Review: Of Monsters and Mainframes, by Barbara Truelove
by
Stuart Holland
I didn’t know what to expect from this book because I hadn’t heard anything about it before I started it (except that it was on libro.fm’s recent best seller list). I have been pleasantly surprised, this book was extremely entertaining. I’ve noticed a pattern of genre blending in books for the past few years that has taken on a series of combinations that would have been “silly” previously, but they’re tackled, if not seriously, but unreservedly. Of Monsters and Mainframes is like that: What if a vampire or an ancient Lovecraftian horror met a futuristic ship’s AI?
The way that Demeter (the ship’s AI) is portrayed is both endearing and alien. The way she doesn’t understand images but can piece them together more slowly, compared to Steward who sees visual data like humans do, creates a really interesting tension between Demeter’s burgeoning understanding that she needs to act outside her existing parameters and the fundamental nature of how those parameters define her existence. She’s believably a computer program but also believably a character, it’s a fine line to thread.
The book switches between several perspectives over the course of the story, and again, the structure of this surprised me. I was expecting a more linear narrative, but the interstellar voyage structure, the resets, they let the reader jump ahead and wonder how the two AIs are going to catch up (and whether they can). The audiobook also swaps narrator for the different perspectives, all of whom do a fantastic job. Particularly when you hear one of the other point-of-view characters talk during a sequence not narrated by them, the narrator changes inflection in a way that approximates the third party narrator. It creates an interesting recognizability effect.
The book does a great job of leaning into the absurd () without compromising the emotional weight of the story. And it has emotional weight - Demeter’s struggles against her limitations are heartbreaking, and her mode of discussion with the human characters she interacts with are both funny and sad, because you, the reader, can see her inner narrative that those humans can’t.
Overall Of Monsters and Mainframes was a lot of fun, and I’d easily recommend it to anyone who enjoys fiction.
