T.R. Napper is mad. No, scratch that. Napper is fucking furious and while he isn’t going to go and [REDACTED] some fuckers, he can write some damn good stories. This collection is a novella (The Hidden God), three short stories, and a sharp essay.

The Hidden God primarily follows Izzy, a philosopher who is the moral instructor of the first Artificial General Intelligence, an entity named Huldo which is a qualitative step beyond any primitive little machine learning system. Her chapters are interspersed with vignettes where various scummy billionaires, like an arms dealer, a pseudoscientific lifestyle influencer, fossil fuel barons, a ‘controversial’ public intellectual who used AI to write his speeches and suck up to the ruling class, and so on, are assassinated or otherwise have their lives comprehensively wrecked by the machines they have surrounded themselves with.

Huldo asks Izzy if it is permissible to kill a person to save more lives. She equivocates, knowing that she can’t give this kind of power over to a machine no one understands. Of course, it’s already too late. Huldo has simulated Izzy, predicted what she would say, and has decided that a threshold of “killed 100,000 people, will kill 100,000 more” is sufficient.

The billionaires are delightfully grotesque, their deaths a cathartic purging of people who are ruining our world and getting away with it. My opinion on the respectability politics around speaking ill of the dead is that if you don’t want people to celebrate your death, don’t be a piece of shit when you’re alive. I’d like to believe it’s possible to do something useful enough to earn one billion dollars, but the people on the Forbes list spend a lot of time subverting democracy, environmental protections, and workers’ rights.

To paraphrase the essay that concludes the story, a book is a weapon of the imagination against billionaires who want to strip away our humanity and usher in a 1000 year reich of AI slop.

The three stories are also excellent. As a dog person, “Highway Requiem”, about a long-haul trucker and his elderly dog, was a real heartstring puller. The others find a little more optimism in the rubble. This is simply a fantastic collection by the sharpest working author in cyberpunk.

well researched but rather dense and not the easiest to read. I do have to say I agree with others in regards to tone – Lewis comes across as a bit snarky, if not morally superior at times with a hint of "yeah I know I'm a white woman from a privileged background, but at least I'm aware of it and I'm a much better feminist now". and while, indeed, she isn't one of these "enemy" feminists, Lewis herself still appears to have a lot to learn.

the further an "enemy feminism" gets away from being explicitly being about race, the less it's acknowledged in her analyses such that it's hard to say it's "truly" intersectional. it's all well and good saying that these enemy feminisms stem from upholding white supremacy, but there's never any actual insight into how or why. she also states that "racism is a patriarchal form of feminism" which is simply not true, especially as it fails to consider the role white women have played in upholding white supremacy, and I have issues with the conflating of race with gender. even when talking about TERFism and the brief mention of misogynoir, there's never any dive into how Black women are often excluded from the idea of feminity and womanhood because of their Blackness, and it's disappointing how white this book actually is once you sit down and think about it further.

I mostly read this as an audiobook, occasionally dipping into a physical copy alongside it, and I think this definitely works better as a physical read; the lack of punctuation means it comes across as lacking nuance or contradictory in points, only for me to reread the sections in the book to discover missing quotation marks in points such that it no longer comes across as contradictory. that being said, I did learn a lot and liked how as the book progressed it was easy to see what they all in common in terms of upholding the patriarchy, and reinforcing gender roles etc, but this isn't a book I'm in a hurry to recommend.

(sidenote: there's also an uncritical mention of/reference to a particularly problematic party in the book that is personally very telling to me where Lewis lies in terms of her feminism. I'm not mentioning the party nor diving into the issues here due to my previous interactions with them, but this party is well known for various issues across multiple activist groups across the UK such that many won't work with them. with the levels of research Lewis seems to have done for this book, the mention of this party is very disappointing.)

a very fun take on one of my favorite subgenres (film set horror). Mara's detached, probably unintentional but still intensely relatable autistic coding is one of my favorite protagonist types, and i find the concept of a home renovation/ghost hunting combo show so enticing; i definitely would've liked a bit more history about the show, but given Mara's character, it makes sense she's not overly curious and prying about it. definitely not a writing style with mass appeal but i'm fascinated by Pinsker's approach here. the ending is a little too quick for my liking but that's just a common problem with novellas; still an engaging read, despite its flaws