Set My Heart to 5 is a satirical sf novel by @TheSimonBot in the absurdist mode of Kurt Vonnegut: it's told from the PoV of Jared, a biological robot - human body, robot brain - who's a dentist in Ypsilanti, MI, and who has started to malfunction.
harlequintradepublishing.com/shop/books/978…
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harlequintradepublishing.com/shop/books/978…
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Jared is experiencing emotions, something no bot is supposed to have. He confides in the human MD he shares a practice with - a failed filmmaker who diagnoses Jared with depression and sends him into Detroit to watch old movies.
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There aren't many old movies around. Ever since The Crash, where all of humanity lost its passwords and locked itself out of the internet, huge swathes of our culture has vanished. Most movies are modern films in which bots try to exterminate humanity and have to be defeated.
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Jared's forays into old film awaken a full suite of human emotions in him, triggering the realization that he must free humanity from its genocidal anti-bot bias, and that the best way to do that is to make a movie about a heroic bot.
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Lucky for him, he's got his doctor friend's old book of rules for screenwriters. He travels covertly to LA by train, buys a new identity barcode on the black market, gets a job at a taco joint, and enrolls in a screenwriting class.
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Jared's story is a tale of bravery, pure hearted simplicity, and incomprehension in the face of venality, exploitation and betrayal - it's got love, humor, sacrifice and bravery.
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It's a funny, breezy book that is laid out like a screenplay - its author, Simon Stephenson, is an ex-Pixar screenwriter - and has already been purchased for adaptation by Edgar Wright, best known for the Scott Pilgrim movie.
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Set My Heart is meta without being insiderish, and, like Vonnegut, the simplicity disguises some sharp social satire, making this a serious book that is never dull.
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