By J. Roslyn
Louis K. Lowy does a stellar job unveiling a complicated plot with many moving parts in the first novel of his new series: To Dream, Anatomy of a Humachine. His protagonist, Dr. Niyati Bopari, is a brilliant roboticist and bio-physicist who mourns her beloved son, Jay, a young man killed in a car crash on his high school graduation day. Dr. Bopari was driving the car, and her guilt, despair and love for her son is so intense that, unbeknownst to her employer, Ameri-Inc., in 2030, as she builds their first highly advanced human-machine hybrid (humachine), she infuses it with his DNA, and names it, “J-1.” Subsequently exiled by Amer-Inc., to a manufacturing facility on the planet Truatta for almost two hundred years, J-1, for various reasons, begins to evolve. As he does so, he must deal with the corrupt underbelly of Ameri-Inc., its attacks on the human population of both Truatta and Earth, and his growing awareness of his own human roots.
Despite a storyline that goes back and forth between two centuries, with detailed descriptions of different technologies and different cultures and characters, Mr. Lowy manages to keep his writing crisp, focused and understandable. The emotional impact of this novel surprised me. In a science fiction novel covering two centuries and several planets, where one of the main protagonists is a hybrid between robot and human, I did not expect to be so moved by his plight. This is a novel worth reading.
* Print Length: 305 pages
* Publisher: IFWG Publishing (January 2, 2017)
* Publication Date: January 2, 2017
* Sold by: Amazon Digital Services LLC
Interview with Louis K. Lowy
I asked Louis Lowy what inspired him to write this novel. He graciously provided the following answer:
Lowy: “‘To Dream: Anatomy of a Humachine’ was inspired by a three page short story that I had written over a decade ago and had completely forgotten about. Rummaging through my virtual files, I stumbled upon it. Reading it, I thought it had the basic elements for a longer (in this case, much longer) story. The basic elements were there. The protagonist was an A.I. named J-17, which became J-1 in my novel. He was working on another planet, which I utilized, and he was mining Genimetrothiasine — another thing I incorporated.
From there it became a lot of ‘what ifs’ and ‘how do I explain how the what ifs came about.’ I had to answer nine key elements of the ‘how the what ifs came about’ before I started on the novel. That took me a couple of months, but once I had the answers, I began writing and eventually the book reached fruition. Of course, there were twists and turns that I hadn’t seen coming, but that’s one of the joys of storytelling.”
For more information about Louis K. Lowy, go to:
https://www.louisklowy.com
