I don’t want to damn A Strange and Brilliant Light with faint praise. I enjoying reading the book and Lee make many thought-provoking points about the potential impact of AI. Like the best Sci-fi, it uses speculative technological developments to explore the way people and society respond to change.

The world-building for the most part is well done, a sort of near-future where robots (or Auts) are slowly taking jobs away from regular folk. Lee has a good ear for dialogue and writes some cracking exchanges between the characters. Lee also captures perfectly the creeping sense of worthlessness that people out of work feel and why having a purpose is so important. The best sequences in the book depict how people working for large corporations work long hours and are asked to complete tasks at an inhuman speed. Lee does a great job of bottling the fear of not wanting to stand out, of not being seen as lazy, of being sacked from a job you hate.
That said it is let down by a clumsy structure. Three separate prologues and the three POV characters occasionally made it hard to follow the narrative. None of the protagonists really got their hooks into me. I felt it could have been streamlined a bit. Part of me wonders if it would have worked better as a TV show where the change of perspective would have been smoother.

Lee writes about relationships very well. The way the characters allow small slights to add up, how difficult they find it to turn to those they love when they feel like they have wronged is something Lee captures well.
It never really soars as a character drama though. The solutions proposed by the characters to the problems they face are nowhere near a clever as Lee seems to think they are. It is the kind of book that ambles along and is entertaining enough. I had a pleasant enough time reading it but was hoping for something a bit more impactful given the themes to book explores.

Buy the book here and me some money.