Evolution's Darling (Paperback)

by Scott Westerfeld (Author) "This place: come out of a gone time without mark or reference..." (more)
Key Phrases: valet drone, sensory strands, artificial intuition, Queen Favor, Blast Event, Home Cluster (more...)

Editorial Reviews

Amazon.com Review
In this disturbing and powerful meditation on consciousness and individuality, Scott Westerfeld captures everything that is wonderful about pure science fiction, but does it at a cost of brutality to his characters. He uses technology to assess something important about human beings--in this case, what makes us sentient, and what part memory plays in our humanity.

Despite the ship captain's best efforts, his navigational computer achieves a Turing level, indicating sentience. When the machine intimately befriends his daughter, the captain tries to have it erased, only to find that his daughter is willing to betray him to preserve her symbiotic love.

Centuries later, the immortally bereft machine, now a being called Darling, searches the universe for meaning and tries not to remember the darkness of his past. When a human assassin on a mission to destroy an AI artist encounters Darling, they begin a relationship that is beyond intense, with a violent sexuality and a deep connection that ultimately calls into question their nature as separate entities.

Westerfeld, the author of Polymorph and Fine Prey, creates a difficult and ultimately despairing future for humans, but one of hope and potential for the artificial intelligences that inherit the mantle of evolution. Beauty, faith, and the power of love are the things that save Darling, if not the humans he remembers, from the maw of oblivion. --Therese Littleton

From Publishers Weekly
In the context of this novel, "Evolution's Darling" is a phrase used by people who envy sentient AIs (Artificial Intuitions) "because they could evolve... within the span of a lifetime, while biologicals were trapped on that slow wheel of generations." The "Darling" of the title refers to a former starship mind, an AI whose increasingly intimate bond with the adolescent daughter of the ship's captain allowed his Turing Quotient to exceed 1.0. With a value above that level, an "artificial" is granted personhood and full human rights. After gaining a cyborg body and outliving his lover, Darling's unique abilities lead him to become an art dealer. After 200 years of traveling, Darling finally hopes to meet the reclusive sculptor Robert Vaddum, whose bizarre work has intrigued and obsessed Darling for decades. On the way to Malvir, Vaddum's world, Darling meets Mira, a woman whose personal history was stolen by the AIs and replaced with a career as an assassin. Sex with Darling triggers strange dreams that may be Mira's recovered memories, the key to unlocking her life before becoming a high-tech killer. But now Mira must finish her latest job: slaying the Maker, a being responsible for the heinous crime of copying an artificial's mind. Darling's search for Vaddum becomes entwined with Mira's pursuit of the Maker, but these stories also become so hopelessly entangled in a morass of out-of-place flashbacks and recovered memories that it's difficult to care whether anyone achieves his or her ultimate goal. While Westerfeld's setting and characters, clearly influenced by the work of Iain Banks, are intriguing, they're severely undermined by choppy action and weak plotting. (May)
Copyright 2000 Reed Business Information, Inc.

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Product Details

• Paperback: 352 pages
• Publisher: Running Press (April 3, 2000)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 1568581491
• ISBN-13: 978-1568581491
• Product Dimensions: 8 x 5 x 0.8 inches
• Shipping Weight: 10.7 ounces
• Average Customer Review: 4.1 out of 5 stars See all reviews (10 customer reviews)
• Amazon.com Sales Rank: #220,195 in Books (See Bestsellers in Books)

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

19 of 20 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Erratic, erotic, inventive and intriguing, January 13, 2003

By	Stephen Dedman (Bayswater, WA Australia) - See all my reviews (REAL NAME)

Evolution's Darling is one of the most interesting science fiction novels I've read in the past year.

Evolution's Darling is a 'bootstrap', an AI who has achieved sentience despite frequent downgrades by its last owner. Under the laws of the Expansion, any machine that reaches a Turing Quotient of 1.0 legally becomes a person, rather than legal property - and needing to replace the shipboard computer would wipe out a year's profits for Darling's owner, Isaah. Darling is also the tutor and companion of Isaah's fifteen-year-old daughter, Rathere, and after Isaah disconnects Darling's sensors, Rathere re-connects them to save her friend, who then becomes her lover. He buys himself a humanoid body, then he and Rathere leave Earth together.

