The Holy Machine   by Chris Beckett

Mash of stories and their respective tropes: ‘Frankenstein’ in ‘1984’, ‘Loganʼs Run’, and ‘Neuromancer’.

A decrepit woman spends all her time hooked up to cyberspace. But the interface takes its toll on limbs and senses, and when she gets abandoned there she consequently loses all her limbs and eyesight, so they wire her permanently into the system. She gets to experience the real world through a ‘vehicle’. She eventually gets bored of cyberspace, uses the vehicle to take her own real body and bury it, witnesses her own death.

It is a 1984-like society, perfect but over-regulated. The above womanʼs live-in son, unsocial, loser, virgin, falls for a (robot) prostitute, escapes from the sterile over-ruled city-state for the outside: religiously divided and often violent enclaves. The robot first tears its own skin off, then the man betrays it completely and it is destroyed by fire by the feral natives. The man lives a Frankenstein existence jumping around the South Europe sub-continent (Greece and its environs; presumably the author recently had a holiday there) looking for solace and something to do with himself. Then he hears of a holy machine, and seeks his salvation for the death of the robot. But it turns out to be that very same robot that didnʼt actually die!

So it is a well-woven tale (like something written by Scrivener or its ilk), and is composed of page-length chapters, which I hate because it becomes very tedious. The prose is clipped, though precise and flowing, but everything feels clichéd in the extreme. It is especially notable that, though the work feels far-future (200-500 years?), the technology mostly feels crude (robots communicate through ultrasound, for example).

But the ending is very satisfying, and closes the book down very well.