A Strange and Brilliant Light by Eli Lee
(Jo Fletcher Books, 2021)
Reviewed by Stuart Carter
For a novel dealing with artificial intelligence, there’s surprisingly little AI in A Strange and Brilliant Light, but Eli Lee has done a remarkable job revealing the human side of AI: examining how its arrival will affect real people with real jobs, families and responsibilities.
A Strange and Brilliant Light takes place in a lovingly realised world that is ours, but not quite. In fact, for an embarrassingly long time I assumed it was set in an unfamiliar corner of our world, but it’s not. Rather, Lee excels at interweaving small details that make it sound real: her casual descriptions of food and drink, for example, give this world a seductive texture that you can believe in.
The protagonists of A Strange and Brilliant Light are three young women, Lal, Rose and Janetta. Lal and Janetta are sisters, and Rose is Lal’s best friend. Lal is struggling up the career ladder, desperately hoping to be noticed by her corporate masters and make it big. She and Rose both work at Slurpees, a coffee shop franchise in a small coastal town. Lal’s dreams seem to be taking flight after she is promoted to store manager, but Rose is struggling to understand what she wants to do and be; and whereas Lal’s plan is to save herself and her family from losing their jobs to the new AI technology, Rose would like to help everyone, if only she knew how…
The Slurpees franchise they both work for is owned by Tekna, a global conglomerate which is betting the farm on AI, and steadily replacing all of its human employees with what it calls “auts”—machines which are increasingly smart and independent but are not yet AI. Not quite yet.
Lal’s sister, Janetta, is a post-grad student studying AI, looking at ways to give it emotions and better understand humans. The irony is that this AI expert herself barely understands the emotions she wants to imbue it with, and when she falls in—and then out of!—love, finds herself lost and completely out of her depth.
After Lal lands her supposed dream job at Tekna and moves away to the capital, Rose and the remaining Slurpees staff are left counting the days until they’re replaced—as Lal’s old job is, by a new aut. The staff are all concerned about their prospects: some are resigned to this new reality, others are angry, but what can any of them do? Many blame the auts, but these proto-AIs are a symptom rather than the cause of their predicament, and so mere humans are left asking, as Lenin did a century earlier: What is to be done?
We see one answer to this question from the corporate bosses we meet. These analogues for our own Zuckerberg and Jobs, are, frankly, horror stories, at best unaware of the effect AI will have on humanity. If A Strange and Brilliant Light has villains, it’s these monsters who give Rose a chilling vision “…of an […] elite in their monied fortresses, owning those auts as slaves; and of people, now pointless excrescences, dying in their millions” (p.270) while “…humans [are] far outnumbered by a mass of humanoid auts, simulacra as luminous and alien and acquiescent as cult members” (also p.270).
Terminator’s Skynet seems almost benign by comparison with these billionaire overlords.
Lee has done an incredible job taking such an oblique new look at one of science fiction’s oldest obsessions, and the story of a struggle to accommodate a future that seems inevitable, but not fully decided. The AI itself, despite being at the heart of A Strange and Brilliant Light, is (almost) entirely absent—everywhere and yet nowhere throughout the book.
Often bleak, A Strange and Brilliant Light is also sad, hopeful, funny, and brilliant, such that I expect to see it on a lot of award lists. This quiet, thoughtful novel, almost entirely led by flawed but amazing women, has a lot to say about the world we’re about to be living in. It will, I hope, inspire many to think long and hard about what we want our future to be like.
Review from BSFA Review 15 - Download your copy here.