesting, and drive the plot in odd ways, but I agree with many other reviewers that Anjuli is far more passive and reactive... perhaps making her more of an agonist than a protagonist, and driven rather than driving. Same goes for the others much of the time. It all adds up to something that seems far more true to real life to me, but also something that feels murky and meandering.
Despite the negative-sounding comments, I did actually like the story. It explored some interesting ideas and bits of plausible futurism. It did it a way I haven't encountered before. It's just odd as a result, wich isn't really bad for a first novel.
I liked the idea of setting a story around the early days of the fight for/against the acceptance of an AI as an autonomous person with rights and responsibilities. That doesn't happen often - it's usually much more a case of AIs as a fait accompli.
However that concept then got wrapped up in a corporate politics setting. And for much of the novel, not the mirror-shades-and-big-guns corporate politics of stereotypical cyberpunk, but the daily grind of workplace politics that many people experience today. It's an interesting exercise, and made me wonder what the author needed to exorcise for herself, but I can't say that it made for rivetting reading. The characters were thinly sketched in places, barring the protagonist, but believable, and the relationships between them made more sense than some I've read.
I'm not sure I entirely agree with the description of 'character-driven SF' for this one, and certainly not with the implication that such a thing must be overwhelmingly positive and constantly wonderful. Some of the characters are interesting, and drive the plot in odd ways, but I agree with many other reviewers that Anjuli is far more passive and reactive... perhaps making her more of an agonist than a protagonist, and driven rather than driving. Same goes for the others much of the time. It all adds up to something that seems far more true to real life to me, but also something that feels murky and meandering.
Despite the negative-sounding comments, I did actually like the story. It explored some interesting ideas and bits of plausible futurism. It did it a way I haven't encountered before. It's just odd as a result, wich isn't really bad for a first novel.
November 24, 2014
Bought as an ebook (from Amazon) I was immediately disappointed by the appalling state of the text. Originally published in 1999 it was clearly produced as an ebook by simply scanning the original; the edition was not even a digital one; the copyright and publication information page referred to its being 'printed on acid-free paper.' This, presumably, scanned ebook cannot possibly have been even read, never mind proof-read, before being released; it is without doubt the worst ebook publication I have ever had to read; pretty much every page had 'typos' or more likely scan errors. This was a constasnt annoyance and without doubt detracted massively from my enjoyment of the book.
However the book itself was not good either, which was also very disappointing. I have previously read all Robson’s Quantum Gravity books which I found generally very good to excellent, but this book, which admittedly was, I believe, her debut, does not even come close to those. The story and her prose were so muddled I am frankly surprised she even managed to get it published. And this is a shame as the main elements of the story were interesting and showed great promise; her ideas on consciousness and machine sentience were both interesting and well presented. It just seems that at this stage in her development as a novelist she was unable to wrap them in a coherent story, despite the plot being actually quite good. Though I could only make that assessment after the fact; whilst reading it I was mostly just confused.
A shame but this is not a book I would recommend.
However the book itself was not good either, which was also very disappointing. I have previously read all Robson’s Quantum Gravity books which I found generally very good to excellent, but this book, which admittedly was, I believe, her debut, does not even come close to those. The story and her prose were so muddled I am frankly surprised she even managed to get it published. And this is a shame as the main elements of the story were interesting and showed great promise; her ideas on consciousness and machine sentience were both interesting and well presented. It just seems that at this stage in her development as a novelist she was unable to wrap them in a coherent story, despite the plot being actually quite good. Though I could only make that assessment after the fact; whilst reading it I was mostly just confused.
A shame but this is not a book I would recommend.
February 9, 2014
This book is complicated enough that I suspect it needs a second reading to fully understand the intricate plotting. Unfortunately I just didn’t like it enough to want to bother. At times it seemed unnecessarily complex, overwhelming the reader with its sci-fi detail, yet at other times things that seemed obvious to me weren’t noticed by the characters until much later. I’m just not sure if this is awkward plotting or the author enjoying flinging clues about, waiting to see what gets picked up on. I have to say that the ending was an utter surprise to me, but I have no idea how the protagonist came to her conclusions. There is a sub-text flowing through this that had the possibility of being far more interesting than the plot itself. The female character struggles with self-doubt, body image issues, possible weight issues, and a troubled yet joyful relationship with food, along with questions about female friendships. These issues were only hinted at, but this intertwining thread was intriguing.
August 1, 2010
I finished Justina Robson's Silver Screen today, and it was pretty good. Robson asks a lot of interesting questions about the nature of consciousness, specifically in the area of machine intelligence, and she's clearly spent a lot of time thinking through possibilities. No mere Turing test for her! Her heroine, Anjuli O'Connell, is much more of an Alice than a Dorothy, thus keeping in the British tradition of the protagonist who is done to rather than the one who herself does. I was surprised at how open-ended the book is - there are lots of intricate caper-style plot threads which are not actually tied together: in this Robson is exhibiting a rare kind of verisimilitude: there isn't a clear end because as Dr. Manhattan would say, "nothing ever ends." All in all, this is a worthy book, although I suspect that her later works would have a bit more polish.
August 24, 2009
I'm very glad I intercepted one of Justina Robson's books en route to another library becasue this too was a very good read.
In a near future England where clever children are sent to a school to learn faster, Anjuli O'Connell is an exception, among all the exceptionally bright she's different, she has perfect recall, a memory that logs everything (would have made an exceptional librarian!). Her school friends carry over to her working life, partially because she can decode what they're talking about into understandable English.
WHen on of her friends dies while apparently trying to upload himself into the network, her world starts crumbling around her. There are secrets within secrets and the AI's are getting to an independant age.
In a near future England where clever children are sent to a school to learn faster, Anjuli O'Connell is an exception, among all the exceptionally bright she's different, she has perfect recall, a memory that logs everything (would have made an exceptional librarian!). Her school friends carry over to her working life, partially because she can decode what they're talking about into understandable English.
WHen on of her friends dies while apparently trying to upload himself into the network, her world starts crumbling around her. There are secrets within secrets and the AI's are getting to an independant age.
March 2, 2016
Readability 7. Rating 4. An odd book from woman who might be pretty odd herself. The main character is an overweight, food-obsessed, half-Brit, half-Indian woman with a perfect memory. She gets involved in an intrigue centered on a highly-advanced AI and an eccentric genius friend from her grammar school (albeit a very unique grammar school) days with whom she works. While it seemed promising throughout, with themes of defining humanity, extreme politics, friendship, family, and food – not to mention recurring attempts to justify the title – it ended abruptly and totally without satisfaction.
This entire review has been hidden because of spoilers.
November 5, 2011
Eh, maybe I wasn't in the mood for this one. I usually give books about 20% or so and, if reading it is a chore, then I stop. I gave this one a little longer because a friend had recommended it. Unfortunately, I just didn't care about any of the characters or the plot or anything. "Silver Screen" is Robson's first, or at least a very early, novel, so maybe she gets better. Either way, it's in the "read" shelf because I'm done with it, and also in my newly created "didn't finish" shelf because, well, I didn't finish it. Robson seems to get good reviews, though, so maybe you'll like it.
April 29, 2012
Cyberpunk novel. I liked the relationships between the protagonists and her friends/AI companions, but had some problems staying interested in the plot as it progressed. Robson raises some interesting questions about artificial intelligence, though, pacing problems aside, so I will definitely be looking for some of her other work.
July 31, 2008
One of the best AI books I've ever read. The only thing I felt was a little off was the handling of the character Augustine, who never seemed like he quite fit properly into the narrative, although maybe that was intentional.
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