Thursday, August 02, 2018

Ten top artificial humans in fiction

Born in Reykjavik in 1962, Sjón is a celebrated Icelandic novelist. He won the Nordic Council's Literary Prize for his novel The Blue Fox (the Nordic countries' equivalent of the Man Booker Prize) and the novel From The Mouth Of The Whale was shortlisted for both the International IMPAC Dublin Literary Award and the Independent Foreign Fiction Prize. His novel Moonstone – The Boy Who Never Was was awarded every Icelandic literature prize, among them the 2013 Icelandic Literary Prize. His latest published work is the definite edition of the trilogy CoDex 1962.

One of his top ten artificial humans in fiction, as shared at the Guardian:
Cloud Atlas by David Mitchell

Told in the past, the present and possible futures, Cloud Atlas’s most tragic and human character is Sonmi–451, a future clone designed to have no self-awareness – and thereby no survival instinct – so she can be worked to death in a diner only to end up reprocessed as food. As her name implies, she finds her strength through reading and her own story becomes a cornerstone of a civilisation even farther in the future.
Read about another entry on the list.

Cloud Atlas is among Naomi Klein's six favorite books, Jeff Somers's seven novels with chronologies that will break you, Christopher Priest’s top five science-fiction books that make use of music, Patrick Hemstreet's five top books for the psychonaut and the six books that changed Maile Meloy's idea of what’s possible in fiction.

--Marshal Zeringue