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by Arielle S. Emmett (Author)
Named Finalist in the American Fiction Awards 2024 (category Science Fiction: Cyberpunk), The Logoharp describes the extraordinary journey of a young American journalist who chooses to work as an AI-driven propagandist for China in the 22nd century. Naomi is surgically transplanted, giving her extraordinary powers of foresight and physical strength. She hears voices in her Logoharp, a universal translator of all world languages, allowing her take the pulse of global crowds, predicting and broadcasting future political and social events with deadly precision.
But Naomi also hears discordant voices coming from an unidentified source. She only knows these are strange, faint, and contradictory voices that sing to her of other worlds, other freedoms. When she's tasked with finding a flaw in a State system that balances births and deaths -a system devised by a Chinese architect, Naomi's lover who abandoned her in youth-she experiences "unintentional contradiction." Suppressed human memories and emotions resurface, compelling her to act against the very institutions she supports. Her decision has unexpected consequences for the men and women she loves, for her own body, and for the global societies she's vowed to protect.
From the novel cover:
She reports the future. And then it happens.
Naomi, half-human, half cyborg, is beyond prescient. She's a Reverse Journalist, working for China in the 22nd century. Naomi's job is to foresee and report the events and personalities of the future. Unlike conventional journalists who frame contemporary events, Naomi extrudes the "truth of probable outcomes" to ensure the smooth progression of history.
Driven by voices she hears in her Logoharp, a universal translator of instructions and signals from sources she can't identify, Naomi listens, speaks and broadcasts in all world languages, ensuring citizen compliance. But an encounter with a leading architect, Naomi's former lover who abandoned her in youth, forces recollections of her human inheritance and the role that chance, culture and racism played in her early life.
Naomi is tasked with finding a flaw in the architect's system that "balances" births and deaths on behalf of the State. But she grows uncomfortable, then furious. Guided by immortals and the dissonant Logoharp, Naomi experiences "unintentional contradiction." The rest isn't silence. She acts.
