Made to Kill

September 28, 2015
Christopher (The Machine Awakes) merges pulp SF and crime novels in the pleasing launch of his L.A. trilogy. In an alternate 1960s America, Raymond is a robot PI, the last of his kind. He’s hired to find a missing movie star with secrets as deep as Raymond’s own. Raymond and his computer partner, Ada, would be at home in an Asimovian retro-future, but Asimov’s three laws of robotics are broken with impunity. The pacing, banter, and descriptions are classic noir, yet the stakes are higher, as Raymond learns that future of the free world is in his mechanical hands. The robot detective is morally gray and instantly likable, and the limitations placed on his abilities help maintain a heightened sense of danger and struggle. Genre mash-ups don’t always succeed, but this one will please fans of both gumshoes and laser beams.

September 15, 2015
Raymond Chandler meets Astounding in this pulpy, hard-boiled detective pastiche, the first of a trilogy by the author of The Empire State and The Spider Wars series (The Machine Awakes, 2015, etc.). In 1965, Raymond Electromatic is the world's last remaining robot. He and a powerful artificial intelligence, Ada, used to run a private detective agency in Los Angeles. That was before Ada, who apparently was "programmed for profit," figured out they'd make much more money using Raymond as a hit man. (Although the author explains that Ada and Raymond's creator, the late Professor Thornton, intended his creations to be financially independent, we never learn what benefit they would actually gain from the money. What use would they even have for money-to pay the power bills, possibly?) Their latest client, film actress Eva McLuckie, hires Raymond to kill missing actor Charles David. Intending to kill both his target and his client, the robot follows their trail to find Russian spies conducting secret and highly radioactive research underneath an exclusive nightclub. His struggle to comprehend the plot is made more difficult by his memory limitations: every 24 hours, his magnetic tape runs out and he must replace it with a blank one. Christopher's afterword explains that this novel is both a carefully researched homage to Chandler and a response to Chandler's ridicule of science fiction. The result certainly borders on the ridiculous, and it's more parody than homage. While it nods at noir, it lacks that genre's bleakness, which may be intentional. None of the characters, biological or constructed, are all that sympathetic-we feel for Raymond, victim of technologically induced amnesia and Ada's manipulations, but his programmed indifference to murder is...uncomfortable-and the villains are cartoonish. A small idea stretched until it snaps.

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September 15, 2015

It's 1966, and Ray Electromatic is the last robot in the world. His cover is that he is a Los Angeles private detective, but in reality he works for his computer handler Ada as an assassin. Every night his memory banks overwrite, so he must rely on Ada to fill him in on his cases. His latest starts out when a mysterious woman hires him to kill a movie star, which leads Ray to a Soviet conspiracy. VERDICT Drunk on its own pulp influences, the most recent work from the inventive Christopher (Empire State; Burning Dark) is an alternate history with intriguing ingredients that fail to jell. The noir tone and Cold War atmosphere clash at times, and the author seems to be uninterested in explaining his version of history--a failed robotic golden age that is long over when the novel begins.--MM

Copyright 2015 Library Journal, LLC Used with permission.

Starred review from November 15, 2015
The genre-blending trend takes an enjoyable turn in this hard-boiled-PI and science-fiction hybrid, which author Christopher describes in his foreword as being like Raymond Chandler's long-lost science fiction epic. The year, 1965. The place, Hollywood. The world, alternate (JFK is still alive, and the Cuban Missile Crisis is just getting going). The citizenry is doubly captivated by the Cuban Missile Crisis and a big Hollywood premier. Enter our hero, Ray, a robot PI. Ray is the last robot left in a world that used to be dominated by them. He has recently been reprogrammed by his supercomputer boss, Ada, to be an undercover contract killer, but with only a 24-hour memory tape, Ray is not sure how or why this happened. When a sultry starlet comes into Ray's office with an order to kill her leading man and a bagful of gold bars to cover the payment, Ray lands in the middle of an evil conspiracy with roots much deeper than the movie industry. The action, plot, dialogue, and characters are straight out of Chandler, while the science-fiction elements are reminiscent of the very best of that genre from the 1940s and '50s (think Philip K. Dick and Robert Heinlein). This first in the L.A. trilogy is a fun, fast read for anyone willing to take the speculative leapa must-add for most fiction collections.(Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 2015, American Library Association.)