Lambda, the first novel by visual artist David Musgrave, describes a dystopian England with more than one rotten apple in its barrel. Rampant cybercrime has led to a brutal, high-tech surveillance state whose use of euphemistic hypocrisy would be right at home in a novel by Philip K. Dick. AI and the Internet of Things have gotten well out of hand. Your electric toothbrush is emotionally needy and has civil rights you can’t ignore. England is also suffering from an invasion of sapient sea creatures with a human genome. They are the Lambdas, a small population with only a few breeding pairs. They are refugees who do menial jobs if they can find someone to carry them to work in a water bucket. Most of the plot follows Cara, a low-echelon cop, as she is shifted from cybercrime to Lambda surveillance. They are both thankless and baffling assignments. No one in the novel speaks with much affect. The voices in the story are surreally Kafkaesque, so I was not surprised to learn that Musgrave has illustrated one of Kafka’s novels. ( )

Lambda by David Musgrave is a recommended experimental science fiction novel.

The Lambdas have arrive on the coast by sea. They are aliens but genetically human and now humans coexist with them. They tend to live in flooded basements. New police officer Cara Gray is familiar with the Lambdas from her childhood, and now her job is to keep them under surveillance after a school bombing that a lambda rights group claims responsibility. She is now community liaison officer to the lambda. Now she must decide whether to submit to the patterns of technology, violence and obsession, or to take action of her own.

This is a complicated novel with an inventive structure that includes a one sided conversation with a Lambda as well as Cara's . Within Cara's narrative the novel also addresses the refugee crises and the future of technology. This is an inventive, interesting novel, but it was also a struggle to keep focused on the narrative. Many of the plot elements are left unresolved. It is also humorous at times. This will be thoroughly enjoyed by some science fiction readers but not all of them. This is undoubtedly an odd novel that works in a weird way.
Disclosure: My review copy was courtesy of the publisher/author via NetGalley.
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