2023/132: Mazarin Blues — Al Hess

I was only a navigator, and no amount of love I showered on Reed would make up for the fact that I wasn’t human. I wasn’t even real. [p. 161]

Reed Rothwell dislikes many things: people, bland decor, AI -- and especially the new beta upgrade of his state-mandated AI 'navigator', which seems to have developed a personality: it's decided that it wants to be called Mazarin, adopted 'he/him' pronouns, and claims to want to alleviate Reed's anxiety. Which is no small task.

America in 2065 is a bland hellscape of New Era beige and oatmeal, everything monochrome and unexceptional. Reed, despite his mild-mannered demeanour, is something of a rebel: his basement is stuffed with colourful wooden furniture, old books and jazz records. He's a decoist, a deviant subculture devoted to more colourful times ('glorifying a time of gross excess, when people didn’t recycle, when they drove petroleum cars, contributed to global warming, and flicked cigarette butts on sidewalks') -- and after Mazarin encourages him to go out to a club with his workmates, he encounters other decoists and discovers there's a thriving community in his home town, Boise. Reed strikes up a relationship with another decoist named Jax... and Mazarin begins to wonder if his programming is operating correctly. He realises that he's in love with Reed, and closer to him than Jax could ever be, but he's not human. Is this a glitch in his software, or something more sinister? There are rumours around town of faulty navigators endangering their pilots, of mysterious visits from the company that makes the navigators, of suspicious deaths. Can Mazarin keep Reed safe? And vice versa?

Mazarin Blues felt like two stories imperfectly fused: there's Reed's anxiety and paranoia (and perhaps autism), his discovery of decoist clubs and his romance with Jax, and then the focus of the story shifts to Mazarin and his interactions with non-binary bar-owner and biohacker Em. Both are intriguing plots, and they're interdependent, but I'd have liked more of Reed and Jax (the latter of whom doesn't really get developed as a character), especially in the second half of the novel. Great characters, though, and just enough hints of the wider world -- campaigns for AI rights in Canada and Germany, colourful socks ordered from Japan -- to intrigue. Mazarin, who narrates part of the novel, is a fascinating character, credibly inhuman: Reed, though really not suited to life in this near future, grows and changes over the course of the story. An intriguing read -- I've bookmarked the author's website, which promises more cosy queer SF.