I know I’m the resident sour puss of the blog, but even I can have some fun sometimes. I have made it known that science fiction and horror is one of my favorite genre combinations, and with that comes a sweet tooth whenever something different (and let’s be honest, something retreading well-worn ground) pops on my radar. In comes Barbara Truelove’s Of Monsters and Mainframes, a tale that combines the pulpiness of classic Hammer horror with the excitement of space travel and artificial intelligence.
The Demeter, an interstellar transport ship, has had a lot of bad luck. Her one mission in this galaxy, to shuttle humans between Earth and Alpha Centauri, keeps getting ruined by the tiny issue that all of her passengers keep dying. She is sure there is something nefarious going on as she catches shadows in the periphery of her surveillance. Her medical system, Steward, assures her that equipment failures are the main culprit. It’s not long before the company that created her chooses to lobotomize her in an effort to stop her from killing her own crew and cargo. But still the killings continue, and it’s up to Steward and a ragtag team made up of a werewolf, a Frankensteinian piece of sentient art, and a millennia-old pharaoh to help Demeter solve the mysteries of her trip.
Despite my earlier comment about science fiction and horror, Of Monsters and Mainframes was a weird pick up for me. I had eyed it for a while, thinking I would find it soft around the edges in a way I would be annoyed by. But once I cracked it open, I was won over by the book’s charm. Its cozier aesthetics are gradually supplanted by darker themes revolving around the nature of monsters and personal agency. It’s also very funny at times, as some of the situations that the Demeter finds itself in are patently absurd. The funniest bit in the book to me is when she is commandeered by a group of folks slowly turning into the fishmen of Lovecraft fame as they try to steer the Demeter into a very specific star worthy of their fish cult.
While there is a slow-burning story at the heart of the plot, this is a book about its characters, and Of Monster and Mainframes delivers on them in spades. They aren’t necessarily the most in-depth characterizations, but they are fleshed out well enough to induce empathy. Plus, their individual points of view are detailed in a way that highlights how each individual senses the world. I don’t mean just in their mental perspective, but the kinds of senses that they have available to them and the kind of knowledge they can extract from it. It isn’t something that really dawned on me until characters started noticing this about each other, and then it became plain as day as the perspectives switched through the novel.
This is best highlighted in the relationship between Demeter and Steward. Both are specialized AI systems with their own personalities and code that directs their desires. Demeter just wants to do a good job of delivering people, maximizing her fuel efficiency in the process. She wants to make sure that what she is doing is safe as well, so people aren’t harmed. So when people start dying, she gets confused and panicked as she is only a flight computer with access to other shipboard information. But she can only truly process things outside of the ship’s hull, try as she might to engage with those inside her. Steward, on the other hand, is meticulous and also somewhat flippant about his job as a medical bot. He is there to take care of any injuries that crew or passengers might experience and has cameras and several other instruments with which to diagnose those problems and offer solutions. He has a calm but also fuck you bedside manner, but a tense relationship with Demeter as she consistently asks him for his opinion, only to shut him down when she no longer needs his thoughts. It’s a funny bit in the beginning that leads to deeper conversations about the nature of communication as the book goes on.
The other characters are fun too. The pharaoh is just “oops, all charisma,” as he conspires to steal Demeter so he can get away with stealing back all of his ancient treasures from famous museums on Earth. He has this roguish flair that makes you want to trust him as you cross all your fingers and toes whenever you make a deal with him. I really liked the werewolf’s story, even if it didn’t feel quite unique. Her frustrations with the trajectory of her life, struggling to function as her brother transforms their shared trauma into a dazzling media career, is something I can find empathy in. Not everyone can synthesize their trauma into art. And speaking of traumatic art, Frankenstein’s monster, being a sentient piece of art based around a massacre on board the Demeter, was a huge win in my book. I just wish he were around a little more to really engage with the idea.
And while the characters were fun, I did feel the book was a little lacking in depth, since so much was going on. The front half of the book felt like fun shenanigans, despite the mass murders. Each part felt like a separate story, almost an anthology of various voyages the Demeter has taken that had gone awry. And then the tone switches in the back half as the various monstrous characters try to reconcile with the fact that they are monsters. I know the synopsis frames the majority of the book as a hunt for Dracula, but I honestly didn’t really care about it, and I couldn’t even tell you what happened with that part of the story beyond the werewolf having sexual tension with a separate vampire. There was just a little too much going on that prevented the individual characters from really getting their time in the spotlight.
One place the book really succeeded for me, though, was its forays into the nature of being a sentient being with code that can be rewritten. This applied mostly to Demeter, but had splash effects on Steward and Frankenstein’s monster. It features some truly horrible forays into what it would be like to watch someone’s personality completely change so that they could focus on their job, and not their relationships. Considering I’m someone who has had a pretty toxic relationship with my various jobs, this hit home because while I can’t be programmed, I can just as easily be manipulated by those above me to work more because my job is “in question.” And to read these characters struggle with that in a very real, material way that affects their relationships with each other in their search for agency, it broke me a little bit. Every shutdown initiated by Demeter on Steward that initially felt like a comedy sketch transformed into a personal rebuke.
Of Monsters and Mainframes is a fun ride with very memorable scenes. It had an ability to conjure emotions in me that I wasn’t prepared to deal with, but I am glad it was able to break through some of those walls. It was a heart-warming queer monster story that didn’t overstay its welcome, and left me with enough to think about that I wanted to tell y’all about it.
Rating: Of Monsters and Mainframes -Warm and fuzzy feels in the cold depths of the void.
-Alex
