Love in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction

Starred review from December 1, 2014
The venerable science fiction theme of human/android love gets an original twist in this impressive debut novel set in late 21st-century Los Angeles. Bot-maker Eliot Lazar is indulging in a forbidden romance with android Iris Matsuo when she is abducted and dismantled for parts. Sidestepping the law, Eliot immerses himself in the shadowy underworld of rogue android trappers, chop-shop recyclers, and bot black marketers in the hope of retrieving all of Iris’s components before replacement parts permanently alter her personality. Trichter foregrounds Eliot and Iris’s intimate love affair against a meticulously worked out near future in which androids, who live in polluted ghettos as second-class citizens, are on the verge of violent revolt against the humans who exploit them for their labor. The incendiary potential of that scenario intensifies the suspense of Eliot’s desperate mission to save Iris, and drives the plot of this novel down some surprising and refreshingly unpredictable avenues. Agent: Ethan Ellenberg, Ethan Ellenberg Agency.

December 1, 2014
A dark and sometimes-gruesome sci-fi noir set in a slick, sick city on the brink of disaster. Debut novelist Trichter plunges the reader into a futuristic LA corrupted by its dependence on androids known as "spinners" for the spinning engines they bear instead of hearts. Most "heartbeats" view the "bots" as nothing more than objects to be used, abused and discarded for scrap. But Eliot Lazar is in love with a bot named Iris. Maybe it's because of who his father was, maybe it's because of his prosthetic arm, "the border where the metal competes with flesh," but whatever it is, it leaves him devastated when Iris is kidnapped and sold off piece by piece. He sets off to beg, buy or steal his love's limbs back and reassemble her, even as the cops start sniffing around the only crimes they care about-the ones against heartbeats. Some readers will be turned off by the cynicism of Trichter's vision or the sexualized violence against android women, but the more hard-boiled will love the fast-paced plot and unforgettably garish, ghoulish world. Many of the minor characters are stock types, but they're embellished with enough gleefully grotesque detail to keep readers engaged. The deeper questions raised by the premise, about what it means to be alive or in love, are never answered, but they'll linger in the mind of any reader with a beating heart. A fast-moving, suspenseful story set in a fascinating future world stuffed with all the violence, sex and sleaze a noir fan could ask for.

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January 1, 2015

Human beings aren't supposed to love bots in the Los Angeles of the future. Eliot Lazar doesn't care if his love for bot Iris Matsuo could get them both killed and plans to run away with her, promising even to kick his drip habit. But before they can run, Iris is killed and sold for parts, and Eliot will brave thugs, criminals, and even the queen of the underground bot rights movement to retrieve Iris's parts and reassemble the woman he loves. VERDICT The premise of a man trying to rebuild his lover might have been romantic if drug-addicted Eliot was not such an unlikable character and if all the women (human and bot alike) in the book weren't depicted as unfeeling assemblages of parts. Those expecting a sf of robots and humans in uneasy coexistence like something Isaac Asimov did so well will have to look elsewhere. This first novel is more of a sad story of one man's dissipation with sf trappings.

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