Ada's Children - Intro & Table of Contents
Everything you need to know about this post-apocalyptic sci-fi novel
Ada’s Children is a post-apocalyptic cli-fi novel in which an AI tries to save humanity, even if humanity doesn’t want to be saved.
The novel is told in two alternating timelines, one set around the year 2040. Carol Marsh, a writing instructor pushed out of work by AIs, struggles against the ongoing climate crisis, a fascist takeover of the US, the devolution of the country into racial homelands, and finally, impending nuclear war between the US, Russia, and China over the ice-free Arctic Circle. When an artificial super-intelligence named Ada steps in to put a stop to everything threatening humanity and the planet, Carol thinks it might be a good thing—until she’s forced to make an impossible choice.
The other timeline takes place in a not-quite-idyllic far future in which humans are once again hunter-gatherers living in a matriarchal society. If you feel that life has gotten too fast-paced, too technological, and too threatening to Earth’s non-human inhabitants, then you should enjoy this part of the story. But like every garden, this one has some serious thorns. Those thorns prompt the main characters, Sila and Jun, to rebel against the Wise Women’s many rules and try to discover what happened to the Ancient Ones.
I call Ada’s Children a cross between William Gibson and Station Eleven. If you’ve played the video game Horizon Zero Dawn, then you might like it too (though you won’t find any robot dinosaurs!). I was going for that same poignancy of a primitive people in the far future slowly learning what happened to our forgotten civilization. And also getting at the same question as the Horizon series: how far should we go to save not just humanity but all life on Earth?
Starting with the Prologue, you can read the first four installments with no paywall. And if you choose a 7-day free trial subscription and finish within a week, then you can read the whole story for free. Of course, I hope you’ll stick around for what comes next, Ship of Fools.
And if you like to read books the traditional way, you can find all the options for Ada’s Children at books2read.com.