Jennifer Pelland

I entered the world of Machine with trepidation. I have enjoyed every short story I've ever read by Ms. Pelland, though "enjoy" is a subjective term when it come to one's reaction to a Jennifer Pelland tale. I only hoped it would be as good as the least of her shorter works. This book was better than them all! It was longer, the plot was multi-level, there was more development of the characters, it was an engaging tale of a woman trying to decide who and what she really is. But still, show more through it all, there was the sense of "things are not quite right, but I cannot say why they are so very wrong" and the appearance of the unbidden shudder that marks a reader as having enjoyed a Jennifer Pelland work.

The story is a fairly old one in the SciFi world- if you had an illness that there was no cure for, yet, would you be willing to put your body nice for a while, letting your mind carry on in a robotic body until your body is healed? What if you hate it? What if you like it so much you don't want to go back to the flesh body? And on & on. Ms. Pelland handles it superbly, showing the reader the conflict from a myriad of angles. The main character, Celia, has been placed in an exact copy of her physical body until a cure of her disease can be found. Unfortunately, Celia's wife hates Celia the bio-android, and wants her to go away, saying she will wait by the side of her love until the cure is found and they can be together once again. But, Celia cannot just turn everything off and, actually, doesn't really want to. In the course of trying to decide how she feels about herself, and her life, Celia meets a whole circus of characters that serve to make her look both more and less human at every turn. And then, and then, just when you think Celia's got it all under control, Ms. Pelland pulls all the rugs out from under everybody. And once again, I am left cursing the author far into the dark night as I shift through all the possible ways it could have turned out and wonder why I didn't even think once about the way it *did* end. Thanks, Jennifer, you have done it again.

I do have to add a note that increasingly as the story progressed I was reminded of Brian Evenson's _Last Days_. Both books deal, in their own way, with the eternal question "How far would you go, what would you be willing to do, to achieve complete perfect happiness?". Or, as my evil twin would put it, "Body Mods to get closer to the Gods? Cool idea, but kinda kinky". show less

Good science fiction makes you think. Pulp science fiction entertains you. Great science fiction, on the other hand, makes you think while entertaining you. Such is the case with Machine by Jennifer Pelland.

The concept at the heart of the story is an interesting one, and even though it's been done before, it's never been done quite like this. In the not-too-distant future, science has managed to create entirely human-looking android bodies into which human thoughts and emotions can be show more copied. It's a technology that was designed for the benefit of terminally ill patients with incurable diseases, allowing them a chance to live while they wait for a cure, although it's starting to become something of a cosmetic procedure as well, despite the overwhelming political and religious objections.

The novel follows the story of Celia, a young woman with a rare genetic disease that's a low priority on the medical research front. She wakes up from the copy-over process, acting, feeling, and thinking exactly as she did in her old body. For her, there is no change, and no awareness of being different from what she was before. Unfortunately, her wife doesn't see it the same way, and Celia awakes to find herself divorced . . . alone . . . shunned by the woman she loves, who refused to cheat on the woman she loves with a soul-less copy.

D.B. Story's Fembot Chronicles, which I've reviewed her many times of the past few years, are some of my favourite stories to deal with the concept of mechanical beings and self-awareness. There, the focus on the story was on robots acquiring sentience, and fighting for rights they never had. Here, with Machine, the focus is instead on humans becoming something less-than-human in the transition, and fighting for the right to distinguish themselves from what they have lost.

On the one hand, it's a rather dark and disturbing reality with which we're presented, with Celia and her new found friends illegally modifying themselves to look less than human since society's rejection has made them feel less than human. It begins with Celia slicing open her finger to see the ceramic 'bone' beneath, and quickly progresses from there. Polished chrome skin, featureless mannequin-like bodies, and glowing eyes are the physical aspect, with the ability to suppress emotions, voluntarily go into lockdown, and play with the sensitivity of their pain/pleasure receptors is another. Like I said, it's almost heartbreaking to see the lengths to which they feel forced to modify themselves, even as we share in the exhilaration of freedoms and feelings otherwise impossible for the rest of humanity. The voluntary fetishization of their condition is oddly confusing, coming across as erotic and exciting when they fetishize one another, but disgusting and inexcusable when they play to human kinks.

As part of her exploration of what it means to be human, Jennifer does an amazing job of dealing with questions of sexuality and gender. Celia, as I mentioned previously, is a lesbian, although it's entirely inconsequential in the future presented. Other than one instance where another character reminds her that her marriage would once have been as controversial as her new body, her sexuality is a complete non-issue. Similarly, we get to explore some interesting ideas of gender through Celia's augmented friends, including one who can alter his gender at will to be male, female, or a combination of the two, and another who is entirely featureless and androgynous since, as it points out, robots do not have a gender.

If I were to voice one complaint, it would be over the ambiguity of the ending, but I realised that was intentional. Celia's fate is what we make of it, and that brings us right back to the concept of making you think while entertaining you. I realise I haven't done the story justice, but hopefully I've highlighted enough of the elements handled so masterfully by Celia that you'll want to give it a read. show less

I didn't actually mean to read this book last night. There were a few other books before it in my queue, but I clicked on it accidentally and thought, what the heck, I'll read a few pages before bed. I didn't put it down again until I was finished, ignoring all basic human necessities such as sleep, water and bathroom breaks in my urgency to reach the end.

I'm fascinated by the deep and thorough examination of body and self, and I'm particularly enamoured of the unreliable narrator, used so show more brilliantly and insidiously here. Which isn't to say that it's a flawless book--there are a few narrative choices, particularly in the beginning, that struck me as a little clumsy--but any book that can do that to me is a book that I would recommend to anyone. show less

Jennifer Pelland's short story collection has been number one on my wishlist for some time now, so of course I started reading it as soon as I picked it up at last weekends readercon. I was not disappointed either. Jenn deserves the rave reviews I first read on Amazon. Her stories cover a broad range of topics as varied as speculative fiction itself, ranging from dystopian societies to environmental issues to flat out abuse. The ability to write across such a wide range while keeping one's show more voice as a writer intact is the mark of a natural talent. And I admire her unflinching willingness to write about things that disturb her. Often these are the subjects others aren't willing to discuss, and beyond the tragedy or horror of the individual story is a warning or a philosophical musing. I cringed, I laughed, and at one point I had to take a deep breath and put the book down, I was so engrossed. Jenn is a voice for those of us who like our speculative fiction broiling over with grit and dark things that go bump in the night. show less