Emily Eternal

[psocoptera]

I was interested in Emily Eternal for a neat-sounding premise - an AI therapist is trying to figure out what to do about impending human extinction - but it didn't live up to that potential. First of all it was way too heteronormative. I'm not anti-het, I read het romance, many of my favorite fictional couples are het, but, ugh, why does an *AI* need to be heterosexual, and why is this story so bogged down in her crush on this dude. (Something interesting could have been said about why the AI was designed as a young white woman in the first place - perhaps that her creators wanted to give her certain kinds of privilege/authority, and not others - but this book failed to look at that.) I am generally not into Pinocchio stories and just did not care about this AI's feelings about wanting to be human. I wanted "Cat Pictures Please"-style "AI using their AI powers in interesting ways" action, and maybe some extinction pathos. Unfortunately that was not this book, which pulled an unsatisfying solution to the extinction crisis out of nowhere, without plucking the ol' heartstrings at all. (Spoilers: it turns out there's a guy in Canada with the mutant power of Darwin from X-Men First Class where he can adapt to anything, and the AI is able to use, like, Bluetooth to infect everyone on Earth with those genes, so everything else on Earth dies but humans can just go live in space. Sure, why not, I guess.)