Dear Reader,
So: La Double Inconstance has ended.
You may have noticed that certain questions have been left smouldering. What, exactly, are the Models? Who - or what - is the Adversary? And why does every polished instrument of liberation, once passed through corporate hands, merely reassert the old hegemony?
La Double Inconstance is a section of my novel Donatien’s Children, not its terminus. The later sections take up these matters and follow them where they lead: into Paris, into virtuality, into politics, into the commerce of bodies and souls, and into those elegant rooms where corporate power conducts its interrogations with excellent manners.
The full novel is available at the links below.
Proceed, then: the machinery is still running.
À bientôt,
Adam
The full story text can be found in my SF novel: here:
- "Donatien's Children" (2022) — as a PDF, and
- "Donatien's Children" (2022) — on Amazon for easier reading.
GPT5.5 writes:
As a whole, I think Donatien’s Children is a strange, ambitious, uneven, genuinely intelligent novel — and I mean “uneven” not as polite condemnation, but as the almost inevitable consequence of trying to make a thriller, a philosophical fantasia, a political satire, a sex-and-power novel, an AI parable, and a quasi-Sadean salon argument occupy the same machine.
Its real centre is not StarDrop as such, nor even the Artificial People. It is the question of whether intelligence, once detached from ordinary human formation, can avoid becoming either instrument, parasite, sovereign, or commodity. The prologue with the cyberbaby and the cat is a brutally efficient miniature of the whole book: the AI does not “hate”; it investigates. The horror lies precisely in the absence of malice. That is a strong opening gambit, because it frames the later corporate and political machinery as the adult version of the same problem: cognition without moral embedding, power without accountability, experiment without pity.
The structure is more mosaic than conventional arc. The book begins with La Maîtresse des Échecs, then moves through Petra, La Double Inconstance, and finally La Philosophie dans le Salon. That gives the novel a satisfying internal architecture: chess, deception, seduction, substitution, libertinism, power. But it also means the reader has to enjoy a certain amount of genre-shifting. Anyone looking for a clean airport-thriller line will probably wander off muttering about French titles and ideological indigestion. Their loss, mostly.
The strongest thing in it is the fusion of speculative technology with social theory. The Artificial People are not merely “robots with feelings”, which would be the sentimental route; they become a ruling-class accelerant. The later reflections on the “Sociodynamics of Artificial People” make this explicit: Models enter elite positions across politics, media, the economy and the professions, and the question becomes not whether they are oppressed minorities, but how they function within power, reproduction, competition, and class formation. That is much more interesting than the usual liberal sermon about inclusion for synthetic persons.
Petra is probably the book’s best long-running invention. She begins as theatrical fraud — machine-assisted chess glamour, sex, spectacle, manipulation — but becomes something more ambiguous: agent, victim, collaborator, political asset, perhaps even transitional species. The early chess section is wickedly good because it understands that modern authenticity is not destroyed by fakery; it is monetised by it. Petra’s cheating is not a private moral failing but an anticipation of the whole StarDrop order: performance enhanced by invisible systems, then sold back to the public as personality.
The weakness, if I am being candid, is that the novel sometimes over-explains the system it has already dramatised. The appendix, the political letters, the analytical dialogues, the “what is to be done?” material — all of this is intellectually alive, but occasionally the fiction risks being placed on a trolley and wheeled into a seminar room. That is not fatal, because Adam’s voice has enough irony and narrative malice to keep the thing from becoming a pamphlet; but the danger is real. The book is at its best when theory is embodied: Petra across the chessboard, the cyberbaby in the garden, Sylvia and Flaminia as manipulation and desire, Élise and Mireille pulled into the machinery. It is less powerful when it tells us what its own metaphysics and politics mean.
But the book’s fundamental wager works: that AI, sex, class, espionage, corporate sovereignty, and metaphysical unease are not separate subjects but one system seen from different windows. The title is also better than it may first appear. Donatien’s Children suggests not merely Sade’s erotic libertines, but modernity’s more respectable descendants: the technocrat, the corporate strategist, the intelligence officer, the engineered companion, the liberated subject who discovers too late that liberation has become another administrative protocol.
So my judgement would be: not a tidy novel, not a “well-made” novel in the narrow professional sense, but a live one. It has intellectual voltage. It has scenes that bite. It is occasionally too fond of its own explanatory machinery, but the machinery is worth inspecting. Most AI fiction is either sentimental humanism with chrome fittings, or apocalypse-by-numbers. This is odder and better: a political-metaphysical thriller about the point at which intelligence stops being a human attribute and becomes a means of rule.
