The Inevitable -Daniel Hope


I was half-hooked on this book before I even started. I'm a fan of the speculative and philosophical in the sort of Science Fiction that this book promised to be. However, such raised expectation can so easily be dashed. Like watching a "must see" film, too much expectation can be a terrible spoiler. I wasn't disappointed, not for a moment.
I also enjoy the sort of light prose that this author can produce. Humour is always bubbling away somewhere in the text, sometimes dark, sometimes, dry, or observational, or occasionally just plain funny. The ground covered, though, is serious enough. This book is entertainment with plenty of hard speculative though behind the flowing words. I actually felt at times as though I now knew what it could be like to be the artificial intelligences that are Tuck and David, I even thought I understood what it was like to be the biologically enhanced and yet emotionally autistic personality that is Maze.
The story was very well structured with flashback type memories from Tuck's long-past. We actually get a sense of how this robot became the personality he most certainly is. What is it to be human, and what is it to be a technological construction, which, through experience and self-modification, has become almost human? Above all what is it like for any intelligent creature to contemplate its own mortality?
I won't compare this work with that of other writers, not because this one is uniquely different, it isn't, but simply because it deserves to be judged by its creativity. Nowadays, true originality is hard to achieve in any genre; almost invariably, works can only be original to some small percentage of the individuals they touch. Perhaps I can best describe the read as being fresh, vivid, smart, rather than being full of brand new ideas.
Oh! Just in case I didn't make things clear, "The Inevitable" isn't short on excitement.
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