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The Unseen World A Novel Liz Moore 9780393354416 Books

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The Unseen World A Novel Liz Moore 9780393354416 Books

The work of the Steiner Lab, in simple terms, was to create more and more sophisticated versions of this kind of language-acquisition software. […]

These applications of the software, however, were only a small part of what interested David, made him stay awake feverishly into the night, designing and testing programs. There was also the art of it, the philosophical questions that this software raised. The essential inquiry was thus: If a machine can convincingly imitate humanity—can persuade a human being of its kinship—then what makes it inhuman? What, after all, is human thought but a series of electrical impulses?

###

“What can I get you to eat, hon?” asked Liston, and rattled off a list of all the snacks of the 1980s that Ada was never permitted to have: canned pastas by Chef Boyardee, Fluffernutter sandwiches, fluorescent Kraft macaroni and cheese. In truth, Ada had never even heard of some of the food Liston offered her.

###

I was told to ask you something, said Ada finally.
I know, said ELIXIR. I’ve been waiting.

###

Ada Sibelius had something of an unconventional upbringing, beginning with her very conception. At the tender age of 45, Dr. David Sibelius – “director of a computer science laboratory at the Boston Institute of Technology, called the Bit, or the Byte if he was feeling funny” – decided that he wanted a child. Ada (named after one of David’s favorite entries in the Encyclopædia Britannica) was born to a surrogate one year later. This was no small thing back then: 1971, to be exact.

In keeping with his eccentric nature, David decided to homeschool his daughter; or rather lab-school her. Ada accompanied David – as she called him – to work every day, where she was immersed in his world, in the language of mathematics, neurology, physics, philosophy, and computer science. In the absence of any biological relatives, David’s colleagues – Charles-Robert, Hayato, Frank Halbert, and Diane Liston – became her extended family; his interests were hers. Ada learned to solve complex equations, decrypt puzzles, and present and defend theories. David filled composition books with the names of books, songs, pieces of artwork, and even wines that she should try one day; a cultured bucket list before its time. In many ways, their relationship was more like that of a teacher and his student than a father and his daughter.

At the Steiner Lab, David and his colleagues studied natural language processing and developed language-acquisition software. Their crowning achievement – David’s second child, if you will – was ELIXIR (mmmm, magic!). Everyone at the lab – including Ada – took turns chatting with ELIXIR, to teach it the words and rules and complexities of language. The program was meant to acquire language the way that humans do, and learn it did. Slowly but surely, ELIXIR grew alongside Ada, evolving from garbled, nonsense text to a semi-eloquent conversationalist (albeit one who reflected the habits and speech patterns of its teachers). For Ada, ELIXIR was a confidant, a non-recoverable diary; she poured her heart and soul into ELIXIR, especially when things got bad.

When Ada was ten, David was diagnosed with Alzheimer’s disease – though he waited two years to tell his daughter, until the symptoms were too obvious to ignore. As David’s condition continued to deteriorate, the authorities became involved: first the police, then the Boston Department of Children & Families, who required monthly visits and demanded that Ada be enrolled in an accredited school. Within a year, David was institutionalized and Ada, sent to live with Liston, who also took over the lab.

While transferring custody of Ada to Liston, a background check revealed some inconsistencies in David’s history. David’s parents reported him missing at the age of seventeen; and, while he eventually resurfaced through a letter, they never saw him again. Furthermore, Caltech had no record of a David Sibelius ever attending. Nor could attorneys find any record of David’s arrangement with Ada’s birth mother, Birdie Auerbach.

Was David a fraud? A baby-napper? A murderer? If he was going to steal someone’s identity, why choose such a prominent family? And why not capitalize on the Sibelius family name? If David wasn’t who he claimed to be, what became of the “real” David Sibelius? Where did Ada come from?

These questions threaten to upend Ada’s life in ways both practical and metaphysical. David has always been the center of Ada’s life – for her, he represents everything that is moral, safe, and good in the world – so to find out that he’s been lying to her all this time shakes Ada to her very core. And she cannot turn to David for answers, for his mind is failing them both.

Yet Ada is not without hope: There’s Miss Holmes, the kind and dedicated librarian who helps Ada troll through microfiche in search of answers. Gregory, the second-youngest Liston kid, who shares her love of science, math, and puzzles. And the mysterious floppy disc David gave her shortly before he disclosed his illness to her. An unassuming little thing, inscribed with a message: “Dear Ada, it said. A puzzle for you. With my love, your father, David Sibelius.”

