Donald Maass Literary Agency

The Times: Nikolai South is a policeman working for StaSec, the state security organ of the Caspian Republic. Covering roughly the territory of present-day Azerbaijan, the republic is a last, lonely redoubt of undigitised humanity, but it’s hardly the beacon of freedom its founders intended. The novel opens with South’s inspection of two suicides. The young, especially, are killing themselves in an effort to transfer their consciousnesses out of the half-starved, authoritarian republic and into the digital Ah! Sea (a too-good-to-be-true emerald cyber-ocean dotted with floating castles).

South is tasked with minding a visitor from beyond the republic’s borders — a world transformed by artificial intelligence, where more than half of humanity lives in cyberspace. His visitor, an AI in a cloned body, is not even strictly human. And, as if South’s chalice were not poisoned enough already, the visitor is the spitting image of his wife, dead these 20 years.

One misstep will kill him, as South tries to protect and understand his charge, ducking and diving all the while through internal struggles within StaSec and its longstanding rivalry with ParSec, the security organ of the totalitarian New Humanist Party.

Neil Sharpson’s debut is adapted from his stage play, The Caspian Sea. It mixes Cold War nostalgia with smart thinking about artificial intelligence and spiritual identity. There’s many a wry nod to the writings of Christian anarchist Jacques Ellul, but while the homework’s impressive, what really matters is South’s lugubrious, Smileyesque odyssey through present bread queues and past disappointments.

Booklist: Sharpson’s debut novel takes place in the 2200s in the Caspian Republic, a totalitarian state that is in theory a safe haven from “the Machine,” inhabitants’ term for the rest of the world and its utopian society administered by and populated with sentient AI. The narrative follows Nikolai South, an operative for StaSec, one of the two security forces in charge of maintaining the status quo in the Republic. When a prominent, rabidly anti-Machine journalist dies and is revealed to have been an AI living in a clone body, South is assigned to look after the AI widow of the deceased as she comes to view her husband’s remains. He is thrown into a whirlpool of intrigue as various factions conspire to use the widow’s visit for their own ends, and is simultaneously dragged back into his own muddled past by the widow’s resemblance to his own dead wife. Well-written and suitably grim, this picture of one dystopian holdout in a utopian world should please many sf readers interested in visions of a post-AI future.

Booklist: Burke’s third novel after her Semiosis Duology (Semiosis, 2018 and Interference, 2019) is a fast-paced hard-sf thriller set in a near future where power is tilted in favor of large corporations and a fascist government foments intolerance and bigotry among its sheep-like followers. In Wisconsin, three women who are seemingly unrelated are embroiled in a mutiny against a bigoted president who wants to restrict the rights of clones and other genetically enhanced persons under the guise of patriotism. Avril, Berenike, and Irene are living perfectly normal lives until revelations of their origins thrust them into action to protect themselves and fight for their freedom. Amid the chaos of rebellion, a mysterious virus previously thought to be a common cold turns deadly and increases panic and paranoia across the nation. Told through alternating points of view by the three women and a mysterious scientist called Peng, Burke imparts detailed discussions on genetics within a dramatic and thought-provoking story of inequality, humanity and family. For fans of the Orphan Black television series or Chuck Wendig’s Wanderers (2019).