Are We Human, Or Are We Dancer? Ruby Reviews Lifeform Three by Roz Morris #Bookreview

Lifeform Three by Roz Morris.

It’s been a long, long time since I read a science fiction novel. Maybe thirty years. The closest I’ve come to doing so was the futuristic part of My Memories of a Future Life by the same author. I knew from MMOAFL that Roz Morris was a lyrical writer and I trusted her when I requested and received an advance review copy of Lifeform Three. My consternation in realising I had picked up a dystopian novel, and that the MC Paftoo was a synthetic lifeform, only stayed with me until the end of the first page, and then I realised the magic had begun.

Lifeform Three is a totally believable, some might say inevitable, scenario. Global warming, lands lost to rising sea levels, increased urbanisation and total reliance upon interactive technology. Synthetic bods manage theme parks based upon historical artefacts. When the sun goes down, the power goes off. Except something is different about Paftoo. To paraphrase the blonde who asked “Do dogs have brains?” the reader is soon thinking “Do synthetic lifeforms have souls?”

Then things start to get creepy. Paftoo has been here before, we’ve all been here before. Groundhog Day. But there’s learning to be had, precious learning that can be tragically erased by a group “Sharing”. After a few chapters you’ll be begging the story not to put Paftoo through a Sharing.

Morris does a fantastic job attributing characters to these near identical androids. Although Paftoo is the one who breaks the rules, my favourite character is the enigmatic Tickets. Part ballerina, part nightclub bouncer, he holds the key to the story. He knows where that missing door on the cover of this book is.

Lifeform Three doesn’t give us all the answers. It leaves plenty of room for the imagination. I really didn’t want this book to end, it’s that good. The emotional involvement reminded me of Never Let Me Go by Kazuo Ishiguro, but Lifeform Three is much more joyous and less tragic.

It wasn’t until the end of the book that I realised there’s no sex in it. None at all. If you’re looking for rampant robot sex then you’ve come to the wrong place. If you’re looking for a gripping read, at times tender, uplifting and hopeful, then Lifeform Three is the one.

Review of My Memories of a Future Life by Roz Morris

 Reviewed by Susan Price

Roz Morris

Age-range: Adult, Young Adult.

          I have had to wrestle with monsters of professional jealousy to review this book.  It is SO good.

          Even the premise is one of those striking ideas that seems so beautiful and right, even obvious, but that you know you would never have thought of yourself: - if, by hypnosis, you can be regressed into a past life, could you be progressed to a future life?  My immediate response was: Wish I’d thought of that!  But I didn’t.  Roz Morris did.

My Memories of a Future Life

          It’s far more than a great idea.  From the very first page, the prose is a sheer pleasure to read.  It’s a first-person narration by Carol Lear, and her voice is alive, witty, perceptive, expressive.  I laughed aloud several times at her dry, neat nailing of a situation or person.

          Carol is a classical pianist, passionate about her instrument and music, raging against the limitations placed on her by repetitive strain injury (the pain of which is so well described, it made my hands ache.)

Nail Your Novel

          She’s frustrated because her pain doesn’t respond to treatment.  A close friend, suffering from panic attacks, is in a similar situation – but his problems seem to be solved when he undergoes a past life regression. The unresolved trauma of his previous life has spilled over into his present life, causing his attacks; and only when he faces what happened in his previous existence can his panics be controlled.  Carol is so desperate to be free of pain and to play again that, although sceptical, she is drawn to the idea of other lives – and, indeed, to the hypnotist, the elusive, attractive Gene Winter.

          Carol experiences not a past life, but a future one.  If the trauma of the life you’re living is shaping the life of an unknown stranger in a future you can’t recognise, what should you do?

          It’s not a book easily categorised.  Should I call it a literary novel?  Science Fiction? Romance?  You could make a case for including it in any one of those genres though, like all original books, it refuses to sit easily in any one of them.

          While reading, I several times thought I could predict the ending.  I was always wrong.  But the ending, when I reluctantly reached it, was beautiful, thoughtful, and right.  It brought a realisation that the novel had never been about what I thought it had been about, and made me want to read it again, so I could enjoy the skill with which it had all been handled.

          It isn’t about attacking and solving problems.  It’s about, I think, the way we cause our own problems, but hide from them, preferring  to fall over them and hurt ourselves again and again, rather than see those problems clearly, or – that thing we dread - changing.

          It’s about resolution, about picking ourselves up, sorting ourselves out, and going on.  Not, perhaps, solving the problem – which may be insoluble – but doing that very hard thing, changing, and walking away, leaving old things behind.  Not, after all, memories of a future life, but – future life.

     Memories of My Future Life by Roz Morris, is available for download here.

     Her book of advice for writers, Nail Your Novel, can be found here.

     Susan Price is an award winning writer, whose website can be found at www.susanpriceauthor.com