I’m stalling. 

Not on anything truly important, just on a book I started reading. It’s called The People’s Library by Veronica G. Henry, and it’s a near-future (maybe 2050 or 2060?) story about AI and libraries. It’s not badly written or anything, and in fact I read through about half of it in one sitting. 

But since then I’ve been stalling. 

This happens to me sometimes. I’ll read part of a book, and then decide I don’t love it enough to jump back into it, but I’ve also read far enough that I can’t DNF it because I’ve committed too much time to it. I think the last time this happened was with one of the Mary Russell mysteries. Either that or with one of the Kushiel books, because I got to a particularly bleak point (which Jacqueline Carey is very good at writing) and didn’t want to watch the MC suffer more even though I knew she was going to survive and win the day. 

There’s no reason for me not to finish The People’s Library. It’s a relatively quick read (although, for me, everything is a relatively quick read) and I could probably finish it in one or two more nights. I think what’s bothering me is the hopeful nature of it, especially as it relates to human rights and AI. In the book, there’s a bloodless “coup” when it comes to AI and intelligent laws are passed surrounding it. That is not going to happen in our current timeline. I can pretty much guarantee that. 

This is my problem with near-future sci-fi: the authors are either hopeful and positive about the way things are going to change, or they’re so doom-and-gloom that you don’t want to read the book in the first place. This book is one of the former, and while it was interesting to read the author’s thoughts on how the AI revolution would go, I don’t think it’s very believable. 

Which is too bad, really. If humanity could just stop hating each other long enough to think rationally about things, we could have a united planet and maybe someday reach the world that we see in Star Trek. I just doubt we’re ever going to get there, especially the way things are going now, and there’s no relief on the horizon.