It will be twenty-odd years before David’s mystery reveals itself to her – and to us. Luckily, this story has nothing if not a patient and compassionate teller.

THE UNSEEN WORLD is, in a word, brilliant: full of heart, empathy, history – and lots of geeky science stuff. The story starts out rather slowly: a portrait of an unusual childhood, marked by a father-daughter relationship that’s both exhilarating and a little unhealthy. While Ada’s intelligence and curiosity blossoms under David’s unconventional tutelage, she lacks social skills (at least with kids her own age, a fact that becomes painfully apparent when she’s forced into Queen of Angels Catholic school) and their relationship seems enmeshed and almost codependent at times. She readily accepts her father’s likes and dislikes as her own, without forming her own opinion on anything. Or mostly: Ada craves normalcy, whereas David shuns it. Perhaps this is because the latter had it (and was found it sorely lacking), whereas the former never did (and when she does, she’s rather ambivalent on the matter).

Oftentimes it feels as though David expects his child to bend and adapt and mold herself into his life, rather than adjusting his own life to accommodate her. Even as later revelations offer a kinder, gentler perspective on David’s more questionable decisions, this thought remained with me; in many ways, David is a neglectful father.

Ada is forced to grow up before her time – well, even more than she’s already done – with the onset of David’s illness. The story transitions seamlessly into a coming-of-age story that’s equally fascinating (see, e.g., the junk food excerpt above) and heart-wrenching. Of course the more normal growing pains are amplified by David’s illness and likely death: gone is the father who wrote and directed Christmas plays at the lab, who gave Ada challenges and puzzles, who taught so many. Now David often resembles ELIXIR during its infancy, uttering non sequiturs when more complex and appropriate responses elude him. Ironically, Ada sometimes sees pieces of David – a favored phrase here, a grammatical tic there – in her talks with ELIXIR, which continue even after the rest of the lab has moved on.

Then, of course, there’s the mystery that forms the core of the story, which is both more devastating and yet more benign than the places my imagination invariably led me. I don’t want to say more, lest I ruin the surprise, but suffice it to say that THE UNSEEN WORLD has something for just about everyone: mystery, historical fiction, romance, STEM fiction, coming of age, speculative fiction, and social justice.
There is diversity like whoah here, woven into the very fabric of the story; diversity that doesn’t quite present itself until the denouement, but was in fact hiding in plain sight the whole time. It’s beautiful and heartbreaking and had me bawling my darn eyes out. Perhaps best of all, it casts a new light on Ada and David’s relationship – particularly David’s deception – one that adds nuance and complexity and, yes, understanding and maybe even forgiveness.

And the last chapter. THE LAST CHAPTER. I don’t think I’ve read a more perfect ending in my entire life.

I honestly can’t say enough good things about THE UNSEEN WORLD. Moore has created a story that’s understated yet surprising; twisty-turny and lyrical and lovely. David, Liston, George, Ada, ELIXIR – these are characters who I won’t soon forget (if ever).

** Full disclosure: I received a free electronic ARC for review through NetGalley. **


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The Unseen World A Novel Liz Moore 9780393354416 Books Reviews

The story starts out being of the 3-star caliber well-written, but nothing really special.
But just when you think this is going to be another sad sobbing family drama, the real story unfolds and turning it into a 5-star novel for me. I absolutely loved the relationship between Ada and her father, and how it evolves over time. I also loved the role of ELIXER and the book's ending - sorry to be so cryptic but I don't want to say too much as I don't want to give the plot.
Why 4 stars instead of 5? Well, I guess the only complaint I have is that Liz Moore took a little bit too long with setting the story.
I found myself while reading this book feeling as if I was a piece of string that had somehow been tangled into a huge messy knot. I could jump to the end of the string to get out of it but then I would never know how I got there. Or I could cut myself out but then I would never be able to assemble the pieces into something that made sense. I just had to sit back and let the author unravel the knot in the telling of her story. A book well worth reading.
A really good book which is so real that you feel you are right there. It covers a long period of time with the primary character being Ada Sebelius who at the beginning of the book is 12 and at the end is an old lady. Her “father” is David, whom she always calls by that first name. David is a very intelligent scientist – computer person at the very beginning of the computer era, when computers filled whole rooms. (That’s almost unbelievable these days, although I’m certainly old enough to remember those days.) One of the primary themes is developing artificial intelligence including a device/program called ELIXIR . (Think Alexa, only ELIXIR as it developed went much farther and much more developed as scientists continued working on it. There are many levels to the story, including the mysterious origin of David himself. The ending is practically unbelievable, and I found that a real reach, but maybe one day such a thing might be a reality, hopefully after I’m long gone. I won’t spell it out here, as I don’t want to spoil it for those who may read the book. Author Liz Moore is an amazing writer with a vast understanding of the subject matter.
This is a beautiful, profound book that requires a deep level of commitment and investment from the reader. It’s a slow burn, there’s not a lot of dialogue, and it’s 451 pages long. But it’s the kind of book that makes you feel like you’re in good hands, the kind that will reward you both emotionally and cerebrally if you take the plunge.

