FILE UNDER BAROQUE-PUNK
1649, North Sea. The great philosopher René Descartes carries a heavy heart and a target on his back. Sick with pneumonia, pursued by powerful enemies, he flees by ship to Sweden and a new life. His companion: a sentient android replica of Francine, his beloved, dead daughter.
But the ship's captain has other plans. Accusing Descartes of sorcery, he tosses the droid overboard, plunging Francine into a bizarre afterlife: a machine graveyard ruled by malignant necromancers.
There, she hacks the dying philosopher's mind, glimpsing the birth of A.I. in a timestream parallel to our own.
'Even Animals Are Machines is luminous, melancholy and charged with real soul.'
—Christopher Brown, author of Tropic of Kansas
'A work of genuinely original and literary science fiction.'
—D. Harlan Wilson, author of Outré
'A marvellous blend of historiography and provocative allegory.'
—Paul McAuley, author of Fairyland