Lambda
-
-
5.0 • 2 Ratings
-
-
- $9.99
Publisher Description
Whoever the lambdas might be, and wherever they really come from, they’re already here among us.
Outwardly alien arrivals from a distant sea, the lambdas are genetically human. The government has noticed them. So has a whole gamut of extremist groups. Cara Gray has noticed them too, first as a haunting presence in her otherwise ordinary childhood, then as the impossibly shifting target of her work as a police officer.
When a bomb goes off at a school, Cara finds herself the weak point in a surveillance regime that has failed to prevent the worst terrorist atrocity in decades. A nebulous group of lambda extremists claims responsibility for the attack — but how could a vulnerable community of tiny aquatic humans, barely visible in society and seemingly indifferent to their own exploitation, be capable of such a horrific act?
In Cara’s world a family member can be replaced with an app, a police quantum computer has the power to decide who dies, and objects are legally alive. As her relationship with the lambdas deepens, Cara must decide whether to submit to the patterns of technology, violence and obsession, or to take action of her own.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Musgrave debuts with an overly complex story about a young woman's stuttering early career in an England full of strange creatures and sentient technology. Humans coexist with lambdas, semiaquatic humanoids that live in wet basements and perform undesirable jobs. New police officer Cara Gray loses her first assignment surveilling the lambdas after she fails to foresee a school bombing and a lambda rights group claims responsibility. Cara's job is replaced by an AI program, and she's reassigned to be a community liaison officer to the lambda. She grows attached to them, especially Gavin Knight-Green, who has a fixation on the "Four Fertile Pairs," lambdas in the Labrador Sea thought to be the original birth parents. Then Cara is approached by a secret intelligence service with an ultimatum: she must agree to converse with a synthetic human assassin tasked with "mitigating" the bombing suspect or her failure to stop the bombing will be exposed. The plot has a few too many threads, many unresolved, and the unusual structure—the action is intercut with a one-sided conversation that goes unexplained for much of the novel—adds to the confusion. Still, Musgrave uses his tale to provide some affecting commentary on refugee crises and the future of technology. Readers will find plenty, if perhaps too much, to chew on.
