Hamlet, the Robot

Hamlet, Prince of Robots by M. Darusha Wehm

Pages: 166 Genre: sci-fi retelling

Rating: 3 Stars

Kindle Notes and Highlights

Elsinore Robotics' pride and joy is HAM(let) v.1. — a human android powered by artificial intelligence. But after defeating the rival company's Fortinbras android, the first Hamlet bot is found deactivated. But his memories are not entirely lost, and he passes them onto Hamlet v2, who swears to avenge his progenitor. [This is a beat-for-beat retelling of "Hamlet" the play.]

I enjoyed this book. As a fan of Hamlet, I'm very easy to please. Of course I enjoyed the beat-for-beat retelling of a play that I adore. What's not to love? In fact, that's also my biggest problem with this book. I wanted to love this book because of what it was, not because of what Shakespeare already wrote.

The context of the robotics lab/artificial intelligence worked really well with the story of Hamlet. If nothing else, I was really impressed with how smoothly these two very different setups were put together. In particular, this created a really engaging backdrop for Hamlet's existentialism and suicidal tendencies. These themes have been explored many times with humans, but what about when the "person" isn't really a person? It's a fresh angle to position the story in, and I thought it worked well.

Pretty much the entire plot of this book was borrowed from the original play, with a few changes regarding life and death at the end. Regarding the aspects that were truly retellings, I was intrigued but ultimately unimpressed. There were some key contextual changes that, while not revolutionary, were interesting: things like a relationship between Hamlet and Horatio, a lack of a romantic relationship with Ophelia, a change in Polonius' role of importance. However, none of these ideas felt fully realized because of the constraints of the original play. For example, what does it mean for this version Ophelia to not be Polonius' daughter? Ultimately, she acts the same, because we need to hit the same story beats. But it leaves this version of Ophelia feeling empty; all of her depth comes from Shakespeare, but she isn't that character right now, so she's actually just a halfway realized character.

Restricting the story to being beat-for-beat also meant that the interpretations of characters was weaker. One of the things that I enjoy most about Hamlet retellings is seeing how different people view all these different characters and their role in the story. And I was really into that aspect of this book! Unfortunately, it seems like I was more interested in exploring that than the author was. The themes that were being explored were really interesting, but they all felt a little half-baked as we had to get through them quickly to get back to the preordained plot.

I liked the concept of this book, and I enjoyed reading it. But I liked it because I like the original Hamlet, which I can read whenever I want. I wanted to read about the Prince of Robots, and unfortunately I just wasn't given enough to latch onto, regardless of how clever and engaging the writing was.