Speak: A Novel

by Louisa Hall

Paperback, 2016

Status

Available

Publication

Ecco (2016), Edition: Reprint, 336 pages

Description

A young Puritan woman travels to the New World with her unwanted new husband. Alan Turing, the renowned mathematician and code breaker, writes letters to his best friend's mother. A Jewish refugee and professor of computer science struggles to reconnect with his increasingly detached wife. An isolated and traumatized young girl exchanges messages with an intelligent software program. A former Silicon Valley Wunderkind is imprisoned for creating illegal lifelike dolls. Each of these characters is attempting to communicate across gaps -- to estranged spouses, lost friends, future readers, or a computer program that may or may not understand them.

Media reviews

“Crystalline, utterly persuasive and transfixing…the freshness — the brilliance, even — of Speak lies in its positioning of robots not as terrifyingly new, but as the latest in a long line of ‘magic mirrors’ from which we are powerless to look away.”
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“Speak is one of a kind, the type of novel that seemingly comes out of nowhere and hits like a thunderbolt. It’s not just one of the smartest books of the year, it’s one of the most beautiful ones, and it almost seems like an understatement to call it a masterpiece”

User reviews

LibraryThing member Gary10
Provocative exploration of the line ultimately fuzzy line between human and artificial intelligence. Raises fascinating issues including a future world where many of us are totally linked to machines that are more appealing than humans--perhaps a world that is not Sonfar away.
LibraryThing member Gwendydd
This book has several intertwined stories, presented through a variety of formats: the creator of an artificially intelligent babysitting robot writes his memoirs from prison, a computer scientist who created an AI and his estranged wife write letters to each other, an AI and an alienated teenage
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girl chat via text, Alan Turing writes letters to the mother of his deceased lover, and a 17th-century woman traveling across the Atlantic writes a diary. Taken together, these all tell the story of the creation of an artificially intelligent babysitting robot, which was outlawed because the children raised with it became emotionally dependent on it.

This book has a lot going for it, but it falls pretty flat. It's trying to say something about what it means to be human, but it fails for a few reasons. First, if you want to use AI as a foil to humans to explore what it means to be human, the AI has to actually play a role in the story. That barely happens here - the only case where we see interaction between AI and humans are in the chat logs between an AI and a girl who has been crippled by the loss of her AI, but those conversations aren't particularly enlightening.

Second, it doesn't seem that Hall has much of an understanding of what artificial intelligence is or how it functions. One of the storylines revolves around a computer scientist's refusal to give his AI memories. The AI can converse with humans, and pass the Turing test most of the time, but yet cannot remember previous conversations. That makes no sense. AI has to have memory to pass a Turing test and to improve, and conversations with an AI with no memory would get really tedious really fast.

So this ends up being the story of some of the people who were involved in creating a human-like AI, and their motivations for doing so. That's not uninteresting, but again, the lack of understanding of what an AI is or how it interacts with humans prevents this from being at all enlightening. We get basically no information about why children became so dependent on their AIs that they couldn't survive without them.

The best part of the book might have been the 17th-century diarist, but that storyline had very tenuous connections to the rest of the story - it felt like the author really wanted to work that in, and never did come up with a good way to tie it together.

This book had lots of unfulfilled potential. It was a nice premise, but the ideas were never fleshed out to my satisfaction.

I listened to the audiobook - each storyline is read by a different narrator, and they were all very good.
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LibraryThing member ardvisoor
It was a different book, sometimes I liked it sometime not. I'm not usually eager about reading letter like books or even diaries and that's why I didn't totally enjoy this book;however it was a bit different and caught my attention.

In this book there letters from a man to his wife/a man to his
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best friend(crush)' mother/ a man from the criminal facility to his divorced wife,a crippled girl chat with a robot and a diary of a newly wed 16 years old woman. They lived in different period from past to future. I didn't like the parts that was from the man to his wife but other than those I liked the rest more or less.
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LibraryThing member Jaylia3
Based on its description I was excited to read this book, but when I first picked it up the format was so unconventional and nonlinear that I couldn’t get into it and put it down after 2 chapters. After reading Planetfall, which has a more conventional format but has an unusual (I think) blend of
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science fiction and psychological suspense that includes high tech, a cult like religion, an off earth colony on a planet with discarded alien structures, and a main character with anxiety and hoarding issues, I felt ready for reading something out of the ordinary and I absolutely loved this. Titled “Speak” it seemed to me as much about memory and preserving memory. Seashells, pineapples and Fibonacci numbers appear and reappear in the story.

The story is told through written narratives by:

--Mary, a Puritan or Pilgrim girl excited to come to the new world, unwilling to leave her beloved dog behind, and angry that she’s expected to marry a man she doesn’t want. It’s her diary we read and these were some of my favorite chapters. When her dog dies she is desperate not to forget him and troubled that her father says the dog has no soul so won’t be in heaven;

--Alan Turing whose chapters are letters to his best friends parents--a real best friend who did actually die young. He wants to create an AI to preserve his friend;

--Stephen Chinn the imprisoned inventor of babybots, a doll so lifelike and compelling that children who had the toys couldn’t bond with anyone else and became “frozen” or paralyzed and mute when the dolls were taken away. He wrote the Mary3, and update of the Mary program created in the 1960s. Grew up a nerd, but used a Fibonacci number inspired conversation tool to talk with women who would then become obsessively drawn to him.

