In the Lives of Puppets: Imagination Tops Repeated Structure

IN THE LIVES OF PUPPETS (2023)

By TJ Klune

Tor Books, 432 pages.

★★★★

 

 

In the Lives of Puppets, the forthcoming novel from TJ Klune, delves into one of fantasy’s most intriguing questions: What makes an individual fully human? He comes down on the side of those who doubt that biology is the sole (or even main) determinant. You’ll find echoes of familiar sources in Klune’s book: Pinocchio, The Wizard of Oz, Mr. Data (and the Borg) from Star Trek, and Philp Dick’s Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? from whence Blade Runner movies derived.

 

Klune takes us to an indeterminate future in which machines have taken over the world. Insofar as the AI Authority knows, Earth’s human contagion has been eradicated. That also renders a lot of machines obsolete, which are decommissioned and scrapped.  As you no doubt anticipate, there’s at least one human left. Victor Lawson lives near a salvage yard but deep in the forest with his “father” Gio/Giovanni and his friends Rambo and Nurse Ratched. Their arrangement is, shall we say, unusual. Gio Lawson is an android, a tinkerer, benevolent, loves old jazz, and his fatherhood has nothing to do with sex. He and Victor scour the junkyard for parts for their hidden compound, taking care that Victor doesn’t bleed as even a drop of blood would set off alarms.

 

Gio is actually a General Innovation Operative, an android inventor/builder that became a renegade with a distinct personality. He does a great job raising Victor, courtesy of the wooden heart animated by a drop of blood. Rambo was once a vacuum cleaner that Gio rebuilt and reprogramed, a Roomba whose lettering wore off. So why not give him a few arms, the ability of speak, a Piglet-like personality, and a love of the musical Top Hat? Ratched was a medical device that used to serve humans: Registered Automation To Care, Heal, Educate, and Drill. She has an empathy protocol, but she prefers to turn it off and drill!

 

To say this is an unusual grouping, but Victor sees nothing weird about having two machines for friends; you take what you can get when you’re the only homo sapiens. Part One, the Forest” details some of these relationships and introduces one of Vic’s salvage efforts, the grumpy HAP, whom Rambo dubs Hysterically Angry Puppet. HAP is powerful, ominous, and stutters. It’s a good thing his systems were corrupted. Unbeknownst to Victor, the R on his chest has worn off and he’s actually a HARP, a Human Annihilation Response Protocol android like the ones that wiped out humankind. Instead, he becomes Victor’s protector and, we sense, the two are falling in love, after HAP is given the spare heart Vic had built for Gio. (Klune is an icon of gay literature.)

 

Part Two, “The Journey” occurs when Gio is captured and the others must flee their destroyed refuge. They encounter a strange machine known as The Coachman who, after playing a different role, helps them get inside the City of Electric Dreams, where Gio has probably been taken to be reprogramed. The city is Part Three of the novel and a weird one it is. Gio once told Victor that the Blue Fairy (a “they”) might or might not help if danger arose. First, they must gain entry to a glass pyramid where, legend holds, “unchained” machines follow their electric dreams. It’s not clear whether the Blue Fairy and their helper are benevolent, volatile, or flat-out dangerous, nor does Klune spell out exactly why the Authority allows them to exist. Let’s just say that things inside the pyramid are strange. I could say the same for the entire book, part four of which resolves various dilemmas.

 

In the midst of this idiosyncratic work Klune raises a few universal questions. What does it mean to be “alive?” What makes a family? What gives purpose to existence? Where, if at all, do we place the parameters of desire? Shades of the Tin Woodsman of the Oz, Klune also asks us whether poets and ancient philosophers were right to locate emotion and memory in the heart rather than the brain.

 

I won’t pretend this novel will light up every reader’s circuits. I enjoyed it quite a bit because it’s so odd. I admit, though, that Klune is guilty of repeating stories he has previously told and has merely dressed this one in metal clothes. The overarching moral is that a vivid imagination serves authors and characters equally well.

 

Rob Weir