Synopsis (from Amazon):
Named Finalist in the American Fiction Awards 2024 (category Science Fiction: Cyberpunk), The Logoharp describes the extraordinary journey of a young American journalist who chooses to work as an AI-driven propagandist—aka "Reverse Journalist" who foresees and reports the future for 22nd century China.
Naomi is surgically transplanted, giving her extraordinary powers of foresight and physical strength. She hears voices in her Logoharp, a universal translator of all world languages, allowing her to take the pulse of global crowds, predicting and broadcasting political and social events with deadly precision.
But Naomi also hears discordant voices coming from unidentified sources. She knows only that mysterious voices sing to her of other worlds, other freedoms. When she's tasked with finding a flaw in a State system that balances births and deaths —a system devised by a Chinese architect, Naomi's lover who abandoned her in youth—she experiences "unintentional contradiction."
Suppressed emotions resurface, compelling her to rebel. Her decision has unexpected consequences for the men and women she loves, for her own body, and for the global societies she's vowed to protect.
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Arielle Emmett, Ph.D., is a writer, visual journalist and traveling scholar specializing in East Asia, science writing and human interest. She has been a Contributing Editor to Smithsonian Air & Space magazine and a Fulbright Scholar and Specialist in Kenya (2018-2019) and Indonesia (2015).
Her work has appeared in Mother Jones, The Scientist, Ms., Parents, Saturday Review, Boston Globe, Washington Times, Philadelphia Inquirer, Detroit Free Press, Los Angeles Times Book Review and Globe & Mail (Canada), among others.
Arielle has taught at the International College Beijing, University of Hong Kong Media Studies Centre, Universitas Padjadjaran (West Java, Indonesia) and Strathmore University Law School (Nairobi). Her first science fiction novel, The Logoharp, about China and America a century from now, is part of a planned series on dystopian paths to utopian justice.
Website
https://leapingtigerpress.com/
https://www.facebook.com/profile.php?id=61560368953572
https://www.instagram.com/arielle.emmett
Amazon
https://tinyurl.com/thelogoharp
Goodreads
https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/216676221-the-logoharp
Praise:
"In Arielle Emmett's fevered imaginings one great and ancient state is able to dominate the rest using an unbeatable secret weapon. Logoharps. Creatures able to see into the future, ensuring the state is always a step ahead. That is, until one rebels. Imagine Mona Lisa Overdrive meshed with The Wind-Up Girl. That's the kind of sci-fi ride you're in for with The Logoharp."
– Kevin Sites, author of The Ocean Above Me
"The Logoharp offers a thought-provoking experience for those willing to confront unsettling truths. Some may find comfort in the familiar illusions of their own "Matrix," while others may feel a revolutionary spark ignited within them. Ultimately, this novel serves as a mirror, reflecting each reader's willingness to either accept the status quo or challenge it."
– Literary Titan
“A hugely ambitious vision of a time in which America is a Chinese colony, almost anyone over 50 is sent off to die in a cozy ice-sled, and journalists are tasked with chronicling a future which then comes to pass. If you're fascinated by technology and by glimpses of where we'll be a hundred years from now, look to a new hero, Naomi. She's the half-human cyborg reporter who believes in truth, foresees the future and, in desperation, rebels against it."
–Beverly Gray (Executive Board Member, ASJA)
"In the world of The Logoharp, there is no security, not even an objective reality, only the reality created by journalism in reverse. Emmett's' novel creates a troubling vision of media that borders on propaganda in an AI-filled future."
—Hamilton Bean, Ph.D., author of No More Secrets: Open Source Information and the Reshaping of US Intelligence (Praeger).
"Prepare to be swept away by an imperfect yet wildly relatable heroine. This ancient, futuristic world will make you angry, frustrated, hopeful, in love, and inspire an uprising within."
—Grace Diida, L.L.M., Venture Capital Research
"Loved The Logoharp! It's genuinely original, disturbing in a provocative way, occasionally funny and erotic, creative and well-paced — and I can't get those ice sleighs out of my head! Naomi is one strange —and beguiling—heroine."
—Laura Berman, feature writer, retired columnist, The Detroit News.
Excerpt
The Null Hypothesis of Love
爱
的
零
假
设
I’m speaking into my nanorecorder that tokenizes dictation into 104 human languages. At any time I can decode my entries to enhance supplemental knowledge. My recorded notes give me access to a tokenized (quintillion) AI database of political events and crowd reactions, the foundation of my training as a multi-channel linguist and scribe.
I’ve been accepted as a candidate for Reverse Journalism (RJ). An RJ researches, extracts and reports the most likely scenarios of the future that will benefit Mother Country, its “children” (the masses) and, at times, the Ameriguan subsidiaries.
Of course, I have to jump through lots of academic hoops to advance beyond the lowest RJ internship tier. Ultimately, I have to understand and speak all 104 languages fluently. In a few weeks I’m headed to Taiwan for further training.
