INTRODUCTION

I first met Madeline Ashby in the autumn of 2014. I had selected vN for my creative writing students’ sci fi component. Madeline was delightfully easy to contact, and even more delightfully, she agreed to appear via conference link to talk about vN.

I had read the novel in one sitting. The prologue – explosive, vivacious and beautifully cruel – opens to introduce, not, as one might think, the new and weird world of synthetic life forms, but the archaic and enduring domesticity of family life.

Imagine, for a moment, a perfect Eve in a garden paradise called Eden. Imagine too, the exotic gothic drama as her eyes startle at the snake’s entrance; and subsequent beguiling, barbarous suggestion. You know how it goes – Eve crunches through the skin of that perfect pink lady or golden delicious apple and in doing so, reveals her unclothed, imperfect self.

Take a giant leap from the beginning of everything – to now.

Fabricate your “perfect” female robot. The shape, size, features, are yours to select.

Ashby introduces the idea of such “perfection” through a (clichéd) domestic male view. Jack has tried and failed to lasso a number of emancipated Eve’s. His final manoeuvre is to select a synthetic vN named Charlotte, who, to his delight has:

“… no hormones to influence her decision-making, no feast-or-famine cycle driving dopamine or serotonin. She didn't get cramps or headaches or nightmares or hangovers. She didn't need retail therapy or any other kind.”

Bingo!

Furthermore, each vN comes with a nifty failsafe, so humans can demand, lie, manipulate, mistreat male, female or child (iteration) vN, and not be harmed by the synthetic, nor held to account. Why would they? The vN are, after all, simply computers on legs with male and female parts derived from von Neumann, mathematician and physicist (hence vN).

Remember your Eve in her lush garden, happy in her biblical naïve perfection? Ashby delivers a further punch when the reader learns that these synthetic renditions of Eve and Adam are bankrolled by the (fictional) Fundamentalist church.

Ashby really doesn’t miss a trick.

I introduce vN to aspiring writers as a science fiction/realist/gothic text. But truly the trilogy is inclusive of much more.

Each of the three novels: vN, iD and ReV are exemplars of detailed research and knowledge. Placing names such as: “The New Eden Ministries”, Arcadio (from the ancient Greek Arkás), meaning “pleasant land”, Ashby interweaves the archaic with the shiny new in a clever, ingenious, gender, cultural, sci fi studies kind of way.

A paragraph in the second of the trilogy iD, made me smile and sigh. Ashby’s ability to place the gothic and ancient side by side with the modern and futuristic is adorable, deeply creative, provocative and writerly:

“Young iterations, most of them missing shirts or pants or even just one sock, slept in the soft grass or the swaying boughs or in the room-sized clusters of roots beneath the big trees. They piled up together like puppies, or splayed out all alone on the banks of the gurgling creek. They were like lambs, Javier realised. Tiny human-shaped lambs asleep in the pasture.”

This writer knows stuff. Her easy engagement in front of students and staff alike, profiled a writer who is energetically, gloriously, engaged in bridging the gap between science and the “science” fiction – and boy is that gap getting smaller.

In China artificial intelligence machines are caring for elderly people, the very thing the vN were built for.

It is her openness to ideas, to exploring the rift between the world of the white coated scientist, and that somewhat messier one of the creative writer; that has made Madeline Ashby into the thinker and author she is today. She understands science and its terrifying forward momentum, and she understands plot and yes – character: how to write loveable, hateful, terrifyingly engaging synthetic organisms.

This gothic rendering of the search for Eden by vN, is all the more poignant in the 2020 Covid malaise from where I write. The ongoing human destruction of our own precious Eden lends itself to the gothic, and perhaps to the aberrant notion that a vN’s version of that perfect place may be more realistic.

Ashby doesn’t shy from hard truths. The glow of dark violence in her writing mixes with moments of intense beauty and emotional layering. Thought provoking and dangerous, her writing demands the reader learns, yet is reminded at every juncture, of the past where all ideas came from.

Dr AML-D – 5/5/20

Anne Lauppe-Dunbar is a fiction writer and senior lecturer at Swansea University, currently lecturing on the creative writing course BA, MA and PhD. Her first novel Dark Mermaids is based on the GDR doping scandal, and was shortlisted for the prestigious Cross Sports Book Award, and the Impress Prize. Her current research is for a novel on the Nazi Werewölfe; a child army reportedly funded by Hitler’s diamond collection. Anne writes short stories, and reviews, and has been widely anthologised by Cinnamon Press, Seren and Albion. www.serenbooks.com/author/anne-lauppe-dunbar