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The Holy Machine (Cosmos) (Mass Market Paperback)

by Chris Beckett (Author)
4.8 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (4 customer reviews)
RRP: £5.99
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Product details

  • Mass Market Paperback: 288 pages
  • Publisher: Dorchester Publishing; Original edition (1 April 2009)
  • Language English
  • ISBN-10: 0843962046
  • ISBN-13: 978-0843962048
  • Product Dimensions: 16.5 x 10.4 x 1.8 cm
  • Average Customer Review: 4.8 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (4 customer reviews)
  • Amazon.co.uk Sales Rank: 137,548 in Books (See Bestsellers in Books)

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Product Description

From the Back Cover

Illyria is a scientific utopia, an enclave of logic and reason founded off the Greek coast in the mid-twenty first century as a refuge from the Reaction, a wave of religious fundamentalism sweeping the planet. Yet to George Simling, first generation son of a former geneticist who was left emotionally and psychically crippled by the persecution she encountered in her native Chicago, science-dominated Illyria is becoming as closed-minded and stifling as the religion-dominated world outside ...

The Holy Machine is Chris Beckett's first novel. As well as being a story about love, adventure and a young man learning to mature and face the world, it deals with a question that is all too easily forgotten or glibly answered in science fiction: what happens to the soul, to beauty, to morality, in the absence of God? --This text refers to the Paperback edition.

About the Author

Chris Beckett is a former social worker and now university lecturer who lives in Cambridge. He is the author of twelve stories for Interzone: three of them, "La Macchina" (issue 46), "The Welfare Man" (issue 74) and "Valour" (issue 141 ) were taken for anthologies. "La Macchina" appeared in Gardner Dozois's The Year's Best SF and in another US anthology, Gendanken Fictions. "The Welfare Man" appeared in The Best of Interzone; "Valour" and "The Marriage of Sky and Sea" were both taken for Year's Best Science Fiction 5 (Harper Eos); and "The Warrior Half-and-Half" features in the Big Engine Interzone collection The Ant-Men of Tibet & Other Stories.
--This text refers to the Paperback edition.
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Customer Reviews

4 Reviews
5 star:
 (3)
4 star:
 (1)
3 star:    (0)
2 star:    (0)
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Average Customer Review
4.8 out of 5 stars (4 customer reviews)
 
 
 
 
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Most Helpful Customer Reviews

 
5 of 5 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars A bitter-sweet gem of a book. , 3 Aug 2006
By C. Gavaghan "CJG" (Scotland, United Kingdom) - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)   
This review is from: The Holy Machine (Paperback)
Chris Beckett is better known for his short fiction output, but this, his first novel, shows that he is capable of developing his themes and his characters into longer and richer tales. His treatment of that SF staple `machine consciousness' is more sensitive and believable than most. While a lot of modern science fiction seems to leap from nothing to Skynet (today, Big Blue; tomorrow, the Singularity) Beckett's conceit is that we'll first have to confront the question of artificial intelligence in a context where the putatively aware machines are dependent & weak, struggling with fragments of nascent consciousness, vulnerable in the face of human bigotry and brutality.

But it's the reflections on and observations about normal, 21st century human relationships that are most poignant. How elderly or damaged people will cope with radical technological and social changes is a vastly under-discussed area in SF, maybe because such people tend not to be as glamorous as sexy young extropian cyber-things in self-aware jumpsuits. I suppose it's a clichéd observation that Beckett's social work background may have heightened his awareness of life on the margins of society, but it's important that someone is writing about this stuff.

The city-state of Illyria was an interesting conceit. The obvious contemporary parallels are with post-9/11 USA (or even post-7/7 Britain) but it made me think more of Israel - a state not only surrounded by enemies, but with a defensive mindset shaped by horrendous persecution, a mindset that is at once understandable & self-destructive. The most awkward & challenging questions, though, are posed by the protagonist's relationship with the robot prostitute, Lucy, a relationship that invites us anew to confront our assumptions about sex and love, but also about the human capacity for wilful self-delusion, and what Kim Stanley Robinson has referred to as `the illusion of intimacy'.

Recommended for anyone happy with books that pose more disurbing questions than comforting answers.
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3 of 3 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars sf that asks interesting questions about human needs, 20 April 2006
By G. Gibson "gary gibson" (scotland, united kingdom) - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)   
This review is from: The Holy Machine (Paperback)
It's a remarkable thing to stumble across a book of quite such quality published by a small press company that, if it hadn't been recommended to me, might well have escaped my attention. Without repeating the positive sentiments of the previous review, I can add that this book is a reminder that at times British sf writers can create a vision of the future at once both bleak and beautiful. The book is a remarkable journey through a near-future environment quite literally born of nightmare, and reminded me that in an era of cookie-cutter sf it is still possible to produce work of high quality. Recommended.
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3 of 3 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars One of the best SF novels of the start of the 21st century, 18 Jan 2006
By Tony Ballantyne (United Kingdom) - See all my reviews
This review is from: The Holy Machine (Paperback)
One of the best SF novels of the start of the 21st century, if not one of the best novels, period. It describes a near future where religious fundamentalism has swept the world. Those who refuse to accept the beliefs of their new leaders are tried for blasphemy. Those found guilty are tortured, or worse.

There is a heartbreaking pathos and beauty to George’s, descent from the grace of Illyrian society as he tries to connect with the developing intelligence of a robot prostitute. Beckett does an exemplary job of making sympathetic and believable the characters that George encounters as, cast adrift in a world of superstition, he moves towards his final encounter with the Holy Machine of the title.

I can’t recommend it highly enough. Buy this book!

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4.0 out of 5 stars A tale of a rational dystopia
This is a first novel and feels like it. At first things are described in detail but later more and more short 'chapters' appear which move the story forward but with minimal... Read more
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