Bringing work home can put stress stress on a marriage, especially when that “work” is a beautiful woman who seems too cozy with the husband. But in Bruce Deitrick Price’s genre-busting tragicomedy book “Frankie”, looks are deceiving.
Raymond Mason, an AI genius and college professor, brings Frankie, his latest, most human-like creation, to dinner. Raymond knows his wife will be impressed.
No way! Julia Mason feels competitive and threatened.
Raymond touches Frankie in a romantic way.
Julia is hostile and drinks too much. She passes out as Professor
Mason runs upstairs to find a gun. An hour later, Julia wakes to find
her husband dead and Frankie gone. Julia, semi-hysterical, races into
the night to find the missing masterpiece.
Simon, a grad school drug dealer, falls in love with Frankie. He
realizes he can build a cult around this spiritually evolved woman.
First, he has to hide her.
For different reasons, many people search frantically for Frankie.
Meanwhile, more unexplained deaths are reported. Panic sweeps New Jersey. Some experts think that humanity is dealing with
an alien invasion.
A pathologist says he has never seen so many beautiful corpses. Cause of death: unknown.
“Elon Musk believes that AI will destroy us.
First there will be lots of misunderstandings, confusion, and paranoia,” Price says. “Frankie is a look into the future of AI. The smarter the robots, the more likely that strange, unanticipated things will happen.”
About the Author
Bruce Deitrick Price is a novelist, poet, artist and education
reformer. He wrote his first article about robots around 1990.
Featured image: Historic “Mona Lisa of the Pacific Islands” photograph Mestiza de Sangley, c. 1875
By author. Reviews I’ve gotten make me think this mystery is one notch too mysterious. So here is the essence of the novel:
Frankie is mild-mannered, even harmless. So the interesting thing is how humans react to her. Some see her as super-capable and thus a threat in the corporate world. Others see her as spiritually evolved, and thus a person that must be taken care of.
I’m interested in the confusion that robots generate, because we don’t know what they’re actually thinking at any second. In this novel, all the characters end up in quests for finding Frankie or understanding Frankie or figuring out what should be done next.
So the irony is that a harmless robot ends up wreaking havoc on a university town, not trying to, not understanding what that even means. I believe this is the kind of tragicomic confusion we will see more often as robots get smarter and smarter.