Liz Moore’s captivating new page-turner, The Unseen World, is a wry, gentle coming-of-age story and an intriguing glimpse into the development of artificial intelligence and virtual reality, both early on and as envisioned for the future. It is also an incisive, insightful, and compassionate examination of the complexities of family and identity ... powerfully touching yet provocative, challenging us to reconsider our relationship to technology and the digital devices that both distance and connect us to one another.
The story moves back and forth through the decades seamlessly. As Ada grows, the mystery around David's life grows with her, until it creates a towering impasse over her and the reader ... Moore does not go so far as to actively examine the longevity of digital memorials, but Ada's concern over whether her father's final message to her will have survived 30 years is enough to get the reader thinking about how their own legacies will be preserved.
Set in the 1980s in the pre-Internet days of the emergence of artificial intelligence, this is a novel that artfully straddles genres. It is a rich and convincing period piece ... But The Unseen World is also a cerebral, page-turning thriller, a novel about code that is itself written in a kind of code ... There is, however, sometimes an overabundance of detail that threatens the otherwise sharp narrative...But these are minor complaints in what is otherwise an elegant and ethereal novel.
...[a] fiercely intelligent new novel ... Moore beautifully depicts a child’s impulse to collect the details of her fading parent ... Moore evocatively renders the remoteness of even our closest loved ones, so it comes as a disappointment when, partway through the novel, she offers a complete back story to explain David’s indirections ... The novel is more enticing when it treats its characters as complicated and ultimately indecipherable puzzles.
[Moore] weaves together gorgeous and, at times, staggering sentences without sacrificing the work's accessibility. Her characters, furthermore, echo Moore's prose: intricate, certainly complex, but also relatable, identifiable, able to elicit empathy and sympathy from the reader ... The Unseen World is a finely-tuned and engrossing novel, one that touches upon the world we knew in the past, the world we know now, and the world we've yet to meet—the future.
Moore deftly elicits the pangs of Ada’s embarrassment from, and sympathy for, the most important person in her life. Fascinating, too, is the exploration of artificial intelligence, its history and development made exciting and somehow tangible.
The Unseen World has one of the most delicate and lovely voices of any book I’ve read this year. Every action and emotion is rendered so precisely and so cleanly that even the simplest sentences bring enormous pleasure. Combined with a wistfully melancholy coming-of-age story and a tricky artificial intelligence puzzle, it makes for a gem of a novel ... a slow-building coming-of-age story that is as heartbreaking as it is lovely, tragic without ever becoming sentimental, grounded but still compellingly shaded with a touch of American gothic here, a touch of speculative fiction there. And it’s all the more impressive for how lightly it wears its accomplishments.
