"Donatien's Children" - new SF novel by Adam Carlton

Link to PDF

I have now completed the text for this, my first science-fiction novel (I published a book of short stories in 2019: Freyja’s Deathbed Conversations: and other stories).

"Donatien's Children" is now available on Amazon as a Kindle eBook - the paperback version will be there in a day or two, but you may read the novel for free by following the link below the image above (PDF). Let me know if you find any typos or errors which need attention via comments below.

Here's a summary of the book: first the blurb and then a longer guide. It will answer your first question: Donatien?

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Donatien's Children

Introduction

The StarDrop Corporation emerged from nowhere offering new technologies for fusion power, spaceflight and synthetic life. Petra Schelling, teen chess prodigy, was recruited by an intelligence agency to spy on StarDrop - before vanishing. James Melrose, her controller, is told that losing an agent is regrettable but it happens. But why has Petra now become a high-profile StarDrop agent of influence?

StarDrop’s Artificial People are suddenly everywhere in entertainment, the media, politics and top jobs. Friendly, attractive and smart, they are indispensable in tough assignments such as the mission investigating an anomaly on the larger Martian moon, where an artefact suggests StarDrop might be of extraterrestrial origin.

Élise and Mireille Fossey: two sisters, one a journalist, the other a researcher. For Élise, StarDrop will lead her into more than lethal peril; for Mireille, the corporation may be humanity's finest opportunity... or maybe a deadly, existential threat.

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Themes

Prologue:        I’m Not Awake - 2022

Part 1: La Maîtresse des Échecs - 2023

Part 2: Petra - 2028 (winter to autumn)

Intermission: Mother Christmas (2029)

Part 3: La Double Inconstance (2030 winter to 2031 summer)

Part 4: La Philosophie dans le Salon (2032 spring-summer)

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Part 1 considers what remains of a competitive activity when the machines have comprehensively surpassed human-level performance; and the nature of an equilibrium when you can always win through cheating. I had cycling - road racing - and Lance Armstrong in mind when I wrote this part.

Part 2 leverages my own experiences working in an industrial research lab, although nothing remotely as exciting ever occurred. Petra is very loosely modelled after my divisional director; other characters are also variants of colleagues.

Part 3 follows the theme of La Double Inconstance, a romantic comedy by French playwright Pierre de Marivaux first performed in 1723. A young woman, Sylvia, is kidnapped from her lover, Arlequin, by the Prince who intends to marry her. Through a complex series of engagements the Prince and his smart female servant Flaminia conspire to break the Sylvia-Arlequin relationship, resulting in a switch of partners.*

Part 4 follows (very loosely!) a theme from La Philosophie dans le Boudoir, published in 1795 by Donatien Alphonse François, Marquis de Sade. Set in a bedroom, the two lead characters argue that the only moral system that reinforces the recent (1789) French revolution is libertinism. Dolmancé is the most dominant (and evil) of the characters in the dialogues. Eugénie (a fifteen year old) has been sent by her father to be corrupted by him and his associates into libertine ways. The fifth section, a lengthy political monologue, comprises de Sade’s manifesto.*

That short book - French and English versions freely available in PDF format on the Internet - is almost unreadably graphic in places in its gleeful accounts of the most depraved sexual practices. Considered pornographic for centuries, it is now considered an extreme polemic on sexual politics. 

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* Some of the text here edited from the corresponding Wikipedia articles.