Review: Uncanny Valley by C.A. Gray 1/5; don’t bother
As a general rule, whenever I start reading a book I make a point of finishing it, whether I like it or not. This goes doubly for short books, but despite Uncanny Valley weighing in at a bare 235 pages, I tapped out at page 94.
The protagonist, Rebecca Cordeaux, is an immediately likable graduate student in an unspecified mid-future where robots handle every task and no one needs to work. This world is presented as a dystopia on the basis that people throughout the english-speaking global Republic (which also includes Mars and the moon) are simply losing their will to live now that they don’t have to earn the right to survive. Now, the President of the Republic has made all research into artificial creativity open source and challenged the world to develop it as quickly as possible, allowing robots to take over artistic and engineering jobs as well.
Rebecca’s likability takes a sharp nosedive as the story progresses because author C.A. Gray apparently hates her, judging by the fact that she never misses an opportunity to portray her as immature, irrational, and disdainful of other women. As the evidence begins piling up that someone is censoring all dissenting opinions about the challenge from the internet equivalent, she remains starkly apathetic about the entire situation.
More than a quarter of the book is spent focusing on her laughably unrealistic and oversimplified work on her master’s thesis, the interference with that as her boss tries to refocus her on his theory that giving robots creativity will result in the extermination of the human race, the interference with that as she starts to fall in love with him despite not being able to stand him, and the interference with that from the fact that she’s obsessed with the idea that she’ll marry another guy who barely appears in the first half of the book at all and shows little-to-no interest in her. Then finally, on page 62, she makes a realization that pushes her into action. Again, that’s page 62 out of 235.
There is a fair amount of clever foreshadowing, and the plot, when it’s actually happening, is interesting, but the pacing leaves absolutely everything to be desired, ethical infractions are painted as romantic, and ableism abounds, ranging from “But sociopaths don’t have emotion or morality, right? ...[Let’s avoid] a race of superintelligent sociopaths” to “What is he, a high functioning autistic or something? / Something like that. An idiot savant, maybe.”
There are certainly worse books out there, many of which you couldn’t pay me to read. Uncanny Valley by C.A. Gray is not quite as bad as all that. You could pay me to finish reading it, but unless someone does, I won’t.
