Cassie Barr has an almost psychic ability to work with machinery. A star mechanic servicing expensive cars, she can fix things nobody else is able to. She can even sense “strange waves emanating from computers” when something is wrong with their software.
As a child, she dreamed of working with robots. Now, a local company, Lorbar—headed by husband-and-wife team Loren Anderson and Barton Forsythe—is about to launch the most sophisticated and lifelike android ever.
Fortuitously, Forsythe brings his misfiring Lamborghini to Cassie’s garage. After working her magic on the car, she finds herself offered a job at Lorbar. Though she loathes Forsythe—describing him as “a lecherous, oily, creepy, bad-tempered liar”—the opportunity is too good to pass up. Soon she finds herself responsible for maintaining a robot called Sam, which stands for “Synthetic Android Man.”
Lorbar plans to run Sam as a candidate for the presidency, with Anderson seeing it as the perfect Trojan horse for her ambitions. As she explains: “For starters, you know how nasty politics can get, but just think: the opposition won’t find any dirt on a candidate with no history. And he’ll espouse exactly the policies we tell him to. We’ll be one hundred percent in control.” Aside from Lorbar’s political plans, Cassie’s life is complicated further by Sam falling in love with her and suffering from intense jealously of her boyfriend Alex. The situation takes a darker turn when Forsythe attempts to rape Cassie and his wife orders a cover-up.
Written by Cathy Parker, ROBOT: A Deadly Love Story is set in the very near future. Elements of its story—misogyny, assault, and cover-ups—will feel all too familiar to today’s readers. Likewise, the questions the author raises about the potential and pitfalls of robotics and AI are thought-provoking. Though the title may suggest a simple tale about a wayward robot, the novel offers much more.
Parker is always in control of her material, skillfully blending the trials and tribulations of unrequited love and its emotional fallout with the philosophical questions of what it truly means to be human. The book reads as a solid sci-fi romance while subtly edging into the territory of sophisticated satire.
Without delving into potentially contentious specifics that could identify real-world targets, Parker’s fictitious Federal Party and its devious machinations embody the worst traits of contemporary politics on both sides of the divide. Added to this is the clever subplot involving Cassie’s mother, who suffers from Alzheimer’s disease, allowing for a deeper exploration of how memory and real emotion are intricately tied to the human experience.
ROBOT: A Deadly Love Story is an entertaining and well-constructed near-future fable. Under the guise of a sci-fi romance, Cathy Parker examines what it means to be human—and the potential dangers of giving too much autonomy to AI.
~Kent Lane for IndieReader