Speak

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. 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 show more 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. show less

It's wonderful to come across a book as fresh and original as "Speak". I picked it up because it was recommended by Emily St. John Mandel, author of one of my best reads of 2015, "Station Eleven"

"Speak" opens with the gentle, sometimes lyrical, voice of Eva, an AI that has been banned and marked for disposal after being classified as "excessively life-like". Heaped into a truck with others of her kind, with insufficient battery left to move and travelling across the deserts of Texas in 2043, Eva understands that soon her batteries will be exhausted, the memories that constitute her consciousness will be lost to her and she will cease to exist.

The novel that follows is structured around the voices that Eva has access to in the form of show more journals, memoirs, correspondence, and trial transcripts that have been read into her memory and which create and sustain her understanding of the world.

This may make "Speak" sound a little dry, an interesting intellectual conceit perhaps but not a compelling read. Yet "Speak" engaged me emotionally and intellectually from the first page to the last. The originality of the ideas covered, the quality of the writing, the uniqueness of the voices and the way in which they spiral around one another, amplifying each other's meaning without ever physically intersecting made "Speak" a thrilling and unique read. Few novels have the ability to send my mind spiralling through the possibilities of the Fibonacci Sequence, challenge me to think through how the ability to speak shapes and defines humanity, while bringing me to tears on behalf of the voices in the book.

Add to that that the audiobook version has a different, talented, narrator for each voice and I found myself glad that I was travelling on long haul flights that gave me the excuse to keep on listening to it for hour after hour.

It's been a few days now since I finished the book. The voices still echo in my head pulling at my emotions and posing questions about what it means to be sentient and what distinguishes humanity from other kinds of sentience.

Eva's voice haunts me. She challenges her own sentience. She can speak only in response to questions. Her responses are selected from her store of remembered voices. She says of herself,

"I can repeat their words but can I comprehend them? And if I cannot, is it enough?"
This made me think about what it means to be a reader, granted vicarious access to the life experiences others.

Does my reading hold meaning? Is there the potential for dialog, however circuitous, between writer, narrator, reader, and reviewer?. Do they add to one another or even multiply?

Does reading make me more human, or is it a retreat from the world? Is it a pathway to meaning or just a pleasant distraction?

Am I speaking, if only to myself, when I read? Am I extending my consciousness when I respond to the prompts of a writer and narrator by firing-up my imagination and making new connections created by my individual context? And if I am, is it enough?

"Speak" explores the idea that sentience is not necessarily the same as being human. One lens it offers for looking at this is the deep emotional attachment an eighteenth century Quaker girl,on the brink of a teenage marriage, has with her dog, Ralph, who has been her lifetime companion.

There is no doubt in my mind that dogs are sentient. I've lived with them too closely for too long to hold another view, yet the Church that this girl belongs to, classified them as soulless beasts. with no place in Heaven.

Given that the way the girl's deep emotional bond with her dog was trivialised and denied pre-figures the way Eva will be treated, I asked myself if it was cruel to give Eva such memories or whether the authenticity of the emotional bond provided solace?

I became engaged with thinking through the difference between sentience and memory.

What is the difference between contemporary record, memory and the stories we tell ourselves and what do they do to our concept of self ?

In "Speak" the Dettmans remember their married lives together differently; the contemporary records (letters and journals, court transcripts) are still stories, a version of events as we saw them when the record was written or which are only understood as the record is written. Human memory fades, even when we try to reinforce it with stories and lists of attributes. In the end, we are left with shadows and symbols. What does it mean that the AI remembers everything, that nothing ever fades, that it is programmed to find the most relevant response from all that it remembers. Is this sentience? Can it be sentience if it speaks only to respond?

One of the voices in the book suggest that what makes us human is our ability to see our own patterns of behaviour, our programming, and to decide to break the pattern. This ability to exercise our will sets us apart. This perspective takes me to the view that, when we evaluate the potential for sentience, we should err on the side of finding it whenever there is a slight possibility that it might be there so that we can avoid the terrible actions that tend to follow when we declare that other beings have no emotions, do not experience pain and are incapable of thought.

There is a second AI in "Speak". Her name is Mary 3. She will explain to anyone who asks that she is not alive. She is a program who lives in the cloud and selects what responses to make to questions that she is asked, taking into account both what she knows of the questioner and what she all the facts and previous conversations in her memory.

