HAMLET

Two alien AIs sneak their way through Shakespeare’s greatest play in Neill’s imaginative staging.

In the far distant future—long after humanity has died out and life has moved on to a different galaxy—the intelligences of an advanced machine-based civilization are still attempting to understand the works of William Shakespeare. The newly minted artificial consciousness J-9 (or Janine, as she prefers to be called) has been created to live within simulations of Shakespeare’s plays, observing the characters’ actions and thereby drawing inferences as to what ancient humans might have been like. With the help of her assistant, Otto—a mutating entity that most often takes the form of a robotic owl—Janine enters a production of Hamlet as a bit player, standing in as a guard, a servant girl, an attendant, or whoever else might slip into a scene unnoticed. From these—the best seats in the house—she and Otto watch the play unfolding in its entirety, with only the occasional asides that help explain some of the more opaque aspects of the language or plot. For example, when it’s revealed the new king Claudius has married his brother’s widow only two months after the dead king’s death, Janine “wrinkles her nose and purses her lips as if she has just bitten into a lemon. JANINE: That seems…hasty.” The reading experience is primarily that of reading Hamlet—there are extended sections where Janine and Otto fade into the background, leaving the reader alone with the text. Neill’s most helpful contributions come in the form of his setting and scene directions, including a highly evocative description of Elsinore castle: “It is no traditional four-walled bailey and keep, nor is it a bastion in the shape of a star to give archers or cannonades angles on attackers. Rather, the walls of Elsinore have followed the contours of the cliffs…giving it the appearance of a building with innumerable facades.” For fans of SF looking for a way into Shakespeare, Janine and Otto make for a fun and not overly intrusive set of guides.

An inventive, accessible presentation of Hamlet with an SF twist.