Review: The Expert System's Brother

The Expert System's Brother by Adrian Tchaikovsky
My rating: 3.5 of 5 stars

3.5 Stars

This is my first foray into Tchaikovsky's work. A friend whose opinion I value and whose taste is similar to mine enthusiastically recommended Tchaikovsky's Chidlren of Time to me the other day, so I jumped at the chance for the ARC of this book, which actually released on Tuesday, as an entry into his writing.

The Expert System's Brother gives us a view into a distant future of a civilization that once had sophisticated technology running everything and serving everyone. Some sort of cultural collapse has occurred resulting in the return to a combined agrarian and hunter-gatherer lifestyle formation of many small enclaves of people living together in villages. Villages are centered around trees and have three central figures in roles of power, an Architect, a Doctor and a Lawgiver. These roles are chosen by wasps, called Electors, who live in a hive community in a large tree that forms the center of the village. Once a person is chosen they become possessed by a ghost with information and decision-making skills that seem to follow a rubric. Cohesiveness in a village is brought mysterious means and when a person displays behaviors that are not useful (violence, for example) to the community they undergo Severance, a process in which they are painted with a substance that sinks into them to the bones and which strips away some sort of protection that allowed them both to be recognized as part of their village's community but also their ability to digest and benefit from food.

Our protagonist, a young man by the name of Handry, became lightly painted with Severance due to an accident at age thirteen. His twin sister Melory protects him within the community until the Electors select her to fill a vacant position in their village. Handry is eventually forced to leave for his, and her, safety. Over the course of the novella, he discovers that the communities that he (and all) humans are living in a kind of construct. Just what kind I'll leave for the reader to find out.

This was an interesting novella. I'm not sure the story fully worked for me, as I feel that the author was trying to put too many elements into the revelations of Handry's world without fully exploring any of them. Focusing more on one or two elements of the world would have worked better for the brief novella format, in my opinion. As it is, I feel like the implications of this type of world and those who lead in it are left unexplored. Exploration of the fallow machine and human dynamic, focused on the ghost in the machine dualism, would have been fascinating enough for me.

The cover art by Raphael Lacoste is stunning.

I'll look forward to reading more of Tchaikovsky's work.




I received a paperback ARC copy of this book.

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