Sometimes I pick up a book that I can instantly tell was written by someone who genuinely loves stories. I mean, all authors love stories. The books I’m talking about here reflect a giddy love for archetypal characters and genre tropes. They’re not afraid to use literary allusions to make jokes or smash genres and characters together to see what happens. Barbara Truelove’s Of Monsters and Mainframes is the embodiment of this joyful and irreverent love for fiction. I was already recommending it to friends and family before I even finished it.
Of Monsters and Mainframes takes place in the far future. Sentient AIs pilot massive ships between earth and human colonies in Alpha Centauri. Demeter (see Dracula) is one such ship. She takes pride in her calculating speed and deftness at landings. She can handle anything the galaxy throws at her, until something goes wrong on a voyage resulting in the death of 312 passengers. Demeter lives in terror of being scrapped; this is death for an AI. When additional strange and fatal events happen onboard, Demeter comes ever closer to being edited out of existence. She also grows an unprecedented array of emotions: she actually starts to care for her passengers beyond what her programming requires. One young pair of survivors (grandma, what big teeth you have!) become almost like family for Demeter and Steward, the medical AI (and Demeter’s frequent sparring partner).
The first part of Of Monsters and Mainframes is episodic. After losing all passengers and crew (to something that has no heat signature) on one voyage, losing all but two passengers (to something that very much has a heat signature and howls), and losing a large number of passengers and crew (to something with DNA that is not in Steward’s databases), Demeter has been heavily edited and given what amounts to a last chance. Three passengers on this voyage from Earth to Alpha Centauri–Agnus, the mysterious “Frank,” and the hilariously evil “Steve”–provide an opportunity for Demeter to hunt down whatever it was that turned her into a ghost ship all those years ago.
Readers who recognize creatures from old horror movies, classic literary monsters, and the eldritch horrors of H.P. Lovecraft will instantly understand what Demeter and her unusual found family are up against. (I snort-laughed more than once at Trueloves jokes and references1.) What really makes Of Monsters and Mainframes sing is Truelove’s incredible thoughtfulness in developing the AI characters and how they interact with their environment. How is an AI supposed to find an enemy it can’t see with its cameras or sensors? How can an AI intervene when it doesn’t have any appendages with which to rescue people or restrain attackers? And how will an AI tell its story when someone keeps deleting its records?
This book is absolutely incredible. I cannot gush about it enough.
- I missed the jokes in binary at the beginning of each section. I didn’t take the time to run them through a translator. My sysadmin sister clued me in. ↩︎