The Sentient by Nadia Afifi

Am I old? Am I a curmudgeon? Nadia Afifi’s The Sentient is a book about people approximately my age who just finished grad school (just like me!) but somehow I felt 100x older than them. This book is paced like a YA book in a strangely unrealistic way to me. I feel like I’m now a boring person because I’m not as interested in unrealistically successful action scenes e.g. Amira immediately stealing a top secret medicine with absolutely no trouble and a plot that moves faster than Lightning McQueen (kachow). Amira is supposed to be in her mid-twenties but her decision making & her friendships feel so immature to me. Was it originally supposed to be about teenagers? That would make way more sense to me.

I am just really kind of sick of the whole ‘magical school’ or in this case, ‘science school’, stories. I found the premise of human cloning & shared conscious interesting, but there was too much trauma porn for me. It’s always surprising to pick something up & find references to the Mormons of yore or modern FLDS, but it wasn’t interesting enough for me to like the book. I didn’t find it particularly well written: immediately after Hadrian explains why going to space is a terrible idea our narrator says its’s the only logical choice??

Let’s not even get started on the character of Hadrian, who makes no sense (literally why is he british) and is way over powered - he can easily sneak people into space & just happens to have a teenage side kick who can hack literally anything & a madame friend with magical technology that’s impossible to have. And how did D’Arcy + Lee + team get to the Utah house? There’s never any explanation at any time? Interesting. Or rather, not interesting. Glossing over details just to have a cool plot device is never fun to me. I like my scifi to have a touch of realism or at least a solid system of science in place that has its own kind of logic (& I’m not even that crazy about hard scifi!). It’s hard to come to The Sentient after reading other amazing scifi like Ann Leckie’s works, in which there is a technological logic & the action moves precisely as slow, or fast, as I imagine it would in a real world. I will say I liked Afifi’s holomentic readings & the ideas that therapists could literally dive into dreams to understand consciousness. That was really interesting & the scenes that touched upon that were compelling.

I randomly picked this up at the library, so I don’t feel personally disappointed in any review or friend. The cover is really cool. The book? Not so much.