Pilgrim X

A collection of affecting and unsettling Irish science fiction from the Booker-listed author of Solar Bones.

For fans of Ted Chiang, Ursula K. Le Guin, and Jorge Luis Borges, near-future speculative stories that explore life, death, memory, and consciousness in an Ireland transformed by surveillance technologies, virtual communities, and artificial intelligence.

Mike McCormack’s new collection is set in an Ireland filled with sentient AIs and clones, and, in one story, avatars replicating endlessly after the death of the human. The stories in Pilgrim X ask us profound questions about what it means to be human. A sequence of four stories center around the android Sophia, stories which take their cue from a true incident about six or seven years ago when Saudia Arabia gave full citizenship to an android called Sophia . . . These stories take up Sophia’s story twenty five years after that event when she settles in the west of Ireland. Then there are six interwoven stories—All the Children Equal, Grieving is done With Your Hair Down, How I Met Welger Holland, Mayo In Excelsis Deo, These Are the Tools God Gave Us and Scrape—that are bound together by a handful of recurring characters, and work as an investigation of the meaning of death and life in a world where technology has increasingly blurred the distinctions between the two.

The last and title story, Pilgrim X, is set in a post apocalyptic western where Mayo is now a fully-fledged penal colony populated by inmates who do not know their own pasts or name—Mad Max crossed with Riddley Walker and The Third Policeman.