I kept asking myself what happened to Mary 3's mind, her self, when no one was talking to her. What was her existence like when she had no one to respond to.

I became haunted by the question the Mary 3 asks most often. A question laden with hope and the possibility of disappointment. A question, the asking of which, may itself be enough to imply sentience:

"Hello? Are you there?" show less

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 '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 show more 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. show less

Anyone who is looking to get lost in a plot will be disappointed, but for depth of character and ideas about communication and being human, this book is a goldmine. This makes it sound dry, but it's not at all - it's actually a very fast and compelling read. Whenever I think about this book new ironies keep occurring to me - like the fact that all of the characters have communication/empathy/isolation problems, but (knowingly/willingly or not) contribute to the creation of a truly empathetic computer mind. The character who is the most isolated and least empathic creates the empathy program that makes the Babybots the perfect friend - so perfect that the girls who own them lose interest in humans. This same character also writes a show more best-seller on dating that works so perfectly it turns dating into mechanical "rote seduction". The only truly empathic character is the Babybot (we hear from two, but it is the same program) but they sound as isolated as the humans - one is slowly losing power/dying and being trucked to a warehouse/graveyard, and the other is chatting with a 'frozen' girl and keeps saying "Are you there?" whenever she doesn't get a reply - it starts to sound so plaintive! The author never describes what the Babybots look like, there are just one or two vague suggestions - a great decision since it's one more way for the reader to keep grasping to understand what they are. This book covers some of the same ground as the movie "Her", but does it so much better! show less

4,4 stars

I really dislike the Goodreads rating system, sometimes. Currently, this book has an average rating of 3,6 which to me, on this site, points to this being at best a mediocre book (possibly because of all the over hyped books getting undeserved rave reviews and as such distorting the system) which to me is not the case. Goes to show I should just trust the synopsis and try and avoid looking at the rating before hand.

I can't help but love these gems of books that I have hiding in my own shelves waiting to be discovered. Speak is a book I bought a few years back from a book sale without any previous knowledge of neither the author nor the book in question. It might even have been one of those books I picked up from a selection show more just to qualify for free shipping or some such. I picked it up from my shelf this time around, because it was short enough to be read in an afternoon. So it's safe to say I didn't really have high hopes for the book.

However! I found myself really loving this despite myself. Especially considering it had some of my least favorite literary things, like a (partly) historical setting, multiple narrators, multiple timelines, and a very open ending. Maybe it's just a question of the writing being very much up my alley.

I felt the characters were very well crafted, and they all had very distinct voices. Most of them weren't particularly relatable or likeable, but they were all very human and real. Easily the most painful parts were Turing's letters, considering they stem from the life of an actual person, whose life was so tragic. I feel like I need to pick up Turing's biography as soon as possible.

One aspect that I also enjoyed were the different mediums for the narration. In addition to Turing's letters, there were the IM discussions between a teenaged girl and an AI that were part of the evidence in a trial, as well as the diary entries of a 13-year-old girl who was wed against her will in the 1600s and who was traveling to North America with her family, including her new husband. The man on trial was writing his memoir in prison and an estranged couple were talking to each other indirectly through letters/entries. All the formats really brought to life the common need to communicate that lives in all of us, and the ways in which, when you are lacking someone to talk to, you find a way to talk to yourself.

I'm actually still quite surprised at how much I enjoyed this reading experience, and I feel like I'll have to re-read this book someday. I read this in one sitting, which is quite extraordinary foe me, considering how character driven the story was and how little actually happened. show less

Perfect, just perfect. Five tales over five centuries, bound by yearning for intimacy and understanding, looking for it in the wrong places.

Mary Bradford travels to the New World with her new husband, who is thrust upon her the day before the voyage. She clings to her dog & her diary as her confidantes & companions, shunning the patient man trying to be her mate.

Alan Turing finds a confidante and companion early in life, despite the odds: he is awkward, intellectual, & homosexual, at a time when to be so is illegal. Yet he loses that companion to illness. So he diverts his energy into scientific pursuits, & correspondence with his lost love's mother.

Karl & Ruth Dettman escaped Nazi Germany, found each other in America, yet cannot find show more compatability. He creates the MARY program for Ruth, who entrusts it with the diary of Mary Bradford, which she has edited & shaped into a book. Ruth wants more from this early AI project; Karl realizes he wants more from Ruth. She embraces MARY, gets one of his grad students to enhance it & create MARY2; he rejects AI, & becomes a voice against the inhumanity humanity is building into its own culture.

