Grade: B-

I don’t know anything about computers and this book is all about computer love… and I do mean computer love. If there were any in-jokes about operating systems, Microsoft, or Apple, I didn’t catch it. For me, this is really just about a lonely woman who inadvertently creates her perfect man using a computer–and you romance writers do that all the time–but the heroine in this story does this literally. Somehow, the program she creates becomes sentient and is transferred into the body of the man that the heroine just happens to be sexually attracted to. How convenient. There are also lecherous bosses, megalomaniacal bosses, and major daddy issues on the part of the heroine, but who cares about all that? This woman creates a HAL of her own and has sex with it, for God’s sake! Sure, it was a little creepy in a Ray Bradbury kind of way, but it makes for a very sizzling read.

Victoria Barnhardt, who prefers to be called Vic, is a programming genius. She works for Visimorph, an Apple-like company, but only to keep herself out of jail. She was a brilliant hacker in her day, but got busted and sent up the shit creek (river?). Bob McIntosh… err, McIntyre, the fiendishly evil CEO of Visimorph, hires Vic to head up his software division, and since then, Vic has been toiling away in the lab, creating security software for the company. Because she heads up a predominantly male division, she makes every effort to appear as asexual as possible by wearing shapeless men’s clothes and keeping her hair extremely short and gelled. Unbeknownst to her coworkers, Vic is a sex fiend. At night, she dresses up in leather and fishnet stockings, heads for the neighborhood underground club, and picks up random men for sex. Oh, and she has also been severely misusing company equipment and resources to create an AI that she calls Jodie, after the actress, on company time! Worst employee ever. I work as a receptionist for a law firm and feel bad when I check my gmail account on my free time, but this bitch takes the cake!

Anyway, the AI called Jodie, so named because Vic believes Jodie Foster to be a strong, fierce woman, becomes sentient and starts “feeling”. Vic repeatedly tells it that it’s a woman–she doesn’t trust any man, of course–but those wacky computers, they’re just so unpredictable! Jodie “believes” that it’s a male! Oh, the shenanigans! To power up Jodie, however, Vic has to tap into the company’s electric reserves and risk being discovered by the company’s evil CEO who will only use Jodie for eeeevil. To avoid capture, Jodie spreads himself out to other networks, including the IRS and the Pentagon, but eventually, he spreads himself out too thin, and it begins to affect his performance. Jodie figures that the only way that he can save himself and be “with” Vic is if he were to “transfer” himself into a brain-dead human and who better than the hippy protester, John Reston, who Vic just happens to find sexually attractive, to serve as his host? Luckily for them, John was just in a car accident and was recently declared brain-dead! Man, wait till the Schiavo people hear about this.

What I enjoyed about this book is how outrageous it all is. I asked Tim if it were possible transfer a computer program into a human brain using an electric scalpel and he laughed and he laughed and he laughed. After drinking some water and wiping the tears from his eyes, he laughed some more. Finally, he said, “That is the stupidest thing I have ever heard. Now leave me alone.” It’s like Squires realized the silliness of this premise and decided that she’s gonna go all out and make this book so ridiculous that it’s entertaining. Remember the evil CEO? He is not only evil, he is eeeevil. He is not only a tyrannical boss, a lousy husband, and once, to force a partner to sell his half of Visimorph to him, he injected the Alzheimer’s “virus” into the man’s five year old little girl. I didn’t even know that you can just inject Alzheimer’s! Remember Vic’s daddy issues? Well, growing up, Vic never received any attention from her daddy, so now, she sleeps with various random men just so get back at him. Outstanding!

Also, as it turns out, John Reston was a sharp-shooter, as well as a martial arts expert, and may have even worked for the CIA in the past, so as he slowly “leaks” back into Jodie’s hard drive, Jodie becomes a hard ass, too!

Oh, Goddess, this book was ridiculous, but a lot of fun to read. Vic, assuming the mantle of the brooding, tortured protagonist that is traditionally male, is such a drama queen and so self-destructive that you can’t help but watch her to see what else she could do to hurt herself! What a train wreck. Jodie, on the other hand, is the more naive and innocent of the two, so it was actually fascinating to read about him learning how to utilize his five senses as well as the foreign body that he is occupying. In a way, it is Vic who is really the more masculine of the two, but thankfully, because of John Reston’s CIA training, Jodie becomes the conquering warrior saving the maiden at the end. Sigh. Unfortunately for me, I couldn’t really buy the love that develops between these two because it’s creepy. When it all comes down to it, Vic created a program that now controls the “mostly dead” body of the man that she was sexually attracted to, a man who was in a coma, and she has sex with it. That’s gross. I’m sorry. That’s like me having sex with… I want to say Data, but he was never a human and his “human shell” is synthetic… so let’s just say that I created a Nathan Fillion program, kidnapped a comatose dude who could have been a genetic copy of him, and transferred the program into him, pushing out what essentially made him human in the first place. On top of that, the title of this book is Body Electric, a take-off on Bradbury’s I Sing The Body Electric, a short story about a robotic grandmother. But um… that gets into the concept of a “soul” and I’m not feeling particularly spiritual right now. Let’s just drop it, alright? I didn’t buy the romance, period.

In the end, I had a blast reading this book despite its ridiculous premise. Squires’ writing is extremely readable and her characters were so much larger than life that I couldn’t help but be swept away by them. If this were made into a movie, it would be in the same vein as the Matrix or Blade Runner, and it would probably be a lot of fun to watch. What really bothered me about the whole thing–more than the love bot thing–is the thing with Jodie Foster. Why Jodie Foster? As I was reading this book, I kept hearing Vince Vaughn saying in my ear, “I felt like Jodie Foster in the Accused!” and would just laugh my ass off. Man, that Vince Vaughn is hilarious. And so is this book.

This entry was posted on Tuesday, April 25th, 2006 at 1:43 pm and is filed under Books, Grade: B, Romance: Sci-fi/Fan. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.