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Hall, Louisa

Entry updated 12 September 2022. Tagged: Author.

(1982-    ) US academic, poet and author who is of sf interest for her second novel, Speak (2015), a multi-voiced tale moderated and in part iterated by AIs, who have come to something like self-consciousness through a radical concept underlying their development: that consciousness is not generated by number-crunching but through the centripetal magnetism through time of storytelling. The figures depicted range from a young seventeenth century emigrant to America through a young woman in the Near Future suffering from lock-in syndrome traumatically induced by the wresting from her of her Robot companion, and a jailed billionaire whose Invention of profoundly empathetic "babybots" has generated a perhaps fatal dysfunction between the young and older generations. Given a dance of protagonists whose interconnections are articulated by a voiceover AI, comparisons with the work of David Mitchell have seemed reasonable. [JC]

Louisa Warren Hall

born Philadelphia, Pennsylvania: 24 June 1982

works (selected)

  • Speak (New York: HarperCollins/Ecco, 2015) [hb/]

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