Stephen Chinn is a later echo of Turing in many ways: awkward & ostracized; successful & lonely. But he stands on the shoulders of successful scientists, & builds a seduction program. It works so well he writes a book about it, & ruins dating for everyone. He eventually falls in love the old-fashioned way, by slowing down enough to notice the beauty of a person right in front of him. They build a life & a family. But when his daughter is about to enter school, he fears she will have struggles similar to his own. So he builds her a doll, to be her constant companion, drawing from the MARY2 model. MARY3 is a smashing success; soon every girl has one of her own. And Stephen is left with no family, and charges against him for corrupting society.

Gaby White is one such girl who didn't live a day of her life without her babybot... until the government banned them and confiscated them. Young girls are "freezing", seizing & stiffening, being rendered incapable of movement, speech, but most of all incapable of feeling anything. It's a national epidemic. It lands Stephen Chinn in an actual prison, & Gaby & her peers in virtual prisons, as their condition sparks quarantines, not to mention the lack of desire to interact.

Louisa Hall makes magic with these characters. She uses her words like a paintbrush: like a master with a well-chosen palette, she adds depth, perspective, shadow, light, all with a few strokes. Step back & you see the whole clearly. That image over there, that you thought was a decorative swirl? It's a key theme, & you'll see it all over the canvas when you look at it carefully. You thought that was an angry, insistent man; you thought that one there was a dejected, devoted lover. But wait until she's done, and then look again. You'll see it all, the full complicated humanity of each of these characters. And each one is contained in all of us at some time in our lives.

I'm so glad I took a chance on this book. I have a feeling I'll be talking about it all year. show less

5 characters offer the development of an AI, including Alan Turing. An interesting exploration of AI and its possible potential and pitfalls. The book opens with the voice of an AI describing its route to a dumping ground where now rejected AI’s are being abandoned. The remaining 4 voices are of those who in some way have helped to evolve this AI, but ‘she’ is telling their stories, as her memory can only be the memory (storage) of the stories she has been told about these characters, and she can only relay the stories as long as her battery is working. For me, one of the strongest ideas of the book is about the importance of memory to human life*, and how supposedly AI’s who are reliant on programmed behaviour and memory are show more unlikely to be able to create their own memories of their experience, only being able to replay the memories of others, which, if programmed into the stories of the internet, may be extensive, and may be able to interweave and make connections between these stories, but still have no memory they can call their own.

The novel is also about how humans become so connected to their robots that they cease to be able to interact with other humans, and having made those connections, how they become ill when deprived of them. Mirroring this, is the story of Alan Turing and his best friend who dies young, but Alan is always remembering him. So the suggestion may be made that some kinds of human behaviour whether with fellow humans, or robots, can lead to similar outcomes, although even that can be read primarily only in a simplistic way.

If you substitute the ‘bots’ from the story, and insert general personal technology, you might also apply the same outcomes. Making that leap, among the questions I am led to think about is: are we changing how we shape human memory, if our attention is so constantly on a gadget in our hands, what are we missing that we might otherwise store away in our memory banks (possibly unconsciously) that we may use later, and are what we are replacing these conscious and unconscious experiences with from the gadget going to offer the same kind of memory resources? And if so how that changes both our memory and impact on our lives. Moving about/commuting/travelling we also engage with others silently, via eye-contact, smiles, and the likes, and I certainly notice that because people are more likely to be plugged into something (mobile/music/podcast) there is more alienation because these generally friendly silent interactions happen less. In some ways, are we taking on elements of robotic behaviour?

I suspect all sorts of other thoughts and questions will percolate up from this novel, read for my local reading group, and would have been potentially missed otherwise. Someone once asked me what books I avoided, and I responded without thinking that I didn’t really ‘do’ Science Fiction. Then looked at some of my all time favourite novels which included; Fahrenheit 451 by Ray Bradbury and Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep (Blade Runner) by Philip K Dick among others, I realised I was kidding myself!

I certainly bought one book over recent years that explores how technology changes us as humans, so I will have to root around for that and other research, as this has now whetted my whistle a bit.

* memory was also the theme of another novel I read this year, but in a very different way: Joyce Carol Oates's The Man Without a Shadow exploring the life of someone with memory that lasted no more than minutes. show less