In my book, The New One, a family with a difficult daughter almost lose her after a hit and run accident. She’s in a coma, and hope is draining away, until the family are offered a lifeline in the form of a medical trial and new life in Geneva. Is this too good to be true? (spoiler: yes). A new daughter, cloned and boosted by AI, joins her parents in their new luxurious life, but this one is fine-tuned to be perfect. So, what happens when the original wakes up and finds an interloper has taken her place?
The sentient AI is appearing in more and more stories, as writers follow, and then leapfrog beyond, the science. These books have all engaged with it in different ways:
The Perfect Wife by JP Delaney
Abbie wakes up realizing that she’s been in an accident, only to discover that actual Abbie has died and her mad-tech-billionaire husband has reanimated her as a robot with his dead wife’s memories and personality. But what really happened to human Abbie, and why is new-Abbie getting messages from a stranger? As the replacement wife secretly follows the trail left by her previous self, the real story, intercut with a POV apparently from one of her husband’s employees, starts to unfold. This thriller twists and turns and gets the reader fully on the side of the robot wife as a darker and scarier reality emerges.
Every Line of You by Naomi Gibson
Teenage Lydia is brilliant at coding. She loves Henry — Henry is the only one who just gets her, and with her dysfunctional and tragic family background, he gives her the stability and understanding she craves. There’s just one problem: Henry has no body. He started as a line of code and has grown into a sentient and charismatic AI, Lydia’s only friend. With Henry’s help Lydia confronts her problems in a way that goes beyond empowerment and into something altogether darker. When a mysterious government agent starts taking an interest in the hacking that Lydia and Henry are doing together things spiral, and the peace Lydia has always craved recedes over the horizon.
Read the full list at
8 Novels Featuring Artificial Intelligence
