Titan: A Novel Review

By JD

I still occasionally think of the 2017 anime series Kado: The Right Answer. This was to me what the last season of Game of Thrones seems to have been to so many others.  It had an excellent set up: A higher dimensional being arrives in Japan and slowly begins negotiating with humanity on how to go about his goal of advancing humanity. I loved it until the end when the negotiating gave way to a few sudden reveals that came out of nowhere to wrap everything up. 

I bring this up because the writer for Kado, Mado Nozaki, is also the author of the light novel Titan. Luckily, it seems that freed from the restraints of having to wrap things up in one season of anime and under budget, Nozaki is able to craft a great and moving science fiction story.
                     
As with some of the most effective pieces of science fiction, Titan takes the technology of today and wonders how advancements on the horizon will affect society. In the world of the story, Titan, named after the twelve beings from Greek mythology and not the giants that gave Eren Jaeger so much trouble, is a worldwide computer network consisting of 12 AI supercomputers well beyond anything we have today that take care of all of humanity’s needs. From entertainment to transportation, housing and even dating services, everything is taken care of by Titan and its autonomous worker units known as Phalanges.  For nearly all of humanity, the need to work is gone. It’s kind of like a benevolent child of the Sybil System from Psycho-Pass and Oz from Summer Wars. 
 
The story focuses on Dr. Seika Naisho, a Japanese psychologist who is called upon to deal with an unusual issue: one of Titan’s supercomputers, Coeus, is experiencing a slowdown in its work output and they think that it’s because Coeus is suffering from depression. Seika is tasked with holding therapy sessions for a manifestation of the AI and getting to the root of the problem. What follows is an exploration of what it means to be a person, to work and why we work as well as Seika guides Coeus through their sessions and the two grow close like a mother and her son.
 
The supporting cast is rather minimal. There’s Narain, the no-nonsense man in charge of the project and communicating with the council governing the Titan system, Lei, the programmer in charge of creating the program that allows Coeus to manifest a personality for therapy, Professor Beckmann, another advisor brought on to supervise the project and Phoebe, another Titan AI that assists Coeus in the latter half of the book. Due to the small size, each of these characters gets time a distinct voice, time to stand out and show new sides of themselves as the story progresses. 
 
Speaking of progression, the story is separated into six parts. The first one deals with Seika’s life up until she is brought onto the project and serves mainly to introduce us to the world as I have described it earlier in this review. The therapy sessions begin in part two and then, the plot starts to take some twists and turns.  However, unlike with Kado, these all make sense and feel like natural conclusions of the events and characters that we started with. This all comes to a satisfying conclusion of both our plot and the major questions the characters ponder.

The English translation of the book is excellent. I can’t really compare it to the original Japanese but as it is presented, it is hard to tell that it was written in a different language barring a few strange word choices like “auctorial” instead of “authorial” which I could probably count on one hand and still have change.
 
In conclusion, Titan is an excellent science fiction story that looks at a place where our world could feasibly be in a century or two with the development of advance artificial intelligence and asks what would happen if those AI had mental illness just like we do.  Due to this nature, it’s not the most action-packed plot but one that focuses more on what makes our characters both human and AI tick (besides the batteries). If you like that kind of things, I think this story might be right up your alley.

For More Information on Titan:
https://sevenseasentertainment.com/series/titan-a-novel/​​