![my talking angela eyes my talking angela eyes](https://i.ytimg.com/vi/LE2iOKkf6Kg/maxresdefault.jpg)
By the time she is put on this beat, there’s already been a widespread institutional effort to integrate these lambdas into society. After her first assignment as a police officer goes awry, she is shifted onto a project monitoring lambdas, a population of around 100,000 mysterious people who are genetically human but evolved to be minuscule in size and semi-aquatic, with tails instead of legs and an inscrutable social structure. Dick pastiche, but Musgrave’s debut is more ambitious than the tropes it borrows, arranging them into original, arresting literary sci-fi.Ĭara is no futuristic Colombo-she’s remarkably, touchingly bad at her job. Meanwhile, the police test out an AI system that will both accuse someone of a crime and go ahead and assassinate them, although the government prefers to call this mitigation, neutralization, deactivation, or closure of agency. In Lambda’s bizarro-world 2019, advances have been made in artificial intelligence to the point that “sentient objects” have been granted rights, including said toothbrush, aka the ToothFriendIV. Sounds like a pretty straightforward potboiler, right? But from its first page, Lambda is up to something weirder and more unwieldy, ditching a linear narrative and setting the story in an alternate-universe Britain where you can get in trouble with the cops for damaging a talking toothbrush.
![my talking angela eyes my talking angela eyes](https://pbs.twimg.com/profile_images/435997299446386688/ySx3uSEP.jpeg)
![my talking angela eyes my talking angela eyes](https://cdn.wallpapersafari.com/53/0/VgaTDf.jpg)
Technically, this is an accurate description of the plot of David Musgrave’s debut novel, Lambda. A novice police officer assigned to watch over a refugee group tries to figure out whether the refugees have been framed for terrorism-and where the real killers are lurking.