A couple of weeks ago we saw “her“, the Spike Jonze film about the lonely man who develops romantic feelings for his artificially intelligent operating system. I thought that one of the most fascinating aspects of the film was how the OS, who calls herself Samantha, grew from the basic program that Theodore bought into a complicated, dynamic, interesting, and fully-actualized “person.” Questions of physicality aside, witnessing Samantha’s evolution beyond her original programming was like watching any human being discover, adapt, learn, and become who they are meant to be.
As I was thinking about Samantha (and her relationship with her world and Theodore), my mind drifted to Jon Skovron‘s Man Made Boy, which has been on my desk awaiting a review since I read it around Halloween. In Skovron’s imaginative and hilarious novel, a brilliant young programmer creates an unbelievably complex AI and sets it free on the internet. VI, as the AI names herself, and Boy, her creator, don’t develop the kind of bond that Theodore and Samantha do; instead, Boy rejects his creation and VI, in her confusion and anger, turns destructive and violent, nearly destroying Boy’s world and killing him in the process. Their flawed relationship gets at the heart of the relationships and characters who so uniquely and interestingly populate Man Made Boy: that of creator and created.
That’s because Boy is the son of The Monster and Bride, created by Dr. Frankenstein, although they are living in 21st century New York City in an off-Broadway theatre where the entire show is populated by all of the fantastical, mythical creatures human beings’ imaginations have created, from vampires to trolls, centaurs, fairies and even Medusa herself. Boy chaffs against the constraints of the only life he’s ever known, and when he gets the chance to escape into the human world, he doesn’t look back. But life on the “outside” isn’t exactly what he’d planned for: he can pass reasonably well for a human (albeit an ugly one), but he finds loneliness, rejection, and fear of discovery make his life harder to bear than he thought it would be. Once he realizes that VI is after him, he embarks on a cross-country road trip with the granddaughters of Jekyll and Hyde, who introduce him to malls and diners, love and heartbreak, and the eventual realization that he has to face the monsters in his life, both inside and out.
- Posted by Cori
For more on authors who have reimagined stories of their favorite “minor” characters from literature, check out this interesting story from NPR’s Weekend Edition Saturday: http://www.npr.org/2013/12/07/249058793/dont-call-it-fanfic-writers-rework-their-favorite-stories