Review: Our Lady of the Artilects by Andrew Gillsmith

Blurb:

For fans of Dan Simmons, Gene Wolfe, Neal Stephenson, A Canticle for Leibowitz and other classic metaphysical sci-fi...this near future technothriller dives deep into questions of consciousness, faith, and artificial intelligence.
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World leaders are already on edge as Artilects (next generation androids) begin reporting a strange apocalyptic vision that only they can see.

But when an Artilect belonging to the wealthiest man in Africa shows up at the Basilica of Our Lady of Nigeria claiming to be possessed, the stakes are raised. The Vatican sends Fr. Gabriel Serafian, an exorcist and former neuroscientist, to investigate. Serafian quickly finds himself swept up in a conspiracy of global--and possibly supernatural--dimensions.

The timing couldn't be worse. Rome is on the verge of reconciliation with the Chinese Economic Interest Zone after a 50 year cold war, and the Chinese are particularly sensitive about the so-called Apparition.

To discover the truth and save not only humanity but the artilects themselves, Serafian enlists the aid of a tough-as-nails Imperial Praetor named Namono Mbambu.

Our Lady of the Artilects is a mind-bending supernatural science fiction novel where The Exorcist meets Westworld, with a light dusting of Snow Crash.

Review:

“I’ve seen things you people wouldn’t believe,” says the android Roy Baty towards the end of Ridley Scott’s Blade Runner, the classic 1982 filmic adaptation of Philip K. Dick’s Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? Baty describes - in few words - the majesty, awe, and horror of the cosmos beyond Earth, and then, as he dies, releases a single, snow-white dove into the blackened, cloudy skies of cyberpunk Los Angeles. A similar moment exists in Denis Villeneuve’s sequel - Blade Runner 2049 - as the android Sapper Morton laments the plights of the newer models of androids because they’ve “...never seen a miracle.” Both Morton and Baty have had something revealed to them, something beyond that which their contemporaries - be they human or replicant - could truly understand. And they end up taking these revelations to the grave; lost, as Baty would famously say, “like tears in the rain.”

I had the words of these androids ringing in my head when another such machine - brought to life by the pen of Andrew Gillsmith in Our Lady of the Artilects - bucked the tradition established by these other, artificial persons and, instead of coyly withholding its grand secrets, simply asks, “I know something new. Would you like me to share it with you?”

And it was in this moment that Our Lady of the Artilects secured its grasp on my mind.

As you may or may not have read in the above blurb, the inciting incident of Our Lady of the Artilects is the possession - or supposed possession - of an artificial person (known in the world of the novel as an “artilect” - or diegetically colloquially as a “synth”) named Thierry, and the subsequent technological and theological fallout of this previously-thought-to-be impossible event. 

It is Thierry, or rather the spirit which may or may not have possessed Thierry, that asks this question, “Would you like me to share it with you?” And in the context of the story, the “it” here is full to bursting with tantalizing profundity.

Theologians will sometimes cite General or Special revelation as a means by which the reality of God is made plain to human beings. General revelation (sometimes called “Natural” revelation) is the idea that God has made Himself known merely by the act and existence of Creation; or as the Psalmist put it, 

“The heavens declare the glory of God;

    the skies proclaim the work of his hands”

But Special revelation is far less passive. This is the revelation by which God speaks directly to humankind. Many modern theologians understand all of the canon of Scripture to be a kind of Special revelation; but in the context of the history about which the Bible was written, we could consider things like the life and ministry of Jesus, the visions given to John on Patmos, or the blinding of Saul on the road to Damascus as kinds of Special Revelation. But are we the only ones capable of receiving such messages?

Our Lady of the Artilects asks: if humanity is made in the image of God, and we then make machines in the image of Man, can the same revelations God gave us be given to these machines? Do they not also bear, in some echoed sense, the Imago Dei?

Dick asked in 1968, “Do androids dream?” 

Gillsmith answered nearly 55 years later, “Yes, but do they dream of God?”

I will say here before going too much further, I loved this book. It is wall to wall the exact kind of science-fiction I love: technical, challenging, unpredictable, philosophical; and above all else, just a heck of a good time. Having been recently reacquainted with the narrative stylings of Michael Crichton, I couldn’t help but notice Gillsmith employing the same kind of verisimilitudinous recontextualization of real history that Crichton does in his books (I was happy to discover my feeling here was not without merit, as Gillsmith himself - or someone within Gillsmith’s editorial circle - uses the back cover blurb to compare Our Lady with The Exorcist, Snowcrash, and Westworld - the latter of which was written and directed for the screen by Michael Crichton). Where Crichton might use the real lives of historic paleontologists or obscure scientific studies on viral mutation to lay the groundwork for his narratives, Gillsmith teases out the murky threads of modern prophecy, lining up a series of increasingly apocalyptic dominos set to fall down upon the people of Earth two hundred years into our future. 

