by ARGreenhollow
In my first SciFi novel, it is in the year 2178, humanity has finally done the unthinkable.War is gone. Poverty is gone. Disease has mostly retreated into specialist archives and the sort of documentaries people watch when they wish to feel historically grateful. Crime survives only as a niche hobby for the bored, the theatrical, and the insufficiently supervised.And above it all, beneath it all, and very often inside the furniture, there is Mother.Mother is the artificial intelligence that saved civilisation. She feeds humanity, heals it, protects it, educates it, comforts it, and prevents it from doing many of the stupid things at which it was once so historically gifted. Humanity is safer, kinder, healthier and more comfortable than it has ever been.Which is exactly what begins to worry Larry Lightwick.Larry is a history teacher. He has no desire to become important, start a movement, challenge civilisation, provoke an interplanetary moral debate, or have anything he says printed on a mug. Unfortunately, Larry writes one small article suggesting that a life with all discomfort carefully removed may not be a perfected human life at all, but one edited until the plot no longer makes sense.This proves unwise.Soon Larry finds himself surrounded by students, philosophers, grief workers, doctors, off-world observers, a suspiciously helpful AI, a motorcycle that refuses to let him enjoy danger properly, and Glorp — an alien cultural observer whose understanding of humanity is completely wrong in several useful directions.As the debate spreads across Earth, Mars, Luna, the orbital habitats and beyond, humanity is forced to ask a question it thought it had outgrown:When a civilisation becomes powerful enough to save us from almost everything, who decides what still belongs to us?Warm, funny, humane and quietly epic, Continuance Finality is an attempt at a philosophical comic science-fiction novel about artificial intelligence, immortality, grief, freedom, love, bad committees, useful foolishness, and the terrible human habit of needing meaning even after paradise has been successfully installed.For readers who enjoy thoughtful speculative fiction with wit, heart, and the occasional argumentative toaster.
