CRASHLAND

The fallout from Twinmaker (2013) and Clair’s role in the hugely disruptive shutdown of teleportation technology put her in even more danger than before.

The d-mat artificial intelligences that govern and safeguard teleportation are gone; the man who ran (abused) the network has been defeated. Clair’s suicidal attack left her less-than-dead, due to the mysterious AI Q’s decision to break “parity” in order to reproduce her pattern and bring her back (triggering debates over when—if ever—it’s OK to bring back the dead). But Clair isn’t the only one—the dupes (copies of people’s patterns with different minds in them) are increasing in number, and they are after her. Puzzling out who’s controlling them sends Clair into a strange tangle of alliances. There’s her d-mat Abstainer boyfriend, Jesse, establishment peacekeepers and a representative of RADICAL, an organization with a libertarian outlook on technology and a desire to safeguard humanity from nonhuman threats, such as Q. Everyone’s looking for Q (including Clair), to no avail. The large cast spends the first act of the book continually running from threats and making little progress, plotwise, along their convoluted paths. (With all the characters’ mileage, the lack of grounding description leaves readers disoriented.) Once Clair and co. stop running, the plot picks up, leading to some knife-in-the-gut twists and a gasp-inducing ending.

Despite confusing pacing, the implications and moral questions raised by the technology give the story weight.