Beautiful Shining People: The extraordinary, EPIC speculative masterpiece…

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Challenging, enlightening, and terrifying, TRUST NO ONE asks the question other people are too scared to: what happens when you can no longer believe your own eyes?

A mixture like that sounds as though it's going to be incoherent but Grothaus expertly brings everything together and infuses all these concerns into gorgeous, well-realised characters to create a truly memorable story. Following the trail back to her "father", Neotnia learns that she was originally designed to address the shortage of young workers available to care for an ageing population, as well as the lack of intuition, flexibility, and compassion in existing bots that makes them unable to effectively assist frail, lonely elderly people. Everything you read is possible, given our current society and the technical prowess that grows by the day. Thoroughly enjoyed this speculative, sci-fi but not too sci-fi story set in a futuristic Tokyo, all about the possibilities of technology but equally about what it is to be a human. I was born a Dutchie, but felt that that tiny, rainy country known for tulips, windmills, cheese and of course Amsterdam wasn't my place to be.There he meets the owner, a retired Sumo wrestler and a lovely young Japanese woman, (oh, and also an adorable dog with a funny round head getting a haircut). Through the balcony’s door, only the artificial lights of the infinite city can be seen, though their glow is muted by the moist air that’s followed from Hakone.

Despite the multi-lingual droids that welcome him to a sometime future Tokyo he is alone and lonely, before finding his way to a small café where he meets Neotnia and everything changes. And with that smile a fist again contracts inside my chest and I feel the air go just a little bit thin. Technology can still be temperamental and janky; for instance, we encounter an entertaining self-driving counterpart to the “old banger”.Oddly enough, considering how weird the other characters initially seem, it’s John, our point of view character, that I had most problems identifying with. At a sentence level Grothaus is excellent; he manages to make even rain falling against the cafe window somehow deeply compelling.

The ability to maintain this many realistic insecurities while not having them cloud the overall story was beautifully executed. Similarly to his audition, the children are not impressed with Ezra's efforts and one child begins to help him adjust his smile. A little different from the mainstream, it’s an absorbing novel that will make you think about the world, its problems, and its inhabitants in an entirely different way. It feels like it needs an edit for length, too – some scenes, exposition and actions seem drawn out and I found myself skimming some of the (lengthy) descriptions of no doubt interesting parts of Japan. The near-future depicted (the SF strand to the story) adds to that unease, as John begins to receive cryptic messages from the AI-infused bots that seem ubiquitous, and we see casual examples of the uses and abuses of the underlying technology behind them.The story is narrated by John, whose life changes irrevocably after his first encounter with young waitress Neotnia. I loved all the smart lines of wisdom sprinkled throughout this book, from the drunken conversations between the three MCs, to the wonderfully real quotes we got from Joe, to the completely ahead of his age thoughts coming from our MMC. His writing has appeared in Fast Company, VICE, The Guardian, Litro Magazine, The Irish Times, Screen, Quartz and others.