Hamlet in The Future

The Death I Gave Him by Em X. Liu

Pages: 351 Genre: sci-fi mystery, Hamlet retelling

Rating: 4.5 Star

My Kindle Notes and Highlights

Hayden Lichfield and his father have been working tirelessly on the Sisyphus Formula, a medicine that will (hopefully) reverse death. But Hayden's life shatters one day when he discovers his father dead and the camera feed lost. Hayden steals their research to keep it from whoever killed his father to try to take it, and he finds a message from his father with one last impossible task: Revenge. The lab goes into lockdown with four others inside — Gabriel Rasmussen, a lab tech; Charles Lichfield, Hayden's uncle and fellow admin in the labs; Felicia Xia, Hayden's ex and research intern; and Felicia's father, Paul, the head of security. But Hayden knows one of them is the killer, and the only one he can trust is the Elsinore Operating System's AI (more commonly known as Horatio). Hayden is forced to confront the secrets he didn't even know existed while also avenging his father and making it out alive.

I'm partial to every Hamlet retelling. There has never been a version of this story that I've disliked, and this book is no exception. This is such a fun and unique setting to put this classic story into, and it worked a lot better than I was expecting it to. Although Horatio becoming a vaguely-sentient AI made me laugh out loud.

First, I want to give props to the names. Normally I find the modernization of the original characters' names to be clunky and awkward, but these worked really well. In particular, I liked Hayden for Hamlet, Gabriel Rasmussen for both Rosencrantz and Guildenstern, and, although he was only mentioned briefly, Art for Laertes. As a Certified Fictional Character Name Snob, I was really impressed with this book.

I really enjoyed the way each character was written. Obviously, since there were less people than in the original cast, some characters had to take on multiple roles (in particular Felicia took on a lot of both Ophelia and Laertes' personalities), but I thought it came together seamlessly. I feel like a lot of authors of retellings tend to sacrifice one character for the sake of the other: to give someone a more sympathetic reading, they fully mischaracterize someone else (or visa versa). But this book did a good job of filling everyone out.

In particular, I was really impressed with Felicia. I think Ophelia deserved the conclusion she got, and Felicia really earned it. The complex feelings that, in the original, are mostly given to her brother worked so well being given to her, and I liked watching her deal with complicated feelings about Hayden both before and after her father's accidental death.

Horatio being the Operating System was very silly, but somehow it made a lot of sense. The way play-Horatio acts fit well into the role of a mildly-omniscient and infallibly loyal AI, which will probably change how I read the original play moving forward. And I was really on board for his relationship with Hamlet for, like, 90% of the book. It's probably not a spoiler to say that yet another authors sees their relationship as more-than-platonic, but I think there's a point between "more than friends" and "explicitly sexual relationship" where the two of them really shined before we leaned too much into the latter. Call me a killjoy, but I thought it was both a little off-putting and overall unnecessary. These are a lot of thoughts about life and longing that made the more explicit moments feel out of place to me. Especially given the meta-narrative context of someone in the future writing about this event that happened at Elsinore Labs a long time ago: give them some space! Why are we airing out their business to everyone like this?

I think there were some times that the writing got repetitive, but it didn't bother me too much. And while I enjoy the reflective and interpretive dialogue, part of the fun of reading Hamlet retellings for me is seeing how people see these characters. Other people might not like this aspect of it as much if they're primarily looking for an action-packed locked-room mystery.

It's not a perfect book and it won't be for everyone, but I really enjoyed it. This will happily join the ranks of Hamlet retellings for me.