“Some day, society will catch up to technology.
Some day, we’ll realize just how much we held back human progress by
not moving out of our flesh bodies and into far superior mechanical ones.”
― Machine by Jennifer Pelland
Science fiction, at its very best, fearlessly challenges readers and compels them to look at the world around them in a different light – and that is exactly what Jennifer Pelland’s brilliant debut novel Machine does in grand style.
While the subject matter – mind uploading, android consciousness, and the ultimate question “what makes an entity human?” – certainly has been explored countless times before in novels like PKD’s Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?, Rudy Rucker’s Software, Robert J. Sawyer’s Mindscan, Christopher Rowley’s Netherworld trilogy (Pleasure Model, The Bloodstained Man, and Money Shot), etc., Pelland examines the topic with an intimacy and honesty that makes Machine an undeniably powerful read.
The story is set in 2092 Massachusetts and revolves around Celia Krajewski, a textbook editor happily married to the love of her life, Rivka. But when she is diagnosed with an incurable – and fatal – disease, she opts to download herself into a medical replacement body while scientists try to find the cure for her particular ailment. But when she awakens in the body of her android duplicate, she is told that not only is her wife not there, she has filed for divorce because she doesn’t believe that Celia’s essence – her soul – is inside the bio-android.
“She was hardware, artificial muscle, bloodless skin. Programming wired into a mechanical construct. Her body had been built to specification on an assembly line. There was nothing natural about her. Nothing human.”
Stuck inside a machine that looks exactly like her, Celia enters the real world still reeling from the loss of her wife. What she finds is an America in the throes of a “New Puritanism” movement – where narrow-minded religious zealots have made the country even more intolerant and fearful of those who are different. Celia quickly becomes a target for their ignorance-fueled wrath and she soon finds herself out of a job and homeless. Her only option is to seek out and stay with those like her – mechanicals.
Celia is filled with self-hate and is obsessed with making herself more like a machine – emotionless and without the ability to feel pain or pleasure. To that extent, she finds those who can modify ("tweak") her and make her into something less human. Her journey of self-degradation leads her into prostitution and she finds perverse solace in the abuse she receives from sexually deviant humans. Her descent into darkness is heartrending:
“She wanted to be locked down and carved up. She wanted to have a chainsaw taken to her arms and legs, and lie there, a helpless torso, being passed around like a sexual party favor…”
But the darkness that she envelops herself in eventually gives way to a light – and Celia finds the unlikeliest of salvation…
Although Pelland called her first novel a “psychosexually f-ed-up piece of work” in an interview back in September, Machine is essentially a romance. But it’s the premise of this love story that is so thought provoking, so wildly intriguing. If you consider society’s obsession with cosmetic surgery coupled with scientific advances in artificial limb technology – and the lunacy surrounding our current crop of politicians – Pelland’s vision isn’t that far-fetched.
The novel also forces readers to reconsider the definition of what it means to be human, what it means to be real. Is the uploading of minds into essentially immortal mechanical constructs evolution or is it the death knell of humankind?
Intensely provocative and deeply disturbing, Pelland’s Machine is simply an unforgettable – and potentially nightmare-inducing – read. In a word: twisted.
Paul Goat Allen has been a full-time book reviewer specializing in genre fiction for the last two decades and has written thousands of reviews for companies like Publishers Weekly, The Chicago Tribune, Kirkus Reviews, and BarnesandNoble.com. He is a member of the National Book Critics Circle.
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