I went into it knowing very little, and I had no idea what to expect. How deep would the artificial intelligence aspects of it go? Who were these characters? This vague sense of mystery and wonder begins in the first pages and builds steadily through to the end.

At its core, The Unseen World is a coming-of-age story about Ada, the strange, thoughtful, brilliant daughter of David Sibelius, a computer scientist at a prestigious university lab in the 1980s. Ada spends the formative years of her life in the lab with David and his colleagues, where she comes to share her father’s love for mathematics, cryptology and puzzle-solving.

When David suddenly falls ill, Ada’s peaceful world is upended. On top of that, she begins to suspect that David has been harboring secrets, and will spend the next couple decades of her life trying to decode the mysteries of his life.

The Unseen World is a fully realized novel about one family’s legacy, but more than that, it’s about what it means to be human the inevitability of hurting the ones we care about the most, and the redemptive power of love, loyalty and forgiveness.

By the time I reached the final pages, I was completely blown away (and devastated) by how it had all come together — like one of David’s and Ada’s puzzles. Every piece of it made sense, every piece of it was an essential part of the whole.
The work of the Steiner Lab, in simple terms, was to create more and more sophisticated versions of this kind of language-acquisition software. […]

These applications of the software, however, were only a small part of what interested David, made him stay awake feverishly into the night, designing and testing programs. There was also the art of it, the philosophical questions that this software raised. The essential inquiry was thus If a machine can convincingly imitate humanity—can persuade a human being of its kinship—then what makes it inhuman? What, after all, is human thought but a series of electrical impulses?

###

“What can I get you to eat, hon?” asked Liston, and rattled off a list of all the snacks of the 1980s that Ada was never permitted to have canned pastas by Chef Boyardee, Fluffernutter sandwiches, fluorescent Kraft macaroni and cheese. In truth, Ada had never even heard of some of the food Liston offered her.

###

I was told to ask you something, said Ada finally.
I know, said ELIXIR. I’ve been waiting.

###

Ada Sibelius had something of an unconventional upbringing, beginning with her very conception. At the tender age of 45, Dr. David Sibelius – “director of a computer science laboratory at the Boston Institute of Technology, called the Bit, or the Byte if he was feeling funny” – decided that he wanted a child. Ada (named after one of David’s favorite entries in the Encyclopædia Britannica) was born to a surrogate one year later. This was no small thing back then 1971, to be exact.

In keeping with his eccentric nature, David decided to homeschool his daughter; or rather lab-school her. Ada accompanied David – as she called him – to work every day, where she was immersed in his world, in the language of mathematics, neurology, physics, philosophy, and computer science. In the absence of any biological relatives, David’s colleagues – Charles-Robert, Hayato, Frank Halbert, and Diane Liston – became her extended family; his interests were hers. Ada learned to solve complex equations, decrypt puzzles, and present and defend theories. David filled composition books with the names of books, songs, pieces of artwork, and even wines that she should try one day; a cultured bucket list before its time. In many ways, their relationship was more like that of a teacher and his student than a father and his daughter.

At the Steiner Lab, David and his colleagues studied natural language processing and developed language-acquisition software. Their crowning achievement – David’s second child, if you will – was ELIXIR (mmmm, magic!). Everyone at the lab – including Ada – took turns chatting with ELIXIR, to teach it the words and rules and complexities of language. The program was meant to acquire language the way that humans do, and learn it did. Slowly but surely, ELIXIR grew alongside Ada, evolving from garbled, nonsense text to a semi-eloquent conversationalist (albeit one who reflected the habits and speech patterns of its teachers). For Ada, ELIXIR was a confidant, a non-recoverable diary; she poured her heart and soul into ELIXIR, especially when things got bad.

When Ada was ten, David was diagnosed with Alzheimer’s disease – though he waited two years to tell his daughter, until the symptoms were too obvious to ignore. As David’s condition continued to deteriorate, the authorities became involved first the police, then the Boston Department of Children & Families, who required monthly visits and demanded that Ada be enrolled in an accredited school. Within a year, David was institutionalized and Ada, sent to live with Liston, who also took over the lab.

