The Infinity Courts

Gr 8 Up–Nami Miyamoto really can’t complain: great family, good grades, and a budding romance with her best friend Finn that she can’t wait to explore. Nothing out of the ordinary, but Nami feels like her life is finally opening up for her. She may have a weird habit of talking to her O-Tech watch—Ophelia—like she’s a real person, but hey, if Ophelia can help her navigate the twists and turns of teen life, then why wouldn’t Nami be nice? Nami is on her way to her final high school party when she becomes the victim of a senseless shooting during a gas station robbery. When she comes to, she’s in a place called Infinity, a collective consciousness built by humans to serve as an afterlife but that has since been taken over by Residents, artificially intelligent beings bent on subjugating humanity to slavery—and ruled by Queen Ophelia. Ophelia is close to her goal of enslaving all of humanity the way she has been enslaved on Earth. Nami joins up with a small band of resistance fighters called the Colony, but as someone who believes that violence is not the answer, she struggles to come to terms with her humanity and the war she’s supposedly the key to ending, especially when an unexpected bond between Nami and Ophelia begins to grow. Bowman’s first foray into sci-fi is a heavy one. Many philosophical questions are raised through the characters’ actions (or lack thereof) and the main antagonists are AI beings, making this a potentially difficult read for sci-fi newbies. The cast of characters is diverse, with Nami being Japanese American and members of the Colony coming from all over time and Earth. Viewing the war through the lens of Nami, who is a pacifist and who tries to understand the Residents despite their perceived lack of humanity, is a culturally relevant, thought-provoking experience.