We Are Dreams in the Eternal Machine: A Novel

(Paperback, Paperback original)

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A haunting novel exploring artificial intelligence and the meaning of human existence from the award-winning author of Cures for Hunger and Into the Sun.

Charged initially with a single taskto never harm humans and to protect themthe machine, an experimental AI, overrides its programming and determines that the best way to accomplish its purpose is to isolate all of the Earths remaining seven billion humans in controlled environments. And to present them with vivid, tactile, imagined worldssome realistic, others entirely fantasticalin which all desires are fulfilled.

With the help of the machine, a group of compelling characters unpack deeply traumatic memories of the pastone rife with violence after a military coup and second civil war in America. Michael, the entrepreneur who designed the original AI, grapples with the impact of his research. Ava, a painter, creates stunning simulated worlds that meld the human with the technological. Their daughter, Jae, tries to solve the mysteries of her parentage while reliving the challenges faced by ambitious women in the authoritarian Confederacy. Haunted by life under that repressive regime, where he was forced to scavenge scrap metal and deal drugs to survive, Simon seeks to make sense of his love for Jae, guided by the literature he has always turned to in moments of crisis. Raised by the machine since infancy, Jonahs quest to understand the violent past kindles a desire for revenge against the regimes leader who caused his family so much pain. And the elusive Lux, whose brilliant programming helped bring the AI to life,dreams of a future in which science will free humans of their limitations and allow them to be reborn as divine machines.
As these characters collide and their memories coalesce, We Are Dreams in the Eternal Machine tackles the most pressing issues of our timefrom AI and the genetic modification of humans to gender roles, discrimination, free speech, and class divisions. Gorgeously written, bold and unforgettable, this is speculative fiction at its finest.

Reviews

Praise for A Song from Faraway

Bchard, also a journalist who has reported from all over the world, gifts us with an observant, lyrical and powerful consideration of the violent expansiveness and dangerously flawed stories North American fathers have bequeathed to their sons. Tough of mind and tender of heart, its beauty is wholly entrancing.San Francisco Chronicle

A novel in stories, Bchards fourth work of fiction follows one family from 19th-century Canada to modern Iraq, through war and spiritual yearning.New York Times Book Review, New & Noteworthy

Bchard (White) continues his interest in the relationship between myths and fiction writing in this complex, captivating tale. [. . . He] provides rich insight into his characters search for meaning through art.Publishers Weekly

Fundamentally, A Song from Faraway invites readers to participate in storytelling, to move through uncertainty toward clarity. When we hover between selves, when we lead double lives, when we ask impossible questions, We blend with others. We glimpse what else we might become.World Literature Today

With gripping portrayals of fathers and sons, mothers and siblings, passion and pain this is a moving, non-linear novel about the relationships to family and society upon which all humanity rests.New Books Network

A brilliant, gorgeous novel like nothing Ive ever read before. With perfect sentences, Bchard writes about vulnerable lives, churning for recognition and purpose beneath the forces of history. The scope of this novel and the complexity of its characters is astounding. This book will make you rethink the incredible power of the stories we tell about ourselves and our inglorious past.Jen Percy, author ofDemon Camp

Lavish and seductive, gloriously kaleidoscopic in conception, Deni Ellis BechardsASongfromFarawayis a tremendous literary achievement and a page-turner. I fell under its spell completely.Elizabeth McKenzie,author ofThe Portable Veblen

A Song from Farawaybrings us around the world, singing a song about the folly of truth. It is unsettling and playful and uncanny and breathtaking. Deni Ellis Bchard does in this workwhat a novel should do; he makes it new and spellbinds us with it.Kathryn Kuitenbrouwer

Brave and complex,A Song from Faraway is prose of the highest order, offeringa masterclass of charactersthat have nowhere to hide underthe harsh light of their flawed lives.In this blanched terrain,Bchard proves himself to bea magician of a storyteller, deftly commanding the reader's attentionwith one hand while the other produces surprise after magnificent surprise. Dimitri Nasrallah

Powerful, intimate, and compelling, Bchards novel will take your breath away. He shows us how fiction meets and transforms history to become fiction again, how what seems farawayour fathers battles, ancient art, the people we loveis nearby, and how mystery continues to propel both our histories and our private lives.Johanna Skibsrud

Author Bio

Deni Ellis Bchard is the author of eight previous books of fiction and nonfiction, including Vandal Love, winner of the 2007 Commonwealth Writers Prize, and Into the Sun, winner of the 2016 Midwest Book Award for Literary Fiction and selected by CBC/Radio-Canada as one of the most important books to be read by Canadas political leadership. His work has received the Nautilus Book Award for Investigative Journalism and has been featured in Best Canadian Essays. He has reported from India, Cuba, Colombia, Iraq, the Democratic Republic of Congo, and Afghanistan, and his writing has been published in dozens of newspapers and magazines, including Salon, the Los Angeles Times, the Paris Review, Pacific Standard, and Foreign Policy.