While transferring custody of Ada to Liston, a background check revealed some inconsistencies in David’s history. David’s parents reported him missing at the age of seventeen; and, while he eventually resurfaced through a letter, they never saw him again. Furthermore, Caltech had no record of a David Sibelius ever attending. Nor could attorneys find any record of David’s arrangement with Ada’s birth mother, Birdie Auerbach.

Was David a fraud? A baby-napper? A murderer? If he was going to steal someone’s identity, why choose such a prominent family? And why not capitalize on the Sibelius family name? If David wasn’t who he claimed to be, what became of the “real” David Sibelius? Where did Ada come from?

These questions threaten to upend Ada’s life in ways both practical and metaphysical. David has always been the center of Ada’s life – for her, he represents everything that is moral, safe, and good in the world – so to find out that he’s been lying to her all this time shakes Ada to her very core. And she cannot turn to David for answers, for his mind is failing them both.

Yet Ada is not without hope There’s Miss Holmes, the kind and dedicated librarian who helps Ada troll through microfiche in search of answers. Gregory, the second-youngest Liston kid, who shares her love of science, math, and puzzles. And the mysterious floppy disc David gave her shortly before he disclosed his illness to her. An unassuming little thing, inscribed with a message “Dear Ada, it said. A puzzle for you. With my love, your father, David Sibelius.”

It will be twenty-odd years before David’s mystery reveals itself to her – and to us. Luckily, this story has nothing if not a patient and compassionate teller.

THE UNSEEN WORLD is, in a word, brilliant full of heart, empathy, history – and lots of geeky science stuff. The story starts out rather slowly a portrait of an unusual childhood, marked by a father-daughter relationship that’s both exhilarating and a little unhealthy. While Ada’s intelligence and curiosity blossoms under David’s unconventional tutelage, she lacks social skills (at least with kids her own age, a fact that becomes painfully apparent when she’s forced into Queen of Angels Catholic school) and their relationship seems enmeshed and almost codependent at times. She readily accepts her father’s likes and dislikes as her own, without forming her own opinion on anything. Or mostly Ada craves normalcy, whereas David shuns it. Perhaps this is because the latter had it (and was found it sorely lacking), whereas the former never did (and when she does, she’s rather ambivalent on the matter).

Oftentimes it feels as though David expects his child to bend and adapt and mold herself into his life, rather than adjusting his own life to accommodate her. Even as later revelations offer a kinder, gentler perspective on David’s more questionable decisions, this thought remained with me; in many ways, David is a neglectful father.

Ada is forced to grow up before her time – well, even more than she’s already done – with the onset of David’s illness. The story transitions seamlessly into a coming-of-age story that’s equally fascinating (see, e.g., the junk food excerpt above) and heart-wrenching. Of course the more normal growing pains are amplified by David’s illness and likely death gone is the father who wrote and directed Christmas plays at the lab, who gave Ada challenges and puzzles, who taught so many. Now David often resembles ELIXIR during its infancy, uttering non sequiturs when more complex and appropriate responses elude him. Ironically, Ada sometimes sees pieces of David – a favored phrase here, a grammatical tic there – in her talks with ELIXIR, which continue even after the rest of the lab has moved on.

Then, of course, there’s the mystery that forms the core of the story, which is both more devastating and yet more benign than the places my imagination invariably led me. I don’t want to say more, lest I ruin the surprise, but suffice it to say that THE UNSEEN WORLD has something for just about everyone mystery, historical fiction, romance, STEM fiction, coming of age, speculative fiction, and social justice.
There is diversity like whoah here, woven into the very fabric of the story; diversity that doesn’t quite present itself until the denouement, but was in fact hiding in plain sight the whole time. It’s beautiful and heartbreaking and had me bawling my darn eyes out. Perhaps best of all, it casts a new light on Ada and David’s relationship – particularly David’s deception – one that adds nuance and complexity and, yes, understanding and maybe even forgiveness.

And the last chapter. THE LAST CHAPTER. I don’t think I’ve read a more perfect ending in my entire life.

I honestly can’t say enough good things about THE UNSEEN WORLD. Moore has created a story that’s understated yet surprising; twisty-turny and lyrical and lovely. David, Liston, George, Ada, ELIXIR – these are characters who I won’t soon forget (if ever).

** Full disclosure I received a free electronic ARC for review through NetGalley. **