Book Review: ‘Some Body Like Me’ by Lucy Lapinska (love and robots in the apocalypse)
I’m a sucker for a story set at the end of the world and so as soon as I saw the synopsis for ‘Some Body Like Me’, I knew I needed to read it. Robots at the end of the world when they’re not the cause of the eradication of humanity? Yes, please.
Lucy Lapinska is a beloved middle grade author, and though I’ve not read from them before, I felt like I would be in safe hands with story and I was, but I was also blown away by the heart, depth and thoughtfulness of this novel.
As the world falls apart around them, piece by piece, Abigail Fuller spends humanity's final days looking after her husband David.
But that's not true, not really. Abigail isn't David's wife. She's not even human. She's a replacement, built in the image of the real Abigail, who died sixteen years ago.
And in three weeks, when the law changes, Abigail will no longer have to do anything David says. She'll be free to go where she likes, do whatever she wants to do. But having never lived for herself, Abigail now faces profound questions about what she is, how she wants to live, and who she wants to love.
Perhaps she should start with herself.
With novels where there is an imminent apocalypse, I’m always obsessed with the causes, the distance from us in the 21st Century, and (rather grimly) what issues we’re facing now that have become catastrophic.
‘Some Body Like You’ sits in an unspecified time in the future in an unspecified but suspected British city (which is actually something that really, really frustrates me as I like to know where and when I am) following the partial eruption of Yellowstone which wiped out a quarter of North America and fast-tracked humanity’s extinction. There’s also the nuclear wars, pollution, the catastrophic climate disasters and climate change, war, and everything that comes along with those things. It’s a grim and galling vision of a very likely future on Earth.
Abigail, our protagonist, is a Personal Companion Computer, a PCC, and in three weeks the Emancipation will come and she will finally be free of the rule and control of humans. Though PCCs have opinions and memories, thoughts and emotions, friendships and found-family connections, they are owned by the humans who purchased them and are restricted by the rules and orders that their owners write into their data.
The treatment of the PCCs in the first part of the novel really made me think about pre-women’s rights society and the growing public and governmental treatment of trans people in the UK at the moment. The act of isolating those acts and placing them in a fictional space really highlights the absurdity of the persecution, as well as the roots in fear-mongering based purely on bigotry and miseducation. I can only hope that someone will read ‘Some Body Like You’ and it will spark a conversation or a thought pattern that leads them to review any anti-trans attitudes they hold. I think I can safely speak for both of us here at BBB when I say that we are firmly on the side of trans folks, and I very much hope that books like this reach the right places to put more people on this side, too.
‘Some Body Like You’ is a beautiful and thoughtful look at what it means to live alongside AI while grappling with what it means to be a person and why it’s worth going all in with love even at the end of the world.
Thank you to Gollancz and NetGalley for the review copy.
Written by Sophie
