Jinx

Fun & fantastic read with series ethical questions addressed.

My favorite techno-thriller novelist is back, after a brief hiatus, and we are all the better for it! Encountering the KESTREL team again was like meeting up with old (and still lethally effective) friends. In JINX, we have a story that is positively eerie in its timeliness, seeing right through to a very possible dystopic future of AI gone rogue. However, unlike AI tropes in sci-fi movies and literature, Gemmell’s tale reflects the deep conundrums inherent in human ethics and this made perfect sense, in the context of the novel’s pulse-pounding narrative—LLMs, after all, are trained on almost the entire corpus of the human word online, within which one finds the most ancient questions. Such a question comes alive in the hands of this skilled story-teller, whose third novel in the KESTREL series reveals nothing less than mastery of the genre. And at the risk of spoiling the story a bit, I found myself with a profound sensation of utter sadness at the very beginning of JINX, in which a character who feels like they’re going to have a main role in the narrative appears… and then disappears, all in the space of the novel’s prologue. Gemmell has an uncanny ability to characterize someone in the briefest strokes and with such spare elegance—but suggesting a deep back story for them, which readers glimpse in our imaginations, hence immediately engendering keen identification with that character. Gemmell’s novel is paced so tightly, yet breathes a great deal in the interstices; the introspective ruminations of Aldridge, Captain Greenwood—and yes, even the AI— elevates this story and brings this reader’s experiences these days in the new world of LLMs and generative AI to a fantastically thrilling plane. It is all very, very real. Can’t recommend this highly enough.