Book Review: The Family Experiment | John Marrs

This is a spoiler-free review of John Marrs’ latest speculative fiction thriller, The Family Experiment. If you are looking for my spoiler thoughts and a refresher on what went down and how this book ends, go to my spoiler review.

What is The Family Experiment about?

As the population grows and cities become over-crowded, families are trying to make ends meet with less income than ever before. Despite initiatives such as the Marriage Act designed to support couples starting families, many can no longer afford it.

A company called Awakening Entertainment promises to provide parents the technology to order MetaBabies—children that exist entirely in the metaverse but who grow up and interact like real children. Parents can choose the age, sex, appearance, interests, and the speed of their growth.

With pre-orders opening, the company is launching a reality TV show called The Family Experiment. The show follows several carefully selected couples over the course of nine months as they raise their MetaBaby. Parents will wear virtual reality headsets and full-body suits that allow them to interact with their child the way biological parents can.

Viewers will be able to watch the parents and their MetaBaby 24/7 as the child progresses from infancy to adulthood over nine months nine months. There will be votes throughout the show that allow viewers to influence the game and eventually select a winner. The winning couple can choose to keep their MetaBaby and whatever stipend they have left over from the experiment, or to permanently delete their child from the metaverse and take cash to start a real world family of their own (dispersed only on the day of the live birth of their real world child). Losers will have their MetaBaby permanently deleted.

Things become tense as couples navigate parenting in the metaverse while trying to appeal to viewers to favor them in votes. And in this experiment, no one will escape without something being exposed…

What did I think?

I love John Marrs’ books, and particularly his speculative fiction books. Starting with The One, Marrs explores a not-so-distant future where technology advancements and government oversight lead to innovations that seem great but ultimately blow back on the people who are trying to make it work. From discovering genetic matches to autonomous self-driving vehicles to government oversight of marriages—this is a terrifying world!

The Family Experiment has nods to the other worlds, but it reads as a standalone story with mostly new characters (a few minorly appeared in other books, but it won’t spoil anything reading out of order). The book centers around the development of metachildren—kids that live entirely in the metaverse but allow parents who either can’t afford kids of their own, struggle with fertility, or people who are otherwise looking to experience being a parent an opportunity to try it. Sounds amazing, right?

Well…maybe not so much. It turns out that it isn’t quite the same as having a real child. The parents spend so much time in the metaverse that they are losing touch with things they need to take care of in their actual lives. The laws that govern each world are different. What is the implication if someone takes the life of another in the metaverse and that metahuman was designed to think, feel, and experience the world like a real person? When people get to design a child exactly as they want, how will they handle it when the child turns out to be imperfect, just as human children are? Complicated, to say the least!

There are greater implications as well—some politicians and investors advocate as this being a way for minor-attracted individuals (pedophiles…) to be able to explore those urges in the metaverse instead of the real world. Yikes! What will happen when they decide to take that behavior to the real world with greater experience? And as with many of the other books, there is the implication that the government will not have full oversight of how people parent because they can go anywhere in the metaverse and craft whatever laws they want to. Many things in this book (and Marrs’ broader world he has built) center around the notion that technology can be great until it nudges over a very thin line with dire consequences, and that it also breaks down the few privacy barriers people have left.

One major storyline centers around a man named Hudson, who is participating in The Family Experiment in the present as a single dad, but whose story is largely told in the past twelve years earlier. Hudson awakens on a boat with no memory of who he is or what his past was. He learns that parents who can’t afford their bills hand their children over in exchange for having their debts wiped. Some of them wipe their child’s memory first, in an ineffective display of mercy. Hudson and the kids go to a facility that they call Ararat where real kids are helping to train AI on how to create metachildren that look, think, feel, and experience emotions like real kids. If that isn’t dark enough, imagine how dark it could get!

The contestants all have interesting stories and roles that all tie together in different ways. Hudson’s chapters are the most compelling to me, but also the most disturbing. The idea that parents traffic their children (and while they pretend they are sending their kid to a better life, they must realize how absurd that belief is) to have their debts paid off is upsetting, but not implausible. The metachildren being trained by real children adds confusion to how we should feel about the metababy program. What does it mean if an AI child is subjected to abuse as the politicians suggest, but that child was developed to feel the way a real child does? Kind of gross, right?

Another entertaining book by John Marrs! Head over to my spoiler review where I summarize what goes down and what I thought about the ending. If you’re looking for a full plot summary, I’ve got that covered as well.