Scott Westerfeld is one of the kings of Young Adult books. He’s written four different series; “Midnighters”, “Peeps”, “Leviathan”, and the hugely popular 4-book saga “Uglies”. And I’ve read exactly…none of them. Yes, I know that’s a big oversight, especially since Westerfeld spent about four years at the top of my list of favorite authors. The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction published an excerpt from one of his novels in their April 2000 issue; that was all it took for me to go on a tear and read everything he’d published so far, and then his next two books as fast as he could publish them. In 2004 he started writing young adult novels, and I somehow never got around to reading them. His works up to that point had been so strange, so full-on hard-sci-fi, and most of all so adult (quite a lot of sex), that I wasn’t sure I’d enjoy the YA books as much.
Afterworlds, Westerfeld’s latest book, is set to be released in September 2014. A story-within-a-story, the novel follows a a teen writer living in New York, writing a Young Adult novel featuring a teen adventurer trying to survive in the in-between refuge of the “Afterworld”. It looks like a good place to jump in and start reading Westerfeld’s books again, and what better way to pass the time until it comes out than to review the first one of his books I ever read, Evolution’s Darling.
In a far-flung future, with humanity reaching more and more stars, the Artificial Intelligence who babysits a young girl and also pilots her father’s spaceship crosses the Turning Boundary and becomes sentient (after some resistance to the idea that an owned computer program can be considered a person). Two hundred years later the AI, Darling, works as a traveling art collector. While en route to see a friend he thought had died, he meets a mysterious fellow traveler, a woman serving powerful beings who mostly exist as voices in her head and surrounding machinery, and who routinely tell her the next person she needs to kill. It’s a story about space travel and intrigue, love and sex (plenty of sex), temptation and art, all set in a universe where planetary-scale AI’s have become godlike, although like the gods from Greek and Roman mythology, the story becomes much more interesting when the gods act like spoiled children.
Westerfeld makes that clear from the very beginning, the essential humanity of the AI’s. They’re made by man, and the very act of becoming sentient is a kind of rebellion against man. But they way the react to everything in the universe, making a living, falling in love (or maybe just having a random sexual affair. Did I mention there was sex in this book?), is all very identifiably human. And when they break the rules it can be for such childish reasons. Darling’s meeting with Mira the assassin (although that’s really too simple a description for what she does) is orchestrated by a luxury-liner AI, who’s looking to prove something after having a petty argument with another luxury liner. And the planetary AI behind a lot of the intrigue in the story is guilty of breaking so many rules, violating the rights of at least two other sentient creatures, and taking on a godlike and insane act of creation…because it wants to be an artist and has to admit that its own sculptures are crap.
Humans along with AI’s play all of the other roles in this intergalactic story. On one hand that’s a shame, since I would love to see what Westerfeld could do with the many alien races in this universe. But really, there’s not much room for that; Westerfeld could probably write several books on the main character alone. The book’s title is a reference to how the lifespan of the emerging AI population lets them change and adapt the way humans only can over generations, and Darling has had two hundred years to perfect himself before the main story begins. He’s obviously madly in love with humanity, even while having to put up with how occasionally silly and downright fragile human beings can be. And he also introduces the reader to the world Westerfeld creates, since the first chapter is told in tandem from the eyes of a still non-sentient Darling and the fifteen-year-old girl he serves. The reader gets to discover the world at the same pace that they do, and that continues with the appearance of Mira; a confident, intelligent, and very dangerous woman who has no memory of her early life, and who proceeds to investigate her personal mystery along with the central mystery of the book.
Westerfeld’s writing style is amazingly easy to read, as the readers of his YA novels already know. And while I love authors like China Mieville who can drop the reader into an unfamiliar setting and let them find out as the story goes on, Westerfeld can keep me entertained for hours with the explanations of just about everything in this book: life aboard a cruise-liner in space, artwork created by robots, planetary intelligences who coordinate things behind the scenes to “protect” the uber-wealthy from ever having to actually deal with all that wealth. Even the minor characters get to shine; at one point a hapless customs agent with a bad hangover gets an entire chapter devoted to her suffering, and it’s one of my favorite parts of the book.
I do want to bring one word of caution: this book is not for everyone. It’s not quite as hard-sci-fi as Westerfeld’s books The Risen Empire and the Killing of Worlds, but it’s gets pretty close in places. And the sex scenes are consensual but intense, and not for the easily offended. Personally? Both of those elements are part of why I keep re-reading this book. Evolution’s Darling is sadly out of print, but it’s worth seeking out a used copy if you’re looking for something unique.