Karen An-hwei Lee

In the near future, when an epidemic of cyberfatigue has triggered a technocracy collapse, an orphaned data cloud narrates the quest of Yang as he visits each of the harbingers of happiness.

The Maze of Transparencies

This was 90 percent linear and prose enough for me to comprehend; the other 10 percent was very "poetic", with a bit of math/formulas/ computer speak thrown in, which is my Achilles heel. I feel like the Al is more of an introductory personality,

setting up the time and place/context of the story,

maybe bookending it. It's really Yang's journey.

I feel I benefitted from previous informal and educational reading because the 'person seeking enlightenment via a journey encountering various people/entities' and 'the philosopher unpacking concepts through dialogues' did not feel like alienating frameworks to encounter in this narrative.

Felt a bit 'old hat' that the end of the modern era in this story was a result of:

Climate crisis, being overly reliant on technology, device addiction, capitalism-financial bubble, minimalism as craze without critical thought/planning, government responsibility turned into faith, tyranny/corruption by power, surveillance, deterioration/manipulation/restriction of language and art forms, control of information, mismanagement. All the present day worries! 

Certainly a larger theme than we currently think of day-to-day but may in the near future was the concept of bots as slaves, who experience genocide(?) As one might expect after a 'data crash', it seems a lot of happenings are up for debate.

Not crazy about the monotheistic/biblical terminology throughout, not my vibe, can be seen to boil down to simple moralizing.

Very evocative language, especially around plants and food. Loved the relationship between humans and computers/robots/artificial intelligence that the book kept hinting at, pre-collapse, but the post-crash remnants told in a flowery way, made it difficult to fully imagine the futuristic world as it was. Still glad I read it.

This was 90 percent linear and prose enough for me to comprehend; the other 10 percent was very "poetic", with a bit of math/formulas/ computer speak thrown in, which is my Achilles heel. I feel like the Al is more of an introductory personality,

setting up the time and place/context of the story,

maybe bookending it. It's really Yang's journey.

I feel I benefitted from previous informal and educational reading because the 'person seeking enlightenment via a journey encountering various people/entities' and 'the philosopher unpacking concepts through dialogues' did not feel like alienating frameworks to encounter in this narrative.

Felt a bit 'old hat' that the end of the modern era in this story was a result of:

Climate crisis, being overly reliant on technology, device addiction, capitalism-financial bubble, minimalism as craze without critical thought/planning, government responsibility turned into faith, tyranny/corruption by power, surveillance, deterioration/manipulation/restriction of language and art forms, control of information, mismanagement. All the present day worries! 

Certainly a larger theme than we currently think of day-to-day but may in the near future was the concept of bots as slaves, who experience genocide(?) As one might expect after a 'data crash', it seems a lot of happenings are up for debate.

Not crazy about the monotheistic/biblical terminology throughout, not my vibe, can be seen to boil down to simple moralizing.

Very evocative language, especially around plants and food. Loved the relationship between humans and computers/robots/artificial intelligence that the book kept hinting at, pre-collapse, but the post-crash remnants told in a flowery way, made it difficult to fully imagine the futuristic world as it was. Still glad I read it.

The Maze of Transparencies

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