The Overman Culture

It baffles me that there are so many positive reviews for this forgotten book online. People talk about the 'mystery' involved, the simple but effective writing, how unpretentious and clever the writer is. Yes, the plot itself is at least lucid, but I think that's where my praise stops. In The Overman Culture a young boy called Micheal Faraday grows more confused about his world by the day, a world where many of the children around him don't bleed, a world where London is under a force field as German bomber fly the skies and Queen Victoria rules with Winston Churchill. He is especially concerned that he is dissuaded from reading and exploring the city by his parents and teacher, but finds comfort that a select few of his friends, among them Jane Austen and Emily Bronte, do in fact bleed, get tired when they exert themselves, and...

It was obvious where this plot was headed from the start, at least for the most part. Yes, the kids are living amongst robots who function as caretakers. The damning part of this is that it takes over 80 percent of the book for the characters to reach that conclusion, which leaves but 20 pages for Cooper to try and make that fact interesting (which he fails to imo). It's just so transparent the entire time, that it feels like this book was intended for children, and I don't mean YA, I mean like the 5-10 range, at least if it weren't for a few rather out of place and cringey sex scenes accompanied by the tried and true objectification of the main female character.

Yet all of this is but a minor complaint to the real issue: the prose itself. The closest equivalent I can draw is if you inhaled sand or ate cardboard. What should be lively, interesting, engaging, is just the opposite. It's dry, wooden, and basic. Sentence structure is repetitive the dialogue is so formal that it feels as though Cooper doesn't understand how friends, family, and romantic partners actually talk to one another. It's as if all of the characters are always meeting each other for the first time after recently learning English. Not to mention that Cooper has a bad habit of characterizing through telling you how people feel, rather than showing you through actions and words. You know, how someone who actually knows how to write does it.

There's a little bit of discussion towards the end about the relationship between humans and machines, how humans give machines purpose. Maybe this conversation could've been interesting, if it wasn't just explored for 10 pages.

I'm pretty overly salty about a book that I really just don't care that much about, and will certainly fade from memory before too much longer. I think the positive reviews online really got to me, and made me scrutinize how wrong I think they are.