Two centuries later, Darling has become one of the Expansion's most astute dealers in artworks, collecting originals and ideas and sex-related body modifications. When a new sculpture allegedly done by fellow bootstrap Vaddum comes onto the market, years after Vaddum's disappearance, Darling and many other dealers rush to see it. While some are prepared to murder their rivals to own the piece, Darling is more interested in its origin. Is Vaddum dead? Can robots actually die? Can intelligent software be copied, and if so, is the copy a forgery or the real thing?

Evolution's Darling contains some wonderful inventions: as well as the Turing Quotient as a solution to the ethical questions of owning intelligent machines, Westerfield gives us a wide range of very individualistic robots, from the fiercely competitive hyper-intelligent starships writing anonymous academic papers on passenger service when they're not hurling insults at each other ("Number-cruncher!" "Intuitionist!"), to Vaddum, the robotic laborer turned sculptor, to the sub-Turing Wardens, cunning but rigid justice machines. I also loved the lithomorphs, alien statues on a thousand-century-long migration towards their breeding grounds. Along with this sparkling inventiveness comes a beautiful prose style: the only flaw, and that a minor one, is the erratic pacing, with two-hundred-year jump cuts and a fistful of flashbacks disguising a very simple and straightforward plot.

Aldiss and Wingrove's Trillion Year Spree defined science fiction (in part) as "the search for a definition of mankind and his status quo in the universe which will stand in our advanced but confused state of knowledge". By this definition, Evolution's Darling is uncommonly pure science fiction, because of the questions it raises about the nature of humanity. When machines can score higher than biological humans on Turing tests, which is really human? Are two beings with identical Turing ratings actually the same person, and is the art they produce equally authentic? Is there a difference between justice and aesthetic considerations? What is alive? What is dead? What is original? What is a copy? Will any of these concepts still be relevant in a few centuries? Westerfield quotes Wilde's essays frequently - and it's Wilde the philosopher, not just Wilde the wit - as well as Wittgenstein and Locke, plus sly nods to Alfred Bester and Samuel Delany... but the book sparkles with ideas and questions, rather than being weighted down with pontification. It manages to combine character-driven and ideas-driven science fiction, and even begs the question of whether there's any real difference between the two.

12 of 13 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Taking the human out of humane, June 22, 2000

By	"smaa" (New York, New York) - See all my reviews

Evolution's Darling is Scott Westerfeld's third scifi novel. It's written with such poise and mastery that the far future in which it inhabits is clear and believable. If we don't quite understand this future, it's because it is already beyond our ken. The clock is ticking......

The prologue provides us with the book's mythology. Told like "The Tempest" - a father-daughter-lover triangle within a setting of sheer otherworldly beauty - the prologue catapults the narrative into a grandly conceived and richly imagined place and time.

The eponymous Darling is perfectly realized, an artificial being who is haunted and profoundly affected by love and loss. His development from multi-purpose AI to a sentient being marks the emergence of a truly new generation. The humans in Evolution's Darling are clearly a species at the beginning of irrelevance. Their lives are tawdry, desirous of excesses of greed, lust and power. In comparison, the AIs go about their lot with, at the very least, a knowing, witty irony, if not, more often, a deep, all-encompassing appreciation. A love for life. With respect.

Although Westerfeld imagines a world where humans have become stuck in an evolutionary cul-de-sac like the duckbilled platypus, it's world that we'd aspire to. A world where art is not merely another commodity but where it literally transforms souls. A world where a family (built from constructs) can live happily ever after. A world where we'd like to be. We just couldn't muster it.

A truly amazing, inspiring book, full of noise and passion, driven by a quiet inevitability that's quite heartbreakingly beautiful to experience.

2 of 2 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars I wish I had written this!, February 15, 2004

By A Customer

Couldn't put _Evolution's Darling_ down. I loved the depiction of our machines achieving sentience. I loved the extrapolation of how the world might cope with it. I loved the sweetness and strangeness of Darling's character, and enjoyed the way that Westerfeld imagined the possibilities for S/M play in a world where physical damage is more easily repaired than in ours. Then I looked at how he imagined the economic realities of the world he'd created, and I felt a bit envious of his abilities. But I didn't dwell on that too long; I was too busy enjoying the novel. Well done!