Hey howdy hey, friends and fiends! It’s, uh. It’s been a minute, hasn’t it?
Look, I’ll shoot straight with you guys. Y’all know that my mental health is garbage, and being housebound for (*checks calendar*) five months and counting isn’t helping anything. I’m tired in that anxious sort of way where all I want to do is rest but I’m haunted by every activity that I need to do that isn’t sleeping. Not to mention I got real disillusioned, real quick, with SFF and its fandom as a whole there for a while.
But I’m getting better. Baby steps. And boy howdy am I glad to be en route to getting better. Because otherwise, I wouldn’t get to be here to talk about THE HEREAFTER BYTES by Vincent Scott.
Here’s our Goodreads summary:
Come for the cyberspace, stay for the laughs.
Come for the laughs, stay for the cyberspace
Romeo is a digital copy of his dead bio self—a ghost—in a spindly robot body. When Romeo’s friend Abigail—a dominatrix with a gift for uncovering secrets—tells Romeo she’s at risk because of dangerous info from a client, Romeo agrees to help her investigate.
Pursued by digital Golden Retrievers and a real-world assassin, Romeo slips in and out of cyberspace in a madcap race for survival. Can he unmask the criminal who threatens the integrity of cyberspace and the real-world economy before it’s too late?
The description doesn’t do it justice, honestly. I mean yeah, that’s what the story is on its surface level, but beneath the fun and campy adventure-based murder mystery, we get to a very deep theme, and one that I’m known to enjoy.
The theme of THERE HEREAFTER BYTES is, of course, personhood.
(Before someone comes crawling out of the woodwork to hiss pro-life in my ears, that’s a seperate can of worms. One that I have no intention of getting into. Seriously, I will Dr. Seuss your ass so hard. Go home and look up “bodily autonomy.”)
It’s no secret that I love books that ask the questions, “What does it mean to be a person? What does it mean to be human? Where does the line lie?” Between the flesh-and-blood humans and the digitally interred (known colloquially as “ghosts”), you would think that the line is nearly nonexistent, but Scott clearly says, “No, I don’t think so.”
I don’t want to spoil the defining moment of this, so you’re not getting the full context. But at one point, Romeo is confronted with the idea that a server exists with thousands of ghosts all be tortured. Despite knowing that their memories of the torture will be deleted, knowing that maybe they weren’t the best people, knowing that he currently lives in a world where digitally-existing people like himself aren’t viewed as having the same status as the living, he still wants to help them.
Simply because they’re still people. Different living situation, different needs to live, but still people all the same. And by god, it cuts to it in a way that doesn’t dither or make you have to draw your own conclusions – it leads by example. (Drawing conclusions is fun, of course, but sometimes you want someone to just say, “Hey guys, this is legitimately wrong and we shouldn’t do this.”)
We see this discussion of personhood not only through the eyes of someone who is technically deceases, but also someone who is asexual and aromantic. Someone who, while walking around in a flesh-and-blood human body, was told that he wasn’t human because he didn’t feel romantic or sexual feelings for anyone. It’s quite a critique, honestly, and as someone who is also ace, it’s nice to have someone point out the way society treats people who don’t fall within their ideal standard in terms of relationships.
That was a very long, drawn out way of pointing at Romeo and going, “Ha! I do that!”
What can I say? After years of seeing the Ace DiscHorse(c) everywhere and being silent about my own lack of attraction, it’s nice to see it in something fun and light.
Speaking of fun and light, the humor in this novel is top-fucking-notch my friends. I found myself chuckling quite a bit throughout the story, which is a nice change in pace let me tell you. That’s what most sci-fi is missing nowadays, really: people chiding others for not being able to find menus and then going, “Wait, no, I found it, I found it.” Like, I’m glad someone is using this for its full comedic energy.
At the end of the day, I would happily pass this book to anyone looking for something lighthearted and entertaining. It sparked a bit of joy in the grey landscape of my existence. It’s funny, but offers some depths to plunge beneath the humor. I’m literally trying to find all the best ways to say, “I really enjoyed this book for its lighthearted take on the serious topic of the line between humanity and personhood,” without actually losing any of the nuance, but that’s pretty much it. This book definitely gets 10 out of 10 from me, and I hope that you, too, can fit this book in your TBR so you can giggle about some AI-related humor.
We talk more about this in the podcast episode that’s gone live, so def check that out. But all in all, this book was a total vibe and it hit the right spot at the right time. THE HEREAFTER BYTES gets my stamp of approval.
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AFTERLIFE BLUES IN THE HEREAFTER BYTES is out now on your favorite podcatcher! Don’t forget to find us on Twitter and Instagram to talk to us about what your digital self might be doing in the next hundred years! 😀