Though I’ve heard from Marco only occasionally in these past years, his face still appears in the mirror. Summers, especially, I see a pale oval reflection of his face against mine.
In winters, I still see a cloaked amateur wearing a knitted cap as he dives down the Breckenridge ski slopes. In each season, I long for its opposite—summer changing to winter’s cold, winter into summer’s heat, spring into fall, fall into spring. Why is that? I can never be satisfied with just what is.
The Logoharp’s life and its reception of signals and spirits takes precedence now. To increase exponentially my quotient of understanding, of empathy for all others, one of my graduate research projects is to map out and publish a Null Hypothesis of Love, a theory based partially on the writings of D.H. Lawrence and Carson McCullers, both of whom wrote about the dichotomies of feeling between lovers and beloveds. Self-modifying this theory to account for cross-cultural and gender-robotic transformations in our times, I aim to post my theory on social media if the academic journals won’t accept it. Internalizing this null hypothesis as I undergo transition to human-cyborg status, I’d like to reshape our social skin.
Deliberately, willingly, I’ve decided to pursue this career instead of medicine. The title, Reverse Journalist, sounds glorious and backward, like a Reverse Engineer. RJs deconstruct reality and remake it in pleasurable form. We’re not like conventional journalists who haplessly report and announce random social and political events of yesterday or today. Instead, we seek the truth of probable outcomes, scripting events to glorify and sustain the health of the Party and its constituents.
RJs extrapolate the future based on algorithms enabling us to analyze millions of social scenarios from a Database of Crowds—a repository of historical events, survey data, political messages and crowd responses to them. Extracting the most likely scenario given a particular convergence of prior events, we ensure the events happen as we prescribe them—that is, if all the social conditions and political strategies of our bosses/leaders are properly aligned.
In Ameriguo, the subsidiary Directorate has already given me permission to begin physical preparation for the Logoharp, my universal translator. This is an essential tool of Reverse Journalists, but only the ones elevated to the highest levels get the full installation. My first surgeries will entail implants of programmable logic from The Laws of Ice and Critique of the Frontier, two Chinese classics about the fate of modern civilization. The logic incorporates Mother Country’s specific instruction set to remake and spread harmony across our societies and a small group of planets outside our solar system preparing for colonization.
*
I realize I’m immature and need rigorous training. Yet my superiors understand I have a gift, sensing what might happen for better or worse to a politician or a scientist or a whole country before the experts do. As an example, at age 15, I started a Citizen Live! nanoblog, forecasting the outcome of the 2104 Taiwanese elections. I predicted Falun Gong’s doom in Taiwan; the Independence Green party would lose badly again to the Blue Party’s Kuomintang loyalists swearing allegiance to Zu Guo (祖国), our Mother Country. I foresaw the downfall of decarbonization on both sides of the Pacific in favor of those who would chop down and bury our trees, claiming the carbon release was actually less than wildfire burning. And now we have the Domers, those who argue that fossil fuel exudate can be scrubbed and recycled to the upper troposphere without raising planetary temperature. It doesn’t work.
The Directorate never applies the terms “propaganda” or “disinformation” to describe RJ’s work, which always contains grains of future truth. Not for a minute has it occurred to me to question either the Directorate in Ameriguo or the training institutes I’ll attend in Taiwan. The whole world demands my focus far more urgently than any selfish ambitions or plays for romance. I’ve wanted, most of all, to produce contentment and insight among the multiple publics who read or listen to my Citizen Live! nanoblogs. With the Logoharp, I’ll foresee, broadcast and monitor the laughter, sufferings and unselfish sacrifices to our State of millions. (I don’t think my parents would approve. Perhaps I do need to get away from them.)
*
My father disappeared about a year ago off the coast of Japan. Most likely, he was in search of a cure for his blood disease. No letters or video messages, either, though periodically I try to locate him, tracking available surveillance videos from drones skirting Mount Yotei adjoining Sapporo. On one of these videos, I watched a man bulked up in ski gear trying to snowshoe down and up a U-shaped hanging glacier. Dad loved unspoiled nature, and I’m guessing he must be settled in Hokkaido. I keep hoping to catch a glimpse of his bear-like body, his hairy chest, a mop of black springy hair that would distinguish him from native Japanese. He has a wide-legged shuffle, wearing down the outer heels of his shoes as though he’s Charlie Chaplin. But so far, I can’t locate him.
Marco’s absence is clearer to me. In the middle of the night, on occasion, when I don’t block out my thoughts, I’ll wake up, believing my lover is rapping on my door. The thermostat inside my body goes haywire as I think of him and the days grow hotter and hotter. With multiple surgeries planned as a State-appointed RJ, of course I’ll remember less and less. Ablation will reduce the normal seven trillion nerve endings in my human body to half that number. I won’t have normal emotions. Transformation to cyborg status will satisfy the Singing Directorate and provide relief for me. With the exception of a rare stinging in my right temple from Logoharp overload, or a pounding in my chest during combat or media assaults, I’ll feel little, if any, conventional human pain.
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