2019 Dragon Award Finalist, Best Alternate History Novel: "Machines Like Me”

Don't buy this book. It's awful

Usually, at this exact point in my blog post, I include a cover image and a link to Amazon for people who want to buy the book, but are running an ad blocker.
I almost decided not to do that, because I think the book doesn't deserve to be bought.
But, what the heck. If you are determined, go ahead.

I wouldn't click here if I were you; 

it will take you where you can buy the book.

By the way, for all of those indie and small house authors: if you were wondering what benefits you get from a Big House, read the burbs on Goodreads. You'd think this was the definitive work on Life The Universe, and Everything.
I must dissent.

Greetings to all my internet friends and neighbors, and  for those of you who are following the Dragon Race To Review, here is that second installment I promised you! And to any of my family who have made an appearance:STOP. Close this file, don't read it. You will NOT benefit by going any further.

Alternate history. As soon as I started reading this book, I had to do a LOT of thinking about the field, and the most hopeful thing I came up with is: maybe it's not even science fiction, and everyone will realize that, and thus I will never have to read something like this again.

Yeah, that WAS the most hopeful thing I came up with, and the hope lasted maybe 30 seconds. It was at that point that I remembered some of the EXCELLENT alternate history I've read in the past, and hope to read more of in the future. In fact, prior to reading THIS work, the only BAD alternate history I've encountered was written by Harry Turtledove about the Civil War. It was bad, because I found NO creativity in the writing; all he did was flip North and South, turn black slaves into blond slaves, and assign slightly modified names to the principal characters, like Avram for Abraham Lincoln. That's a book your word processor can write, if you know how to use the search-and-replace function.

Still, I'd much rather read THREE works like that, than one like “Machines Like Me.”

This is, clearly, alternate history, and thus qualifies for the category. It's hard to say exactly what the point of divergence could be; Alan Turing is the most prominent secondary character, and one source said the divergence was that Turing refused chemical castration, and took a year in prison instead. That doesn't fly, though, because Turing was arrested in 1952, and died in 1954, while the book also mentions that the US did NOT drop the atomic bomb on Japan, which would have been a divergence in 1945. Whatever the divergence point, in the setting of the book, England in the 1980s, there are numerous technological advances that vary from our timeline, and that leads to a British loss to Argentina in the Falklands War.

So, yes. Alternate history.

But that hardly seems the point. Although a chief plot device is the ability to purchase a human-appearing robot, which then acts more-or-less like a human, almost all the action takes place in the mind of the protagonist. And his mind is a terrible thing to waste your time on. He's a boring drone; although not born to wealth, he has inherited a great deal of money due to the sale of his family home. He then proceeds to squander it, mostly on the purchase of a robot, but on a smaller, more constant scale by online trading. He is really a zero, going nowhere, and the purchase of a robot human mostly serves to give him the opportunity to whine about how pathetic he is.

He's right, you know. He IS pathetic. He has a wretched love affair with his neighbor, which he is afraid to invest in. They appear to have some sexual chemistry, the details of which transpire behind a closed bedroom door, thankfully, but otherwise, don't really seem to like each other.

There are plot developments. They transform the story from a dull monotonous tale of a drone who owns an android to a dull monotonous tale of a drone who owns an android and has a couple of things happen to him. However, none of the things which happen to him seem to result in any change at all.

It is entirely possible that this is a brilliant, scathing satire on middle class British life. If so, it went over my head entirely, and makes me ever so grateful that my ancestors fled the island for America.

It took me the better part of a day to read this. If it weren't for the honor of the thing, I would rather have done just about anything else.

Is this a legitimate contender for the 2019 Dragon Award for Best Alternate History? If it wins, the fix is in, and the people who are responsible for the fix wish to kill enjoyable science fiction.

Peace be on your household.