I quite enjoyed Artificial Absolutes, the first book from Mary Fan, which used its science fiction premise - a world in where it turns out androids have been planted among humans, sometimes without the androids themselves being aware that they weren't human - to not only tell a solid thriller story, but also to play with ideas of religion, faith, and more. Synthetic Illusions, Fan's follow-up to Absolutes, at first feels like a little bit more of the same. Once again, an android is forced to grapple with questions about his own origins; once again, Fan uses that to start speculating on matters of faith and religion, here questioning what the supreme being might be for an artificial intelligence - would it be a god, or simply a programmer? But once you start digging into Synthetic Illusions, it's clear that Fan is doing something different here, playing with questions of free will and choice. How much of what we do is our own choice? How much are we shaped by the choices and lives of others? And what happens if we have no free will of our own? And if Fan doesn't quite interweave her thematic ideas with her thriller, that's okay, because the thriller is far more engaging and satisfying this time around, sending her characters into a bizarre chase where one of them might be guilty of assassinating major political figures, even though he wasn't even there. For all that, Illusions stumbles a bit at the end with the reveal of its major villain, who's far more one dimensional and less interesting than he needs to be to drive the book's action. Still, it's a solid thriller, and I like how Fan is willing to play with bigger ideas while telling fun stories that work on multiple levels. It's fun science fiction with some thoughtfulness, and I'm all for seeing that in the genre.
- Josh Mauthe
- Josh Mauthe