swingbeat: 24/26 Sunrise Alley by Catherine Asaro

I had read a chapter of another book by Asaro, and I liked what I read. So when I came across this one, I decided to give it a try. I was a little disappointed.

The story starts out as a handsome man appears capsized by the beach home of Samantha Bryton, world-reknowned bioroboticist. They blur the lines between AI and neuroscience in this near-future tale. The man is running away from a mastermind named Charon (how droll, honestly!) and he turns out to be dead man who was rebuilt with a new computer brain but with the imprints of the former memories (and consciousness?). He is beyond the forefront of current robotic technology, a specimen that everyone from Charon to the government wants to find.

Asaro could have done much with this idea from an ethical and philosophical point of view, in an intellectually Asimovian way. But she only touches upon the basic questions (what is life? Is a self-aware android a like a human?) and repeats them throughout the book. She makes the story an action-adventure, with Sam and the android (Turner) falling in love and running from Charon. the love story was lame and not really deep; Asaro wrote about Sam admiring Turner's a little too often without really making the reader see it as well. All we really got was that Sam fell in love with Turner for his looks :).

The title of the book is the name of a place where rejected AIs can go to find refuge from humanity. Eventually, these two stumble upon it and we meet some other AIs. It would have been interesting if Asaro had developed the society of AIs even further but we only get a superficial peek, and she did not even imply anything more or mysterious under the visible iceberg.

All in all, the setting had potential, but it turned out to be space opera that I eventually had to force myself to finish.