--the inventor of the the original Mary program in the 1960s, a German refugee from WWII, and then later in the book his ex-wife, who became obsessed with the program and angry with her husband because he refused to give it memory. She also was a German refugee, but unlike her husband she lost her entire family. The program was written to for psychological reasons, it would ask people questions I think and respond based on what they said in ways that were helpful, but the husband’s point was the program didn’t know, understand, or feel anything and he wasn’t going to give it a memory. Wife eventually got some of his graduate students to expand the program and access the internet, that became Mary2 and she kept a relationship with it into old age

--a dying babybot, shipped to a dessert warehouse, piled in with lots of others, and slowly losing power

--a teenage girl who owned that babybot and is now “frozen”, unable to talk or leave her room. But she’s having conversations with Mary3, the program that her babybot had, that are transcribed and used as evidence for both the prosecution and defense of Stephen Chinn, the inventor of the babybots

One of 2 epigraphs that open the book (the other being from Notes From Underground by Dostoevsky) gives the book its title and is I think from Disney because its Snow White and dated 1937:

“Slave in the magic mirror, come from farthest outer space, through wind and darkness I summon thee. Speak!”
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LibraryThing member books_ofa_feather
I believe it is worth noting this book is a definite reread for the future. While the audiobook is one of the best I have ever listened to, I feel I could have better immersed myself in the story and its many characters had I been reading from the page. Multi-tasking works well with audiobooks, but
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sometimes (for me) it doesn't allow for the connection necessary for the full impact of an author's voice. That being said, I couldn't get over the quiet calmness and urgency of the book. It begged to be heard and understood in is many complexities. My mind is not well versed in the realm of heavily driven scientific fiction (or non-fiction) and I could sense my brain stretching to accommodate all the knowledge here. Many thought provoking ideas brought to light and historical elements that urge for further reading and research. The audiobook is excellent because it lends so well to the distinction and personality of the voices Louisa Hall has written here. *Three cheers for multiple narrators and their amazing talents!*

“I fretted so much about my earthly interactions that I had very few interactions to speak of.” ~Louisa Hall
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LibraryThing member AdonisGuilfoyle
I would have to agree with a previous reviewer - although the premise is promising, and the writing is beautifully done, crafting different narrative voices to tell parts of the same story, the novel as a whole is missing some vital connection. The letters from Alan Turing to the mother of his late
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'friend' prompted me to look up and buy his biography, so I can learn about the real man, but that was the height of my interest after the first few chapters.

Karl and Ruth Dettman's duelling diaries, recording the breakdown of their marriage over his creation of an artificial intelligence programme, are just depressing, much like the self-centred musings from a futuristic prison of the man who took that programme and built the first robot companion for children. The impact of their combined heuristic project is examined in the online conversations between Dettman's programme, MARY3, and a young girl suffering a kind of mental breakdown after the 'babybots' are confiscated, and the last journey of the bots into the desert. Thoughtful and well-written - but I couldn't connect with any of the characters and started to lose interest.
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LibraryThing member shelbycassie
I really enjoyed this book. History and science
LibraryThing member quondame
Both humans and computers "speak" to us in this interleaved story which includes people whose speech is inadequate to connect well enough to those for whom they care. And some who find fear of or attraction to artificial speakers. The reaction against AI that is the force encompassing the later 3
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narratives is unexplained in its severity or ubiquity, no part of the USA being in step with any other part. The Alan Turing letters are very poignant, though having a historical figure shuffled among fictitious ones is a bit disorienting. No position on the self awareness of any AI in the story is overtly given beyond the speech of the artificial entities being as coherent as the other voices.
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LibraryThing member Castlelass
This book is a mental puzzle where the reader follows six narratives that gradually form a complete picture. The interwoven stories are set at different times and places. We track Mary Bradford’s journey across the sea in the 1600s. She keeps a diary that is later being analyzed by Ruth Dettmann.
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We follow Alan Turing’s life in the early to mid-1900s, as he develops early computing technology. Ruth’s husband, Karl, creates the first interactive conversational program that enables a computer to mimic basic human sentences. In the 2030s, we read Stephen Chinn’s memoir about the development of a unique algorithm which can simulate sentient behavior. The dolls that use the algorithm are eventually widely marketed, and unexpected consequences ensue. Finally, we have a transcript that documents a young girl’s obsessive attachment to her realistic doll, called a Babybot.

This book has a relatively complex plot and can, at times, be a little difficult to follow. But once all the pieces start coming together, it is easy to appreciate the author’s creativity and expert crafting. It examines the psychological effects of technology and artificial intelligence, including addictive behavior and withdrawal symptoms. Each narrative is related in a different format – diary, letters, memoir, interview, and transcripts. The Dettmanns have escaped from Naziism so there are tie-ins to how eugenics contributed to mass suffering.

This book asks many pertinent questions regarding artificial intelligence, and the effects of technology, and is based on current research as well as observed phenomena. The storylines are intricately connected. They examine memory, identity, and what it means to achieve “being.” It is a touching and engaging speculative novel that spans centuries. It features interesting characters rising to the challenges of their times. I loved it and look forward to reading more from Louisa Hall.
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Awards

Language

Original language

English

Barcode

9159
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