Fictional Alignment

Mike French

Average Rating 8/10 (1 Review)

Our culture is generated by machines.

It’s ten years after Android Writer PD121928 from An Android Awakes was fed into a sink grinder by its replacement PD121929.

The human prostitute Sapphira, believing PD121929 to be PD121928 for all that time has tried and failed to save PD121929 from being destroyed for selling fewer than a hundred copies of its novel. Sapphira herself has written the bestselling novel Humans (An Arrangement of Minor Defects) based on the stories PD121928 told her on the night they first met.

It has been marketed by Altostratus as the first work of fiction by a human for over a hundred years. Unhappy, a handful of zealot androids massacre the senate and a new regime is formed fuelled with a passion to eradicate the evil of fiction from android society.

This message has been approved by The Bureau for Fictional Alignment.

Review by Nigel (010320) Rating (8/10)

Review by Nigel
Book Source: Publisher
Rating 8/10
Fictional Alignment is the sequel to An Android Awakes in which Sapphira, the last remaining human and the author of the novel Humans, travels back in time with the androids Heisenberg and Tractatus, their mission to render fiction to fact. So ensues a series of ever more insane situations as the protagonists enact the stories written by Android Writer PD121928 turning them into historical events.

I was somewhat uncertain about this book, much as Heisenberg. The biggest problem I had with the story is its sheer genius; it is almost too clever. To say it is a sequel is to do the word sequel an injustice, it is more like part two of a single book. I don’t think anyone could pick this up as a standalone and have a clue on what is going on; I’ve read An Android Awakes, albeit some time ago, but still missed a lot of the connections. I think to enjoy the full brilliance of Mike French’s writing it would be best to read them one after the other. A lot of other reviewers have used the adjective surreal to describe this story, to this I would have to add the adverb very, maybe twice… very very surreal.

Once again we have a marmite book; I can see a lot of SF fans loving the intricacies of the plot and the depth of the writing while equally others are going to be baffled and think it too pretentious – you pays your money and takes your choice. I personally found it very entertaining. The author is either mad or a genius, or maybe both, I’m not certain.
Nigel (1st March 2020)