Review: In the Lives of Puppets
How to Love Our New Robot Overlords
In the Lives of Puppets by T J Klune
Robots are the new Covid
We had the pandemic. Nobody saw that coming and our lives were thrown into turmoil — or termination — for three years.
Now we have AI, spreading like a new virus through the human world.
“There’s no threat,” we are told. “Look, the people in the robot pictures have three arms and two fingers. Look, the robot text is banal and full of errors. Robots have no souls.”
Maybe, but those who are wizards at prompt engineering achieve far better results. Every time I turn around to check what’s coming up behind me, the quality is better, more and more people are fooled, and the overlap between the best robot creations and the worst of humans is growing bigger every day.
Menu
- Robots are the new Covid
- Where will it end?
- Rambo and Nurse Ratched are a Boy’s Best Friends
- Look what I found in the junk pile! Can I keep it?
- More than just a story. It’s deep.
- The novel
- My verdict
Where will it end?
Personally, I give us about a year. Tops.
Like the pandemic, the robots are turning from something amusing a long way away to an unstoppable force creating chaos and destruction all around.
Luckily we have T J Klune as our guide to the robocalypse.
He wrote the fabulous House in the Cerulean Sea — one of the vanishingly rare new books nowadays that I have read twice — and his new book maintains the storytelling magic.
Rambo and Nurse Ratched are a Boy’s Best Friends
Two of the most enchanting robots you’ll meet. Honestly, the wise-cracking between the cynical and deadly Nurse Ratched medibot and the brave but scatter-brained Rambo robovacuum is reason enough to buy the book.
Rambo worried about most things, such as the dirt on the floor, the dirt on Vic’s hands, and death in all manner of ways.
Nurse Ratched, Vic’s first robot, had asked if she could kill the vacuum.
Vic said she could not.
Nurse Ratched asked why.
Vic said it was because they didn’t kill their new friends.
“I would,” Nurse Ratched had said in that flat voice of hers. “I would kill him quite easily. Euthanasia does not have to be painful. But it can, if you want it to be.” She rode on her continuous track toward the vacuum, drill extended.
These pair are the companions for Victor, a boy growing up in a forest wonderland under the guidance of Gio, a silver-bearded gentleman inventor who just happens to be a robot with a past that we shouldn’t look into too closely.
There are treehouses to live in, workshops to tinker in, an endless forest to hunt in, and the Scrap Heaps to mine for treasures.
It’s fun and delightful with amusing companions until one day…
Look what I found in the junk pile! Can I keep it?
Victor finds something in the scrap heap on one of his expeditions, brings it home and everything changes. The adventures begin and you’ll never guess where they end up.
The past — and the future — come rolling in. I’ll let the reader discover what happens for themselves but I can tell you that Travis John Klune tells a great story full of colourful characters in exotic settings. You won’t be bored.
Klune has become a “must-read” author for me. I see his name pop up on the “New Releases” shelve and I can’t stop myself from picking up the shiny new title to see what fresh magic has appeared.
His stories are quirky, interesting, enchanting, and satisfying. The man knows how to hold his audience and keep them coming back for more, and this member of the audience is happy to do just that.
More than just a story. It’s deep.
House in the Cerulean Sea was — on the surface — a tale about magical children. As the story developed themes of tolerance, respect, friendship, and love unfolded and the cutesy fairytale turned into something more interesting and valuable.
Puppets is more of the same. This is a novel worth reading for the entertainment and again for the deep thinking. It all hangs together in a way that is more than just a story; it is a commentary on our own world and an invitation to look at the everyday with fresh eyes.
Just where are all these wonderful robot systems leading us? Is it safe? Should we be worried? Maybe we should be thinking about what’s happening beyond the pretty pictures and the convenience of “Hey Siri!” to deliver helpful information.
Like the mad and murderous HAL 9000 in Kubrick’s groundbreaking 2001:a space odyssey, Klune’s robots aren’t necessarily benign mechanical helpmeets. They have their own tortured souls. We need to understand what really makes them tick before we trust them too much.
The novel
As a story, it takes we readers on a good old rollercoaster, there-and-back-again, Hero’s Journey adventure.
The Audible version with the voice of Daniel Henning receives high scores on the Goodreads site. I have a copy but I’m saving that for my next long trip when I can fill in fifteen hours and change.
The novel is satisfying enough but there are a few details that grated with me. Human blood seems to have magical powers. Robots stop dead in their tracks when a single drop is spilt. The Nurse Ratched robot hunts down a squirrel and returns covered in gore but if Victor has even the tiniest cut as he rambles through the trees, sirens go off and things get desperate.
There’s a deus ex machina moment near the end of the book that I thought was a bit of a liberty on the part of the author.
The robots haven’t achieved the sort of super-efficient eco-paradise that humans were supposedly ruining. If anything the robot world crackles with surplus energy and the flying battleship demolishes forests with ease. Just where is all this electricity coming from and how does everything mechanical get lubricated? There must be massive arrays of power stations and oil wells just offscreen.
Don’t look too closely under the hood. Suspend disbelief. Klune isn’t designing an economy so much as looking at what makes robots tick and how we and they might get along. Or not.
My verdict
If you haven’t worked it out, I enjoyed In the Lives of Puppets immensely. A rattling good yarn, full of adventure and excitement, moments of tension interspersed with comic robot banter and a developing love story.
There are callouts to older tales. The treehouses of Swiss Family Robinson. The story of Pinocchio the puppet boy and Geppetto who made him. The Wizard of Oz. I don’t know where the Blue Fairy and the Coachman come from.
It is a book I intend to read again. Maybe I’ll find more in the discussion of blood and souls and dreams than was apparent the first time around. I’ll certainly enjoy the chat between the diverse robot characters.
And I can think more about where we are going in our bold new AI world.
The bold new links above are affiliates. I get a dollar or two from Amazon if you buy from them. Or just go to your local independent bookseller, no strings attached, pick up the physical book, look inside. Hey, reserve a copy at your council library and read it for free!
Britni
If you enjoyed this post, please consider subscribing. You’ll get access to all of my content (including member-only stories) plus every other article on Medium from thousands of creators.
