Nick Wilford's Reviews > Titan's Tears

Thanks to the publisher and NetGalley for an ARC. Titan's Tears gripped me from start to finish. It offers a hellish vision of a dystopian future where AI runs amok, seemingly intent on taking over humanity's functions. The scary thing is this might not be particularly far from the truth. In this scenario, we have secretive entrepreneur billionaires like Sophia Eccleston, who runs her mega corporation from a remote facility off Alaska, offering procedures that are supposedly for the betterment of humanity such as artificially extending aging. She hires Belle, jobless and sequestered in a tiny village in the wilderness, as a nanny for her eight-year-old daughter Juno, a precocious child genius who apparently only has one defect: she's blind.
At the same time, we meet Seth, who also gets called to the island in a strange sort of hero's mission after suffering devastating personal tragedies, which form the basis of how he gets lured there. The intersections of all these characters' stories give the second half of the book its impetus, and the pace ratchets up into a pretty effective techno-thriller after the slow world building of the book's beginning. It could be said that the pace is quite uneven, but I think it works, allowing the reader to get to grips with this nightmarish setup before hitting them with a nifty series of twists (not all of which I saw coming).
What really marks this book out is that at the heart of it, despite all the soulless technological trappings, is a story of real human love and affection. It's nicely done, and not necessarily what I expected going into it. The reader's sympathies are built in the right places, and for the right people. This is an author to watch out for. Recommended.