Fictional Alignment review
Reading time: 3 minutes
Mike French has returned to the work of An Android Awakes and gone for a more conventional novel this time.
The plot of Fictional Alignment is a bit tough to explain, but we shall give it a go (it's okay, though, because reading and following the plot is not tough. There's just so much happening. Fictional Alignment is a sequel to An Android Awakes, where Android Writer PD121928 kept having his novels rejected to the point of committing suicide. In Fictional Alignment, Sapphira, who was in love with PD121928, becomes the first human writer in a century by using PD121928's unsuccessful stories as her own, and the book turns out to be a best-seller. That is not what the Androids want. They can't erase her fiction from culture because it's become too embedded in the Digitised Treasury, so instead decide that her fiction has to become fact. So a gang of androids kidnap Sapphira and, using time travel, embark on a series of adventures to turn every short story in Sapphira's book, Humans, into factual history by recreating the events. That way, the stories pose no threat to the greater good of the Andromium.
Sounds completely mad, right? That's because it is. It's also incredibly hilarious. There's so much going on all the time that it's impossible to become bored with what you're reading, and some of the scenarios get weirder and weirder as they go. There's also a load of science fiction references throughout to appreciate that fit the story instead of feeling like they're thrown in there for the sake of it. The best is when they're describing how time travel works. Rather than go into scientific details and try and work around paradoxes, Mike French embraces the problems and almost brushes over them with how much of a non-problem it will be to the story because do you have a PhD in time travel? Can you die in the past? Not if there's even an incredibly slim chance of survival – it's okay to shoot someone in the head if there's something like a 1 in a million chance of survival. Sure, they must go through the pain, surgery and possibly rehab… but they'll survive.
"You only need a very small mathematical probability, in fact any number greater than zero, however implausible the event might seem to us, and you will be okay. Just don't try to kill your grandparents or anything impossible like that."
Surprisingly the best character is one that you're probably not meant to like – Heisenberg. This particular android is awful and seemingly uncaring throughout most of the book. He's also quite funny in that he doesn't apparently care, and because of that usually delivers the best lines. A good amount of the chaos in the book results from him/her/ne.
Some parts of the book don't make much sense at all, but then you're dealing with a book that plays with time travel and androids trying to be human in the past, so you can be a bit forgiving with all the future technology that is used without fully explaining what it does, which given the overall style and tone of the book somehow works even if it can leave you scratching your head a little. It's all part of the madness that you need to embrace when reading it.
It's a very different book, though, which wasn't expected. The premise of An Android Awakes echoed humanity's quest to create artificial intelligence that we might mistake for being human. Fictional Alignment gives off a completely different premise and feeling; the perception of our past and how much we rely upon the individual truths we live by. Can you truly believe the factual reports from a few hundred years ago happened exactly as they were written or passed through generations? It's a worthy sequel to An Android Awakes, but it does leave a question about where French can take the story from here.
Rating: 4/5
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