The Electronic Mother

Sawyer Adams has been born into a world of pleasure and convenience. Raised by Western Confederation state programmers who use artificial intelligence and omnipresent telecommunications to foster radical equality and supervise their citizens, Sawyer is coming of age in the year 2084 and feels for the first time the terrible loneliness of social paradise—where no child will ever know the kiss or touch of a mother. That is, Sawyer lives in a world where the abiding love fostered in old regime families has been exchanged for unfamilied social friendships—at once more commonplace and less valuable. Only after being contacted by a mysterious group of subversives called the Aristos does the pubescent boy face a dilemma: whether to accept his continued place in the controlled happiness of modern civilization or to seek the natural love of mother and child in an inequal world filled with sorrows and suffering.

The Electronic Mother is a gripping coming of age story set one generation into our future—showing where we might be if current cultural and technological trends continue unabated. In the spirit of 1984 and Brave New World, the author shows an all-controlling modern state, now armed with the ability to shape human nature by biological and technical innovation—leading to an androgenous world in which men and women differ little from each other and are linked to the ruling Guardians by continual telecommunications and virtual contact. Yet dissent exists, and the shadowy Aristos remain determined to sabotage modernity in the name of inequality and blood lineage.

The Electronic Mother imagines a world governed by genetic engineering and artificial intelligence: a world where equality and comfort have refashioned traditional human realities according to egalitarian ideals—dismantling not only the traditional family, but also nearly all biological distinctions between the sexes. It imagines children birthed by Third Word surrogates, raised in communal nurseries, and given to dispassionate electronic mothers to raise them exactly as the Fathers and Guardians of the Western Confederation require.

In this compelling dystopia, Kirk Adams offers a conservative vision of what might be lost—what is being lost—as modern technology and androgenous egalitarianism deface traditional human life through the on-going abolition of the traditional family. He envisions the loveless technocracy that will come to be if modern men and women use digital and biological advancements to give themselves over to a philosophical nightmare stretching back to the most ethereal and ungrounded philosopher of Greek antiquity—a man who idealized the brutal and inhuman manners of the Spartan military barracks as the model for all mankind.