A Strange And Brilliant Light

Eli Lee

Jo Fletcher Books

Otago Daily Times, October 16th 2021

One of the functions of speculative fiction is to critique contemporary society, rendering tangible the consequences of maintaining or disrupting the status quo. In A Strange and Beautiful Light, British author Eli Lee creates a culture in which human labour is rapidly being rendered superfluous by technological developments that cover the spectrum from service robots to artificial intelligence. The story, which takes place over the course of a year, is told from the perspective of three young women who find themselves in the nexus of events, the struggles in their personal lives shaped by – and shaping – the broader social flux around them.

Rose and Lal are in their early 20s and come from working-class families – Rose’s father was a trade union leader, and Lal’s mother has been a cleaner for her entire life. Despite being friends since childhood, they have grown apart over time, and their differences are experienced as a keenly felt betrayal. Lal, who has known from a very young age that there is always something more to want, has gone from managing the local coffee shop where she and Rose work to overseeing the replacement of her friends and former colleagues by ‘auts’, while Rose has joined a group fighting for workers rights. 

As disruptive as the roll-out of the auts is on the society the girls have grown up in, it pales in comparison to what may come next. The third protagonist, Lal’s sister Janetta,  is a PhD student trying to create emotionally intelligent AI, and the potential consequences of machine sentience ­ haunts the novel. Is it possible to create synthetic consciousness that can co-exist with humanity without either destroying or being enslaved by it? And is this something that can be trusted to the forces of capitalism? The solution to these questions lies within the reach of these three very different women, but only if they can reconcile their differences and act in a common cause.

The philosophical questions that Lee raises are real and pressing, and her characters embody the diversity of social and individual responses to the new technology. Lal’s passive acceptance of its inevitability, which she justifies on the basis that her family need the money she sends home, reflects her desire for security and her need to measure up to her brilliant sibling. Rose’s boyfriend champions source gain – a form of living wage for displaced workers – but is more interested in ingratiating himself into the ranks of the intelligentsia than the welfare of the people he claims to represent. Meanwhile, her older brother is involved with an anarchist group intent on physically destroying the auts. Rose’s own initial enthusiasm for compensating workers for their economic devaluation wanes in favour of transferring ownership of the auts to the Commons, while Janetta believes that empathic AI should be free to find its own way to enlightenment, an emotional journey that parallels her own.

Although I largely share Lee’s sympathies, this deliberate framing is too tidily conspicuous to be satisfying. She is more successful in her handling of setting, creating a place enough like the world as we know it to be familiar but strewn with subtle reminders (food, places, histories) that jolt us out of our complacency. By letting such details exist without comment or explanation, she leaves space for the reader’s imagination to fill, and the story’s open-ended conclusion keeps the illusion alive beyond the final page.

Whether this is enough to compensate for the novel’s shortcomings is a moot point, but the questions it raises are real and more immediate than we might think.