Over the last three months I’ve fallen in love with a comic published by Image called, ALEX + ADA. Written by Jonathan Luna, with gorgeous art by Sarah Vaughn, ALEX + ADA tells the story of Alex who, against his wishes, is gifted by his grandmother a X5 android. Ada is programmed to follow the commands of her owner, which can range from cooking dinner to offering more intimate services. It transpires that like an iPhone, Ada can be jail-broken. But rather than provide free apps, a hacked android gains sentience.

I mention ALEX + ADA because it’s important to know that it’s possible to write thoughtful fiction about android / human relations and self awareness. I had to keep reminding myself of this while reading The Mad Scientist’s Daughter.

The novel is set on a post-Disaster (with a capital ‘D’) Earth where androids and robots have been built to “replace all those lost people” and reconstruct the cities that were destroyed. Cat’s father, the mad scientist of the title, one day brings home an android named Finn to home-school five year old Cat. Over the course of the novel Cat and Finn’s relationship develops from teacher, to older brother, to best friend, to, eventually, lover.

As a love story with science fiction trappings, The Mad Scientist’s Daughter fails miserably on both counts. In the case of the science, the world building has the feeling of something that’s been sketched on the back of a napkin. The Disaster, for example, while never adequately explained, seems to be ecological in nature. Kansas has become a dust bowl and the weather patterns are completely out of whack; spring turns into winter ice overnight. But there’s no sense of the lasting effects of the Disaster. Millions might have died but a couple of generations after this terrible event and everything seems fine. The economy is strong enough to (a) allow for the continued mass production of androids and (b) pay for the maintenance of a lunar base on the moon and a manned mission to Mars. And there seems to be no indication that food production has suffered. If rationing is happening, it’s not experienced by the characters in this novel.

In fact, other than a couple of minor advancements in technology and, of course, artificial intelligence, the Mad Scientist’s Daughter might as well be set in 2014.

But Ian, I hear you say, this novel isn’t meant to be about the world-building, it’s about Cat’s relationship with Finn. And I’d be willing to accept all that if the love story element of the novel worked in its own right. But it doesn’t and most of the problem here can be laid at Cat’s fictional feet.

I don’t believe Clarke intended to write Cat as an unlikeable character. I believe we’re meant to see her as a flawed, but sympathetic person, who struggles to make friends due to her upbringing. However what we get is someone so self absorbed, so caught up in her desire and love for Finn, that she couldn’t care less about anyone else in her life. Conversation, whether it’s with friends or with her parents, seem to always track back to Finn. Even her one interest, weaving yarn the old fashioned way, is linked back to her android boyfriend.

The cliche is that true love can be all consuming. In the case of Cat it literally sucks the life out of her. Following her marriage to Richard she becomes so passive, so inward looking, that to move the plot along Clarke turns Richard – a thumbnail sketch of a character – into an abusive partner. It’s cynical, tasteless written, engineered for the sole purpose of freeing Cat from Richard.

The thing is, it’s not like Cat’s anymore likeable when she’s with Finn. And again this comes back to the issue of world building. I appreciate that due to the aloofness of her parents and Cat’s own struggle to make friends, she turns to Finn, initially for companionship and then intimacy. But what’s not clear, because the novel never bothers to make it clear, is how self aware these androids are. We know that Finn is a special case, he doesn’t have a registration number on his back like other androids, but I never got the sense that Finn had a mind of his own, that he had interests that existed outside the desires of both Cat and her father.

And because it’s not clear whether Finn is aware, it’s also not clear whether he’s providing consent when he has sex with Cat, or whether he’s simply falling in line with his programming. When they first make love, the scene is expressly all about Cat and her feelings:

She felt something: not grief, not mourning, but desire, and it twisted up inside her like a flame until that was all she was, a pillar of lust… When he finally slipped inside her Cat cried out at the unexpected intensity of it: how long had she wanted this, without realizing it? How long had she wanted to feel him pressed against her? To understand the shape of his body? She buried her face in his shoulder and whispered, Oh God.

Finn’s response is to ask, “Was that acceptable?” In other words, no indication that sex was anything more than just a mechanical act performed because he was asked to do so. So, as a reader, it’s very hard to cheer on their relationship because from a power dynamic it seems so one-sided.

Rather than explore the power dynamics further, Clarke takes the easy way out by having Cat’s father bestow Finn with software that not only unlocks his emotions but also his love for Cat. Or to put it more melodramatically – Finn always loved Cat he just never had the ability to express it.

Finn discovers that love comes with a side order of jealousy when the woman you adore is about to be married to another guy. So he decides to flounce off to the lunar colony so he never has to deal with Cat again. See, androids can be passive aggressive as well.

Finn’s departure takes an already self absorbed character and adds more angst. Throw in an obsessive search for Finn’s origins, an abusive husband, a pregnancy, a dying father and the ‘surprise’ re-appearance of Finn and the last third of the novel becomes an unreadable mess of predictable melodrama and manufactured emotion.

The thing is, as ALEX + ADA proves, you can have a nuanced story about android / human relations without having to forgo the world building, questions of self awareness and power dynamics. But it feels like that Cassandra Rose Clarke hasn’t bothered to try.

P.S. Matt Hilliard provides a far more balanced critique of the novel here at Strange Horizons