Parting Shadows by Kate Sherran Swed: Vengeance, A Heartbroken AI and some Bad Parenting Characterize this SF Novella

Parting Shadows by Kate Sheeran Swed Series: Toccata System, #1 Paperback, 135 pg. Spells & Spaceships Press, 2019 Read: February 5-6, 2021 Grab a copy from your local indie bookstore!

What’s Parting Shadows About?

We’ve all read variations on this story before. You’ve got a brilliant scientist who convinces a sentient AI to break her programming by falling in love with him, then her to break his true love out of prison, ends up marrying the person and not the AI. This drives the AI to a decades-long-vendetta where she kidnaps a baby, molds the child into an assassin to exact her revenge for her. Okay, maybe we haven’t read that story before, thankfully we can now.

Based, to some extent, on Dickens’s Miss Havisham, SATIS is a tragic figure. I wavered between feeling sorry for it/her and being angry for the way it manipulated and abused Astra (the kidnapped baby). Okay, I didn’t waver too much.

Astra, it turns out, is pretty well-adjusted for someone that a deranged AI programmed from infancy to be a killer. She definitely has a better moral compass than you’d expect. Better. Not perfect. I grew to really like her.

So, what did I think about Parting Shadows?

There are a few other aspects of the book I’d like to talk about, but I think I’m going to hold my fire until book two or three when I have a better idea of how things go.

On the one hand, I’d like this to get a full novel-length treatment, there are a few things I think really need developed more (well, maybe not need, but it’d make me happier). But, this concise, punchy length is just what this story needs, who cares that I want to see some things expanded.

Now, everything I know about Miss Havisham comes from her appearance in the second Tuesday Next novel, and a vague sense from general cultural references, so I’m not how great a job she does at capturing that essence. But the way she talks about it, I’m betting she did it justice.

What I can say, is that she told a fun story, one that left me guessing and one that left me eager for the sequels. Which is more important than her take on her inspiration (if she’d nailed the Havisham, but told a dull story? That would’ve been crossing the line).

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