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Reviewed by Asher Syed for Readers' Favorite
In Don Stuart’s Descartes' Shadow, born during the Cascadia disaster, Ellie Frye Carver grows up on Vashon Island with unanswered questions about her mother’s death and the father she never knew. Her closest confidante is Patrice, an advanced artificial intelligence who first enters her life as a virtual advisor and stays as Ellie moves from adolescence into public service. As Ellie’s world widens from island restoration work to national politics, Patrice’s influence extends into the systems shaping public life and the forces directing events far beyond Ellie’s immediate world. Decades later, a replicated version of Patrice is sent across interstellar space to survey Tau Ceti J, a dangerous planet that may become humanity’s next home. Their linked paths begin converging toward a choice that will determine humanity’s next destination forever.
In real life, René Descartes was a philosopher who believed in the separation of mind and body consciousness. By placing Patrice as an AI with both an original self and a replicated presence, Don Stuart leans into this brilliantly in Descartes' Shadow. Philosophy plays a massive role here, with points of view that move between Patrice's first-person perspective and the third-person perspectives of everyone else. There are many characters, but the author fleshes them all out. I love Ellie’s rise from an isolated Vashon Island childhood to a United States senator. From the ancillary characters, the telecom expert Eduardo Avila and his discoveries are instrumental in the trajectory of the well-paced arc. With exceptional world-building and visual scenery, from a military helicopter descending onto a rural airfield at night, to the world of Tau Ceti J’s subterranean chamber and its towering wall of painted figures, this book is perfect for readers who adore intelligent, philosophical science fiction.
