Fabrications

Both the terror and the fantasy of Fabrications are simple: the record survives the event, claiming to have been its cause.

System architect Parker Henning inherits an archive of domestic telemetry then enters it as if escorted into a building where his name is already on file. Through the stories he finds in the logs, he hopes to reconstruct a life and perhaps a crime. Instead, he finds they have been thoroughly interleaved. The house remembers everything while explaining nothing. What speaks is procedure without a face.

More than a warning about surveillance, Roth's novel denies the comforting belief that enough data will yield the truth.

In the Home System's endless stores, the data are obedient and useless. Truth has been dismissed. In its place comes narrative, stamped and certified. Whoever controls the story controls the past, whoever controls the child controls the future. The rest is paperwork.

In a world run by Artists of Despair, both everyone and no one can be cleanly accused. K, the AI agent, is an office, exact and without pity. Parker suffers as a man who still believes the system will justify him. Tal, his son, is being groomed at his own initiative.

The fabrications are everywhere: in the files, in the machine, in the ordinary dream of autonomy. Ultimately, reason itself has been put on record under a false name.

Will reticence prove art has succumbed, or is it the way out?