A thoughtful, poignant novel that explores the creation of Artificial Intelligence—illuminating the very human need for communication, connection, and understanding.
In a narrative that spans geography and time, from the Atlantic Ocean in the seventeenth century, to a correctional institute in Texas in the near future, and told from the perspectives of five very different characters, Speak considers what it means to be human, and what it means to be less than fully alive.
A young Puritan woman travels to the New World with her unwanted new husband. Alan Turing, the renowned mathematician and code breaker, writes letters to his best friend’s mother. A Jewish refugee and professor of computer science struggles to reconnect with his increasingly detached wife. An isolated and traumatized young girl exchanges messages with an intelligent software program. A former Silicon Valley Wunderkind is imprisoned for creating illegal lifelike dolls.
Each of these characters is attempting to communicate across gaps—to estranged spouses, lost friends, future readers, or a computer program that may or may not understand them. In dazzling and electrifying prose, Louisa Hall explores how the chasm between computer and human—shrinking rapidly with today’s technological advances—echoes the gaps that exist between ordinary people. Though each speaks from a distinct place and moment in time, all five characters share the need to express themselves while simultaneously wondering if they will ever be heard, or understood.
In a dazzling and electrifying prose, Louisa Hall explores how the chasm between computer and human--shrinking rapidly with today's technological advances--echoes the gaps that exist between ordinary people.
Editorial Reviews
"A marvelously inventive novel about what it means to communicate with one another." --Men's Journal
"Speak feels less remarkable for its structure than for its thoughtfulness and emotional force. Hall is a poet…and that training comes through not just in her musical phrasing or intimacy of expression…[Hall] brines her book in apocalyptic elements…and yet Speak, a cascade of "found" documents and transcripts, is less Black Mirror dystopia than meditation on how life, spirit, improbably gets into language…Speak may not be the first science fiction novel to counterpoise hubris, ingenuity, loss and progress. But the delicacy with which it juggles those concerns, allowing each its crystalline, utterly persuasive and transfixing moment in the air, speaks to Hall's uncommonly deep and complex intellectual engagement with her themes…The freshness—the brilliance, even—of Speak lies in its positioning of robots not as terrifyingly new, but as the latest in a long line of "magic mirrors" from which we are powerless to look away." --The New York Times Book Review
"Speak is that rarest of finds: a novel that doesn’t remind me of any other book I’ve ever read. A complex, nuanced, and beautifully written meditation on language, immortality, the nature of memory, the ethical problems of artificial intelligence, and what it means to be human." --Emily St. John Mandel
"[A] stunning new novel... Comparisons to Margaret Atwood, David Mitchell, and Helen Phillips will abound, but the remarkable Speak is a unique creation that stands on its own." --Bustle
About the Author
Louisa Hall grew up in Philadelphia. She is the author of the novels Speak and The Carriage House, and her poems have been published in The New Republic, Southwest Review, and other journals. She is a professor at the University of Iowa, and the Western Writer in Residence at Montana State University.