A fan of science fiction and the unknown? Like reading something a little strange?
Check out todays book: Francine by Joe Taylor
Francine was the illegitimate daughter of René Descartes and Helena Jans van der Strom, a bookseller’s maid. At the age of five Francine died from scarlet fever. Descartes was devastated. Two years later, he remained so obsessed that he created an automaton resembling her. Automatons were in the air at the time, fascinating Europe with flute-playing and harp-plucking homunculi. Descartes carried this automaton around four years, but when he loaded his “Francine” onto a boat that underwent a long and terrific storm, the sailors connected “Francine” with witchcraft and threw the automaton overboard. My imagining is that she’d been covertly alive, that her sinking into the sea and her seeming death by drowning offered her freedom to live many centuries until our present time. She does “die” in our time, only to live, relive, and relive her entire life from “inception,” caught in something of a computer’s loop. Ever aware in this loop, she relates her many experiences through the centuries to her father on the boat directly before the storm, and also to her imagined listeners, whom she addresses as, “ladies.”
Get your copy today here:
https://livingstonpress.org/product/francine/
Some reviews:
“You're about to meet the most intriguing character in recent American fiction. Francine is an automaton, living across centuries, meeting (and often sleeping with) some of history's most fascinating people. But Francine is no machine, no robot, but a captivating woman who will take you places you never dreamed of going. Brilliant, a tad crazy. The best of both." —Robert Inman, Villages and Home Fires Burning.
“Joe Taylor has brought Descartes’s famous automaton to new life to speak of time past and time to come. A parable that eerily reflects on our contemporary dilemma with the prospect of self-governing artificial intelligence, the titular character Francine speaks to us, coming alive to contemplate the centuries. She nurses soldiers with Walt Whitman, paces outside Emily Dickinson’s homestead, leaves a glove on Spinoza’s grave, and indulges herself through multiple fascinating lives. Sorrowing, visceral, witty, Taylor’s Francine is an unpredictable, ingenious, and bold novel contemplating a dizzying world of recurrences.” —Lee Upton, Wrongful
“Joe Taylor serves up a time-travelling tale narrated by René Descartes’s automaton daughter, and within it there’s nary a dull thought or line to be found. Francine has a ringside seat to much of what humankind has been up to for centuries: the good, the bad, and the very ugly (France’s Terror, Los Alamos’s mushroom cloud, Salem’s witch trials, the U.S. Civil War, to name a few), but she also has some fun, marching with Victoria Woodhull, motorcycling with B.F. Skinner’s daughter, bedding Kurt Vonnegut and John Berryman (among scores of others), all the while questioning the nature of existence.” .” —Kat Meads, While Visiting Babette