And like Crichton, Gillsmith’s speculations on the future are not just philosophical, but - as are the most exciting works in the genre - technological as well. In Our Lady of the Artilects, humanity’s technological achievements are astounding, luring asteroids into Earth orbit for mining, developing injectable nano implants for boosted cognitive function and communication, and - most importantly for the sake of this story - designing the most advanced AIs in history. And that’s all just in the first act. In the third act of the story Gillsmith veers hard into the realm of astrophysics and geoengineering in a ratcheting-up of stakes so bombastic that if I even tried to explain it to you here and how it plays into the context of the broader “are these robot able to see God” story, I’m sure you’d think I was joking. 

But beyond these technical, aesthetic trappings of the science-fiction genre, Our Lady of the Artilects is an intensely spiritual book. 

As a Christian author myself, I have always been keenly fascinated by how faith is depicted in fiction, especially fictional faiths drawn whole cloth from the minds of authors and screenwriters: faiths like the Sword Logic in Destiny; whatever weird stuff Karl Urban was into in Chronicles of Riddick; the Fremen worship of Shai Hulud in Dune; the Narn’s Book of G’Quan and the Minbari’s divine beings of Velaria and Valen in Babylon 5; the Force and Jedi and Sith philosophies in Star Wars; Dead Space’s Church of Unitology; and much more recently the post-apocalyptic mysticism of Yuval Kordov’s Dark Legacies series. 

But even more interesting to me is when an author speculates on the contemporary faiths of the here and now. We see this most often in the horror genre, upon which Christianity has had a stranglehold for much of the modern era; but we do occasionally see the influence of this and other faiths trickle in sci-fi, typically if the setting requires a cult of some sort in which the writer will deploy any manner of creative twisting of sincere faiths and traditions - though sometimes truly sincere depictions find their way to the page and the screen. We see this in Keith David’s pilgrimage to New Mecca in Pitch Black, Denzel Washington’s quest to save a braille copy of the King James Bible in The Book of Eli, or the construction of a giant, Mormon generation ship in the books and TV adaptation of The Expanse. But rarely is the world of science-fiction given such a richly textured and sincere depiction of faith as Gillsmith has penned in Our Lady of the Artilects. And it is this sincerity to which I want to draw special attention.

I will digress for a moment here to assuage the fears of those who see me tiptoeing ever closer to the phrase “Christian fiction” and are imagining something like Left Behind, or recent cultural lightning rods like the God’s Not Dead films. This is not that. Our Lady of the Artilects does not, like much of the other pablum occupying similar spaces in fiction, sacrifice the meat of its narrative upon the altar of cheap proselytizing. It does not, as is the colloquial parlance, “preach to the choir”. It is first and foremost an excellently crafted tome of speculative fiction, interwoven with deeply insightful theological and philosophical musings. This is a book that can be enjoyed by anybody, not just by those who already subscribe to the theological framework that underpins its narrative arc. Its characters are real people, not cardboard cutouts whose sole function is shallow sermonizing. They are developed and nuanced, full in equal measure of faith and doubt; and Gillsmith provides this level of sincerity not only to his Christian characters, but to those of other faiths as well.

Most of the narrative of Our Lady takes place in Africa, the Middle East, and Asia; and I didn’t fully realize how refreshing it would be to read an Earth-bound tale so decidedly not set in North America. And as a result of its geographic focus, Our Lady of the Artilects features not only Christian characters but a great deal of Muslim ones as well; yet in a move that I’m sure has ruffled many feathers in what would otherwise be this book’s target demographic, Gillsmith treats the faith of his Muslim characters with the exact same reverence as his Christian ones. This too was deeply refreshing for someone like me whose primary childhood experiences in the Christian church took place during the Bush era and the “War on Terror”, and I got to hear entirely too many supposedly faithful followers of Christ’s teachings gleefully speculate about the ways in which the United States military might go about burning the Middle East to the ground. 

But Gillsmith does not consider for a moment trafficking in these kinds of perverse abdications of human decency; in fact, one of the main thrusts of the narrative involves the speculative aftermath of the currently ongoing genocide against the Uyghurs in China - whose failure to be stopped is seen, from the perspective of Gillsmith’s vision of the Christian Church some two-hundred years into the future, as a grotesque moral failing on the part of Christianity.

We see here a further twist on the work of Philip K. Dick. In Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? it is empathy that is the undoing of the replicants. They are designed with an absence of it, and in seeking out that singular, human experience they kill their masters and flee to Earth to find it - the consequence of which is death at the hands of the protagonist, Rick Deckard. 

The lack of empathy in Dick’s replicants is their undoing; but in Our Lady of the Artilects, it is an abundance of empathy - in our human characters and in the synths - that saves the entire world.

Solaris author Stanislaw Lem once called Philip K. Dick “A Visionary Among the Charlatans” - though I think this is perhaps because he did not ever have the chance to read Andrew Gillsmith.