Liz Moore on The Unseen World

Good afternoon everyone and welcome to another edition of The Avid Reader. Today our guest is Liz Moore. Liz has been here before to discuss her second book, Heft after which she did a reading and signing at our store, Wellington Square Bookshop, and she’ll be appearing again to read and sign from her latest work and the one we will be discussing today, The Unseen World, published in July by Norton. (She will be here on Friday October 28th at 7 o’clock) Liz’ first novel was The Words of Every Song, way back in 2007, and Heft in 2012 and now right as clockwork we have The Unseen World.Liz received her MFA in fiction from Hunter and lives in Philly and is an assistant professor of Writing at Holy Family UniversityHer work has appeared in Tin House, The New York Times and Narrative.She spent most of 2014-2015 in Rome (which must have been fun) writing this book.Which,First of all has a great cover and three of the best epigraphs ever. Which would be enough for me right there.So, The Unseen World, seen, kinda, through the eyes of Ada, the precocious and painfully shy (at times) protagonist is a work of mystery, science and the thought of an intelligence, not ours, which may reach beyond what we now consider the limits of a computer’s abilities.In other words A.I. A computer that passes the Turing Test.Ada’s father is an enigma, a riddle, and one, which unravels slowly but deftly. He is at once, a didactic teacher, a, at least in the beginning, the be all and end all of Ada’s young life (she’s 12, when the story begins) although we travel from the twenties to the (almost) present, with various stops along the way.Our second and most unusual protagonist, perhaps our most important, is ELIXIR a constantly evolving computer intelligence, which in many ways drives the plot and the conclusion of The Unseen World (which by the way is much more than just a title!David, Ava’s dad, is winding down cause of Alzheimer’s, while ELIXIR is winding up, and Ada is growing up. And something that David can no longer articulate is passed from him to Ada, and others which is a key to another story, an unseen story and one which answers lots of questions but in so doing asks another more profound one.