Two women from very different backgrounds take an eerie road trip together in Aifric Campbell’s intriguing new novel, The Love Makers. Scarlett, the driver of the gold Buick, is a former banker turned tech investor who is trying to get home to her family for Christmas. Along the way she offers a lift to a mildly aggressive, vulnerable young woman, Gurl, whose meathead boyfriend, Blane, has left her stranded somewhere deep in the American wilderness.
Unusually for a novel, the vast majority of the narrative, if you can even call it that, takes place within the confines of a car over this lengthy journey, meaning that the book is almost entirely composed of dialogue. What makes it work is Campbell’s command of voice and the polar opposite perspectives she has created in her protagonists.
One memorable example of the divide is when Scarlett, quoting Virginia Woolf, tells Gurl, “Every woman should have a room of her own and five hundred pounds,” eliciting this succinct response from her school-dropout passenger: “Every woman should have a million bucks and be a slut.”
Of interest is Julie Carpenter's piece about robots as an antidote to human loneliness, where she charts the experiences of soldiers who mourn their drones destroyed in battle
By the end of the journey, the reader has come to understand the viewpoint of both women, while also getting a crash course in the technological advances of the not-too- distant future. The Love Makers is set in an uncanny near-future, where the integration of artificial intelligence in everyday life has progressed significantly. Imagine a Black Mirror take on Thelma and Louise, then throw in a vibrant debate on ethics and plenty of philosophising about the future of humankind. It’s a lot for the novel form to take on.
In recent times, authors such as Jeanette Winterson, Ian McEwan and Kazuo Ishiguro have explored the unknown frontiers of AI in their fiction, to varying degrees of success. Campbell goes one further by publishing her novel alongside a collection of 12 essays from leading scientists and commentators who examine what is at stake in human-machine relations. These essays make up the second half of the book, and the shift in format takes a while to get used to, but ultimately they add meaning to the subject matter of the novel and are suitably diverse in their own right.
Of particular interest is Anita Chandran’s argument on constructing racial identity in AI, and Julie Carpenter’s piece about robots as an antidote to human loneliness, where she charts the experiences of soldiers who mourn their drones destroyed in battle.
While each of the essays gives a broader context to The Love Makers, some delve into the specific world of the novel, as with an essay on robot-human hierarchies by Stephen Cave and Kanta Dihal, which notes, "The relationship between Gurl, Blane and Roxanne shows that positioning the robot at the bottom of the human hierarchy is not guaranteed to move the rest of humanity up."
If Campbell's ambition is to get readers thinking about what AI will mean for society, present and future, she has certainly achieved her aim
Roxanne, to return to the fiction, is a sex robot owned by Blane, who is wryly and accurately characterised as “not a man who likes to read”. Campbell examines Gurl’s place in the trio, where she comes in the hierarchy, how her agency is taken away from her, and how ultimately she starts to have feelings for the robot herself. Through these stories, there is a skilful exploration of sex, desire and the erotic nature of voyeurism. The Love Makers is terrifying on the ways in which AI may be used to subjugate women and encourage violent sexual assault or paedophilic predilections: “Roxanne’s got four people she can be: wild and horny, girl next door, mother, or hot bitch. There was a number five. A little girl called Roxette.”
From robot nannies (iMoms), to tracking your partner’s sexual activity (iPussy), to a nanochip that monitors an individual’s “emotional turbulence”, lest it affect their productivity at work, this is a novel of big ideas and ethical quandaries that may be closer than we think in real time. The lack of dramatic action does weigh things down from time to time, and there’s far too much exposition through dialogue, but Gurl’s knack for storytelling has a kind of hypnotic effect that keeps things buoyant and works in contrast to Scarlett’s somewhat heavy-handed storyline about missing her toddler son.
If Campbell's ambition in writing The Love Makers is to get readers thinking about what AI will mean for society, present and future, she has certainly achieved her aim. She is the author of three previous novels – her debut, On the Floor, was longlisted for the Orange Prize in 2012 – and a former investment banker who now teaches at Imperial College London. The Love Makers, with its many literary and academic references, combines her backgrounds to good effect. An intelligent, humane and original novel, this is a timely piece of work that explores the real and sometimes deadly consequences of human interactions with machines.
